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.

Real Estate Recency Bias

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If there’s one sweet job to have — besides being a Goldman banker – – it’s Palo Alto real estate agent (at least a top-tier one). These days, just toss an ad into the Palo Alto Daily Post, and, voila, multiple above-market offers, of which you get a healthy percentage. The winningest realtor in town these days in Ken DeLeon, who is (not surprisingly) given editorial space on a regular basis in the paper in which he advertises regularly so he can share his (cough cough) objective view on where real estate is headed. His conclusions, of course, tend to suggest everlasting upside.

0718-realestate

Dial M for Murder

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There was an interesting comment made to me yesterday that the shooting down of the Malaysian Airlines flight over Ukraine helped the bears considerably, and that’s true, up to a point. It is something I have noticed regularly before at big inflection points, and it’s obviously not the case that the patterns can somehow see into the future. I think there is a relationship there but logically it must be that if there is a strong bear setup like this, then the right news trigger will set the ball rolling with an apparent reaction to the news that is disproportionately larger than the reaction you might see to similar news at other times. We’ve all seen the markets shrug off bad news many times before, but when there are decent bear setups in play the market is showing a willingness to reverse that any bad news can then set strongly in motion.

Obviously the investigation into the extent that Moscow was responsible for this very avoidable tragedy is just getting started, and we may well see more geopolitical shockwaves from this in current days, though it’s important to keep this in proportion. No war is likely to start due to this tragedy, and it’s even possible that it may act as a catalyst to end the current Russian insurgency in Ukraine. (more…)