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.

Expiration Charts!

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I have an extremely cool new feature for you SlopeCharts folks out there: earnings dates charts. This will be of particular interest to you options traders. Allow me to explain………..

What we’ve done is merged together historical stock data with earnings announcements so you can see how a stock behaves as it approaches its earnings day. By default, we show you every day for twenty days in advance of earnings, as well as the day of and the day after earnings (you can change how many days via a dropdown). Using it, as with all things SlopeCharts, is simple. Just choose the Earnings Dates item from the new Chart Mode menu item:

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Obviously

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There are countless quotes, aphorisms, and bromides related to the world of trading. One of the best known is Joe Granville‘s: “If it’s obvious, it’s obviously wrong.”

Having lived with, considered, and occasionally applied this nugget of wisdom over the years, my conclusion is that what’s “wrong” is actually the quote itself. I believe its principal appeal is that it has that counter-intuitive, funny-because’s-it’s-ironically-true sensibility to it. Kind of like Mark Twain’s “….the coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.” Har de har har. (more…)

Weaponizing Intellect

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My fear for the future of the human race is grounded in two contrasting but related facts: (1) I am supposed to be extremely intelligent (2) I consider myself an idiot. In other words, if, based upon hard data from tests, the vast majority of people are less intelligent than me, yet if I consider myself just barely able to function and be a responsible member of society, where on earth are we all heading? I mean, come on – – I suck – – but most people suck even worse.

It wasn’t long ago that this wouldn’t have mattered at all. At any given point in human history, you could have created a bell curve of intelligence among all living humans. And yet how much has it truly mattered until recently?

In the year 1100, if you were far and away the most brilliant person in your entire village, would it have helped you at all? Would anyone have cared? Of course not! Because you just need to shovel the pig shit into a pile just like everyone else. Intellect was irrelevant. (more…)

SlopeCharts In Action

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I had a recent experience with Slopecharts that I wanted to share, since it is illustrative of how some very simple functions built into the program can produce powerful results.

I have a watch list called ETFs which contains 80 symbols of popular ETF symbols like SPY, TLT, QQQ, and so forth. Because these instruments have been so important to my trading, I wondered to myself if there were other interesting symbols that I wasn’t yet following.

One Google search later, I was on a page that had the biggest 100 funds, and I simply copied this table text and pasted it into Excel.

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