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 Nerve

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Kuroda, Draghi, and Yellen sure have a lot of nerve.

How dare these blinkered bureaucrats cause someone like me anxiety and stress? What business is it of theirs to threaten a normally-operating market and trouble a sweet soul like myself? I might as well be scared of a DMV clerk. These sickening, self-serving civil sycophants surely should have a special place in hell.

This morning was Exhibit A. Here I was, positioned with 125 shorts and 0 longs. I have said time again, we are in a bear market which started on December 26, 2014, and I have positioned myself to take advantage of it. And yet seven years of “training” the sheep have put the central bankers in a place of vomit-inducing power.

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The Kindness of Strangers

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Many years ago, when I rented a condo with a couple of other roommates who had just graduated college with me, I had a friend named Timo who lived with me. (Yes, Timo. Like my name with an “o” at the end). We would greet each other enthusiastically – “Timo!!!” “Timmy!” and shared a mutual fondness for Pee Wee’s Playhouse and Mystery Science Theatre 3000. Good times. Good times.

One day, Timo saw his cubicle-mate working on some code that didn’t look familiar. “What cha workin’ on, Pierre?”, he asked. Turns out this fellow Pierre was putting together code for a web site (and at the time the commercial web was brand spanking new) called Auction Web to match buyers and sellers. That Pierre was, of course, Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay.

One of Pierre’s core beliefs was that people, on the whole, were honest and respectable, and that creating a community of totally anonymous buyers and sellers could succeed based on the general premise that the community would be relatively moral and self-policing. His thesis was correct, and eBay’s tremendous success has made Pierre a billionaire many times over.

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Wayback Machine

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Although this is bound to cause delight amongst a few folks, the past three weeks have been utter torture for me. There have been many reasons for this, but one of them, of course, has been the brutal counter-trend rally which seems to have strength drawn from another dimension.

Of course, what’s maddening is that it wasn’t a secret that things were badly oversold on February 11th. Indeed, I took the time yesterday to read every post from 2/11 to see what people were saying. I figured everyone would be screaming at me to get out. Nope. Everyone – – both authors of posts (Springheel Jack, for instance) as well as the commenters were all jumping up and down about the next leg down, be it 1750 (conservatively) or the 1500s. So the atmosphere was definitely “bearish now and bearish to stay.” Of course, the oversold state of the market is plain as the nose on my face now:

0303-oversold

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Thing One Violated

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In yesterday afternoon’s post, I described the day as “taking the wind out of my sails.” Well, today went ahead and just took the sails themselves. Excuse my bluntness, but God damn it, what happened to our breakdown? The Powers That Be seem to be intolerant of anything more than a few percentage points to the downside before they crank up the buy programs again. It’s revolting.

With all this strength, the ES has cut above the “Thing One” level I mentioned yesterday, and now we’re into the DMZ. There’s very little holding the market back from marching up to somewhere south of 2000. If the bulls were waiting for an opportunity, it has arrived.

ESDMZ

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Failure to Bank

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I’ve had this post in my head for about a week now, although I’ve been debating whether to write it or not. The reason for my hesitation isn’t because what I have to say is particularly shameful (“I have a secret fetish related to capuchin monkeys………”) but it is one of those Earnest Trader posts which is prone to attracting stupid/obvious advice or, even worse, criticism. Part of the reason for Slope’s success, however, has been my openness, and I have no intention of changing that.

To come right to the point, even though we’re just a little bit into 2016, I have twice had “peak profits”, only to see the majority of them wither away. More specifically, I managed to put together a very handsome profit, peaking on January 20 (which happens to be the day I saved those two puppies in the park), only to see most of those profits get torched (see first green tinting below). A subsequent drop in the market allowed me to rebuild those same profits, step by painful step, to enjoy an even greater total profit by February 11th (second green tinting below) after which time the vast majority of those profits were, in turn, torched. (more…)