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.

Emerging Profits

By -

First off, a tip of the hat to five-star general and long-time Sloper NYUGrad, whom I had the pleasure of meeting very early this morning. We spent about an hour together (including his dog, which was a big bonus) walking around the southern tip of Manhattan. What a pleasure to meet one of you folks in person!

It’s a good (and rare) day for the bears so far. In addition to my typical “doesn’t expire for many months” puts, I had been, from time to time, buying some crazy-short-term ETF puts recently. The most recent was yesterday, when I acquired some EEM (emerging markets ETF) May 31st puts. They’re up 173% right now, so I sold half off, leaving the rest as a runner (I think that’s the term?) Whee!

Beautiful Curves

By -

It’s just 3:30 in the morning, Tim-time, but the sun started rising over the East River half an hour ago, so I’m up and about. It’s interesting to see how the narrative of the market is falling to pieces. The thesis of this entire ridiculous 2024 rally has been that (a) multiple interest rate cuts from a Biden-loving Fed and (b) low inflation would both contribute to a stock market that did nothing but make new highs every day.

Yet what do we have? Well, we have a plunging bond market, thanks to the fact that Powell has cut rates precisely ZERO times almost halfway through the year (in contract to the 5 cuts predicted before)……..

(more…)