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.

What Support Means in Human Terms

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I was recently asked a question on Quora (“What does support level mean in a technical chart of a stock?“), and after I finished answering it, I realized it was way too long not to share here. So here it what I said:

Although I’m a chartist, I will answer this in “human” rather than chart-based terms. I’ll use a rather facetious example to make my point.

Let’s say a given stock X traded between $50 and $51 for two solid years. Countless people bought at that price. It was boring but very, very stable.

Now let’s say for whatever reason the stock vaulted swiftly over the course of a month up to $80 per share. Perhaps there were takeover rumors or optimism about a new product line. So now you’ve got a huge mass of people with nice fat profits, as well as some newcomers who paid between $51 and $80 for the same stock.

So now you have two classes of owners – – a large mass of folks with a good basis price and big profits, as well as newcomers whose profits range from decent to very small, depending on the price they paid. This latter group is going to be quite nervous and have weak hands. The former group will be more confident, since they have a much lower basis and have grown accustomed to the stock never being below $50. (more…)

The Old College Try

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Over the course of writing thousands and thousands of posts on this blog (personally, about 15,000, although Slope itself has well in excess of 20,000), I take a certain amount of liberty with the topics I choose. By no means are all my posts related to charts or trading. Sometimes I talk about personal (but not too personal) stuff. This will be one of those posts.

This is just an off-the-cuff musing about how much the process of applying to colleges has changed since I was in high school. The reason this is on my mind is that my oldest child is enter the “hot zone” spanning end-of-Junior and start-of-Senior year during which applying to schools becomes a full-time occupation. I suspect I’ll be doing other posts about this adventure as the year wears on.

To set a baseline, I’ll share my experience from when I went through this. It won’t take long, because there wasn’t much to it. There were no consultants. There were no books I read. There were no seminars or college visits or any help at all from my parents. I didn’t do any prep classes, and I received no counseling from the school at all. All I did was take the SAT test, did a desultory job of filling out a few applications……….and I got into Princeton and Brown. (more…)