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.

People of the Lie

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Let’s start off with a simple fact: out of 100,000 people, you’ll find maybe one true bear among them. There’s hardly anyone that’s ever going to posit a bearish argument about the stock market, because they have no vested interest in doing so. Not the carnival barkers on CNBC. Not the equity-pushers from Goldman Sachs, And, God knows, never, ever from any Wall Street analyst. 365 days out of every year, their message is the same: “Buy, Buy, and Buy some more.”

Thus, it is no surprise that we’re seeing a particular “fact‘ being pushed onto the public, stating in no uncertain terms that there has never been an instance in the history of the universe when a market has recovered more than 50% of its price plunge and failed to soar forward into a new bull market. I am seeing this argument absolutely slathered all over Twitter………..

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Third Security Winge

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Having written well in excess of 30,000 posts……….

……..I do a pretty good job not being repetitive. In other words, I tend to remember what I’ve written about over the course of the past two decades. Thus, when I wanted to piss and moan about some of the really dumb security questions out there, I knew I had done so in the past – – first, way back in 2009 (a post so ancient, the graphics don’t even exist anymore) and another in 2017. But I can’t help myself. This just bugs me too much.

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Rough and Raw

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Well, THAT was a shit sandwich! At least for any bears besides me. Jesus!

I was watching the CPI release with great anticipation. You can imagine how I felt when I saw that think spike go raging higher on the screen. It felt like an OHLC bar was being shoved through my stomach. So it seems that the Sloper verdict about how tame inflation would be was on-the-mark.

The only things I did right over the past two days were:

  1. Dumped my SPY puts yesterday at a profit;
  2. Wasted no time dumping my IWM puts at the opening bell this morning at a smaller loss than I would have endured;
  3. NOT deploying more cash into positions, and instead tucking it back into the safety of my checking account, where the mean old bulls can’t get to it.
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Complete Clarity

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I have been, as perhaps some of you, torturing myself over what I could have done differently on June 16th. That was, of course, the market’s bottom so far, and a perfect time to get rid of EVERY short and go ENTIRELY long.

As it stands now, the Fibonacci retracements are totally clear, and I look and think to myself, “What kind of moron would have held on when the Fib was getting hit like that?” And then I wonder to myself, was I even WATCHING these same retracement levels? Maybe I’m being too hard on myself.

Turns out………...nope, I’m not being hard ENOUGH on myself. I had identified these exact levels long before the bottom, and I went and reviewed my posts from June 13-17, right when the market was bottoming, and I knew EXACTLY WHAT WAS GOING ON, and I said EXACTLY WHAT I SHOULD DO.

Did I do it? No. Why? Because I’m a goddamn idiot, in spite of being a brilliant chartist. Ugh!

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Remembrance of Things Pissed

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I want you to know what caliber of genius and pigheaded idiot you’re dealing with. By way of introduction, I share with you below the premium post published on July 21st. In its entirety:

I just had one of those “whoa!” moments that I wanted to share with just my premium members. I just put together this chart for you of the /ES, which I’ll explain next. As always, you can click on it for a larger version.

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