Slope of Hope Blog Posts

Slope initially began as a blog, so this is where most of the website’s content resides. Here we have tens of thousands of posts dating back over a decade. These are listed in reverse chronological order. Click on any category icon below to see posts tagged with that particular subject, or click on a word in the category cloud on the right side of the screen for more specific choices.

Summer is Coming

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I was going to entitle this post ‘Winter is Coming’ as it has a strongly bearish tone and I am something of a GoT fan. However it is early May, and despite the fact that my wife has been pressing me to have the central heating fixed, in theory at least, summer is coming.

In stock market terms though, the six months May through October are the months of winter on the markets. On my Stock Trader’s Almanac 2014 statistics are given from 1950-2012 showing that $10,000 invested on SPX in November through April, the best six months of the year, would now be worth $575,846, while the same $10,000 invested on SPX in May through October, the worst six months of the year, would now be worth $15,356. That excludes dealing costs (and interest and taxes) but you get the point I’m sure:

summer is coming

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Panning for Gold

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I have been posting charts every so often over the last year or so talking about the end of the bear market on precious metals, which either ended in 2013 and is now waiting for confirmation of that , or should end sometime over the next few months. As and when a new bull market is confirmed I’ll be expecting the precious metals sector to be a very nice earner over the course of the next bull market there.

On the gold chart there is good reason to believe that the bull market low may be in. Gold was close enough to the triangle target for government work, just missed the 61.8% fib retracement of the bull market from the late 2008 low, has been trading back above the very key bull/bear dividing 150 DMA, and has a part formed double-bottom that would target the 1688 area on a clear break over 1434. Gold daily chart: (more…)

Games with Frontiers

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‘A quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing’
Neville Chamberlain, PM of Great Britain, talking about Czechoslovakia in 1938

Back in 1963 there was an significant milestone in the transition to modern warfare when the the name of the British Ministry of War was changed to the Ministry of Defence. Many other euphemisms about war have been used since then with ‘police actions’, ‘military advisers’ and many others becoming common.

At the same time the absurd situation arose, as the age of empires passed away and the British Empire was dismantled, that the only two remaining true empires, based in Russia and China, posed as anti-imperial powers, with the pejorative description ‘imperialist’ mainly applied by them to Western Powers who had already lost or given away their foreign territories. (more…)

TGI Friday

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A key target for bulls yesterday was to break up from the falling megaphone on NDX, and they did that. As long as NDX can hold above broken megaphone resistance that is a bullish break with a target back at the 3717.36 high. If NDX breaks back below broken megaphone support then that would raise a possibility that this break may be a bearish overthrow with an ultimate target in the 3000-3100 area, so I’ll be watching that trendline carefully. NDX 60min chart:

140502 NDX 60min Falling Megaphone Broken Up

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