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
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“.
(more…)Severed
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.
Great Expectations and Bitcoin
Metaphors and analogies are how I tend to make sense of the world, and a new one occurred to me today between two unlikely situations: the purchase of my company in 2005 and the price of Bitcoin, show below (with an arrow marking the Presidential election).
It’s a Magic Number
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.
