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.

Great Moments in Portfolio Mathematics

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For quite a while, I was getting solicitations from a site (which I won’t bother naming, for reasons that shall soon be clear) that promised to “revolutionize” investing by showing actual results of portfolio picks to the investing public. This kind of web site has been done a dozen different ways over the years, so it was hardly unique, and my skin crawls any time any tech company promises to “revolutionize” anything, even if they find a comely lass (that can’t stop smiling) with an off-the-shoulder dress to promote its virtues.

0417-lass

I had pretty much forgotten about the site, but for no particular reason it occurred to me to check in on them and see how they were doing. The site was up and running, and on the home page was a list of their superstar stock pickers and their returns. I was sort of blown away to see the result at the very top:

0417-thomscarr

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Apple’s Lost Lustre

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UPDATE: I wrote this over the weekend, and it doesn’t take into account that AAPL is down today (unlike just about every other ticker symbol on the planet), which I think only strengthens the case……….

Perhaps the best-known publicly-traded stock on the planet is Apple. There are a couple of things about Apple that would probably surprise a lot of people. First, as marvelous as the percentage gain was during the “golden dozen years” (2003-2015) of this stock, there are many stocks – – far, far more boring companies – – whose percentage gains completely dwarf Apple’s. I’ve mentioned them before, but basically, the more dull the company (Hormel, Smuckers, etc.) the more amazing the gains have been.

Second, for a huge period of time, Apple was an absolutely awful stock. It had its ups and downs, but the 1983 to 2003, a period of two entire decades, the stock went nowhere. And keep in mind, this 0% return was six years after Jobs’ glorious return, and well into the success of the iPod product line. Take note of the magenta line below and see how, in spite of wild swings, Apple was dead money for a twenty year span of time.

0417-AAPLOLD

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One More Heave

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I said to somebody last week that topping processes would often last until you were completely bored with them, and then they’d run on a bit longer, and this topping process has been a good case in point.

I was saying on Friday that the ideal high would be just a little higher and that was very much on my mind as SPX was retracing a bit on Friday and retracing further on ES overnight. Stan was looking for a backtest to broken resistance in the 2056-8 area, and I’d been thinking we’d see that in trading hours but we saw that last night instead. That support held, the sell signals on the ES, NQ and TF charts all made target or very close (TF), and 60min buy signals fixed on both ES and NQ, which is why I was talking about a likely run to a marginal new high on twitter before the open.

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