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.

The Path to Total Surrender

By - 

PLEASE NOTE that, quite obviously, we've had some rough technical issues the past 12 hours, but it's only because we're doing a major upgrade. I've mentioned four times in a row (but somehow people keep missing it) that comments are OFFLINE for the foreseeable future (and it's tempting, frankly, to LEAVE it that way until December 1st, considering what's about to happen). Anyway, the site is 98% functional. and we're working on this sacred Day of Rest to even get comments restored.

Everything that “should” have happened………hasn’t. The seasonal weakness in September was a joke. The historic over-valuations that I’ve written about extensively have simply became more over-valued. And, from a charting perspective, as impossible as it seems to believe, the major indexes seem poised to just blast off to yet more lifetime highs.

(more…)

Insights from My Fake Longs

By -

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.

(more…)