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.

Call Buying & Gamma Squeeze

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From our friend at ORATS: The last two months of market and volatility action is unparalleled. Usually, when the market rises, volatility falls — since 2006, this has happened 90% of the time. The last two months, however, has seen a volatility rise connected to a market rise 25% of the time, more than double the historical average.

Historically, when volatility rises and the market rises, it has been a coin flip between the skew steepening, indicating put buying, or shallowing indicating call buying, both happening 50% of the time. However, in the past two months, volatility rising has come with a skew shallowing 73% of the time, indicating massive call buying.

Call buying is driving the volatility spikes and the real action is not in the index but in the single names, and the buying has not been in normal just out-of-the-money calls but way out-of-the-money calls.

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Magic Flop

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Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you know that Magic Leap is the Duke Nukem of the high-tech world. These clowns have raised literally billions of dollars and haven’t shipped dick.

I decided to wander over to their site to see what almost $4 billion of funding had created for us to enjoy. Well, their home page shows a trio of scenes which ostensibly show the spiffy ways their VR product (which will ship Real Soon Now, I’m sure…….) will do. They show an old woman with her virtual brain floating above her hospital bed. And they show a group of people in a business setting.

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