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.

Impressions of the Eastern Bloc

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Growing up during the Cold War as I did, my impression of places like Hungary and Czechoslovakia was that they were grey, oppressed, and full of unhappy people glumly plowing their way through life. Now that we live on a more-or-less entirely capitalist planet, it’s interesting to visit former regions of what had been the U.S.S.R. and see what it’s like.

I’ve spent the past few days in Slovakia, a place I’d never been before, nor had ever anticipated visiting. Here are a few off-the-cuff impressions I’ve had from my brief time here: (more…)

Semi Canary Still Chirping, But He’s Gonna Croak in 2018

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Since January 2013 we have been using the worldwide Semiconductor Equipment industry as a leader within the Semiconductor sector, which is an economic cyclical leader itself. That month we noted a positive move in Equipment bookings, which became a (3 month) trend that spring. This trend was used to project positive economic signals to come.

Through some turbulence in 2014 and 2015 the sector has remained on ‘economic up’ along with our cross reference indicator, the Palladium/Gold ratio right up to the current time as the economic Canary in a Coal Mine has kept on chirping.

But on November 21, two days before the sector topped I derisively poked at the mainstream media for hyping the Semiconductor Equipment sector with its bold headline… Fund manager looks beyond ‘FAANG’ stocks and finds even bigger winners for 2018. Talk about eyeball harvesting and greed stimulation. (more…)