Countries for Old Men
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.
The Wisdom of the Bonds
“Bonds aren’t buying it.” You hear that sometimes, since the bonds markets have historically been considered substantially wiser and more forward-looking than equity markets, and there are instances when bonds are saying one thing and stocks the other. That’s going on now, with bonds weakening (which flies in the face of the narrative that interest rates will be dropping and thus propelling stocks higher). The net change since early December has been just about zero, which should scare stocks.
Emerging and Retail Sine
I was quite smitten with the sine wave pattern about a month ago, but the results have been too uneven for me to have complete faith in them. Emerging markets, for example, is still sort-of-kind-of hanging in there with respect to obeying the cycle, although it has to weaken pretty soon here in order to this thing a chance at success.
Looking at Utilities
One of my positions is long September XLU puts. Utilities have been more robust than I’d like to see, but I will say that the failure of the horizontal breakout (the dashed line below) is encouraging, on top of the fact that at no time did prices break above the descending trendline.
The S&P 100
The situation with the S&P 100 cash index is very similar to what I’m seeing across the board: a very convincing failed wedge pattern. Here’s hoping this sucker brings us the first meaningful sell-off in six months!
