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.

Raw and Uncut Bars

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I am pleased to let you know of an important new improvement to SlopeCharts, which may sound paradoxical: the ability to show raw price bars.

Let me start with a simple fact: financial data is dirty. I’ve been in this business for many decades, and from the time I started in the late 1980s until the very day, financial data has had errors galore. It only takes 0.01% inaccuracy to screw up a chart.

Because of this, every since the earliest days of SlopeCharts, the program will take price bars that it considers impossible and severely truncate them, since the assumption is that the price data being presented simply isn’t real. Thus, you wind up with a chart that looks like this:

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Introducing Personal Symbols

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SlopeCharts has another cool new feature which will be especially useful for paying subscribers: the ability to create a shorthand way to reference even very complex symbols. Not only is this useful as a time-saver (and memory saver, since no one can remember some of these crazy formulae) but it makes working with Layered Charts possible in ways that couldn’t be done before.

Here’s how the feature works: if you have a customized symbol created, right-click on it within its watch list and choose the menu item Add Personal Symbol.

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Do Your Worst!

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In spite of all evidence to the contrary, I’m quite fond of my readers (even the non-paying ones!) and want their Slope experience to be a good one. As many of you know, the bane of my existence has been what I’ve dubbed the Disappearing Comments Bug, which tends to take place when some poor soul is typing a very long comment and then, BLAMMO, it vanishes. We have spent countless hours, and my dollars, in pursuit of a fix, and we’ve just rolled out our latest attempt.

For the love of my personal savior Jesus H. Christ, do two things: (1) Go to either SlopeTalk or classic comments (your choice!) and hit Ctrl-F5 to make sure you’ve got the latest version (2) If, God forbid, you see this bug happen, email me. Don’t leave a comment with the hope I’ll see it (I won’t). Email me. And in defiance of the old “no news is good news” saw, if you do NOT see this problem happening, I’d like to know that too. And, with that, I shall thank you.