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.

The Horrid Grind

By -

Why does the market have to be like this? Especially to a nice guy like me?

Here, let’s take Netflix as an example. This is a perfect instance of the kind of pulling-my-hair-out insanity I’ve been dealing with. Below is a chart of NFLX. The first arrow marks, at 9:57 a.m., where I bought June puts. Now even though these goddamn things have MONTHS of time on them, a mere two hours (!!!) later, where the second arrow is, I dumped them at a loss of about 7%. That was very close to the top tick of the day. By the close, they were nicely above my purchase price (and, of course, the daily chart looks terrific, which is why I bought them in the first place). Jesus!

(more…)

M_ss_ng Mes_ag_s

By -

Beloved Slopers………with the introduction of the oh-my-God-so-cool and yet oh-my-Lord-so-complex system known as Slopetalk, some people have noticed that comments may be entered but occasionally seem to be missing. (They aren’t really, but perception is reality, so there ya go).

We have deployed what we believe is a fix to the problem. Please pay close attention (some of you will without me even asking) and let me know if it seems to have helped or not. Obviously I am hoping the answer is “yes” but please let me know by way of an email or the “@” feature. Thank you.

Is China’s Drop Over?

By -

One of the better sectors in the past couple of weeks for me in this horrid market has been China. I stupidly dumped my FXI puts a couple of weeks ago, only to see them ascend nearly 80% in value, but I at least held on to BIDU, BABA, and JD puts. My initial target price on FXI was 29.54, and both yesterday and today we came within 30 cents of that level. I’m getting nervous about the three individual equity puts I’ve got, but that’s badly exacerbated by the clown-raping that’s been happening across the board. Suffice it to say I’ve got an itchy trigger finger on these three Chinese position, in spite of them having literally months left until they expire.