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.

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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Crumblin’ Down

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Happy December 26th to you Slope. As we begin to close the book on 2024 and look forward towards 2025, I thought it was a good time to look back at my primary call for 2024. This year I was focused on Tom McClellan’s 10-year crude oil analog, and what it was forecasting for the 2024-2026 time period. Let’s take a look.

You can read Tom discussing the analog here, just after the 2020 Covid crash. In the article he states:

“I first discovered this relationship back in 2008, when I looked at a log-scaled long-term chart of crude oil prices and noticed that it looked an awful lot like the chart of the DJIA.  So, I put the two on a chart together but was not really satisfied with the way that the pattern details lined up.  After some tinkering, I found that offsetting the crude oil plot forward by 10 years made for a much better fit between the two plots.

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