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.

Wall Street Gets A Merry Christmas Main St. Gets Keynesian Coal

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Here we are going into what should be by all accounts one of the most festive times of the year. If one were to listen to most of the commentary coming from the mouths of what are proclaimed as the “smart-crowd” you would think we should be dancing in the streets, buying everything, and anything within arms reach, and much, much more.

Yet, anyone who owns, runs, or works for a business will tell you in private they are either paralyzed by uncertainty, or worse, they’re just scared to death. It just seems nothing makes sense as to what they know – and what they’re being told they should believe.

I talk directly with people who are entrepreneurs and business professionals. One glaringly impression that gets made to me over, and over again, is they literally can’t make heads or tails out of not only who to believe, but also what data to believe. (more…)

The New Boremal

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This market has had the “market” beaten out of it. If I had any sense – – or, more precisely, if I had the sense to not have any sense – – I’d just throw charts and reason out the window and dump my entire net worth into SPY calls so I could spend the next ten years cleaning out my nostrils. But I’m not dumb enough to be smart, so I can only sit back and watch, slack-jawed.

Take the chart below, for instance, from which I’ve removed the price bars; I merely show a trio of exponential moving averages (50, 100, 200) against the S&P 500 index.

1220-spx

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