No, thank you. Not me. Out of longs. Pushing into more shorts.
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.
August Closing Strong (by Springheel Jack)
We've had an impressive rally on equities since the low last Friday, but there's still every reason to think that this is just a rally before the downtrend resumes. Vix broke support nicely, but bonds and precious metals are still holding up well and at minimum bonds should break down if equities are to convincingly break up further. I don't have anything suggesting reversal in terms of short term patterns on equities, but what I'm watching on ES are two resistance trendlines that should meet tomorrow at slightly over 1230:
Hedging Update — BAC Again
BAC Again
In a post last week ("Optimal Hedging Costs: A Tell for Stocks"), we mentioned that Bank of America (BAC) had the highest hedging costs in the Dow for most of the last several months, and we speculated about how those high hedging costs might have been a red flag for BAC longs. BAC is up about 28% since then, on news of Warren Buffett's $5 billion preferred stock investment in the Berkshire holding. But as David Weidner noted on Tuesday, Buffett followers who piled into the common stock of Goldman Sachs and General Electric after previous preferred stock investments by Buffett are still under water.
Is the Correction Over? (By eMiniSchool.com)
POTW: Socializing Everything
I've been mixed up with computers since 1979, and I've been online since 1981. During all that time, I've seen a lot of fads and trends.
I remember very well back in 1995 that the holiest-of-holy words was "Portal". People knew almost nothing about the Internet, but they could grasp the concept that a person needed a pathway – a portal – into this mysterious new world, so any business that called itself a portal must be a good one.
Legitimate portals were the likes of AOL and Yahoo. However, some companies begin touting themselves as portals which were nothing of the sort. My favorite example of this was Doubleclick, which simply serves advertisements. No one on the planet went to doubleclick.com in order to check out the web. It was a service for businesses. All the same, their stock, DCLK, soared when they simply uttered that they were, in fact, a portal.
Well, "social" is the big word these days, so everyone wants to jump on the social bandwagon. Facebook is the Uber-King of all things social, and there really isn't even a distant second-place winner at this point.
But calling your site "social" is often like trying to push a square peg through a round hole. This became clear to me when I started seeing that weather.com – of all sites – was spending a lot of money promoting itself as a social network.
I mean, look, I am a weather nerd, and even though I live in a place where the weather is agonizingly predictable, I still stay on top of all weather news. But even I would never consider being part of the "convo" (ack, barf, gag………) I mean, I love Slopers dearly, but I couldn't care less what the humidity or temperature is at your current location. I hope this doesn't mean we still can't be friends.
