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.

Why Bother?

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I noticed on a different site someone mentioned the fund SHE, the “gender diversity fund“, and I thought they were just doing a politically correct joke. Sort of a riff on all the virtue signaling going on these days. Nope. This is real. There is seriously a fund based only on having more women than usual in senior management positions. And as you can see below, comparing SHE to the male-dominated SPY, those women sure do make a gigantic difference in investment returns. I’m sure it makes the lack of liquidity and wider bid/ask spreads totally worth it.

slopechart SHESPY

EWY South Korea ETF, Proxy for Global Tech, Probing Key Support

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Many Street analysts consider the iShares South Korea ETF (EWY) as a proxy for the health of global technology, the semiconductor sector, the chip sector, and perhaps the retail electronics sector as well.

One look at my weekly chart of EWY shows that it has been in the grasp of a major correction or possibly even bear phase since its January all-time high at 79.07 into Tuesday’s low at 56.34, a near 30% decline.  This decline has retraced two-thirds of of the entire prior advance from the August 2015 low at 42.94 to the January 2018 high at 79.07. One could think that the ugly EWY performance reflected deteriorating relations with North Korea, but, ironically, relations have not been so promising since 1950! (more…)