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.

Climbing the Charts!

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Hey, this is pretty cool. The 2nd edition of my new book, Chart Your Way to Profits, isn't going to be shipped for another week or two, but it's already climbing the charts on Amazon. If you use ProphetCharts, you need this book!

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This is kind of exciting for me. I wrote my first book, The World Connection, wayyyyyyy back in 1982 when I was 16 years old. I wrote twenty books total, but I've never had a 2nd edition of anything until now.

By the way, I've updated my Author's Page on Amazon. Some readers decried my original photo choice as – and I'm quoting here – "gay". I hope my boring head shot is more to your satisfaction.

Freedom From Fear

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I am currently re-reading Freedom From Fear, the superb history by David Kennedy of 1929-1945 in the United States. I emphasize re-reading, since this sucker weighs in at 900 pages, but I'm a history buff, and the Depression and World War 2 is at the top of my list of interests.

I'm halfway through this tome at this point, just before the attack of Pearl Harbor. I can share a few thoughts off the top of my head:

+ Roosevelt was much more hamstrung by an uncooperative Congress than most people remember. It's incredible he got as much done as he did, particularly in the late 1930s.

+ People think of the French as the pathetic do-nothings in World War 2. They don't hold a candle to the people of the United States, which watched apathetically as Ethiopians, Chinese, and Jews were slaughtered. The isolationist/pacifist attitude of the United States was, in retrospect, revolting.

+ Thank God for Winston Churchill.

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One Lesson I Forgot to Mention

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Last night, I did a post about nine things I had learned from The Big Short. I meant to write about ten things (as the URL of the post implies), but until now I forgot was it was.

It is this – The Powers That Be Can Mask Weakness Longer Than the Shorts Would Like. In other words, they can use their power to hide the truth for a while. The truth will come out, as it always eventually does, but waiting for the truth to emerge can be uncomfortable – – and sometimes even ruinous – – for those depending on the truth for their salvation.

In the case of the short-sellers cited in the book, the "masking" going on was that CDOs, having pretty much no liquid market, were priced by such upstanding organizations as Goldman Sachs. These firms naturally cited prices favorable to their own positions. So an honest broker might declare a given bundle of swaps to be worth 60 cents on the dollar, but Goldman and Morgan were claiming they were worth, say, 95 cents on the dollar, thus making quite-valuable CDO swaps to be purportedly worth not much value at all.

It would be sort of like getting into a huge short position on Apple Computer (AAPL) at $240/share and then suddenly finding Goldman to be the only arbiter of AAPL value. And after you put your short on, iPod sales collapsed, Steve Jobs got run over by a rickshaw, and Macintosh computers were found to randomly erase hard drives without warning……..yet Goldman said the value of AAPL was $239.50/share, simply because they had a huge long position, even though you knew the value was really more like $80. You can imagine the frustration of the shorts.

The dam did finally break, however, and the investment banks finally had to accept reality, albeit kicking and screaming. Except for Lehman and Bear Stearns, the investment banks didn't really get their comeuppance fully, but it's at least heartening near Big Shorts' end to see these bets pay off handsomely for those with the foresight to make them in the first place.

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