What information do we collect?

We collect information from you when you register on our site or place an order.

When ordering or registering on our site, as appropriate, you may be asked to enter your: name, email address, mailing address, credit card information or other data required for billing. You may, however, visit our site anonymously.

What do we use your information for?

Any of the information we collect from you may be used in one of the following ways:

+ To personalize your experience (your information helps us to better respond to your individual needs)

+ To improve our website (we continually strive to improve our website offerings based on the information and feedback we receive from you)

+ To process transactions (We may share or sell information with third parties for marketing or other purposes without your consent.)

+ To send periodic emails

The email address you provide for order processing, may be used to send you information and updates pertaining to your order, in addition to receiving occasional company news, updates, related product or service information, etc.

How do we protect your information?

We implement a variety of security measures to maintain the safety of your personal information when you place an order or enter, submit, or access your personal information.

We offer the use of a secure server. All supplied sensitive/credit information is transmitted via Secure Socket Layer (SSL) technology and then encrypted into our Payment gateway providers database only to be accessible by those authorized with special access rights to such systems, and are required to?keep the information confidential.

After a transaction, your private information (credit cards, social security numbers, financials, etc.) will not be stored on our servers.

Do we use cookies?

Yes (Cookies are small files that a site or its service provider transfers to your computers hard drive through your Web browser (if you allow) that enables the sites or service providers systems to recognize your browser and capture and remember certain information

We use cookies to help us remember and process the items in your shopping cart, keep track of advertisements and compile aggregate data about site traffic and site interaction so that we can offer better site experiences and tools in the future.

Do we disclose any information to outside parties?

We do not sell, trade, or otherwise transfer to outside parties your personally identifiable information. This does not include trusted third parties who assist us in operating our website, conducting our business, or servicing you, so long as those parties agree to keep this information confidential. We may also release your information when we believe release is appropriate to comply with the law, enforce our site policies, or protect ours or others rights, property, or safety. However, non-personally identifiable visitor information may be provided to other parties for marketing, advertising, or other uses.

California Online Privacy Protection Act Compliance

Because we value your privacy we have taken the necessary precautions to be in compliance with the California Online Privacy Protection Act. We therefore will not distribute your personal information to outside parties without your consent.

Childrens Online Privacy Protection Act Compliance

We are in compliance with the requirements of COPPA (Childrens Online Privacy Protection Act), we do not collect any information from anyone under 13 years of age. Our website, products and services are all directed to people who are at least 13 years old or older.

Your Consent

By using our site, you consent to our websites privacy policy.

Changes to our Privacy Policy

If we decide to change our privacy policy, we will post those changes on this page.

This policy was last modified on March 25, 2013

Contacting Us

If there are any questions regarding this privacy policy you may contact us using the information below.

Socialtrade Corporation
555 Bryant 711
Palo Alto, CA 94301

tim@socialtrade.com

Tim Knight has been charting and trading since 1987. His first stock trade was, in fact, on October 19, 1987 – the day of the crash – which perhaps goes a long way explaining his disposition toward bearishness.

He has been involved in personal computers since late 1979 and, starting at age 16, began writing a couple dozen books about using and programming computers. His most recent writing has been focused on charting and the history of financial markets, including his newest books, Panic, Prosperity, and Progress, and, more recently, Silicon Valley Babble On and Solid State, his first novel.

He has been running Slope since March 29 2005 and has, during that time, written more than 30,000 posts on the site.

In 1992 Knight founded Prophet, a web-based technical analysis company that was acquired by Investools (and, later, Ameritrade) in January 2005. Tim served as Senior Vice President of Technology for Investools from 2005 through 2010. Both Barron’s & Forbes consistently named Prophet the #1 website for technical analysis. 

Besides running the Slope of Hope, Tim also hosts a daily show on the tastylive network, Trading Charts with Tim Knight. Long starting Prophet, Tim was Vice President of Technology Products at Montgomery Securities in San Francisco, where he led the development of an institutional online-trading platform. Additionally, he has held various positions in marketing management at Technical Tools and Apple Computer.

