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.

Jobless Claims And A Meaningful Understanding of Employment

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From Sloper Ray……….

There are four elements to a meaningful understanding of employment: 1) Employment, 2) Unemployment, 3) Job Openings, and 4) Jobless (AKA Unemployment Insurance) Claims.

1) Employment

Employment measures the number of people with jobs providing paychecks.  Paychecks to employees drive the economy by providing revenues to businesses.  The most favored measure is the Non-Farm Payroll (NFP) released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA)  the first Friday of each month for the preceding month.  NFP numbers are commonly known to fluctuate month to month across seasons due to predictable differences in the number of days per month, holidays, and college student movement into and out of the labor force.  Because these factors can be predicted the current employment (CE) actual numbers, series CEU0000000001, can be “adjusted” to eliminate these variants to provide more meaningful results, thus the most commonly referenced numbers will be “seasonally adjusted” numbers, series CES0000000001.  (However, my personal preference is for actual numbers since no one pays for mortgages, utilities, insurance, or food with “seasonally adjusted paychecks.”)

0813-jobsone (more…)

Powering to Failure

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Now that ebola has been cured, and ISIS has changed its charter to one of peace and civil engineering projects, and Putin has decided Russia should really just mind its own business, and Israel and Hamas have signed an historic peace agreement for the next century, and since equity prices represent incredible values based on the forthcoming prospect of unlimited earnings expansion, the stock market quite rightfully continues to push higher.

I suspect this ridiculous little countertrend rally will exhaust itself in short order, taking out the lows from late last week before August is through. Keep buying, bully boys.

0813-comp