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.

Insurance Casualities

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I’m going to be traveling all day on this Good Friday to visit a business in which I invested back in 2005. The aforementioned business looked to be heading into bankruptcy in 2007, but it turned itself around, and it is thriving now. I haven’t visited them in a few years, so I’m eager to see how much they’ve grown.

Anyway, I thought I’d just put up a post of a particular sector on which I’m cheerfully bearish: insurance. One look at the likes of Aflac during the financial crisis shows how interesting things can get: (more…)

Big Pictures: Stocks, Gold and the Miners

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Ukraine war hype, China demand drop, GOFO mysteries… these are the short term noise inputs on the gold sector.

US Treasury bond yield spreads, gold vs. commodities (i.e. the ‘real’ price of gold), gold vs. the stock market… these are some of the fundamental considerations that actually matter and they have taken a hit since January.

It is easy to say ‘I am bullish in the big picture’ (measured in years) but it is not so easy to actively manage in the smaller pictures (measured in days, weeks and months) with all of the above noise inputs and more bombarding the poor individual player. (more…)