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.
I'm just about ready to write off 2009 as an utter waste of time for myself, but – – persistence pays, so I continue to go through hundreds of charts on a weekly basis. I managed to scare up a few long ideas that I can stomach. One of the more interesting ones in ASIA, which also happens to have the benefit of being a company not based in the United States.
I'm going to indulge in a few minor sins right now: (a) a touch of self-pity; (b) a touch of blaming someone else for an investment decision; (c) more than a touch of regret.
About a year ago, I was flush with cash, so I decided to do something I'd never done before – – buy some precious metals bullion. I bought a 1000 ounce brick of silver (and when I say brick, I mean brick – – this thing weighed nearly 70 kilos, and I could hardly lift it) and a 1000 gram bar of gold.
I mainly bought them because, frankly, it was just kinda cool. A minuscule reason was all the talk about the need for precious metals just to get by in daily life. But it was mostly just for fun.
However, there was a lot of persistent talk in the EWI STU – – I think this was early this year – – – about how gold was going to tumble from $950 to under $690, and silver would fall even harder. So the fact that these things were kind of unwieldy, were at risk of being stolen, and were – – according to Elliott Wave theory – – at risk of tumbling in value – – made me drive them back to where I bought them, where I sold them for a small profit. I think I made perhaps a thousand bucks. Hardly even worth the trouble of driving around.
As I sit here, watching gold and silver explode yet again to new highs, I can't help but think of the tens of thousands of dollars in profits that I denied myself. And – – I really gotta say – – it just pounds a few more golden- and silver-plated nails into the coffin holding the body of my faith in Elliott Wave as a basis for forward-looking decisions. It's all very cute and precious and lovely in retrospect, but for predictive value………..I'm really having grave doubts.
There is a longish but excellent article by John Hussman which I would urge you to at least skim. In it, he calls for an 80% probability of a crash next year (and this from a man whose historical returns over the past decade have been impressive). Here is a choice snippet:
Whether or not I have focused too much on probable “second-wave” credit risks is something we will find out in the quarters ahead – my record of economic analysis is strong enough that a “miss” on that front would be an outlier. What I do think is that over the past decade, investors (including people who hold themselves out as investment professionals) have become far more susceptible to reckless myopia than I would have liked to believe. They have become speculators up to the point of disaster.
Frankly, I've come to believe that the markets are no longer reliable or sound discounting mechanisms. The repeated cycle of bubbles and predictable crashes over the recent decade makes that clear. Rather, investors appear to respond to emerging risks no more than about three months ahead of time. Worse, far too many analysts and strategists appear to discount the future only in the most pedestrian way, by taking year-ahead earnings estimates at face value, and mindlessly applying some arbitrary and historically inconsistent multiple to them.
