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.

The General Premise

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Before I begin, I wanted to mention how long I’ve been looking forward to the start of October. I’ve been lining up engineering talent to revitalize Slope and also bring some serious strength to SlopeCharts, and that all starts happening Monday. As a person who has lived his life creating products, I couldn’t be more excited about this “new era” of Slope commencing.

As far as the market, I couldn’t be less excited. This is pretty much as bad as it gets for an ursine soul like myself………lifetime highs everywhere, a raging small caps market, and a VIX in the single digits. Absolutely soul-crushing.

I’m not the sort of give up (ummm……..obviously) and I have, in fact, put together five options positions based on one simple premise. I’ll get to the premise later.

For now, let me show you the five positions in question. They all have these elements in common: (1) I own puts against them (2) the puts are in-the-money (3) the options expiration is way out in January 19 2018 (at least), giving me tons of time. (more…)

Right Under the Channel

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I may regret it terribly – – or it may be my finest hour – – but I just bought a substantial options position against the Russell 2000 following the crazy surge we had just now. They are January $1500 puts against the Russell 2000 index itself, and I’m basing it on the simple fact that we are precisely beneath the broken channel for the index. I chose January to give me ample time.

0927-rut