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 Funnel of Excess (brendan burke)

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Yesterday I finished a model I'm building for an electric generator. My first attempt at building this small device failed because I tried to violate the laws of physics. I live in a small Norwegian salmon fishing shack on the grounds of the large hadron collider in Switzerland. The shack was built by a very distant relative of mine that goes beyond 2nd's and remove's, but somehow this thin trace of blood was enough for me to take over his legacy job as grounds keeper of the inner circle of the collider. 

I eat lunch in the cafeteria every day with all the other people from all over the world, luckily I have been able to get to know a few of them very well through a common interest in art. I asked them about violating laws of physics; if i just kept at it and worked hard enough would physics eventually cave in and give up. They said no. I laughed too, after all if these PHD's really knew anything they would be on Wall Street. That being said I described my invention and they proceeded to give me some simple solutions for proper use of magnetic fields. Hoek Vun! (means by the beard of the fermented shark in Norweigan) It worked! Now my generator is up and running and I can move to phase II on this alt energy project.

I have been trading since 2001 but I am working on a multitude of other projects so I can potentially cycle out of trading the markets. The end of the prosperity, the end of the semi fair game may be near for the US markets and all its players. As a result the end of value in your money and our society may also be near. With this risk plausible I don't want to be caught in the world with only the skills of a day/swing trader.

Careening:

It is not an easy task to accomplish, wrecking a globally powerful empire but history is full of examples. We may have entered not a Japanese style recession but rather an Italian one. Italy has been in a recession since the 400's, that's one thousand six hundred ten years, crappenshaft! So which is it, what recession are we in? Are we still in one? I guess so, things are a mixed bag of good and bad at the moment based on real world indicators. I am looking around me; the people I know whom have lost jobs, the foreclosure map on zillow, stores closed in otherwise prosperous places in my old neighborhood in Pasadena CA. 

The violation of laws that would make a free market work could lead to economic ambiguity. If the stock market is kept inflated and continues to move unabated to untold heights it will be like building a meth lab in your heart. Its going to feel awesome to pump it right into the epicenter but eventually when the long haired chemists with jr high educations get it wrong its going to explode and paste your heart on the ceiling of your trailer. How long can we pump the market up and why are we doing it? What is the outcome? In our awesome service based economy the stock market has almost become the largest passive service industry of all. So much of the power paradigm relies on it going up. Pensions, senators, billionaires, investment bank warlords (whom make up our government), companies with no profit (many US companies seem to follow this interesting strategy of no profit). We have really collectively gone all in on the US market. Perhaps its the market itself and not its components that is too big to fail. We drain our best brains to wall street and our dumbest to Washington. We manufacture a moderate amount and we consume a lot of distraction. Now we are at a cross roads. We can take the pain and go through a very ugly recession in which everyone loses a lot, or we can use artificial means to inflate our biggest oxygen tank piggy bank. We have chosen… it has been chosen for us as the latter.

So now what happens? When you artificially inflate assets at an epic scale how do you step off the accelerator? How do you wean off the tit thats full of rainbow juice? It is very very hard. The only way you can is when a bigger boobie emerges behind it thats full of the real stuff; an actual producing economy. How do we grow a new economy? I personally think it needs to be driven by science and technology, manufacturing as we know it from boom times in the 20th century isn't necessarily the solution. We have botched our old real economy by allowing a slow ruin of the middle class through several presidencies and the pull of great minds into finance. There is an enormous challenge in the asset inflate stop gap that we are on. This is why I am moving on to other skill sets, at least until the market normalizes, if it ever does.

By going all in on the stock markets at a national level from government to individuals we may seal our fate into a vicious crack of inflation/deflation/muttonation. I don't know, it doesn't matter one word or the next, that's up to real economists to predict. What matters is trusting the market which is based on primarily illusion with your entire intellectual and physical wealth will at this juncture in our capitalist history possibly lead to personal ruin.

11 Stocks the Street is Shorting (By Ryan Mallory)

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Feast on this – Here is 11 stocks that the street is continuing to get
more and more bearish on since the beginning of this year. The
interesting thing is none of these stocks, to-date, have broken down yet
but their short interest has rapidly increased against their historical
norms, and could be prime for a major pullback or sell-off.

The one that is of most interest to me is Exxon Mobil (XOM) as the
number of shares being shorted over the last four months gas grown
exponentially compared to where the interest is typically at.

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Originally Posted By Ryan Mallory on his blog at SharePlanner.com

Man of Steel (by Nathaniel Goodwin)

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The one thing I find more embarrassing than my inverse ETF positions is the photo Tim Knight found of me in Paris.

One of the nicknames my peers gave me as a teenager was "Man of Steel", which was obviously inverse to my actual physical stature. Eventually, like so many other teenage boys, I began taking several "Growth Supplements" to enhance my body.  One of those supplements worked so well that I sent a letter and photos of myself to the company overseas, which they have apparently been using unbeknownst to me.

The two adverse side effects were that my balls began shrinking at an alarming rate, and it made my skin condition even worse. I quit using the product years ago, and my physique is now back to normal.

Speaking of steel, here is one short doing well. May it shrink as quickly as my testicles did many years ago.

Steel