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 Lower High?

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It may seem odd, but it’s only just occurring to me just how badly the market got wiped out, particularly on Friday I had sort of been taking it stride, but the abundance of “I turned $500 into $17,000” posts in /wsb made it dawn on me that, yeah, trillions of dollars of market cap have been destroyed in just days. I wonder, however, if this is just the umpteenth “lower high” in the VIX, and we’ll be subject to yet another multi-month “recovery” which is oh-so-boring compared to the blast we’ve been enjoying lately.

Counting on Correlation

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One of my more painful memories as a trader was from many years ago, in which I had been aggressively bearish against the Chinese market. I forget the precise circumstance, but after a long while of the Chinese market just refusing to go lower, I finally surrendered and took my loss. At the time, I had been speaking about this position openly, so my friends knew about it.

Anyway, I went on a ski vacation, and during that vacation the Chinese market got absolutely nuked, and a close friend of mine sent me a congratulatory note, stating how happy I must be that everything had worked out. I was so humiliated, I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the wonderful wipeout in China didn’t do me one bit of good. It felt awful to be the cause of my own misfortune.

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