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.

This is Getting Silly

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I’ve offered many tales about the insanity of real estate here in the Silicon Valley, such as:

But now I’ve got a new high – – not in Palo Alto exactly, but just up the road a few miles. This big-ass (20,000 square feet) house is going for Eighty Eight Million dollars (which is a non-too-subtle inducement to some Chinese billionaire, since the more superstitious among them are really, really hung up on the number 8). But if this strikes your fancy, you don’t have to be Chinese, so long as your money is green. Form a single line! No cutting, please!

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Same Shape, Different Day

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Well, my friends, it’s getting a little challenging adding a lot of new color to a market whose most recent changes for the entire trading day were down a few hundredths of a percentage point on Thursday and up a few hundredths of a percentage point today. Two words: Bo. Ring.

The entire market can be beautifully summed up with a single index chart: that of the S&P 100, shown below. The bull market ended when the wedge was broken (red arrow) and now we’re at the very top of the recent range (green tint), just waiting for the damned thing to weaken. And so……..we wait.

0328-waiting