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.

A Tale of Two Fridays

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Both this Monday (that is, today) and last Monday had, for me, some singular and very nasty losses. I wanted to share the story of each of them, since the contrast between what led to those losses is worth noting. In short, one of them was a royal screw-up on my part, and the other was just plain bad luck. Let’s review, and in doing so, we’re going to look at the Friday preceding each of the aforementioned Mondays.

A couple of Fridays ago, the market was falling to pieces, thanks to the Corona virus scare. All my positions were doing great, and I was just about fully committed with respect to buying power. Egged on by this success, I decided to get cute and put the last of my buying power into some weekly SPY put options.

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Ex Squeeze Me

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I had an interesting little experience the other day which reminded me of a post I wrote a decade ago.

Here in my beloved home of Palo Alto, we’ve got a shopping center that has been around for decades called Town & Country. I had to run an errand down there, so I had to make a quick decision whether to take the Tesla or just pile all my dogs into my other (not-as-nice) car. The dogs were eager for a drive, so I decided to slum it and take the non-Tesla instead.

I arrived at the shopping center, parked, ran my errand, and got back to my car. I put it in reverse and started backing out.

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Iowa Kaka

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What a mess.

See, I really like watching politics. This is going to be an amazing year for political theater, and I’ve actually been anticipating the Iowa caucus for months. The results were supposed to be out by 5:30 p.m. my time, so I started hitting the refresh screen starting a few minutes before then.

After trying to get an update for hours, with no results presenting themselves, it was clear to me that something was seriously messed up. Turns out that the heart of the matter was a completely screwed-up app developed by a company called Shadow. The headlines have been tumbling out all morning……..

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