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.

Disqus New Version

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The new version of Disqus has rolled out. In order to test this, I need to post an image of Catherine Zeta Jones.

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OK, so far, so good.

So I've been in touch with Disqus' co-founder tonight (who has been very responsive, thank you!). There is a nasty bug now which scrambles the sort order of comments. So if you post comments Oldest First (as most sane people do), you'll find new comments being shoved into the top. They hope to have this fixed by Wednesday morning.

One silver lining is, at my request, they fired up a spiffy new Tim feature that auto-updates your comments.

Failure to Launch

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As we all know, consumers are 70% of the economy, and their confidence is core to their spending. This morning, the latest consumer confidence figures came out, and they didn't just beat the high end of the consensus – – they knocked them out of the park.

0825-confidence

Naturally, the markets shot higher, but the euphoria from this extremely bullish news lasted about as long as Susan Boyle's worldwide popularity. (Oh, and not to get all socionomic on you, but it's interesting to me her "feel good" story happened right when the countertrend rally was gaining steam).

I would also point out that the Case-Schiller report, released before the open, likewise provided good bull fodder.

And where did we wind up on all this positive news? Here's a daily bar graph:

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Hmmm. Not too impressive.

My overall portfolio slipped 0.21% today, which isn't too painful at all. The first couple days this week have been quiet, but the remainder have one big report before the market opens each day. Durable Goods on Wednesday, GDP on Thursday, and Personal Income/Outlays on Friday.

I've been at it since 4:30 this morning, so I think I'm going to cool it for a while.