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.

Another Brick in the Wall

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I’m here for advice. Ideas. Musings.

As some of you know, I am now the proud owner of the domain wallofworry.com, which is pretty much the antonym of slopeofhope.com. The latter is bearish, and the former is bullish. Some have suggested to me, hey, bud, in this endless bull market, why not reposition your site for the bulls? You’ll do better!

Well, here’s the thing. If you examine Slope, you’ll find precisely 0.00% of the tools I provide here are bullish or bearish. They are totally neutral. So I’m not sure how I’d do “better” with a different domain. If I am stupidly overlooking something, let me know, because besides simply forwarding all wallofworry.com traffic to Slope, I’m not sure what else folks are thinking that would be such a boon for the site! I’m all ears.

Peering Through the Kaleidoscope

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I would like to start out with a snippet from the 1993 film Schindler’s List.

We were on the roof on Monday, young Lisiek and I and we saw the Herr Commandant come out of the front door and down the steps by the patio right there below us and there on the steps he drew his gun and he shot a woman who was passing by. A woman with a bundle, through the throat, just shot her. Just a woman on her way somewhere, you know, she was no fatter or thinner or slower or faster than anyone else and I couldn't guess what she had done. The more you see of the Herr Commandant, the more you see there are no set rules that you can live by. You can't say to yourself, "If I follow these rules, I will be safe."

For me, nothing captures my feelings toward the stock market better than the above quote. The stock market, in the form of Herr Commandant, has power. It can do things at will. It has its own behavior. But that behavior is no longer something that can be understood. It simply does what it does, without any clear basis in rational thought, and we can either participate as willing collaborators, rationality be damned, or we can stand back in abject puzzlement and horror. I’m kind of in the horror camp.

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ETF Theme: Steady

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Preface to all posts: Instead of my typical ETF videos over the weekend, I went through all the charts and put them into certain groupings. In this post, I cover the ETFs that seemed appropriate for the grouping mentioned in this post's title.

This category is pretty much the “steady as she goes” group. We start off with semiconductors, which has become the most important sector in the entire universe. For all the wild swings, SMH is actually behaving itself quite placidly, making a steady series of higher highs and higher lows within its neatly-formed price channel that dates back for months.

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