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.

The Bears’ Escalator

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If there’s one fund that neatly captures the suckitude of being a bear the past 2.5 years, it is the Ranger Equity Bear ETF. It describes itself thusly: “The investment seeks capital appreciation through short sales of domestically traded equity securities. The Sub-Advisor seeks to achieve the fund’s investment objective by short selling a portfolio of liquid mid- and large-cap U.S. exchange-traded equity securities, The Sub-Advisor implements a bottom-up, fundamental, research driven security selection process that seeks to identify securities with low earnings quality or aggressive accounting that may tend to mask operational deterioration and bolster the reported earnings per share over a short time period.”

Well, the bottom-up, fundamental, research-driven security selection produces results like those below, which is no surprise, in a centrally-planned economy like ours (and take note, this is not a leveraged fund!) The brief lifts in 2011 and 2012 have given way to a steady descent, topped off nicely by today’s lifetime low, as Yellen has her tiny hands around the market’s neck.

0701-hdge

 

Fifteen Years with No Change

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I scanned a couple of my favorite comics from This Modern World from back in 1999 (they are askew since I scanned them in and the book wasn’t quite in there perfectly……….forgive me!) This just goes to show how little has changed; the first comic has to do with the concentration of wealth, and the second with insane valuations of Internet companies. No need for time travel, friends! Click either one to see a larger version. (more…)

Who Are Those Guys?

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As the silver CoT report data systematically, almost robotically degraded into the September 2012 top (despite the seemingly bullish coming of QE3) NFTRH used to ask week after week “Who are those guys?” doing its best Butch Cassidy while evaluating the gathering short interest.

Below is the CoT graph from NFTRH 203 dated September 9, 2012. Week after week ‘those guys’ were ganging up on silver and we all know what soon happened; a harsh bear market down leg for the precious metals. (more…)