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.

The Year Bias Died

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“All of us show bias when it comes to what information we take in. We typically focus on anything that agrees with the outcome we want.” – Noreena Hertz

I have been wanting to write this article for some time now this year. I wanted to wait until the results I was attempting to achieve became overwhelming. I think we’re there, so I am eager to share. Before I do, let me take a step back and share briefly my history as a trader and investor. I would divide my investing & trading history into three segments.

1998-2007 – Long term investor. Buying and holding assets.

2007-2014 – Combination of buying long term investments & discretionary trading

2015 – Combination of buying long term investments & ATR based trading

I graduated from college in 1998, began working, and investing. My focus was accumulating capital, and putting it to work buying companies that I believed in, understood, had good balance sheets, and for the most part paid dividends. It worked. I enjoyed it. I was good at it. At this point in my life my expertise was understanding companies, not the global economy, or technical analysis. My father was an executive, and my brother was an entrepreneur. I had grown up in business, and been educated in the management of companies.

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Lucky Lucky Girl

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Over the past 15 years, Yahoo (YHOO) has lost nearly 70% of its peak value (and this is taking into account its utterly and completely lucky gains from Alibaba). During those fifteen years – – and let’s remember, on the day of Yahoo’s price peak, Mark Zuckerberg was a 15 year-old high school student – – Yahoo has struggled mightily to recapture its lost glory, only to fail again and again, in spite of a series of blonde female CEOs whose principal difference appears to be whether they use profanities in public or not.

As a person who has been online since 1981 (literally), I have a strong sense as to what’s good and what isn’t so good, and I’ve always thought Yahoo sucked out loud. It’s astonishing to me that they are ever still around. And, in a way, they are not, because their enterprise value was recently calculated as negative thirteen billion dollars.

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My Dream W.A.G.

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I am typing this hours before GLOBEX opens on Sunday, so I continue to have no clue what kind of follow-through (if any) will exist from Friday’s selling. My dumb guess for this week (or hope, at least) is to wrap up the selling Monday/Tuesday, get the Fed announcement, rally firmly until the year is almost over, and then start slipping again to begin what promises to be a really amazing 2016. I remain only in short positions, but half as committed as I was Friday morning, and I intend to trim with gusto before Yellen and her bizarre voice commences Wednesday.

1212-wagtw

Ignore-ance is Bliss

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Well, I think it’s time for me to say something.

Some of you know that I’ve been online longer than some of my readers have been alive. I first went online in 1982, and I’ve been on ever since. I have what I think is a strong understanding of the nature of online communities, and I’m proud of the one we have created here (particularly thanks to the comments system, which was developed by me and totally unique to the Slope of Hope).

For those of you who would like to know some important facts about the comments system, please click this link. I especially encourage lurkers (that is, non-participants) to do so.

Through the ten+ years that Slope has been around, the community has, on the whole, proved itself to be remarkably cordial, helpful, and resilient. I confess there are a few folks that hang out in comments that I’d be nervous meeting in a public place, but overall they’re a likeable bunch. (If you’d like to get a taste of the kind of hostile, packed-with-nutjobs place a financial blog comments section can be like, just read the first couple dozen of these comments on a recent ZeroHedge post).

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A Litany of Errors

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I suspect some of you saw the article over on ZH about the “trader” who had the misfortune of having his entire account short KBIO which ripped about 700% higher this morning. The guy blew out his entire account (and a lot more) and put up this page to ask for people to help him make his six-figure margin call (the margin call itself is three times bigger than the original account). As of this writing, he’s raised about 1.8% of what he owes Etrade.

Having read the text of his GoFundMe page (which is typically used for more worthy causes, such as helping out families or individuals with medical emergencies or charitable organizations that need assistance), I wanted to review the entirety of his missive, since I think there are some important lessons in here. I’ve cleaned up some of the more egregious misspellings and syntactical errors, since it bothers me to sully my blog with such things. Here we go:

Hello to all you traders out there. I’m starting this page out of the recommendation of other traders in the community.

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