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.

Stocks at Highs: Time to Sell it All?

By -

It’s a theory
that’s treated me well for years…

You simply buy
the 10 Dow stocks with the highest dividend yields that have fallen out of
favor with investors.  And, after a year
of holding, you’re supposed to walk with gains across the board and a dividend
to boot.

2013 should
prove to be another successful year for the Dow, as markets push record,
nosebleed highs on the heels of incessant, and reckless, money printing.

But I digress…

If you followed
my advice on January 8, 2013, you bought AT&T
(T)
Verizon (VZ)
Intel (INTC)
Merck (MRK)
Pfizer (PFE)
DuPont (DD)
Hewlett
Packard (HPQ)
General Electric (GE)
McDonald’s (MCD)
and Johnson & Johnson
(JNJ)… otherwise known as the 2013 Dogs of the Dow.

(more…)

Hedging a $500k Portfolio

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A reader recently emailed me, asking how he could hedge a "typical $500k
mutual fund portfolio". I'm going to walk through a step-by-step
example of doing that in this post.

Step One: Choose A Proxy Exchange-Traded Fund

If you own a portfolio of
stocks or stock funds, you can hedge that portfolio against market risk
by buying optimal puts* on a suitable exchange-traded fund, or ETF. The
first consideration is that the ETF will need to have options traded on
it, but most of the most widely-traded ETFs do. The second
consideration is that the ETF be invested in same asset class as your
portfolio. Let's assume your portfolio consists primarily of blue chip
U.S. stocks. An ETF you could use as a proxy would be the SPDR Dow Jones
Industrial Average (DIA), which, as its name suggests, tracks the Dow
Jones Industrial Average. You could then enter its ticker symbol, DIA,
in "Ticker Symbol" field in the Portfolio Armor app, as in the screen
capture below.

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Memo to the Internet

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The snoozefest in the market today is reflected in traffic on Slope, which is down 15% from yesterday (yes, I follow Slope's traffic with as much interest as I do any other charts). Averaging out the IWM, SPY, and QQQ, the market was unchanged today – a complete bore. Maybe Friday morning's jobs report will add some vim and vigor.

In the absence of anything market-ish to discuss, I'll fall back on my inner Andy Rooney and gripe about something that's on my mind from time to time. ("Ya ever wonder………?") The item in question is a dropdown menu found on many forms. It is the field for the Country of your address, and it almost always looks like this:

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Building a Master Scan List for Trading Options

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For any options traders out there, I thought I’d throw out a helping hand.
 
No one
likes to go through the time of finding a nice trade setup and then
finding that the board is rubbish. Here are two ways to do away with
that forever and virtually never have to deal with a poor options board
again! 
 
1. If you have a stockcharts subscription, you can scan
for stocks with > 10 billion in market cap and other helpful metrics
with this scan then save it to a Master List. Afterwards, you can just
scan for setups against that list. 
 
[[exchange is NYSE] or [exchange is NASD] or [exchange is AMEX]] 
and [type = stock] 
and [optionable is true] 
and [close >20] 
and [volume > 1,000,000] 
and [market cap > 10,000] 
 
2. If you have TOS, you can do the following. 
 
This
youtube link will show you how to load a scan list from finviz into
TOS. What I did was make a scan list of optionable and >10bil market
cap to give myself a master scan list, then I put it in TOS and now I
can scan that list only for potential trades. 
 
Video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZFUHUe138U

 

Finviz Scan 

http://finviz.com/screener.ashx?v=111&f=cap_large,exch_nyse,geo_usa,
idx_sp500,sh_avgvol_o1000,sh_opt_option,sh_price_o30&ft=3 
 
Have fun!