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.

A Lower-Risk Way To Bet Against Oil

By -

Our Highest-Ranked ETF is a Bet Against Oil – And The Global Economy

Each trading day, Portfolio Armor calculates potential returns for every security with options traded on it in the U.S. Potential returns are high-end estimates of how the security might perform over the next six months, and they’re based on an analysis of price history and on option market sentiment. On Friday, the security with the 5th highest potential return in our universe (which consists of all securities with options traded on them in the U.S.) was the ProShares Ultra Short Bloomberg Crude Oil ETF (SCO), which is 2x short oil.

SCO had a potential return of 19%, which was 5th overall, but the highest of any ETF in our system. Here’s a way an investor who wants to bet against oil (and, by extension, much of the global economy) can own SCO while limiting his downside risk to a decline of no more than 15% if SCO moves against him. The best part is, the cost of this hedge is negative, so our investor would essentially be getting paid to hedge.

Getting Paid To Hedge SCO (more…)

Just Wow

By -

Well this has certainly been an impressive move. I wrote a post yesterday looking at the stats for daily and weekly 3SD (three standard deviations from 20 period MA) punches, and the last time that a weekly punch through the 3SD lower band like the one we saw on Friday was at the collapse of France before the German attack in May 1940. If we close down hard today then this decline will, in this respect, have done what the declines in 2000 (Tech crash), 1998 (Russian crisis and LCTM failure), 1997 (Asian crisis), 1994 (bonds crash), 1987 (no clarification required I hope), and others all failed to manage. You can see that post here.

That said, we are a long way from today’s close and on the four equivalent punch closes through the 3SD daily lower band, three of those went lower the next day, with AM declines of 1.8% (equiv to 1934), 2.5% (equiv to 1920) and 3.7% (equiv to 1897). All four closed up with rises ranging between 3.2% and 5%.

(more…)