We study the relationship between recent conjectures on slopes of overconvergent p-adic modular forms "near the boundary" of p-adic weight space. We also prove in tame level 1 that the coefficients of the Fredholm series of the U_p operator never vanish modulo p, a phenomenon that fails at higher level. In higher level, we do check that infinitely many coefficients are non-zero modulo p using a modular interpretation of the mod p reduction of the Fredholm series recently discovered by Andreatta, Iovita and Pilloni.

Final version. Numbering in main body different different from previous version. To appear in Proc. Lon. Math. Soc. 25 pages, 7 tables