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.

Boiling It Down

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In spite of it being merely four days long, it was a really good trading week. The one giant blemish was how I bungled my AAPL trade, which was a tremendous success from an analytical perspective but an utter gaffe personally, since I managed to completely avoid the 200%+ gain that ensued a mere three days after my post. I mulled it over a long time, and I wrote down this short but sweet ruleset:

An ENTRY is based on a discrete rationale

An EXIT is based on the violation of that rationale OR a discrete profit rationale

There is NO PLACE for whimsy

The first rule I nailed perfectly. My entry was indeed based on a discrete rationale. More specifically, it was based on my superb analysis! It’s the rest of this compact little Guide to Life where I completely muffed it.

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Tango and Cash

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OK, that feels better.

  1. I have moved from 0% cash to 25% cash;
  2. I have maintained almost every single position, simply taking partial profits;
  3. I’ve got a ton of buying power IF we move higher next week and have better prices for shorting

One item I didn’t touch at all is Nvidia, which reports next Wednesday afternoon. This thing is totally in the free-fall zone.

Hazardous Weekend

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Most trading bromides are useless and annoying (the all-time champ: “Trade the chart in front of you”) but one I think is actually worth remembering is “Trees do not grow to the sky.” That is a reference to stocks going up, but there should be some converse for stocks going down, like “Roots do not go to the Earth’s molten core.” Nah, that’s not quite it.

Anyway, this has been a fun week, no doubt about that for one moment:

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