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.

Chart on FXI (Mike Paulenoff)

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Let's notice that the iShares FTSE/Xinhua China 25 Index (NYSE: FXI) peaked at 46.66 in November 2009 and was in the confines of a coil-like corrective pattern into the series of May lows near 36.60/25. Since early May, the FXI has carved out a 5-week basing pattern which could be the second coordinate of a larger Double Bottom formation established in February 2010.

Right now, the combination of the base formations argues for higher prices near term that project into the 41.50 area, on the way to test the multi-month resistance line in the vicinity of 44.50. Furthermore, there appears to be a reliable 15-16 week trading day cycle that bottomed in mid-May, which is exerting positive influence on prices into the first week of July.

It is with the foregoing in mind, as well as because the FXI pattern appears to be ahead of, or leading, the major U.S. equity market indices, that we are long the China equity market in our model portfolio.

DPKaM8OwG
Originally published on MPTrader.com.

New Shorts Deployed and Their Stops

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ACL…………..149.48

ANF…………..36.50

ATHR…………..31.35

AU…………..43.56

BAK…………..12.92

BEZ…………..39.63

BHI…………..42.64

BRY…………..33.01

CBS…………..14.84

CBT…………..28.39

CCK…………..24.98

CHRS…………..4.28

CLB…………..145.75

DBRN…………..27.49

GFF…………..12.05

IFN…………..29.70

PLL…………..37.98

SLB…………..60.88

SRE…………..48.23

VNO…………..76.13

VOD…………..20.66

XTEX…………..11.00

Tax-Free Multi-Billionaire

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I imagine some of you saw this article from the New York Times yesterday. It's about how our Congress allowed 2010 to start without any inheritance tax in place. Simply stated, anyone who dies this year gets a free ride, including the multil-billionaire pictured below, whose children and grandchildren won't pay a cent in estate taxes. If he had died just a few months earlier, his estate would have paid billions to the Feds.

Whatever your view on the estate tax is, at least know this: the amount of money every reader of this blog will pay in their entire lifetimes, cumulatively, will not approach what this one man's estate would have paid to the same government if Congress had their act together. I imagine they'll try to make a show of it and get a tax to apply retroactively, but as the article states, that'll probably fail too. Nice goin', fellas.

0609-billionaire