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.

Rent-a-Wreck

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This is a follow-up on something I posted two Septembers ago which, over the long haul, was a fantastic short, but there’s no doubt I was too early!

I had suggested shorting Rent-A-Center in this post, and I predicted it would eventually look like the destroyed chart of one of the for-profit education companies. The Rent-A-Center chart was about $30 at the time, which I’ve marked with an arrow. Here’s where we are at now:

0202-RCII

So suggesting shorting a stock at nearly $30 that’s in the single digits was pretty brilliant, eh? Well, yes and no, because you’d have endured some nasty pain beforehand, and I’m the first to admit I wouldn’t have stuck with this short since it pushed about 20% higher before the plunge began.

All the same, it’s nice to see such an exploitative sector get nuked. Oh, and I was spot-on about what the chart would look like. Take a look at the post I mentioned, and you’ll see.