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.

Stop-Setting

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A reader sent me an email which asked: “I have a question about stops…once before you mentioned that you limit your losses to think 1-5% using stops. How do you decide whether its 1%, 2% or 5% etc? And can I assume that some of your losses are very small numbers like $150 and some are thousands of dollars? ”

As I’ve tried to say before, I avoid responding 1-on-1 to just about anything, so I told the gentleman I’d write up a post about this topic. So here are a few points, in no particular order, about how I set stop-loss levels: (more…)

Revisiting Woulda

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We recently introduced a page that I don’t think has an equal on the Internet – – it tells you the present value of any equity investment you made in the past as well as the worst drawdown during the span of your personal holding period. You can use the page by clicking here.

woulda

I discovered, however, a mistake in the arithmetic on the original deployment. The drawdown would tell you how much you might lost from your entry price. I thought a more useful definition – – particularly given the psychology involved – – would be the loss from the peak value to the lowest value during any period of your holding. We’ve made this correction, and I think the improved results speak for themselves.

Have fun with the regret! It’s quite a painful page.