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.

From Meme to Has-Bean

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In one of the most bizarre moments of an incredibly bizarre few years, the last gasp of the Covid Cash insanity was experienced with Bed Bath and Beyond (BBBY). Just over three months ago, based on nothing more than the wsb boys saying that they were going to squeeze BBBY to the moon, the stock spiked to $30 on volume of hundreds of millions of shares. As you can see, that was the peak of the counter-trend rally for the market overall (appropriately enough) and the stock is now down 90% (!!!!!!!!!) and trades just about 1% of the volume it did back during the mania.

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Don’t Show This to Elon

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As everyone in the Solar System knows, the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, bought Twitter earlier this year, and none of us know how he feels about it, but I suspect he would happily Ctrl-Z the entire event if he could. It occurred to me while walking my dogs in the pouring rain this morning, what would Twitter probably be worth now if he had never sought to purchase it? Let’s go through a simple exercise.

My first goal was to find another stock which is still actively traded that, prior to the buyout, was highly correlated with Twitter. I thought it would be something like META, but in fact Spotify (SPOT) turned out to be a much better fit. Here is the percentage performance of SPOT and TWTR up to when Musk announced the buyout.

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Another CPI (by DoubleNaughtSpy)

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Here in the hallowed halls of Slope of Hope, we like to pick on Cramer. Of course, he makes it so easy that it is just too hard to resist. So let’s talk about the Cramer Predictive Indicator (CPI).

Back on March 17th, an article on CNBC was published (Jim Cramer says investors should buy these 11 recently boosted dividend stocks). At the time, the markets were down roughly 50% of the way to the June bottom. He was early, to say the least. Below are the charts for each one he recommended. In all fairness to him, it could be a lot worse. However, even though there are 5 out of 11 “winners” in the lot, the losses on the 6 losers do outweigh the gains.

Now, I chose a time to do this comparison after (I hope) a MAJOR bear market rally. What will these picks look like in a few days/weeks? Anybody’s guess is as good as mine, but I have a feeling that the losses are going to mount soon. For $5,000,000/year, I would expect a little better track record than this, but at least it is not an account busting performance….if you were to get out of them now.

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