Tim lives in Palo Alto with his wife, their children, a bevy of egg-laying hens, a pond full of fish, nine thousand honeybees, and a trio of dogs which occupy whatever free time may be available. He has also been known to burst into song from a wide repertoire of Broadway musicals, irrespective of the preference of those around him at any given moment.

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Trading Style

Over the many years that I’ve been building and running the Slope of Hope, one of the most frequently-asked questions is, in one form or another, what my style of trading is. I’ve emailed bespoke answers to this question for years, but I figure it’s high time to put something permanent on the site to clear the air and also save myself the time of answering the question any more. I’m going to take a somewhat lazy style of writing and construct this as a series of questions and answers, which might make it more efficient for those who are only interested in certain aspects of how I trade.

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When you place options trades, do you do straddles, butterflies, calendar spreads, or………?

None of the above. I have made a deliberate point of being a surprisingly unsophisticated trader. I sometimes tell the viewers on my tastylive program that they are almost all more sophisticated traders than me. I tend to simply buy options (puts, usually) which are (1) at least a few months out in the future (2) in the money (3) liquid enough to have a reasonable bid/ask spread. When people ask me questions about options greeks and what my delta is, my eyes just glaze over.

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How do you decide what to trade?

I tend to take a “bottoms-up” approach to my trading ideas, meaning that I prefer to look at a large quantity of symbols (literally hundreds of charts per day) and then pick out from them those that seem the most promising. The SlopeCharts product was designed early on to appeal to organization freaks like myself, so the watch lists are very flexible and easy to use. I keep a frequently-updated watch list called “Bear Pen” which I review daily, and if anything within there seems promising, and I don’t have a position in it yet, I’ll take a close look to see if its risk/reward relationship is appealing enough to warrant a trade.

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Do you make a living by trading?

No, and although I’ve been mixed up in the world of trading since 1987, my belief is that precious few people are mentally constructed in such a way that they can do so. To me, it’s sort of like being a great artist or pianist. I believe that traders, by and large, are born and not made, and although there are certainly skills, techniques, and knowledge that we can acquire that helps us in trading, it takes a certain kind of person to actually thrive year after year as a trader. I am exceptionally proud of the tools I’ve created, and the words I’ve written, about the world of trading, but I do not hold myself out as a professional “trader” by any means.

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How long have you been doing this?

Pretty much my entire adult life. I first got involved in the world of charting and trading in 1987, and I’ve never looked back. In all that time, I’ve created, from scratch, two popular charting platforms, two successful websites, and have written several books and tens of thousands of posts about charts and trading. Simply stated, I really like looking and talking about charts, so I’ve made a career out of it.

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What kinds of financial instruments do you trade?

Virtually all of my trading is stock options. Over the years, I have traded large quantities of stock (both buying and shorting), crypto-currencies, FOREX, and equity futures contracts. I’ve pretty much honed in just on options trading, however, for the sake of leverage and risk management.

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How significant is your trading account to your overall financial situation?

It’s a good-sized account, but it represents – – if I dare to use a term associated with Cramer – – “mad money” on my part. In other words, whether the account zooms in value or plunges to zero (and I do try to avoid that latter outcome), it isn’t going to affect the choices in my life, for better or worse. More than anything else, the existence of the account, and the trading thereof, constitutes for me a living experiment of all the things I develop here on Slope. In other words, I put my money where my mouth is.

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Why are you a stock market bear, when assets usually go up over the long haul?

This question is probably best left to a crack team of psychiatrists! Maybe I was dropped on my head. Ironically, the vast majority of my own personal wealth has come from “long” positions in either real estate or small business. There’s something about a chart that looks like it’s about to fall that has always appealed to me. I must emphasize, however, that technical analysis, and the tools offered on Slope, are utterly indifferent to direction. You can be he world’s most fanatic perma-bull and still get every morsel of value out of these tools as would the world’s most resolute bear. One hammer can serve all styles of carpenters.

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