Hello Slopers,

First off – it's that time of year again. I'll be spending a glorious week at Fallen Leaf Lake, thus the blog's pace will be less frenetic than normal. It'll still be fifty times more interesting and active than 99% of the finance blogs out there, but Slope has its own reputation to uphold, so I offer you my annual apology.

Most of you are aware that Slope has a very active comments section. You can read about the basics here, learn about joining comments, and also read about the most recent features.

I have paid for the development of the comments system completely out of my own pocket (aided, in part, to your abiding interest in the advertisements on the site) and I wanted to add a few new features to it. The most important thing I want to change is the ranking system for trading performance. It is fairly well-known among frequent Slopers that the data is 15-minute delayed, and I've got a pretty strong hunch that a lot of the best performers are, shall we say, gaming the system. It's all too easy to see a stock make a big change, enter a Short or Long on it, and then close it out profitably a little later in the day.

I am therefore going to eliminate "day-trading" as part of the performance grading and only use data for trades lasting more than a day. I apologize to the awesome day traders out there who seriously are doing well, but I think the risk of a "gamed" system really diminishes the value of the leader board.

Anyway, I'm not bringing this up to talk about that – – I want to hear your ideas. What improvements would you like to see in comments, or on Slope in general? Now's your time to voice your opinion, since I'm putting together a to-do list right now.

Thanks, and I hope you are having a relaxing weekend! I certainly am.