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.

Macro Falling Into Place

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Pretty please with sugar on top, let the markets correct

Because this week I did the very thing that exposes my dark side by shorting leveraged mid-caps (MIDU) and this morning got long a VIX vehicle (VIXY) while it was still negative. Before that I shorted the Euro (EUO) and longed the USD (UUP), which are sort of the same thing, and raised a lot of cash. When I have anti-market or bear positions and the markets get a kick save I get disturbed. It’s a psychological vulnerability I have.

I’d rather do this the easy way instead of the usual way bearish positioning goes. I will not make money if the market crashes, but I’ll lose a lot less of it as the portfolios are constructed right now. From here I have the option to go back to bull boy or increase bearish positioning, pending setups and indicators.

So… I am ready for it. I was out for the last 1.5 hours of the day and the last thing I wanted to see when I returned was the market up and that is for two main reasons:

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Major Number Coming

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An hour before the opening bell on Tuesday comes the Consumer Price Index reports. These days, I consider this vastly more important than what used to be the big monthly report, which was unemployment. Inflation has been the big topic this year, and if we get another set of strong numbers (and that’s not “strong” in a positive sense), people could start to think that we’re starting to have a serious “non-transitory” problem on our hands.

cpinums