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.

Just Screw It

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There are few things more boring and pointless than hearing someone tell you about “the one that got away.” By its very nature, trading generates countless missed opportunities, and anyone who has done this for a while has approximately zero interest in hearing about the big fish that got away. It’s got to be as boring as listening to someone tell you about a dream they had last night.

I’m not here to write a post about the countless profits I let slip away last quarter, but I would like to share a tale of “blowing it” that I think informs my decisions in the immediate future.

Back in mid-February, I did something which I had not done in years, which was buy puts on individual stock. I had reason to believe that Nike (NKE) was going to weaken, so I bought some puts. When I buy options, they tend to be quite conservative. Specifically, I bought some puts that were in the money and didn’t expire for months.

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Thank You, Leonardo!

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There’s just no two ways about it. Absolutely extraordinary.

In my epiphanic post from March 21st, I stated, in part, “Should we rally to 270.14, either now, or many weeks from now, that’s going to be a lead wall. It also, I believe, will mark the start of an even larger selloff.“

Well, we did indeed rally, thanks to the impotent and treasonous Jerome Powell and even more evil Steve Mnuchin throwing trillions of dollars at our dying nation, but we didn’t even reach my target. Instead, it nailed – – and I mean NAILED – – the Fibonacci level. Just jaw-dropping. I’ve marked with an arrow my “epiphanic” target.

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