My last few posts have been a coronavirus COVID-19 series, so I’m putting in the links here so as to refer back to them easily for now. These are the ten posts so far. I’m planning to finish this series with a post on the likely economic impact of COVID-19 over the coming year, and a look at the interesting search for scapegoats that is now getting started, with the obvious targets being the very strange behaviour of both China and the WHO as this crisis was developing. That should conclude this series in the next week or two, though economies and markets will likely take quite a while longer to get back to anything that we might recognise as normal.
(more…)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.
Kids Today
Back when I was a lad, I subscribed to Investors Business Daily (umm, that didn’t last). There was a full page ad that appeared just about every day for something called The Better Software People, and it basically showed how, using their software, you could have turned $10,000 into $43 million, or something like that.
I don’t think I ever subscribed to their product, but the ad had the same effect on me as I suspect it had on a lot of other people, which was to put stars in our eyes about how easy it would be to just print money by participating in the equity and index options market (and this was back in 1985, so you can imagine how horrible the options markets were, to say nothing of the bid/ask spreads, which were probably wider than Kim Kardashian’s backside).
(more…)Opportunity or Illusion?
Take a look at this ratio chart of the XME divided by the GDX. Note the long-term range and its cyclic nature.
Illusions. Lies. Falsehoods.
As most of you know, everything I know I learned from the original Star Trek series.
The other night, as I was watching Specter of the Gun for the billionth time, the scene below struck me as absolutely appropriate for what we’re living through now. As we consider what the traitorous son-of-a-bitch Jerome Powell is doing to destroy this country, for the benefit of his billionaire butt buddies, Spock’s wise words come to mind:
The bullets are unreal. Without body. They are illusions only. Shadows without substance. They will not pass through your body, for they do not exist. Unreal. Appearances only. They are shadows. Illusions. Nothing but ghosts of reality. They are lies. Falsehoods. Specters without body. They are to be ignored.
Powell and his currency-printing guns are the quartet of men in black shown in the clip. Drink in the scene and appreciate how it applies to our times.
(more…)Material Girl
I’ve added the Materials Sector Fund to my shove-it-up-your-ass-Powell collection of equity shorts. Observe:
