Amazon Hits An All Time High
Despite its climb from the March low, the S&P 500 was still down 11.03% year-to-date on Friday, while Amazon (AMZN), which hit an all-time high last week, was up 28.53%.
(more…)Locking In Amazon Gains
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.
Biggy Smalls
I don’t usually talk about my family life, but I’d like to make a small exception to make a point with respect to the well-intentioned SBA program to support small businesses.
My beloved wife has a clinical practice which is the very definition of a small business. It’s a one-person shop. She had a multi-month waiting list, and plenty of clients, but that all got zeroed out with the lock-down. She had to cancel every single person, because her practice requires face to face interaction. So revenue went from great to zilch instantly.
Mercifully, we are financially secure enough that this multi-month zeroing-out of income doesn’t affect us. She’s not eligible for unemployment, because she is self-employed, but she is most certainly eligible for the PPP. However, in spite of doing all the application properly, we have heard absolutely nothing, nor, frankly, do I expect to. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to get $0.00 from the entire program. (Larry Kudlow’s third wife, on the other hand, got her money instantly, as the cocaine-addled numbskull loudly declared on public media).
(more…)Friday Fail
The idiotic and baseless ramp-up from last Friday is now totally gone. The old saw about markets climbing the stairs up and taking the elevator down seems to have been turned on its head. Why even put me through that exercise? It’s infuriating. The only good thing about it is that bulls were tricked into losing money.
Advances and Declines
A while ago, we introduced our Statistics data panel. An important part of that panel was the Advances/Declines data, but we had to get rid of it because the data vendor stopped providing it. Undaunted, we decided to create the data ourselves! So I’m delighted to let you know the Statistics data panel is back, and frankly I think the data is better than ever (since we created it this time).
The Slope of Hope system calculates each day the number of stocks that increased in value, the number that decreased in value, what the sum total of those values is, and what the “running” total is back to the beginning of its calculation, many years ago.
(more…)Akazoo Shares Tank On Quintessential Capital’s Short Thesis
Gabriel Grego of Quintessential Capital presented his short thesis for music streaming company Akazoo SA (NASDAQ:SONG) at ValueWalk’s Contrarian Investor Virtual Conference today. He said the company looks like an accounting scheme because its users, subscribers, revenue and profit may be “profoundly overstated.”
Missed the event? Watch it here.
He argues that the company is a fraction of its claimed size and that it’s losing money. He found that the service is available in only a handful of countries and is rarely used. He also suspects round-tripping between Akazoo and foreign shell companies and found that its infrastructure is collapsing with offices closing and employees leaving “in droves.”
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