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.

Let’s Wrap This Up

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The past six trading days have been absolutely bonkers. Starting a week ago, I started to get freaked out that we were going to go into some kind of counter-trend rally. God knows, everyone has been predicting it. And this morning’s no different. My Twitter feed is slathered with “we’re going to 4,400′ type predictions. Such predictions have cost me staggering sums of foregone profits recently.

Of course, the bears have absolutely owned this market for 2022, and this week in particular. For all the dramatic hoo-ha about the $3.2 trillion OpEx, equity futures are picking their noses with about 1% price gains pre-market.

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The Crypto Catalyst

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The past seven trading days have been absolutely historic. Never in our lifetimes, or the lifetimes of our parents, has anything like this happened before. It’s honestly incredible.

Yes, there are reasons the markets should rally, and perhaps do so immediately. But……….and this is a big but………..in my opinion (which has been pretty damned priceless lately), if for some reason Ethereum breaks $1,000 or Bitcoin breaks $20,000, I think you’re going to see a total washout across the asset spectrum.

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Rearview Mirror

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No one leads an optimized life. Did you go to the perfect school for you? Do you have the ideal friends? How about your spouse? Is there no one among eight billion people who could possibly be better? Yeah, that’s what I thought.

We don’t think about such things, except in the world of trading. Or at least I do. I keep track of my closed positions, just to see how things worked out afterward. Of the 157 most recently closed positions, want to know how many kept going up? 149 of them.

Below I show the biggest percentage gainers (if you care, the columns, from left to right, are underlying stock, days until expiration, underlying price, intrinsic value, strike price, expiration date, entry price, bid, ask, and then, the most important of all, the percentage change since I closed it). Why I do this to myself, I’ll never know, but……….let’s just agree we live in an opportunity-rich environment: