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.

Searching Text Notes

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Hey, folks, let’s make some NOTES in SlopeCharts!

The entry of text notes, launched last night, is the “input” that Slopers contribute. The “output” is just as interesting, however, because you can search through the text notes of all Slopers to see the charts they have posted and what their annotations are.

There’s one problem, though – – there’s hardly any notes yet, because this is a brand new feature! So I’m going to do my part and start going through all my charts, annotating them copiously. We’d all appreciate if you’d do the same with your own charts. (more…)

Text Notes in SlopeCharts

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Charting is my passion, and with ProphetCharts dead and buried, SlopeCharts is now my new baby. As with ProphetCharts, I intend to make it the best there is. I beat everyone else before. I intend to do it again. And, as before, I will do so with almost no money and no resources.

This will start slowly at first but will build steam. I’d like you to know we’ve already made big improvements to the “bar so far”. This is the bar representing the current day’s activity (the term is something I came up with many years ago in the early days of Prophet; I’m not sure if it’s been stolen or not, but that’s the word I use). Any of you using SlopeCharts during the day, especially early in the trading day, will see a huge improvement. Oh, and you see this without paying any real time fees or signing any freakin’ agreements. You’re welcome. (more…)

SlopeCharts Survey

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I am terribly excited, because for the first time since 2004, I am going to have an honest-to-goodness full-time employee. His purpose in life is simple: SlopeCharts. As you can tell, I’m very committed to this product. It’s been very quiet for a couple of months now (very stable, but no new features), but that’s about to change.

I have a notebook full of goals and ideas, but I’d really like to get a sense directly from you, the user, about what you’d like to see next, what you wish SlopeCharts had, or maybe what would have made you keep using the product (assuming you tried it and didn’t stick with it). This will only take a minute of your time, or less. Thanks!

Equities in Real Money

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Using good old SlopeCharts, I thought I’d do a little experiment. As you know, stocks are at lifetime highs, but in nominal terms. I wondered what things look like in terms of “real” money (as measured by GLD), so I entered the symbol (SPY/GLD) and got this result:

slopechart_(SPY-GLD)

What jumped out me is that, in these terms, we are actually lower than we were in the pre-financial crisis peak! In addition, the ultimate low for the market wasn’t the famous March 2009 bottom, but instead took place a couple of years later (which makes sense, if you look at bank and financial stocks, which plunged until then). Food for thought.