Slope of Hope Blog Posts

This is the heart and soul of the web site. Here we have literally tens of thousands of posts dating back over a decade. These are listed in reverse chronological order. You can also click on any category icon to see posts tagged with that particular category.

The Big ‘Uns

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I have been flopped on my hotel room bed, looking at hundreds of charts (what else would one do on a hotel bed?) I’m pretty excited about the week ahead. Let’s face it, Jerome Powell’s message on Wednesday is probably going to be the Last Big Event of 2018.

I’ve got a lot of great positions, but the biggest fish are the ones that got away. Here are some charts whose bearishness I trumpeted many times, but, frankly, I didn’t engage with. Maybe I lacked the patience, the testicular fortitude, or something else. They’re still fascinating to me:

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Partial Foods

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My family and I travel to a lot of towns across the country and abroad, and it’s quite eye-opening. I am presently in Cincinnati, and as is often the case, I ventured out to the nearest grocery store I could find in order to get some basics for the hotel room.

The best real grocery store was about half a mile away. It was a Kroger, which was a name I remember from my Louisiana childhood. I finally got there, and boy, what a shock. If you took the Palo Alto Whole Foods Market and inverted it, you would get the Cincinnati Kroger. I present to you below the entire produce section of the entire store.

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Barron’s Has Your Back

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One fun thing about the end of the year is all the “year in review” type articles that come out. One that just printed is from Barron’s, in which they show how their trading ideas did compared to the target. Here we are:

“Only so-so”

The bottom line is that the recommendations from the finest minds of Wall Street produced a loss of 2.2% as compared to a benchmark gain of 1.9% from the S&P 500. They describe these results as “so-so”, although I think readers may have more color language.

Of course, Slope has its only little comparison here, and I’m pleased to say that we’ve got a positive 26% spread versus the S&P. Or, even if you were wise enough to short the S&P at time these measurements began, you’d still be ahead by 7%. Take that, Barron’s!

Who’s Winning?

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Don’t let my Herculean physique fool you. I’ve never been an athlete. Not even once. In fact, I don’t even like perspiration. The only exercise I get is swimming, and that’s because I don’t have to deal with sweat, which I find sort of ewwww. So, yeah, I’m a man’s man.

My beloved children, however, are all top-notch fencers, and they tour internationally. We travel as a family, the gallant Knights and their swords, which on occasions like this pulls me somewhat away from my normal prolific nature.

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Blip

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Good morning, everyone, and happy Friday to you. Having taken a red eye last night, I’m definitely feeling it. There’s nothing quite like “sleeping” in a nearly vertical position, surrounded by strangers.

Well before I got on the plane, the ES and NQ took a nice tumble, ostensibly due to some more Trumpian scandals. As the selloff was really picking up steam, a big government obviously had to do something, so this concession was swiftly trotted out:

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