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 key: SlopeTalk 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.

The principal purpose of SlopeTalk, which you can access here, is for Slopers to chat with one another. Doing so couldn’t be easier, because all you have to do is type something into the entry box at the bottom of the discussion panel and click the Post button (or, even better, hit Ctrl-Enter on your keyboard, sparing you the need to mess around with your pointing device at all).

There are a number of buttons around this entry box. They have the following functions:

• • Upload: Clicking this lets you upload an image to add to your comment (you can also paste an image directly into the comment box the way you would with any other document);

• • Starred: This presents you with a list of all the comments, if any, which you have “starred” at any point in time;

• • Comment (radio button): This is the default selection, which lets you enter a new comment into the discussion;

• • Link (radio button): If you would like to provide a URL so you fellow Slopers can see a website of interest, you can choose this and, optionally, add text describe the URL you are sharing;

• • Poll (radio button): Described elsewhere in this guide, clicking the Poll button lets you create a question and any number of possible answers from the other readers on the site;

• • Post: Submits the comment to the system. As a shortcut, you can also use Ctrl+Enter on the keyboard, which for frequent visitors to the site is a much faster way to go about it.

One exceptionally useful feature is the ability to “@” someone. What this means is that you can direct your comment at one user in particular by using their screen name, which is preceded with the “@” sign. To do this, type the @ character and start typing their screen name. Suggestions will appear for you, and you can choose the name in particular you want. (If you like, you can target more than one user with your message).

By doing this, the recipient will not get get an email with your comment but will also see a special link in the Users Panel showing a message is waiting for them. They can click on this link to go directly to the message. What’s great about this feature is that as people “@” you, their messages will appear under their names, and their names will be placed at the top of the Users Panel, making it very easy to see these messages.

The SlopeTalk page is very much designed to be “alive” as users come and go, posts are updated, and people add comments. You can scroll up and down the comments, and when you reach the end of the scroll, SlopeTalk will load another chunk of comments for you automatically.

Since the purpose of SlopeTalk is for the community to chat with one another, there are a variety of ways to respond to, and react to, the contributions of your fellow Slopers.

Next to every comment are a handful of buttons with the following functions:

• Thumb Up: Click on this to add a “Like” to someone’s comment (also known as an up-vote). Comments will show the quantity of likes they had. For instance, +3 would mean that comment received three likes from other readers. (The original poster of a comment cannot Like their own comment);
• Trash: Deletes a comment (you can only do this with your own);
• Block: Blocks a user from the site for being obnoxious (administrator access only);
• Reply: Lets you enter a reply to a comment;
• Three dots: Brings up reaction palette

The reaction palette, invoked by clicking the three-dots menu, has two components. One of them, at the top, contains some less-frequently used buttons, whose purposes are as follows:

• Thumb Down: Click to Dislike a comment. If you find yourself disliking a particular person’s comments a lot, you might instead want to just ignore that person (see below);
• Star: Designates a comment as so good that you want to save it for later reference;
• Follow: Lets you follow the comments of a specific user, which means that whenever that person leaves a comment, his or her comment will be emailed to you;
• Ignore: Makes a given Sloper’s comments become invisible to you so that you need not trouble yourself with what they have to say;
• Tweet: Lets you send out a particular comment by way of your Twitter account.

Beneath these buttons are a set of twenty-five different emoticons so that you can express your reaction to a comment with any number of fun, animated objects. You can click on as many as you like for any comment (clicking the same emoticon a second time will remove it).

The ability to do a poll is built right into SlopeTalk. To create one, click on the Poll radio button, and you will be given fields to enter your question and at least two answers. You can add more answers if you like, and the topic can be on anything – – what the market is going to do, what sports team you think is going to win a championship, and so forth. As always, just keep it civil and decent.

Once your poll is posted, everyone (including you!) is allowed to vote on it one time. The percentage will be displayed for all to see. One especially cool feature we’ve added is that the poll will update in real time so that people who have voted can see the percentages change and update as new votes come in!

On the left side of SlopeTalk is a panel titled Users Online which shows you, in alphabetical order, the other people who are on SlopeTalk at that particular moment. You will notice a color circled around the avatar of each user. The color of this circle indicates how recently they were active on the page. Green means recent activity, yellow means less active, and red means they are on the page but haven’t done anything on it in a while.

Another way you can see the activity of people on the page is by way of the “is typing” feature. For any particular user that is actively typing a message, these words will appear next to their screen name.

You can also change the visibility of the panels by clicking on the green header. This will let you expand and collapse individual panels so you can focus on the information most important to you.

You can also right-click on any given user to access various actions pertaining to that specific user, as appropriate.

On the left side of the screen, beneath the Users Online panel, is the Latest Posts panel. This provides you one-click access to any of the tens of thousands of posts on the Slope of Hope. As the title suggests, you are shown the latest posts on the site, and clicking on any of the post titles will bring up a special window that resembles this:

You can click on Read on Full Screen to go to the part of Slope where the post is shown by itself (which means you will leave SlopeTalk). You can also click on Jump to Post Comments, which loads all the comments that people created when that particular post was the latest one. If you do this, the specific post in question will also be highlighted so it will be clear to you what particular post compelled people to leave the specific comments you are viewing.

As a shortcut, you can right-click on any post to get a menu that allows you to access these features instantly:

Finally, you can scroll up and down the Latest Posts window, and when you reach the bottom of the list, it will load more posts in an “infinite scroll“.

You can fine-tune how SlopeTalk behaves for you by way of the Preferences dialog box. Click on the gear in the upper-left corner of the discussion panel to access Preferences.

Click on any of the three tabs to adjust those settings. The first tab is Appearance, which lets you control basic elements of the SlopeTalk experience. Click any of the switches to turn them on (green) or off (not green).

The Ignored Users tab lets you “Unignore” any Slopers you earlier decided to ignore.

The Sounds tab lets you control when sounds are heard to let you know about specific events. By default, only the New Post and Notification to You events are designated as worthy of making sounds, but you can turn on any others that you like.

Here are some suggestions to make using SloperTalk easier and more fun:

Reference Ticker Symbols

When mentioning a stock symbol, be sure to precede it with a dollar sign. For example, if you simply refer to the symbol AAPL, it will be presented as normal text. However, if you type in $AAPL, it will be shown as a hyperlinked symbol which, if clicked, will take you to a Super Summary Page, such as this one. If you want to refer to an index symbol that already has $ as part of its ticker, such as $, then just use two dollar signs, such as $$INDU.

Automatic Stock Charts

In instances as shown above, in which a ticker symbol has been hyperlinked, you can get an instant chart of the symbol just by pointing at the symbol.

Pasting Images

If you want to include an image with a comment (such as a stock chart, a cartoon, or anything else that’s appropriate for the site), there are two ways to go about this. One way is to click the Upload button and use the dialog box to find the file of the image you want to upload. A much faster way to go about this is to simply paste the image directly into the comment box (usually done on the keyboard with a Ctrl-V). If you do this, a spinning icon will display briefly showing that the system is getting the image, then it will show some text indicate that it is ready to post. (In other words, the image itself does now show up in the text entry box). Once you click the Post button, the image will display.

Collapse and Expand Panels

You can easily expand and collapse the panels on the left side of SlopeTalk by clicking on the green header.

You can also collapse and expand the entire left panel area by clicking the arrow as shown here, in order to make more room (for example, on a mobile tablet device):