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.
Confessions Of an Unsuccessful Trader (by DoubleNaughtSpy)
Very few people can say they are worse at investing and trading than me. How’s that for whetting your appetite for my advice? Well, how about I tell you of how I have been a rotten trader for so long, and how I have recently managed to turn it around?
Birth of an Investing Idiot
My investment education started when the company I worked for was sold and I was given the opportunity to roll out my 401K to an IRA. This was around 1995. Of course, this was during the real start of the dot com bubble. In the five years leading up to the dot com bust, I made a ton of money. I took my 35K and turned it into 99K by trading in and out of the usual suspects of the day. In a way, it was like WSB without the formal Reddit page. Instead, I was all over Yahoo Finance message boards scanning for the next big winner. I listened to the hype and participated in it along with all the other Yahooligans. I also started watching CNBC religiously every morning while getting ready for work, then tuning in after work while I watched the profits roll in.
(more…)Be Your Own Man (by Winston Smith)
In trading as everything that you do in life, it pays to be your own man. It is fine to stand on the shoulders of giants that have paved the way in this fine profession that is trading. I find myself out of my depth many times. I continue to make mistakes. What I have taken to heart is to always be accountable to yourself for these mistakes. Once we find ourselves pointing to some outside source for our shortcomings we permanently foreclose on the helpful lesson that the market is teaching us. Won Enters Crash Zone (by LZ)
The Korean won has traded lower twice, in 1997 and 2008. Both moves were explosive. The question for traders is termination or follow through? If it follows through, there’s all manner of short targets because this is not an isolated chart. It has to be seen in concert with charts such as USDJPY, EURUSD, USDCNY and so on. It has to be seen in context with stock charts such as EEM that are at long-term support.
A currency crisis can have several catalysts. A big one would be yuan depreciation. A breakdown in U.S. stocks that triggered more dollar strength might do it. It’s an echo of the 1997 Asian Crisis more than the 2008 financial crisis.
