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.

Dual Manscape

By -

Good morning, everyone., Well, today’s the big day. And I do mean BIG day! It’s a damned shame we all have to slavishly react to whatever the financial politburo utters, but there we have it.

I want to thank everyone for their generous suggestions in last night’s “What do I do??” post. The poll results were spread fairly evenly, although the distribution isn’t at all a surprise to me. Suffice it to say I’m strongly inclined to follow your counsel and take on a meaningful long position to act as a salve at the all-too-likely rally.

(more…)

FOMC Game Plan

By -

This is a selfish and a selfless post. It is selfish in the respect that I’m hoping to glean some wisdom from the crowd. It is selfless since it’s a decent amount of work to construct this properly, with the hope that some folks might benefit from the problem and its potential solutions.

Let me start with the situation and my assumptions:

  1. I have a substantial portfolio which consists of only cash and 30 bearish equity positions, by way of being long puts that expire no earlier than September and, on most cases, expire much later than that.
  2. I have 20% of my portfolio in cash. The portfolio overall is sporting a 57% profit so far this year.
  3. Over the past few weeks, I saw about 90% of my profits for the year go up in smoke, only to be restored over the course of the past few days (please note: it was not a good feeling, and I’d rather not go there again);
  4. My overarching assumption is that stocks will be MUCH lower at some point this year (prior to October) and, counter-trend rallies be damned, virtually all these puts will be worth much more later, even with time decay.
(more…)