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.

Top of the Roller Coaster Track?

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Good morning, everyone.

I had truly forgotten how stressful product launches can be. Perhaps the low point was late Sunday, after we were all exhausted, when the site suddenly…………disappeared. Having worked smoothly all weekend, the site vanished completely. Turns out we had to make some changes to the SSL certification, but it felt like one of these moments:

So I was relieved to wake up this morning to see this working smoothly. More important, my final post of the weekend was one in which I actively solicited complaints and problems, and I only had a handful of emails in my inbox waiting for me (amongst the normal sea of spam). So we are firmly in “make things better” mode now. (more…)

Tell Me Your Troubles

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What a weekend this has been. We’ve deployed the new site and have, over the course of 48 hours, improved the state of affairs from a “D-” to about a “B+”. I have a laundry list of stuff we have to fix, much of it tiny, but a few of the more obvious problems that I already know exist are:

  • Slope Daily Digest, which is emailed about an hour after the close each day, has stopped going out;
  • People reading Slope via RSS aren’t seeing it, since we need to update the link with Feedburner;
  • The “@” feature in comments isn’t sending the targeted user the comment via email;
  • Those of you who used to use your username (instead of email) to log in are unable to do so;

For those of you who have written me, clearing your cache has solved your problem 95% of the time, so please, have mercy, do that first (and log in) before you reach out to me with issues.

Setting that aside, however, if you’re still having trouble, or if you see something wrong, please write to me and let me know. We are fixing problems in terms of severity and importance, so please be patient. On the whole, I’m pretty happy with how things turned out, since this was like replacing the engines on an airborne jet.

Strolling Through the Biggies

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Happy Sunday, everyone. Well, the launch of the new site has gone decently so far. We still have some issues – – a couple of fairly major ones, in fact – – but in the same way that many of the improvements on the site are “under the hood’ and unknown to most users, likewise these lingering problems are invisible or imperceptible to most of you.

All the same, Sunday for me and my guys is slated to addressing these last items before the trading week begins. I am, as some like to say, cautiously optimistic.

Yet I can’t spend the entire weekend doing new site announcements. Let me share a few words about the big indexes as we enter a new trading week.

First up is the Major Market Index which exhibits the exact same pattern that is virtually omnipresent in equity markets: (1) a peak at the end of January followed by (2) lower lows and (3) lower highs. Of substantial concern to me is that there might be a double bottom which took place in early February and just last week (it’s plain to see we didn’t get another “lower low”). The rally on Friday was powerful, and I’m wringing my hands over whether that descending trendline holds.

slopechart XMI (more…)

The New Slope of Hope

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I will begin this important post with a quote from the movie Apollo 13:

apollo

That, better than anything else, summarizes the old Slope of Hope. It was built, piece by piece, step by step, with no particular plan in mind, over many years. It did its job well, but it lived well past its prime and, technologically, fell far behind the times. But it was a good ship.

I introduce you now to our new ship – the new Slope of Hope. This system was built new from the ground up. We started with a blank sheet of paper and blank hard drives and went from there.

The vast majority of improvements are invisible to the eye. I wanted to take this opportunity, however, to illustrate a few differences between the old and new Slope to get you acquainted with our new home. (more…)