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.

Friendly Reminder to Torture Yourself

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I want to remind everyone of Slope’s extremely unique page called Woulda Shoulda Coulda which lets you enter in any hypothetical trade and find out:

  • What it would be worth today;
  • What percentage change would have take place;
  • What maximum drawdown you would have had to endure at any point;
  • What the maximum loss would have been from your original investment.

As an example, let’s say the day after I sold Prophet, I put $50,000 into NFLX, which was a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the cash that went into my account.

nflxshoulda

So this reveals a $50,000 investment in Netflix would be worth nearly $12 million today. This assumes, of course, I would have had the testicular fortitude to ignore a 22% drop in value and, far worse, a nearly 83% drawdown during this holding period.

I would normally be jumping off a bridge at this point, but I know there’s no way in hell I would have held on, so I’m going to let myself off the hook.

Baby Steps

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I was expecting a modest retracement in my last post and we have seen one. I was looking at the setup on the premarket video today and there is a probable short term low here testing support at the ES weekly pivot, open gap support on SPX and the 50 hour MA. We should see a short term higher high next and that will likely be setting up a larger retracement to follow. That’s working out so far.

Partial Premarket Video from theartofchart.net – Update on ES, NQ:

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Great Scott!

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Good morning, everyone. Considering all the mayhem from Netflix (and congrats to those here who profited from it), it’s a surprisingly dull-feeling morning. As I’m typing this, the ES is unchanged (!) and the NQ is up over 20. Just to get a fresh post up for the day, I’ll show an updated chart of one of my shorts, Scotts Miracle Gro (symbol SMG). I entered this as $87 and have a stop of $85.50 on it. As of this moment, it’s trading at $81.

smg (more…)

Viewing Some Important ETFs

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As I mentioned on my Twitter feed, some folks are going to get a little confused (and misled) by the NQ since there’s all this chatter about Netflix’s plunge and yet the NQ is bright green (at least as of this writing). What they’re missing is that, in the few minutes between the close of the regular session and the close of the GLOBEX, the NQ went plunge-a-roony. When the new “day” began, everything is zeroed out, of course, and so the gain they see on the NQ is merely a fractional recapture of the loss it had earlier (tinted below in yellow).

nqswoon (more…)