Welcome to SlopeTalk

Welcome to the information page for the SlopeTalk discussion forum. To access the SlopeTalk page directly, click here. If you don’t have your free Sloper account yet, please get one now. It takes just a few seconds, costs nothing, and we do not share your information to anyone. You need an account to post comments, use SlopeTalk, or do anything else useful with the site. So go and get it. We’ll wait.

Now that you’ve got your account, let’s get going.

Since this site began in early 2005, the community has grown tremendously. Each day, hundreds of comments are exchanged among Slopers, and “old timers” have made names for themselves through their insights and trading prowess; there’s even a Hall of Fame page celebrating the best of them. Hang around for a bit, and you’ll quickly pick up on the pulse and personality of the Slope of Hope.

Here are some important things to keep in mind:

Slopers are friendly! The most common concern we hear from “lurkers” (that is, folks who read but don’t participate in discussion) is that they are worried about being embarrassed. Don’t be! Slopers are a friendly, helpful bunch that want nothing more than to share, teach, and interact with other traders. This is a well-established community that embraces new participants with open arms. Please join them!

An avatar makes you one of the cool kids: Although it’s not required to have one of those spiffy little pictures next to your screen name, it sure does give you more of a personality. If you didn’t make an avatar when you first set up your account, take a moment to add a picture in your profile by going to the the Profile Page and clicking the Upload button to submit your profile picture. It can be the real you, a cartoon, a famous person, or anyone else. Express yourself!

Click on any Sloper’s avatar to learn more about them: You can read about other folks, choose to highlight their comments, follow them via email, or – in instances where you’d rather not read what a particular person has to say – just Ignore them altogether. There are Follow and Ignore buttons beneath every comment for convenient one-click access.

You can scroll up and down a person’s profile to learn all kinds of things about them and their activity on Slope.

You should find SlopeTalk to be fun and easy to use. This is a place where traders get together and discuss the markets or anything else on their minds. Feel free to just enjoy the discussion from the sidelines if you like, and whenever you feel like chiming in, please do so. You'll find Slope to be a warm and welcoming place. If you would like to read something about the philosophy behind the page's creation, read on.......

If there’s one thing we’ve heard consistently over the years, it is that the community on Slope is its greatest asset. The glue that binds that community together is the comments system, which has been a custom-made product from Slope virtually since the site’s inception in 2005.

In all that time, the model has been the same as any other blog (although we are loath to use that term, as we outgrew the designation of “blog” years ago). That is, create a post, and have comments following it.

After thinking at length about the various shortcomings of this model, and the benefits of a new approach, we decided we needed a totally new paradigm, which is to have a conglomeration of channels of conversation with unlimited access points.

Henceforth, there is NO rigid link between a given post and a given set of comments. Such a linkage is no longer relevant, and the community’s conversation will be something you can leap into at any time from anywhere without being prompted to do so by a blog post:

Here are the most important things to know about the philosophy behind SlopeTalk:

  • The conversation is perpetual: People are on the site every day of the year and every hour of the day. There is no start or end to the conversation. You just jump in and start talking, sort of like a never-ending cocktail party without the drinks. You can scroll back in time to see what you’ve missed recently, but the idea is that people should be able to jump in and out of any given channel and simply join in.
  • Integration with Slope is keySlopeTalk is not just a “plug-in” module acquired off the shelf from a third party. It is a from-the-ground-up bespoke component of the Slope of Hope site as a whole, and as such, its integration with other portions of the site will be deepening all the time.
  • SlopeTalk will serve as the center of the site: As the integration improves, it will feel more and more natural to use SlopeTalk as a kind of “home room” for your experience on the site. Moving in and out of the conversation to other pages on the site should feel smooth.

The comments system was a tremendous success on the site, yielding millions of comments over the years, but SlopeTalk is an entirely new approach to our community. We look forward to your active participation.