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.

Apple Investors Have Jumped the Shark

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OK, if there ever was a sign to short the living daylights out of AAPL, this is it:

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An entire conference has been put together (which you can attend for $395) whose sole purpose is to talk about trading AAPL. Featuring Dancing-with-the-Stars celebrity Steve Wozniak, who will spin old yarns about his experience in the 1970s when he actually worked there.

Stick a fork in it, folks. We have reached complete cultural saturation. I'll say what no one else will dare say: not only will AAPL not reach the trillion-dollar market cap which seems to be a universal given, but it will lose half its value within the next three years.

This "summit" is just about the dumbest thing I've ever seen since the late-90s bubble. And I say this as a former Apple employee, 1984-Macintosh buyer, first-day iPhone buyer, first-day iPad buyer, and all-around Steve Jobs worshipper.

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Market Lessons (Re)Learned in 2011 (by Market Sniper)

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In this last day of reflection prior to the resumption of trading tomorrow, I thought I would share this with you. Here are the top lessons the market handed out to us in the year just passed. Most are old lessons that just need to be reinforced. In the heat of the "battle" some are difficult to keep foremost in our thinking.

Lesson #1: Price patterns work.

I, personally, have difficulty trading classical chart patterns as I note they tend to fail to deliver the next technical expectation as often as they deliver. That being said, there is no denying that, for the broad markets in 2011, they did deliver on two notable occasions. 1) The summer of 2011 with the head and shoulders off the May high and 2) The double bottom off the August and October lows. One of my personal goals this year is to attempt to do better in this area. To that end, I will be using Tim Knight's and Tom Bulkowski's works predominately. 

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