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.

Bitter-Sweet-Laughable-and Everything In Between (by Mark St.Cyr)

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Whether you’re a veteran entrepreneur or just making the plunge one thing will remain constant. You’ll have a lifetime filled with moments of reflection in self-analysis. Some will come out of the blue years or even decades later that will make you stop, think, and ask yourself;  “Was that the right decision at the time or not?” A truly informative, and useful self-analysis should also include this question answered honestly; “Would I make the same decision today if all I knew was what I knew then?”

Woulda, shoulda, coulda, is for amateurs and parlor game discussions. Shoulda bought shares in Apple® at $60.00 then you coulda sold them at $600.00 and you woulda made a killing is worthless chatter. If something you invested in went to ZERO and you lost a near fortune would you have still made the same decision based on what you knew then is more relevant, and useful. Sometimes knowing that yes you would, or no you wouldn’t and why is the only significant question to be answered regardless of the final outcome. I have done this countless times over my career. It never ends.

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Position Updates and CIE (by Ryan Mallory)

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Moments before this post I jumped in Cobalt International Energy (CIE) at $24.22. One of the plays in this current market that has done exceedingly well for me have been the breakouts from support, and then waiting for a few days to even a week perhaps for it to pull back to that original breakout/support level. In fact, in the case of CIE, you could say that the stock 'bull-flagged' its way back to support which is pretty impressive and not nearly as common as the other setup type I just described. 

Coupled with the double bottom of late, its formed a nice base, and with the market bouncing off of support from the 6/4 trend-line today, should it be able to continue into next week, this stock should provide a nice return. 

As for other positions I'm currently holding, the CMG trade and AGU are doing great, and while Netflix is trading lower, I'm still up nicely on it, and have learned from many experiences trading this stock, to just let it trade in a vacuum outside of general market movements. My remaining two positions HD and TPC have been rather quiet today. At this point, I'm looking to hold everything over the weekend, and don't see any major weak spots in my current holdings. 

Here's the CIE Trade Setup. 

Cobalt Intl Energy CIE

Check out Ryan's Blog at SharePlanner.com

China’s Downtrend Continues

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Data released Thursday night shows a marked downtrend in place in China from 2010 on GDP, Fixed Asset Investment, Industrial Production, and from 2008 on Retail Sales, as shown on the graphs below. In fact, the numbers for Fixed Asset Investment and Retail Sales are lower than the lows in 2009.

My only conclusion from these is that China has been in, and is still in, a period of contraction…there are no signs that China will lead the world out of a slowdown in growth.

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