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.

In Marketing and in Markets, Don’t be the Mark!

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I have made countless posts lampooning the mainstream media and its eyeball harvesting, click baiting content. This content and especially the associated headlines (let’s recall the classic R.I.P. Bond Bull Market as Charts Say Last Gasps Have Been Taken, dated Dec. 2016 as but one example) are designed to whip up emotions, draw attention and thereby gain traffic and ad dollars (diminishing though they are these days). nftrh.com is and always will be ad-free, by the way.

So sure, the bond bull market may well have ended in the Brexit and NIRP dominated summer of anxiety (in fact I believe it did), but any good contrarian would have seen the trade setup to go bearish on bonds in the middle of that hysteria, not a half a year later when Bloomberg used Louis Yamada’s chart to make a big headline. From a post in June 2016 about the Silver/Gold ratio and the prospects for a future ‘inflation trade’ right at the height of the bond bull… (more…)

Gridlock in Washington and the Impact on Equity Markets

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Gridlock in Washington (with the utter failure to pass any kind of new healthcare reform) is the theme, so far, in 2017…with Republicans unable to agree to support their party’s latest bill, which is now completely dead, and Democrats simply obstructing everything in sight.

It looks like everyone is tired and unable to do what they were elected to do.

If everyone’s tired, how will this failure affect the progress of any other political items that President Trump has on his agenda?

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His Majesty’s Presence

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I love America. The first words of The Godfather, and three words also deep within my heart. In spite of my distaste for many of its inhabitants (present company excluded), the ideals of this nation are dear to me, and, as on every 4th of July, I read the entire Declaration of Independence with a lump in my throat.

I, too, would like to share with you this magnificent clip from John Adams, in which Paul Giamatti’s character meets King George to try to mend the obvious rift between the newborn U.S. and Britain. It is an extraordinary scene, and I’ve read that this is one of the very few instances where every single word was written down, and those words are precisely presented here: