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.

Who Do I Think I Am?

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This year will be the 8th year I’ve been writing this blog. I never imagined when I started writing what would become Slope of Hope in 2005 that I would have this many readers and that the blog would be such a big part of my life, but I have been feeling the urge to tell people just who you are dealing with, since this blog is still very much a personal expression.

You are going to find a lot of dichotomy and contradiction in this post, because that’s what I’m like. I spend half my days wishing someone would sneak up behind me and shoot me in the head, and the other half of my days feeling just OK. I'm never really happy – – – it’s been years since I’ve been anything close to that – – – but at part of my life I can spend not wishing to be wiped away.

The darkness of my mindset is pervasive; I have written countless private notes to myself to try to sort out my feelings; one snippet reads like this:

• No good deed goes unpunished. So hang on to everything you’ve got. Giving always backfires.

• Most of “success” is dumb luck – being in the right place at the right time. Lots of good, smart people don’t get shit, and lots of mindless, stupid people make fortunes.

• The way you live and what you get aren’t correlated. Evil, obnoxious people can get all they want, and decent, hard-working people can live with deprivation.

• The human desire to consume useless shit is almost insatiable, since most people are devoid of any real soul or understanding.

I sound like a barrel of laughs, don’t I? But I have to be honest with you. I can feel very bitter at times, and if nothing else, I owe my readers some honesty.

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Premature Emissions

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If there's one thing that binds bulls and bears together, it's the mistake of closing out a position too soon in order to (a) take profits (b) avoid any chance of a smaller profit or, worse, a loss.

This is a beginner's mistake, and it's one that I make from time to time as well. Just yesterday I covered two profitable shorts – SPRD and GMCR – simply because they had nice profits and I thought the risk of them reversing was high (these are pretty volatile beasts). Well, here's what has happened today, and I've marked the approximate point-of-closure with an arrow.

1213-sprd

1213-gmcr

So…..great picks, Tim, but sub-optimal closings, to say the least!

Don't do this.

That Perpetual State of Disappointment

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This is one of those "got to get this off my chest" type posts.

I cannot help but feel very disappointed in today's action. It's not so much that the market isn't doing what I'd like it to do – – that's something none of us can ever control – – it's the fact that the way this market is behaving is rewarding rule-breaking and punishing rule-following.

One of the most basic rules is to let profits run. You don't close out positions the same day you open them just because you happen to have a small profit. You let them run, updating the stops along the way, and hope that they will blossom into big winners.

Well, that's what I try to do, and it's not working. What we're going through today is a perfect example of this. Yesterday the market fell nicely, and I had a handsomely-profitable day. Now that the Summit is done, it seemed that things were in line for a continuation of a soft market. Irrespective of one's views of what the market was going to do today, the fact is that there was no logical reason to scurry around just before the close and shut down all my positions just to take profits.

But that is precisely what I wish I would have done, simply because the market is rocketing higher today. It seems that we're on an endless cycle of up/down/up/down/up/down/up, and it's enough to break one's spirit. After all, if we can't manage to hold on to gains for more than a day, what's the point of any of this?

I took some profits on some of my riskier positions earlier today, and I've bought a big block of DIA (and shorted a medium-sized TLT) to help balance things out. But this market is exhausting, I've got to tell you, and as much as I'd love to pretend to wallow around in the joy of trading every single day, I'm frankly getting awfully tired of this. I imagine some of you are, too, and I wanted you to know you're not alone.

The Wisdom of the Unwieldy Portfolio

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Given all the insanity of this day, I was reminded of this post that I wrote a year and a half ago about why I have so many positions. The quantity of my positions have been the butt of a lot of jokes by my detractors (most regularly by erstwhile vistor The Hun), but I have my reasons for holding on to such a wide variety of positions.

A day like today, in which I've definitely caused myself a bit of self-harm by chasing a rally, was largely saved by the fact that the vast majority of my shorts were left in place because, frankly, it was too much time and trouble to close them out in the first place. Here's how I explained my style in the aforementioned post:

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Be Reasonable

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I feel compelled to write something for a number of reasons:

+ You are, like it or not, my therapy;

+ My brain has been in trade-psycho-overdrive for the past 30 hours;

+ It is only proper that I disclose any "big feelings" I am having with the group

Of the many complimentary emails I've received over the years with respect to this blog, by far the most common reason people cite for their love of Slope is my honesty. I freely admit screw-ups, fears, concerns, problems, and any other bad or embarassing stuff that 99% of other blogs would hide or outright lie about. Some clowns take advantage of this openness by hatefully mocking me, but Karma has a way of catching up with such souls. It always has. I'm not going to let emotionally-unstable sociopaths keep me from being open and honest.

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