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.

Trends Up, Bull On, Risk High

By -

The opening segment from this week’s edition of Notes From the Rabbit Hole, NFTRH 829: Trends Up, Bull On, Risk High (Macro Discussion)

The segment’s title might also read “Another Week, Status Unchanged”, as it has been for so long now. That status targets “to or through the election” [for the broad bull rally], as it has all year long (with a few caution points along the way).

I’d like to go back to one of my favorite charts illustrating the macro situation of 2024. While some are giddy (the casual public “playing” a stock market that always goes up, eventually), some are pissed (those who have staked their marketing schemes, and thus their reputations, on a perma-bearish view) and some are bewildered (mainstream investment houses retooling their outlooks in lagging fashion with every interim macro event/turn), we simply follow our guides, like the 2 year Treasury yield’s divergence to the (Fed proxy) 3 month T-bill yield, which is now finally starting to adjust to the divergence, as expected.

(more…)

In and Out

By -

Lord, what a brutal morning, huh? I’ve been trying to focus on the positive, which is (1) I was still at 35% cash (2) umm, let’s see, I don’t have cancer of the eyeballs.

I’ve made precious little changes to my portfolio, however, but I wanted to walk through those alterations. First, with a heavy heart, I got out of my EFA puts (January expiration). Candidly, I bet this chart ultimately works out fantastically, but I really needed to trim risk, so I ditched it.

(more…)

Laying Down the Law

By -

It’s been a long time since I’ve written about trading rules, mainly because the rules I typically read aren’t very useful. I have reviewed all my prior posts on this subject, and probed my own experiences, and I’ve come up with this list of ten rules that I’ve made a permanent part of the site.

Incidentally, I wasn’t the least bit tempted to pull the old “Thou Shalt Not…….” in front of each of these, since I’ve always considered that one of the most annoying, hackneyed, cornball, and distracting cutesy elements of any such “ten commandments” type list. Anyhoo, here we go……….

(more…)