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.

Rocking with Energy

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Back on February 10, I wrote a post called Lake Erie, and I did a post for my beloved Slope Plus members called Return to Lake Erie, in which I suggested that energy stocks were going to head lower, and noted I was going to buy the triple-bearish ETF symbol ERY (my precise words on February 10th were Yesterday I start accruing a sizeable position in my IRA account of ERY, the triple-bearish fund based on energy stocks. So far, so good.) I would say this has been going pretty well, as the arrow “buy” point reveals. We’re up about 25% since then.

0314-ERY

I confess to getting a little nervous with crude oil approaching a fairly important trendline, but I’m just going to tighten my stop and hang on. Congrats to others in this trade.

The U.S. Economy, Post-Payrolls & Pre-FOMC

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This week’s Notes From the Rabbit Hole included a little Payrolls/Wages related economic discussion before moving on to the usual coverage of stock markets, commodities, precious metals, bonds, currencies and related indicators and market internals.  With FOMC on tap there will be more data noise directly ahead, but then I expect markets to smooth out into what is looking like a sensible short and intermediate-term plan.

U.S. Economy

Graphic sources:  St. Louis Fed, BLS, TradingEconomics, Macrotrends & Bespoke Premium

So Payrolls came in a little firmer than expected and interestingly, the manufacturing sectors did some solid hiring. This is an area that is sensitive to coming fiscal policy because it is subject to regulations likely to be repealed (especially environmental, a real fundamental underpinning) and high paying jobs repatriation to U.S. shores (a phony baloney fundamental, at least in large part, in my opinion). In this graph we see that manufacturing job losses had been easing into the election, but job gains have ramped up after the election. All of this on anticipated policy changes? (more…)