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.

World Market Headwinds Escalate

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INTRODUCTION

In my Market Forecast for 2018, I thought that, taking into consideration the uncertainty of the 2018 U.S. midterm elections, coupled with likely interest rate hikes, we’d probably see:

  • volatility rise in 2018 and the SPX and other U.S. Major Indices gain only about half of what they gained in 2017, which would mean an approximate increase of 10% for the SPX
  • that Technology would remain fairly strong, while Small-Caps would likely struggle more than Big-Caps
  • that U.S. markets would continue to outperform other World markets (with the performance of their financials playing an important part)

(more…)

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…)