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 Pratfall Awaits

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I honestly love this market.

Wait, Tim, what? All you have is SHORT positions, the NQ is up triple digits, every single equity futures is bright green, and every tidbit of news out there is bullish. What’s wrong with you??

Oh, plenty is wrong with me, but I still love this market. Every thing about it feels right.

To be sure, I’m pleased to have backed off yesterday. I’ve got a ton of cash and much less exposure than I did 24 hours ago. But, believe you, me, I’m going to be going in with guns a-blazin’ later today, if I can get the prices I want.

The hodgepodge of good news (much of it dreamed up out of whole cloth by China for the support of their own devastated bourses) has sent us flying to the same peak as the “Positive Developments” rally from last week.

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Doubling Down on Dumb

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Observant Slopers will know by now that I sold to close a block of IWM puts on Friday morning, and that I regretted doing so. Now, I’m not the first trader who has screwed up like this. And it’s not the first time in my life I’ve done so. I’ve only done it eight or nine thousand times before. But I wanted to break down what happened, for your sake and mine, just to examine how emotions can really trip a person up.

Let’s rewind to Thursday morning. I was already quite short, having about 30 bearish positions set up. I did, however, have a ton of buying power left, and the market was definitely going my way. Things were getting weaker and weaker, and I decided to get very aggressive with a very large IWM put position – – about five times the size of my other bearish positions. The green circle shows about where I jumped in:

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