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.
On Thursday, this headline caught my eye:
Let that sink in for a moment. People in this country, most of them in their late teens or early twenties, borrowed over one-fifth of a trillion dollars. That money went into the pockets of educational enterprises (with fat administrative salaries, tenured professor paychecks, and God knows what else). The people who borrowed the money blew off the debts. And now those stupid enough to be responsible are stuck holding the bag.
(more…)When I was a little kid and got what I considered a bad grade (let’s say a B+) at school, I would sheepishly come home and start to tell my mom. She could tell I had disappointing news, and she would invariably ask me, “Was it a C? A D? An F?” Hearing her offer some low expectations was a relief for me, and it made me easier to tell her, “I got a B+”, and she would tell me it wasn’t so bad, and we would talk about it. For a little boy, it was a weight off his shoulders. And she did it that way every time.
I suppose, or at least I hope, it was her way of making it easier for me to tell her the news. Thus, in a strange way, telling her something bad was magically transformed into what I felt was actually pretty good news. Hearing her suggest that I might be reporting an “F” but instead giving her a “B+” made me feel good again. It was a curious, but clever, psychological trick.
(more…)Both this Monday (that is, today) and last Monday had, for me, some singular and very nasty losses. I wanted to share the story of each of them, since the contrast between what led to those losses is worth noting. In short, one of them was a royal screw-up on my part, and the other was just plain bad luck. Let’s review, and in doing so, we’re going to look at the Friday preceding each of the aforementioned Mondays.
A couple of Fridays ago, the market was falling to pieces, thanks to the Corona virus scare. All my positions were doing great, and I was just about fully committed with respect to buying power. Egged on by this success, I decided to get cute and put the last of my buying power into some weekly SPY put options.
(more…)I last wrote about FNGU in my post of December 26, 2019.
FNGU is an exchange-traded note that tracks 3x the daily price movements of an index of US-listed technology and consumer discretionary companies. The index is highly concentrated and equally weighted.
Since then, price blew through both the 78.6% Fibonacci level and it’s prior all-time high, as shown on the following weekly chart
The Balance of Power still lies in the hands of buyers, in spite of a bit of a blow-off in the last weekly candle. We may not see a trend reversal until this indicator spikes to, and closes on, a new high in one of the coming weeks.
(more…)It seems to me that for every one owner of a Tesla electric car, there are about 2,000 “investors” who trade the thing. This reached a new apex of absurdity a few days ago when a little-known research firm trotted out a target price for TSLA at, conveniently, a trillion dollar market cap. The intended result played out as you might expect.
