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.

The Cold Financial War

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When I was a lad, the Cold War was still humming along as it had been for decades. Even as a child, I had a strong sense of what was going on and what I felt was right and wrong. I perceived my native United States as a place of individual freedom and open choices. I perceived the USSR as an evil prison housing hundreds of millions of poor souls who were under the thumb of an oppressive government. When Reagan described them as “An Evil Empire”, I was in total agreement.

What was particularly nauseating to me was how the Soviet government would shameless and persistently lie to its own people. They would always offer assurances that everything was under control, everything was going to plan, and everything was going to be fine. They were able to sustain that lie from 1919 until 1989, but then it all came crashing down. At the time, it seemed the world had finally come to its senses.

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Magic!

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Earlier this year, we rolled out the SlopeTalk discussion system. My original intent was to dispose of “classic comments“, but out of consideration of those who prefer the older system, I decided to keep them both. Since that time, we’ve been grappling with the famous “disappearing comments bug“, and here on the 69th floor of the the Slope skyscraper, we have spent a lot of time and energy debugging it.

We think……….we think!……….we’ve got it. For those of you who have experienced this bug, please, for the love of all that is holy, go to whatever you use (be it SlopeTalk or classic comments) and hit Shift-F5 to make sure you’re on the latest version. Hopefully you’ll never see a comment vanish again, and if you do, and you are 100% certain you’ve refreshed your browser, please email me directly. Thank you!

A Perfect Morning

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Perfect? Why would I say that? Every single index is up, and up big!

Well, it’s raining, for one thing. I’ve got the window open on this pitch-black morning, and the sound of the rain always pleases me. I guess it’s no shock that rain is my favorite kind of weather. I’ve got Bob Dylan’s Street Legal playing in the background, my dogs are here, my charts are here, and I’m feeling comfortable with the market. So I’ve shed some profits this morning. So what? They’ll come back.

The market’s ephemeral strength, of course, has come from the un-surprising CPI print, which caused the /ES to bounce (although not quite as high as its post-bailout peak, circled below).

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Back from Pennsylvania Again

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Thanks to having one of my kids on the Duke fencing team, I have been traveling to the northeastern part of the United States more in the past few months than I have in the rest of my entire life.

In a way, it’s like visiting a different planet. It feels older. It feels dirtier (and sometimes that’s a good thing). Even though it’s supposed to be a megalopolis, there are tremendous portions of open land, farms, and natural scenery. Plus, the people look different. I think a person who lived in the 1950s would feel far more comfortable walking around one of these towns than, let’s say, Palo Alto. It just seems more……..American.

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