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.
I have written dozens of books, but the one I’m most proud of is my novel Solid State.
It is a very well-reviewed book (4.8 stars!) but I’d love to bump this up to 100 reviews to help get the word out more. For this reason, I am taking brand new copies of my $50 book and giving them away for nothing except the promise that, if you really like it, you’ll leave a positive review.
A little over a week ago, I received a treasure trove of goodies from a very nice Sloper in Ireland. Among this bounty was this book, which I hadn’t heard about but was delighted to receive (and precisely on Apple’s 50th birthday, no less).
Most of you have heard of the classic book about trading written over a century ago named Reminiscences of a Stock Operator (by Edwin Lefèvre). There is a tale within that book which I used to find perplexing, and even kind of annoying, but I think I finally get it. Here’s how the text reads:
His name was Partridge, but they nicknamed him Turkey behind his back, because he was so thick-chested and had a habit of strutting about the various rooms, with the point of his chin resting on his breast. The customers, who were all eager to be shoved and forced into doing things so as to lay the blame for failure on others, used to go to old Partridge and tell him what some friend of a friend of an insider had advised them to do in a certain stock. They would tell him what they had not done with the tip so he would tell them what they ought to do. But whether the tip they had was to buy or to sell, the old chap’s answer was always the same. The customer would finish the tale of his perplexity and then ask: “What do you think I ought to do?”
(more…)An interesting breakdown as to the kind of books folks buy from the most popular (mystery) to least (poetry!) as well as where women’s and men’s preferences fall (like, let’s say, romance book).
Preface: due to the intense interest in silver these days, I have decided to share a chapter from my Panic Prosperity and Progress book which focuses on the Hunt Brothers and their attempt to corner the silver market in the late 1970s. I hope you enjoy it.
At this point, the exchanges did something extraordinary: simply stated, they outlawed buying. More specifically, on January 21, 1980, the COMEX said that the only orders they would accept would be liquidation orders. No one could buy. They could only sell.
The market was past the point of shrugging off news like this. With no buyers permitted, the price went into a free-fall. The day after the announcement, silver plunged to $34. To add to the selling pressure, the everyday people of the American middle class finally woke up to silver’s sensationally high price and began selling everything they might possess with silver content, from heirloom silverware to coins jingling in canvas bags.
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