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.

Trading Style

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Over the many years that I’ve been building and running the Slope of Hope, one of the most frequently-asked questions is, in one form or another, what my style of trading is. I’ve emailed bespoke answers to this question for years, but I figure it’s high time to put something permanent on the site to clear the air and also save myself the time of answering the question any more. I’m going to take a somewhat lazy style of writing and construct this as a series of questions and answers, which might make it more efficient for those who are only interested in certain aspects of how I trade.

When you place options trades, do you do straddles, butterflies, calendar spreads, or………?

None of the above. I have made a deliberate point of being a surprisingly unsophisticated trader. I sometimes tell the viewers on my tastytrade program that they are almost all more sophisticated traders than me. I tend to simply buy options (puts, usually) which are (1) at least a few months out in the future (2) in the money (3) liquid enough to have a reasonable bid/ask spread. When people ask me questions about options greeks and what my delta is, my eyes just glaze over.

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Auntie Earth

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“When you’re rich, they think you really know” – Tevye the Dairyman

Something occurred to me when I was in the pool (which is about the only place anything occurs to me), and it is this: the idea of colonizing Mars is just about the dumbest thing anyone has ever thought up. Ever. And I’m including alt-coins, Ice Capades, and molecular gastronomy in that list. It’s absolutely r-word level stupid.

Let’s take a step back and consider things from Alan Watts’ perspective, which is usually a very good idea. I am badly paraphrasing, but he hypothetically asked his audience to consider what it would be like to be God. You could do anything you want, you were omniscient, and as such, you knew everything that was going to happen before it happened.

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Man Without a Website

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I’m starting to feel like a bit of a stranger on Slope. The reason is there’s so much optimism. I think the reason is simple enough: people have 2009-2021 on the brain. In other words, things were never allowed to get more than a little bad. And the bad never lasted long at all. So even the likes of Slopers have been conditioned to believe that bad news will not be tolerated, pain will not be permitted, and help will always be on the way. Indeed, strolling into the Slope comments section gives me a true Cramer zeitgeist:

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