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.

Lynch Mob

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When I was a boy and first started reading about investing, Peter Lynch was The Man. His basic philosophy, offered by way of his One Up on Wall Street book, was for people to basically buy companies whose products/services they used and respected.

That works great in a fairly-valued market. In recent times, however, companies are so laughably overvalued that the Lynch philosophy is dangerous. For instance, I think the salad chain sweetgreen is fantastic. They are crazy-popular, I love their food, and I think they’ve got a great future. But the performance after their IPO tells the story. There ARE no values anymore. Stocks are all priced for thievery, and once the insiders and VCs have dumped it, the hapless public gets to enjoy the red ink.

Double Proud

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This week started awful and, so far today, is ending great. There are a couple of ideas I’m especially proud of offering. One of them is Amazon, in which I suggested buying puts since Lauren Sanchez is a disgusting, family-wrecking, gold-digging plastic-surgery-loving skank due to my perception that the stock split was an illogical rationale for its ascent. My puts on this are up about 50% in just days.

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Testing The Middle Band

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Yesterday’s bearish historical stats delivered hard and broke the bull flag setups that I posted in the morning. SPX is now testing the 4000 area and, if that breaks, the next target will likely be a retest of the retracement low at 3810.32.

I still like all the bull flags from the high here, but if SPX reaches the retracement low and continues down hard, there is an obvious target for that move. The H&S I have drawn on SPX from the high isn’t high quality, but it isn’t bad, and has a very obvious target in the 3400 area, which is a significant area because that would be a backtest of the pre-2000 crash all time high. In my view that would be the obvious target on a  break below 3600.

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Basket Case

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Greetings from Orange County; specifically, from Gate 18 at the John Wayne Airport. I have just completed a day watching one of my beloved children graduate, and I’m waiting to go home to my trio of dogs who are surely wondering where I’ve been all day.

The world-famous “Tim travels=markets plunge” folklore is still batting 1,000. Some here may recall that the last experiment we did in this respect, my wife and daughter were traveling, and we all wanted to see if this mystical power applied to family members or just me. It was quite clearly shown that, regrettably, I and only I possess this supernatural and as-yet unexplained potency. Perhaps it’s associated with abnormally large genitalia. The jury is still out.

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