I don’t watch television, but I heard an interview with Howie Mandel (on Gilbert, of course) about the revival of his Deal or No Deal show. I say, good for Howie, because he’s really reinvented himself and is a success later in life. But this isn’t about Howie………it’s about a contestant who was on a few days ago. Just watch this.
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 Fade
Good morning, everyone, and welcome to December.
You’d expect me to be beating my chest and howling at the gods above, but nope. Indeed, I used used a command on my brokerage software I’ve never used in my entire life – – I wasn’t even sure it existed – – “Cancel All Open Orders”. I’m going into the day with not a single stop, which is unprecedented for me. I want the initial dust to clear before I make any decisions.
For those who missed my last 300 posts, I’m very light right now. I am 100% guaranteed to lose money when the bell opens. I am 99% guaranteed to be down when the closing bell rings. But even though the bulls are celebrating the enormous green numbers on the screen (one-dimensional thinking), the chart of the ES (two-dimensional thinking) don’t exactly paint this as a New Era for our hoofed friends:
One Nightmare to Go
Irony Deluxe
One Fund’s Instant Destruction
This is a cautionary tale. A tale of a fund of nearly 300 clients and nearly $80 million which blew up in the span of hours from a market move that was, in the grand scheme of things, not that big a deal. It illustrates how excessive leverage can completely torch the risk-taker (and, in this case, his clients). And it just happened.
The person in question is James Cordier, who is a bestselling author of books about options. One glance at Amazon, and you can see the myriad of volumes he’s written on the topic:
