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.

Six Bits

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It seems paradoxical, but there are instances in which the lack of detail provides more clarity than the abundance of detail. Because we just finished up the third quarter of the year, I decided to show a variety of graphs with the extremely crude granularity of one quarter per bar, which provides a very different way of looking at the market that can yield some helpful general insights.

Of course, there are some charts in which there’s no surprise whatever, such as QID (the ultra-short on NASDAQ). This just goes to show you, it hasn’t been fruitful to fight the NASDAQ for about two decades.

slopechart QID
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Oh Hi Mark to Market

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I penned a recent post describing how the good people at Zillow had slashed the ostensible value of my lovely private residence from $8.4 million to $4.8 million (maybe they just like flipping digits?) Given the relatively smooth sailing of Zillow data, this was curious to me, until I stumbled upon an event that might have jostled their statistics: the sale of the home of my next door neighbor:

satellite
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Black Girls Code!

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One recent morning, I was driving home from a nearby errand on El Camino Real, crossing from Menlo Park into Palo Alto, when a bus rumbled past me. It was one of those double-long buses and, as usual, there wasn’t a single soul on it. Well, obviously there was the driver, probably paid in the six figures thanks to overtime, but otherwise it was, as is always the case, utterly empty and unused.

On the side of the bus, as there usually was, a large advertisement was affixed. These ads normally encourage the onlooker to drink milk, or sign up for online courses at De Anza College, or go to the Stanford Shopping Center.

However, This was one I had never seen before. There was a stylized photo of a young black woman’s face, and next to that were the giant words: “It isn’t a question of if she will change the world. But when.”

Centered beneath all of this were the words: Black Girls Code.

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What a Pain!

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My arm hurts.

Who cares, right? (Actually, Slopers are a gentle-spirited lot, and the last time I mentioned this, I received a heartwarming amount of personal attention and counsel). I only mention this to offer up a small point that’s been bouncing around my tapioca-filled head.

As I’ve stated in the past, my disposition toward my health has two states: either I am immortal, or else all life is about to end. The latter appears in instances in which I am experiencing any kind of pain whatever.

Over a period of two or three weeks, I’ve had pains in my left arm and the left side of my back. The pains have been diminishing a tiny bit every day, and today I actually feel closer to normal than I’ve been for a long time.

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