On March 29th, 2005, O.J. attorney Johnnie Cochran died. Moments later, the Slope of Hope was born. I don’t believe for a minute this was an accident.
Seventeen Thousand Years Ago
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.
Dialing Up the Censorship
Forget the charts. Forget the market. Set aside the P & L. Let’s talk about censorship.
In my experience as the proprietor of this little corner of the web, I have found there are about three levels of push-back that I receive.
The first, rarest level is from Slopers themselves. This is an extremely liberal (in the classic sense) and tolerant bunch. It’s a pretty free-wheeling place here on Slope. As such, if there is ever a time when I get scolded by folks here, I know I’ve seriously crossed the line.
I actually think it’s only happened once, which is when I – – heaven help me – – urinated on a giant poster of Janet Yellen and posted the video. For some peculiar reason, a few people found this in bad taste, and I quickly deleted the post. In the nearly 17 years of Slope’s existence, I think that’s the only time that I’ve censored myself, after I realized that, OK, yeah, I guess there ARE limits. (Hey, it could have been worse.)
(more…)12 Angry Slopers
There are rare occasions when I’m alone for a few days, and I normally make use of this surplus time by:
- Working on Slope even more than I normally do;
- Taking on some big house project and/or obsessively cleaning;
- Watching a classic movie I’ve never seen before.
Well, I’ve been doing all three of these things in the past few days, and the classic movie I just watched for the first time in my life was 12 Angry Men, which is about two-thirds of a century old. Each of the twelve actors who comprised the jury are dead now (with Jack Klugman, funny enough, being the longest to survive – – he died a decade ago on Christmas Eve) but the drama could absolutely be portrayed today with no change in content.
(more…)The Oil Top
Well, happy weekend Slopeland! I hope it has been a good start to 2022 for you. It has certainly been an interesting and profitable year thus far, which brings me to today’s post. I try to compose posts around what I perceive to be key turning points in markets, and I think our current market qualifies. Today, I want to try to bring some closure to what has been my baby of late… crude oil. I will also discuss interest rates, and the outlook for the S&P 500 for the remainder of the year. Let’s take a look!
Below is a one year chart of the monstrosity that has become crude oil. I have been heavily involved in the energy space for nearly two years now, coming off the Covid crash low. On Monday through Wednesday of last week I sold off all of my energy-related positions. Why did I do that, and what do I think is ahead for the oil market?
(more…)Doubling Down on Dumb
Observant Slopers will know by now that I sold to close a block of IWM puts on Friday morning, and that I regretted doing so. Now, I’m not the first trader who has screwed up like this. And it’s not the first time in my life I’ve done so. I’ve only done it eight or nine thousand times before. But I wanted to break down what happened, for your sake and mine, just to examine how emotions can really trip a person up.
Let’s rewind to Thursday morning. I was already quite short, having about 30 bearish positions set up. I did, however, have a ton of buying power left, and the market was definitely going my way. Things were getting weaker and weaker, and I decided to get very aggressive with a very large IWM put position – – about five times the size of my other bearish positions. The green circle shows about where I jumped in:
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