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.
In Search of an Agent
In the midst of all this market revelry, I have a selfish request.
I am seeking a literary agent for my first novel. If you know any good ones, kindly drop me an email to let me know. I know this is a bit of a long shot, since my audience probably doesn’t intersect the publishing world very much, but I at least wanted to toss this request out there. Thank you!
Like Gartman to the Third Power
I Finally Took a Dump
Well that was difficult.
I am moving a fat wad of profits from my brokerage account into my checking account. This is an incredibly hard act for me, because to my eyes, the market is going to get blasted to smithereens, and the last thing I want to do is what I just did – – which is to trim back enough positions to extract a mountain of cash away. In doing so, I have reduced my account by 1/7th, since it reached a threshold that I demanded of myself to take profits. I have NO use for the money, but by God, I’m shielding it.
Why am I doing this? As I’ve explained, the reason is that I’ve become utterly weary of making and losing the same wad of profits in this crazy market. I am therefore FORCING myself to gut 1/7th of my account on a ONE WAY TRIP to my checking account and preserve those profits forever. I wish I had trained myself to do this, oh, I dunno, about thirty years ago, but better late than never.
The fundamental change here, and I hope it is profound, is to transform my trading goal from ACCRUING a huge account to instead having a PROFIT-GENERATOR from which I habitually extract cash. I guess I’m just a slow learner. Anyway, the deed is done, and I’m slightly proud of myself for going through with it.
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The Latest Lovely Lines
Good morning, everyone, from pitch-black Palo Alto. It’s been quite the week, and I’ve got to say two adjacent things right at the top: (a) the market has been amazingly chart-friendly (b) shame on me for missing some of that chart-friendliness in real time. (Although I’ll add (c) NOT shame on me for actually anticipating some of this stuff in advance, even though I myself ignored it!)
Look at what’s going on with the /ES futures. Tuesday, of course, was our amazing CPI tumble. Wednesday and the first portion of Thursday were the “grinding away” period, clinging tightly to the trendline. Yesterday (and here’s the part I’m upset with myself about) the market fell hard, went roaring higher, and did a PERFECT touch of the aforementioned “clinging” trendline (blue arrow) at which time it did a miniature version of the Tuesday plunge. Since then, we’ve been leaking lower.
