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.

Two Ways Of Hedging Disney

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Dying To See Star Wars

One of the trending hashtags on Twitter in recent weeks was #ForceForDaniel, a campaign to get an early screening of the new Star Wars movie for a dying fan, Daniel Fleetwood. Director J.J. Abrams had the film screened for the man at his home, as The Verge noted below.

It wasn’t the first time, incidentally, that Abrams accommodated a dying fan: In 2009, he gave the late Randy Pausch (of Last Lecture fame) a cameo in his Star Trek reboot.

A Boost For Disney  (more…)

Two Ways Of Hedging ATVI

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Our Current Number One Stock: Activision Blizzard

Activision Blizzard (ATVI), which just announced its purchase of King Digital (KING), the Dublin-based maker of the Candy Crush mobile game, currently has the highest potential return of any security in Portfolio Armor‘s universe, at 20.8%. Potential return, in our terminology, is a bullish estimate of how a security will perform over the next 6 months. Below, we’ll explain how we calculate potential return, and then we’ll show a couple of ways of hedging ATVI.

How We Calculate Potential Return (more…)

A Brazilian Reasons To Be Bearish

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A Brazilian Reasons To Be Bearish

In a recent post (“A Brazilian with a Sudden Rip of the Wax”), Tim noted that Brazil ETF EWZ was in free fall. For those who haven’t been keeping up on the bad news from Brazil, the headline of this AP article from Tuesday will give you a sense of what’s been happening: “Brazil’s economy plunging; no relief in sight amid political, financial chaos”.

A Hedged Bet Against Brazil 

Every trading day, Portfolio Armor ranks all of the hedgeable stocks, ETFs, and other exchange-traded products in the U.S. by its estimate of their potential return over the next six months, based on an analysis of price history and option market sentiment. Then it subtracts hedging costs, and ranks them all by potential return net of hedging costs, or net potential return. On Tuesday, the highest-ranked ETF, and the 6th-ranked security overall, was BZQ, the 2x levered bet against Brazil. Portfolio Armor calculated a potential return of 15.2% for it over the next six months.

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