The Q&A Forum is a user-created knowledge-base that resides here on the Slope of Hope. The questions users pose, and the answers that other users provide, provides a mechanism for retaining the most valuable part of the comment stream in a manner that dispenses with the ephemeral nature of comments.

Anyone registered on the comments system can pose a question (which, in order to be useful, should be trading-related and not time-sensitive). Simply click the Question radio button and enter the question.

At this point, your Unanswered Question is in the comments stream. People can click Reply to provide an answer. The default form of a reply is an Answer, although they can also click the Comment radio button if they’d simply like to say something about the question, as opposed to offering a suggested answer. Please note the Categorize button appears only for moderators, so don’t be puzzled that you don’t see it.

When a moderator gets around to categorizing the question, you’ll see the category as shown below, and you can click on the hyperlinks to go to that category (or sub-category) to see all the questions.

Any number of people can offer answers to a given question, and it is a vital role of Slopers to provide both questions and answers in this forum. As the answers accumulate, they are all listed as Possible Answers.

There are two entities that can deem an answer as “Best” – (1) the moderators, or (2) the person who posed the question in the first place. So if you posed the question, you can choose your favorite answer among all those offered by clicking the Best Answer button. Once you had done so, the “Unanswered Question” becomes a “Question”, the best answer becomes the “Selected Answer”, and each of the others become an “Alternate Answer”.

To encourage Slopers to provide answers, unanswered questions will appear throughout the comment stream. You can click on these images in order to provide a suggested answer (and, in doing so, accumulate points to acquire coveted badges).

You can also check out the entire database of questions and answers by going to this menu item:

Once there, you will see the categories and their contents.

Clicking on any category will show you its sub-categories and their contents.

The more questions and answers we accumulate, the more useful the system will be. I hope using this aspect of the system becomes a regular part of your experience at the Slope of Hope.

Every time I write about Apple, I feel like I have to do a little preamble about how I don't hate them and how, in fact, I've been an Apple guy for way longer than any of you good people. In sum, I started working at Apple in 1987, I bought the first iPhone and the first iPad on the days of their introduction, and my videos about Steve Jobs border on hero-worship.

Part of my love of Apple, of course, is the astounding amount of passion and polish behind their products. There have been rare exceptions to this. One was the "hockey puck" mouse from the original iMac, shown below. At the time, Jobs bragged about what a great mouse it was, but after a few minutes using it, you pretty much lost all feeling in your hand. It was ergonomically wretched.

But that mouse was killed years ago, and just about all their products, be they the iMac, Powerbook, iPhone, iPad, or whatever else, are outstanding. Except for………the earbuds.

I used to think something must be wrong with my ears, because the damned things just wouldn't stay in. But when I got a pair of third-party earbuds, which fit like a glove, I realized how piss-poor the Apple earbuds were.

So, err, there's no actionable trading idea in this post. But I just wanted to get this off my chest – – or out of my ears, as the case may be – – to tell you that the next time one of the earbuds drops out of your earhole, don't worry that you've got some kind of physical deformity. Apple clearly made these things for some alien creatures and not us.