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.
Lord only knows how many billions of bucks parents spend trying to get their kids into these places. Some of the most vapid people I’ve ever met emerge from these places, but as a nation we’ve been trained to believe that getting in will get you absolutely set for life. Nope!
Just one simple chart for you here: the Broker/Dealer Index ($XBD). The price is absolutely rammed perfectly against the apex of the triangle. This should – – I would almost say MUST – – fall on Monday. Failing that, it’s time for start a career in aluminum siding sales.
Hey, stupid! Why not just buy longs and be done with it?
Yep, that’s the kind of cruel query I pose to myself after times like, oh, the past eight trading days (kicked off on the morning of 9/11, appropriately enough, when Jensen Huang talked up his own stock and kicked off a multi-trillion-dollar worldwide equity rally). The lifetime-highs-every-day rallies we get compel me, from time to time, to put together hypothetical “what if I just bought a bunch of good-looking stocks?” portfolios and track them over time. I’d like to share this updated data with you now.
The construction of these portfolios is easy to explain: I go through all my charts as I normally would, and I try to pick out the very best setups. Here, for instance, are a dozen stocks (a pretend $120,000 portfolio evenly divided into starting $10,000 positions) that I “bought” on July 31st. As you can see, in spite of us being at lifetime highs, it’s a mixed bag: 5 winners and 7 losers, yielding a small loss and an annualized -3.1% return.
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I’ve been very pleased at the reception of my novel Solid State, which I’ve been publishing in a serialized form over on Substack. Folks seem to like getting a bite-sized chapter each day. I’ve broken up this monster of a tale into 73 (!!!) chapters, which will be emailed for free every weekday until the end of the year.
If you want to catch up, please do so – – here are the links to the first five chapters, all of which tumbled out this past week.
