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.

What’s Next for ES

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Well, my cocky swagger yesterday about the bulls being marooned on an island has been thoroughly cock-blocked. The only good things I can say are (a) my bearish-on-bonds call early last week has been pretty solid the whole time (b) I haven't been heavily committed to shorts, sticking to around 40%, as I've been saying.

And a good thing, too. The surge has been relentless. If, God forbid, we break 1223.75, I think 1265 or so is next up to bat. It'll partly depend on if today's surge has legs or if we get another shooting star.

1014-es

Unexpected IHS (by Springheel Jack)

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I'm not a Jim Cramer fan I have to say, but even Jim Cramer can say something sensible once in a while and I saw a great quote from him while browsing yesterday. It's a good attitude to take and worth remembering, even if he hasn't said much else worth repeating. Markets are all about setups and probabilities.

'Remember, I am neither a bear nor a bull, I am an agnostic opportunist. I want to make money short- and long-term. I want to find good situations and exploit them.'

I was looking for an H&S pattern to form yesterday and one did, albeit not facing the way that I was expecting, as a very nice looking IHS formed on ES in the last 24 hours or so. The retracement into it was shallow, and it's therefore a bit marginal in my view as a reversal IHS, but it might play out, and is worth bearing in mind today. The target is just under 1220 ES. There is therefore a very significant chance that we will see the last high retested or a new high made today:

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Hedging Update — Foreign Currency ETFs

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Hedging Foreign Currency ETFs

For this post, I looked at the hedging costs of a basket of foreign currency ETFs. Something that jumped out of me when running the numbers on them was the hedging cost of the CurrencyShares Aussie Dollar Trust ETF (FXA). Not only was it the most expensive of these currency ETFs to hedge; it was also more than twice as expensive to hedge as the CurrencyShares Euro Trust (FXE). Given the continuing crisis in the Eurozone, I found that interesting.

The table below shows the costs, as of Thursday's close, of hedging FXA, FXE, and 4 other foreign currency ETFs against greater-than-15% declines over the next several months.

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