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.

Fear & Failure

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Let me share a personal experience and hope you and I can both learn something from it.

I’m not sure precisely when it began, but this premium post from March 7th is a good place to start. In the post, I make it abundantly clear that the real estate fund IYR is one of my favorite analogs of all time (using such words as “crazy about this analog” and “just ga-ga”). I’m certain this wasn’t my first post about it, but it is at least one where I put a stake very firmly in the ground that I am bonkers about the IYR short.

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Confessions Of an Unsuccessful Trader (by DoubleNaughtSpy)

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Very few people can say they are worse at investing and trading than me. How’s that for whetting your appetite for my advice? Well, how about I tell you of how I have been a rotten trader for so long, and how I have recently managed to turn it around?

Birth of an Investing Idiot

My investment education started when the company I worked for was sold and I was given the opportunity to roll out my 401K to an IRA. This was around 1995. Of course, this was during the real start of the dot com bubble. In the five years leading up to the dot com bust, I made a ton of money. I took my 35K and turned it into 99K by trading in and out of the usual suspects of the day. In a way, it was like WSB without the formal Reddit page. Instead, I was all over Yahoo Finance message boards scanning for the next big winner. I listened to the hype and participated in it along with all the other Yahooligans. I also started watching CNBC religiously every morning while getting ready for work, then tuning in after work while I watched the profits roll in.

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