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.

Our Top Names Versus The Market

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Each week since June 8th, we’ve been presenting the top 10 names in Portfolio Armor‘s daily ranking to subscribers of a service we run on another site. The performance of our top 10 names from June 8th and eight subsequent weekly cohorts exemplifies the alpha our security selection delivers, as we elaborate below.

How Our Security Selection Method Works

In a nutshell, here’s how our method works. First, we apply our 2 screens to avoid bad investments. Then, for the securities that pass both screens, we start with the assumption that securities will begin to revert to their long term average returns over the next several months, and then we use our gauge of option market sentiment as a “sanity check” on that to arrive at a potential return estimate. We then subtract the cost of hedging from each potential return, and rank every name by potential return, net of hedging cost. The top 10 names each week refer to the top 10 names on that ranking. (more…)

Remember CMGI?

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During the Internet bubble, there was this one stock that was insanely powerful – – CMGI. It was some kind of “roll up” of little Internet companies, and the (idiotic) investing public went crazy about it.

As the bubble was bursting, however, people began to refer to CMGI as “Can’t Make Good Investments”, and it undid pretty much all of its multi-thousand percent gains. For no particular reason, I was wondering whatever happened to them, and sort of like how the Weinstein Company is changing its name, CMGI did the same……….now known as ModusLink Global Solutions, whatever the fuck that is supposed to mean. Here’s the arithmetic chart:

slopechart_MLNK (1)

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