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.

In My Write Mind

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For this post, I wanted to write about something which I don’t think I’ve ever addressed, which is my experience thus far creating my first novel. I have a couple of reasons for wanting to compose a post that has nothing at all to do with charts or the markets: (1) the past couple of weeks have been absolutely brutal, and frankly I’d rather write about ANYTHING else at the moment than the freakin’ stock market (2) it’s a fun way for me to self-examine my experience with this very new adventure of mine.

As a reminder, I’ve been writing all my life – – for national magazines at age 15, my first book at age 16, and dozens of books after that. And, of course, tens of thousands (literally) of posts here on Slope. Yet although I’ve written for many decades, I’ve never tried a piece of fiction. Instead of starting off sensibly, like with a short story, I instead threw caution to the wind and am trying to write The Great American Novel.

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The Bullish Playbook

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One of our fellow Slopers, Big Red, left the following question in the comments stream. I’ve boldfaced a few particularly salient portions:

Thanks for the chats, @TimKnight! It is always soothing to see and hear what other bear(s) are going through…and don’t worry, I won’t leave as a subscriber if I lose money (40% last week alone) as I believe you are one of the most enlightened voices on the Markets anywhere. My losses are my own. I knew when to get out and I ignored my own signals. I am in training for the next time and am *visualizing* getting out (my biggest problem)! 😛 

That said, I feel more comfortable on the bear side (making 2M and losing it in 2008 because, once again, I didn’t know when to get out). 🙂 

What do you do (not now, because I agree with you the markets still have more to go downwards) when the markets finally turn and things start to look bullish (the “green shoots” haunt me to this day as I would still have that 2M if I had paid attention). It might be an interesting post – speculating on the bear side vs. the bull side. I have my own thoughts but I’d love to hear from someone who is better than I!  

Do you have a bullish playbook? I am working on mine – which has to be different than the bear side! I have a completely different lineup of stocks and strategies for the bull side (which I am continuously preparing for). 

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Retracement Particulars

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This is obviously a holiday weekend (not as exciting as Juneteenth, but a federal holiday nonetheless), and frankly I don’t have a heck of a lot to say. So I’m just going to do a handful of posts and try to make them good ones. So this is for Saturday…………..

The good news is that things are playing out perfectly. My charts were correct (some monkeying around with anchor points here and there, but on the whole, on the money). The bad news is that my pigheadedness, which more than a few of you have noticed, kept me committed to my puts way too long.

The only thing I did SOMEWHAT right during the week was move 40%+ of my portfolio into cash, which at least didn’t spend its time getting punched repeatedly in the face like my poor puts did! The OTHER not-totally-stupid thing I did was, as always, be in puts that have months of time left on them (average 147 days now; literally nothing before mid-September!).

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