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.

The Worst Good Feeling

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On this momentous morning, which could either be one of the most important inflection points in market history or another Taco-driven bore-fest, I’d like to discuss an important phenomenon that I’ve experienced more than once in my life. It is best described in steps:

  1. I uncover a spectacular opportunity by way of my charts
  2. I write about it and position myself in that investment
  3. I am expecting it to “behave” perfectly, but it moves against me to a small degree
  4. I become disillusioned and frustrated that it is not doing what it “should” do
  5. I dump it at a loss out of exasperation
  6. It moves against for me a little while longer, making me feel good I’ve made the right choice
  7. It then proceeds to make precisely the kind of magnificent move I predicted the entire time
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The Rolo Bottom

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Fear and greed. It’s all that makes any market. As a bear, I’m feeling greedy as the market collapses, as it has over the past five weeks. Greed served me particularly well last week. Also, as a bear, I feel fear, since to be blunt, virtually the entire world is aligned against me and my interests.

This fear has been born from hard experience, such as what I went through in October of 2022. For most of the year, the market has been going splendidly my way. I make doing amazingly well.

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Old Turkey

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Most of you have heard of the classic book about trading written over a century ago named Reminiscences of a Stock Operator (by Edwin Lefèvre). There is a tale within that book which I used to find perplexing, and even kind of annoying, but I think I finally get it. Here’s how the text reads:

His name was Partridge, but they nicknamed him Turkey behind his back, because he was so thick-chested and had a habit of strutting about the various rooms, with the point of his chin resting on his breast. The customers, who were all eager to be shoved and forced into doing things so as to lay the blame for failure on others, used to go to old Partridge and tell him what some friend of a friend of an insider had advised them to do in a certain stock. They would tell him what they had not done with the tip so he would tell them what they ought to do. But whether the tip they had was to buy or to sell, the old chap’s answer was always the same. The customer would finish the tale of his perplexity and then ask: “What do you think I ought to do?”

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