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.

Ground to a Pulp

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Before the year is over, we must take one last glance at a company which, not that many years ago, would never have seen as a plausible candidate for a public offering. That is, the anonymous gay sex app known as Grindr (symbol GRND) which, denied the opportunity to issue a normal IPO, took the back entrance by way of a SPAC with predictable results. It is down 94% from its IPO high, only weeks ago. Why people keep buying stuff like this is quite beyond me.

Five Days of Fog

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Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the end of the trading year. With a complete lack of economic data and earnings data, I think the next five trading days – – today, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and next Tuesday, are going to be buffeted about like a ship lost in fog. There are a number of factors at work here that are going to make the trading activity messy and, in the end, meaningless;

  • Low volume: let’s face it, except for Slopers, humans are bums. They eased off work in mid-December and won’t deign to put in a few hours a day again until well into January. It’s going to be a very quiet trading environment. (I’ll also grumble, as I always do, that once we get out of this insanely long holiday season, we have yet ANOTHER forced holiday by way of MLK, only two weeks later! Doesn’t anyone like to WORK anymore? And don’t get me started on Juneteenth).
  • Economic blank sheet: we don’t get an even semi-interesting economic data report until next Wednesday. Zero. Zilch. Nada.
  • End-of-Year Weirdness: This has been a year of losses for almost everyone. Will they be dumping in order to harvest tax losses? Will they be loading up in advance of the new year to get stocks “cheap” (ha!) There’s a lot of weird psychology and second-guessing going on.
  • Start-of-Year Weirdness: Once all the cruft from 2022 is done, then people will jump the gun and gobble up stocks when the new year begins, thinking that the bear market is over and it’s time to get stocks immediately so they can enjoy fat gains in the new year. This same psychology drove the market to its lifetime high on the 2nd day of 2022. Literally within ten trading hours of the new year, the market peaked.
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