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.

Two Months and Ten Percent

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Tonight’s post is going to be exceptionally short, because I am exceptionally busy.

I will note that I have recently been uncharacteristically courageous and confident with respect to the market. It is not because the market has been collapsing before our eyes; on the contrary, many indexes have been vaulting to lifetime highs on pretty much an every-other-day basis.

However, for a variety of reasons – – some known, others confidential – – I have a firm belief that the song and dance from Bernanke & Company shouldn’t turn me off shorting. I have been getting increasingly aggressive, and as I type this, I am nearly 100% committed (94%, to be precise) with 90 different positions.

I offer the chart below of the NASDAQ Composite, which I believe may be heading for a 10% drop over the next two months. This may seen an insane conjecture in this “Bernanke/Yellen Put” environment, but reality be damned, I think this is the most likely path ahead.

0321-compq

I will not continue with my evening, and I’ll see you here in the morning. Pray for rain.

An Opportunity for Giving

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Anyone living with me for a long time probably would either (a) go nuts; or (b) decide to become professionally-qualified to help people who are going nuts. My beloved wife,. whom I have known since the dawn of time, is in the second category.

As such, in the final throes of earning her psychology PhD, she works at a local organization called CHAC(Community Health Awareness Ccouncil). CHAC had the good fortune to have a $3 million+ building gifted to them by a family that recognizes the good work they do for the mental health of the community, particularly young people, but they are trying to raise about $187,000 to make needed improvements to the building to make it ready to use. (more…)

Another Good Example of the Value of Stops

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As most of you know, I tend to have a large number of small short positions – as of this morning, 70, but as of now, 69 – and it is the elimination of one of those by way of a stop-loss order I want to mention herein.

Things were sailing along smoothly this morning, when all of a sudden, I saw a very, very large loss on one of my positions. It appeared from out of the clear blue sky, and my first thought was that I must have been short some stock which was being taken over, and they had only commenced trading very late in the day. The stock was BMC Software (symbol BMC).

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