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.

The Importance of Being Ernest

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Before I decided to shell out money each month for YouTube Premium, I would constantly be burdened with the task of listening to a commercial for a company I grew to despise, merely because their ad was so insipid. The commercial was from Carvana, and I can hear to this day to idiotic “origin story” they offered (“People said we couldn’t sell used cars online, but we knew we could, so we went to work….……”) Even more annoying than the ads was the ridiculous gimmick of having a huge car “vending machine” where a person would put in a gigantic “coin” and have their car brought down to them in a big elevator.

But, annoyed as I might have been, it was hard to argue with their success. CVNA was the kind of ticker symbol that people adored, and the stock went from $8 to nearly $400. In other words, if you had just invested $8 billion at the IPO, you’d have almost $400 billion at the peak. Anyway, I couldn’t explain their success, but you can’t argue with a chart.

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Westbound Thoughts

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Now that I am done with my brief trip to Pennsylvania, I’m heading back to the Bay Area for a big week ahead. The two looming events this week are the election on Tuesday (whose results, I suppose, will be finalized sometimes before the end of 2022) as well as the monster of them all, the CPI report on Thursday morning. The trauma from October 13th still lingers in the air, but I’ve got a hunch that it’s going to be payback time for the bears.

Now that the futures markets are open, everything is red, which I appreciate. It’s nothing dramatic, but let’s face it, the clawback that happened in the final hours of Friday was just plain dumb, so it’s nice to see it getting at least partly erased. None of this is going to amount to a hill of beans by the time we’re deep into the trading session on Thursday, however.

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