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.

Barry Fizzle

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I cannot help but express my delight at having real infrastructure again. I spent the entirety of Monday flying back home, and while I am accustomed to Internet connectivity that is similar to a firehose, I have to satisfy my data needs with a tiny plastic straw that had a kink in it. I wound up sleeping through most of the trading day, as there was little to be done.

I did an ETF roundup over the weekend for our gold and diamond members, and in it I highlighted crude oil’s vulnerability to a downturn, based principally on its approach of an important price gap. I was pleased to see that panned out nicely, with crude withering away persistently.

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Free Money! (Sort Of)

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You may not know this, but having surveyed the readers of Slope, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the most popular brokerage among them is none other than tastytrade – – which has a special place in my heart for obvious reasons.

The last time I saw Tom Sosnoff in person, he was telling me about this new promotion they were going to run, which essentially would let a person play with $5,000 of virtual money in a trading account and, if they manage to make $250 profit in two days, they’d actually get that money for real. In other words, you could lose the entire $5,000, and you actually wouldn’t lose anything, but if you managed to make $250 or more in two days, you’d actually get that cash (zero risk, all reward).

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Snap Judgments

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Earlier this week, I made an offhand remark in the comments section about something which happened to me at the airport. I thought I’d share it more thoroughly here, accompanied by some thoughts on the topic. So, first, the story.

My family was already in Phuket, Thailand, but I needed to take one of my children back up to Bangkok in order for her to join an elephant conservation program to be held in the rural north. Thus, we had a car take the two of us to the Phuket International Airport for the 70 minute flight to Bangkok. The flight was at 10 a.m.

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Market Battle Fatigue: China Versus USA

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There have been numerous reports of an economic slowdown (and even contraction in some sectors) in China, one of which describes those in detail at ZeroHedge. While some of China’s difficulties may have been exacerbated by a fairly recent trade war with the U.S., it certainly didn’t start them…other factors were already in play and bear responsibility for its inception, as explained therein.

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