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.

More on XLU

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Sorry to be so hung up on XLU, but, again, it's not only my biggest short position, but it's also the short that is being the most kind to my portfolio.

As most of us know, the bond/interest rate markets tend to be a bit wiser than equity markets as a whole, and they tend to tip their hands before equities. It's instructive, I think, that XLU (which is interest-rate sensitive) is so soft in the face of an astonishingly strong equity market. Take a look at the intraday line chart, below, comparing XLU with IWM (shown in blue).

0105-xlucompared

Godspeed Your Love to Me

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My subconscious gets its kicks by playing music in my head. It's always trying to tell me something, particularly when I'm troubled by the market. Here's the #1 hit playing incessantly in my brain these days. Hey, I guess it beats voices telling me to pick up an ax, right?

Incidentally, I've been quite absent from the comments section. Part of it is due to overwhelming ennui, and part of it is due to time constraints. But mostly I like to hang out in comments when it's fun, and lately the market hasn't been fun ("lately"=many months).

I did happen to glance at one question about why the y-axis figures in the XLU chart were different. It's probably because Prophet adjusts for dividends, whereas other services don't. Someone else asked if I was shorting XLU or buying SDP. Goodness, I gave up on SDP ages ago. This is a straight-up XLU short.