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.

2001: A Historical Odyssey For Gold Stocks

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One chart shows the details of an important historical analog for gold stocks

Through many years of frustration among gold bugs due to the failure of gold stock prices to leverage the gold price in a positive way, there were very clear reasons for that failure. Reasons why it was not only logical, but probable that gold stocks would continue to under-perform vs. their product.

The primary driver to gold stock under-performance was a new era of ever more monetary (Fed) and fiscal (Government) policy meddling that began in 2001 and probably blew off in the inflationary panic of 2020. I called it the “Age of Inflation on Demand“.

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Severed

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Do not be alarmed. A minority of you get Apple TV, and a subset of that group watches the television series Severance. This post doesn’t require knowledge or even interest in the show, but the show’s conceit is the basis for what I have to say.

The premise of the show is that a small number of people have consented to a medical procedure on their brain which allows a corporation to employ them during the day, and during that workday, they will have absolutely no knowledge of their lives, memories, or families outside the workplace. Even though there may be a single human being, there are two human experiences: the “innie” who is the worker and the “outie” who is the person outside the confines of the office.

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It’s a Magic Number

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Check out the fascinating chart below: it illustrates the behavior of bull markets during the first three years of their existence. 2023 underperformed the Year One average. Year Two, 2024, more than made up for it. And Year Three? Well, that would be this year, 2025, and as you can plainly see, the historical behavior of the third years of bull markets tends to be flat, to put it kindly.

Jello Molds and BLM Yardsigns

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My brain isn’t good at much. I don’t have a knack for math. I’m lousy at remembering names of human beings. And I bet if I tried to be an actor, I’d forget my lines. I am, however, very good at analogs and metaphors, and they’re always creeping into my head, uninvited.

The latest one involves something in which I have a weird fascination, which is the peculiar and frankly gross recipes that seemed so popular from the early 1950s until the early 1980s. I run across these on a daily basis. Here’s just a small sampling, with a particular emphasis on what seems to have been a fetish in the United States: Jello-O based molds. Shield your eyes, Frank.

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