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.

Holmes On the Range

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As most of you know, Elizabeth Holmes has managed to avoid prison for many years after her transgressions. My hunch is that this month will not end without her being led off to prison. Anyway, the New York Times did a huge write-up on her, and it’s quite a read. I’ve got to admit, the whole pretty mom+likes dogs angle works awfully well with me. Like this:

“In the waning days of Theranos, Ms. Holmes got a dog, a Siberian husky named Balto. Last year, when a mountain lion carried Balto away from the front porch, Ms. Holmes spent 16 hours searching in the woods, digging through brambles and poison oak, hoping to find him alive. Everyone knew Balto was dead, but Ms. Holmes kept searching. The relentlessness. The certainty. The fanaticism. “

Glancing at the comments of the article, it’s clear people have blood in their eyes when they read about this woman. The whole thing makes me just sad.

Recap!

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During the course of this weekend, during which sane people relax and enjoy themselves, I have:

  • Published thirteen posts;
  • Introduced the Unfiltered Prices feature in SlopeCharts
  • Introduced the Personal Symbols feature in SlopeCharts
  • Emailed a special free book offer to my annual subscribers
  • Completed the submission of the audio version of Solid State

I need to tell myself I’ve done enough for King & Country for now. I’ll see you Monday morning.

Raw and Uncut Bars

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I am pleased to let you know of an important new improvement to SlopeCharts, which may sound paradoxical: the ability to show raw price bars.

Let me start with a simple fact: financial data is dirty. I’ve been in this business for many decades, and from the time I started in the late 1980s until the very day, financial data has had errors galore. It only takes 0.01% inaccuracy to screw up a chart.

Because of this, every since the earliest days of SlopeCharts, the program will take price bars that it considers impossible and severely truncate them, since the assumption is that the price data being presented simply isn’t real. Thus, you wind up with a chart that looks like this:

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