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.

FOMC Game Plan

By -

This is a selfish and a selfless post. It is selfish in the respect that I’m hoping to glean some wisdom from the crowd. It is selfless since it’s a decent amount of work to construct this properly, with the hope that some folks might benefit from the problem and its potential solutions.

Let me start with the situation and my assumptions:

  1. I have a substantial portfolio which consists of only cash and 30 bearish equity positions, by way of being long puts that expire no earlier than September and, on most cases, expire much later than that.
  2. I have 20% of my portfolio in cash. The portfolio overall is sporting a 57% profit so far this year.
  3. Over the past few weeks, I saw about 90% of my profits for the year go up in smoke, only to be restored over the course of the past few days (please note: it was not a good feeling, and I’d rather not go there again);
  4. My overarching assumption is that stocks will be MUCH lower at some point this year (prior to October) and, counter-trend rallies be damned, virtually all these puts will be worth much more later, even with time decay.
(more…)

Through A Glass Darkly

By -

SPX broke down and has retested the retracement low, as have NDX and Dow as well, but not yet IWM. This brings SPX and the other US indices to the key inflection point this year, where we see whether the move so far this year has been the formation of large bull flags setting up retests of the all time highs, or whether US indices are going to break down further directly.

What we have on the bull side here are possible buy signals now brewing on the weekly chart and clear high quality bull flags formed on SPX and Dow particularly, as well as on many other individual stocks and ETFs of course. On the bear side we have the worsening economy, rising interest rates and embedded inflation that the Fed are now admitting is not transitory. I would point out though that a retest of the all time highs might well not be a bullish development, as that might make the second highs on double tops large enough to then potentially retrace most or even all of the gains made since the 2020 low.

(more…)