
Who Has Most Felt the Heat

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.

As the VIX eases down into the lower 30s (!) I wanted to offer up a less wild and wooly short: HYG, the high yield corporate bond fund. It has a clean stop at 77.85 (I’ve set mine at 77.90; this is a new trade) and, frankly, doesn’t tend to move crazily like, say, oh, something like LLY.

Here’s an eye-opening illustration of where Meta revenue comes from: virtually nothing (relatively speaking) from reality labs (stuff like the Meta glasses) and virtually everything from deliberately addictive stuff like Instagram.

I’m always happy to share my success stories here, but it’s more important than I share my blunders. I was short Eli Lilly (LLY). I hadn’t even glanced at them pre-market, but when I saw a huge loss in my portfolio, I was baffled where it came from. It didn’t take long to find out: LLY was up triple digits on news of some new Ozempic-type drug.

When I fired up my iPad from bed to see what the markets had done overnight, I was puzzled by a very strange sight. Everything was up mildly with the exception of the Dow 30 futures, which were down hard. I had never seen anything like this before, and I assumed there were two reasons: either it was just a data error, which is pretty common in finance, or there was a single extreme outlier in the Dow.
