OK, last Watts video for a while, I promise. But allow me to explain what occurred to me: I’ve been listening to and reading the works of all manner of gurus ever since I was a kid. And yet, having discovered Alan Watts only recently, I feel like someone who has been eating Hydrox his whole life, thinking they were perfectly good, only to just discover that there’s this thing called Oreo’s which is vastly truer and better than what I’ve been consuming all this time. That’s Alan Watts. He’s the original. He’s the Oreo. The others are bad copies.
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.
Watts & Materialism
I know I’ve gone kind of Watts-bonkers, and I’ve got more to say about it. But for now, I’ll just leave this video:
Volatility Gap Nearly Closed
Who would have thought that in such a short span of time we’d go from the 80s on the VIX back down into the teens? This has just about been smashed into oblivion, with a gap-closure quite close.
From TBSP to WSB
Back in the late 1980s, when I first developed a strong interest in trading, I subscribed to a newspaper that’s still around today: Investor’s Business Daily. In that paper, without fail, would appear a full-page ad from a company that I don’t think is around anymore called The Better Software People (or, as they called themselves, T.B.S.P.).
The message TBSP wanted to convey was simplicity itself: buy our software, and you will get options trade signals that will make you rich. About 95% of the ad was just row after row of trades, starting with something like $10,000, which steadily grew to literally hundreds of millions of dollars. These people, with a straight face, retroactively picked all the perfect trades and convinced some poor saps that a small account could, in a few years, grow to hundreds of millions of dollars. Self-evidently, they must have sold enough software to pay for these expensive ads year after year.
(more…)Three Metallic Amigos
Metals Ratios Continue to Indicate Inflation
And that is welcome for monetary and fiscal policymakers of course, since inflation is the only trick they have up their sleeve to bail this mess out once again. And this is no comment on COVID-19. The economy was slowly decelerating last year well before this guy showed up (I like the picture, okay?)…
The yield curve bottomed and turned up in August of 2019 as manufacturing was slipping, long-term yields were tanking and other economic signals were fraying in the wake of the trade war. So please, no convenient COVID excuses.
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