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.

From TBSP to WSB

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Back in the late 1980s, when I first developed a strong interest in trading, I subscribed to a newspaper that’s still around today: Investor’s Business Daily. In that paper, without fail, would appear a full-page ad from a company that I don’t think is around anymore called The Better Software People (or, as they called themselves, T.B.S.P.).

The message TBSP wanted to convey was simplicity itself: buy our software, and you will get options trade signals that will make you rich. About 95% of the ad was just row after row of trades, starting with something like $10,000, which steadily grew to literally hundreds of millions of dollars. These people, with a straight face, retroactively picked all the perfect trades and convinced some poor saps that a small account could, in a few years, grow to hundreds of millions of dollars. Self-evidently, they must have sold enough software to pay for these expensive ads year after year.

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Karen Analysis (Part 2)

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Note from Tim. The following is kindly contributed by Buccaneer. The first part can be read here. I am not sure what preamble is required with respect to what I assume is an ongoing legal case, except to say that the words below are obviously a matter of personal opinion and none of these are offered as fact or conclusive findings: On Karen Bruton the Supertrader (KST) topic here’s my analysis about her case. (Links to SEC PDFs are here and here).

Unfortunately, the market had been moving up, and as you all know the adjustments to the Call side being tested can and do include selling Puts also. This works effectively if the volatility stays low and market keeps moving up or flattens out. But where you run into trouble is when this upward moving market suddenly dips with a big vol increase, which is exactly what happened with the Oct 2014 dip. So now Karen had sold many Puts at low vol in an up market, and they suddenly generated significant paper losses.

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