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.

His Majesty’s Presence

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I love America. The first words of The Godfather, and three words also deep within my heart. In spite of my distaste for many of its inhabitants (present company excluded), the ideals of this nation are dear to me, and, as on every 4th of July, I read the entire Declaration of Independence with a lump in my throat.

I, too, would like to share with you this magnificent clip from John Adams, in which Paul Giamatti’s character meets King George to try to mend the obvious rift between the newborn U.S. and Britain. It is an extraordinary scene, and I’ve read that this is one of the very few instances where every single word was written down, and those words are precisely presented here:

Whispering ETFs

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No less an authority than Tom McClellan went onto CNBC (“The Network That Never Knew a Bear Market”) yesterday to declare that the bull market would just keep rip-roaring away another year. Maybe. Maybe not. I wanted to show a couple of ETFs which I’m short that suggest otherwise, at least for the short-term.

The first one is the emerging markets bond fund. Doesn’t exactly look healthy, does it? This is by far (by an order of 10 times) my biggest positions, and I’m cheerfully holding onto it.

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Numb Skull

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I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer, and sometimes it takes me years for a truth to sink through my thick skull. Allow me to give you a couple of examples.

The first has to do with buying gold bullion. Now, I’m not a gold kook, but I’m fond of coins and bullion to some degree, and there have been instances when I got the urge to buy the stuff. Usually this would come after a long bout of strength on gold’s part, and I just couldn’t help myself anymore, so I rushed out and gobbled up whatever I wanted at my local dealer.

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