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.
Here is a chart we haven’t looked at in a very long time. The symbol is FR:T10Y3M in SlopeCharts, and it shows the 10 year rate minus the 3 month rate, which has been a flawless predictor of recessions. We watched it as we approached the “trigger line”, although little did we know precisely what would be to blame for the ensuing recession that did, in fact, take place.
Imagine the following scene.
You are walking on a street, toward the crest of a hill. You can hear the crackling of flames, and you can see the orange glow in the sky as cinders spiral slowly down from above you. Upon reaching the crest, you can see an entire neighborhood engulfed in a conflagration.
And there I am with a hose, pointed right at the center of the flames.
You assume, incorrectly, that I am dousing the flames with a powerful stream of water. You soon discover that the liquid shooting out of my hose is, in fact, gasoline, and I am doing my best to point the hose where I think the gas will be most effective.
“What the hell are you doing?”
(more…)I was glaring at the insanely tiny ranges of the past few weeks when it occurred to me there was only one other time that I recall seeing such a phenomenon, and that was………….just before the Covid crash! The old saying is never to short a dull market. I don’t see the logic to that. If you compare the past few months to the late December/early January period of 2019/2020, you’ll find the action on the SPY remarkably similar:
I’ve mentioned before my fondness for learning random new things. This has morphed from grabbing random volumes of the Encyclopedia when I was a kid to the modern-day equivalent, which is either looking at Quora or punching up topics on Wikipedia that crossed my mind.
I was flying over the Great Salt Lake a few days ago, and I decided to learn about it (my initial curiosity was regarding whether there was life in the lake or not, and there is, although mostly in the form of brine shrimp). One illustration was particularly striking to me: it showed how the present-day Salt Lake (which is huge) used to be just a small portion of a vastly larger body of water called Lake Bonneville. (You have probably heard of the fabled Bonneville salt flats where land-speed records are challenged).
