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.

Revolution No. 9 (Part 2)

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Preamble: this is certainly not the first time the United States has gone berserk printing money in order to address its present woes. This habit dates back to the nation’s founding. Here is an excerpt from my Panic, Prosperity, and Progress book on one such instance. You can find the first part here.

As prosperous as the colonies were, the government itself had very little in the way of assets. The public was not inclined to a strong government, particularly given the behavior of the British crown, and it was agreed by the colonial leaders that the issuance of paper money would be more palatable than the creation of a tax to fund the war. The colonists were, after all, already weary of taxes.

The new currency, a Continental dollar, was carefully designed to be difficult to counterfeit, and initially a prudent issuance of $19 million was distributed, with one Continental dollar being on par with one gold dollar. General Washington intended to fight a war of attrition, counting on the British to eventually grow weary of the war, but it would be years before peace would finally be at hand. Thus, there were many years of substantial expenditures forthcoming, and the temptation to simply print up more Continentals to pay the soldiers and suppliers was hard to resist.

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Revolution No. 9 (Part 1)

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Preamble: this is certainly not the first time the United States has gone berserk printing money in order to address its present woes. This habit dates back to the nation’s founding. Here is an excerpt from my Panic, Prosperity, and Progress book on one such instance:

When most American citizens are asked about the revolutionary war, they probably conjure up images of a freedom-loving populace striving to unchain themselves from their distant British overlords. In popular folklore, the year 1776 is the kicking-off point of a great political struggle which, led by the founding fathers, ultimately gave birth to our Constitution and a new land.

This is largely true, of course, but the American Revolution was as much about commerce and taxes as it was about political philosophy. The currency problems that the young nation grappled with during this period shaped the framework of our country, and the motivations behind the founding fathers’ fight against Britain was not always as pure as has been taught to schoolchildren for centuries.

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Boomerangs and Greased Logs

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Have you ever tried to climb on top of a log that’s floating in the water?

I have. I don’t remember the circumstance. Maybe it was some Scout Camp thing. All I remember is that it was really, really tough. The log was typically much larger than the one pictured below, and as such, it was extremely tough to climb on top of it, because naturally when you reached up and tried to hoist yourself, the damned thing would just spin on its axis.

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Gold/Silver Ratio: “Slowly I Toined”

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Toined the macro, that is. Step by step…

stooges

A rising Gold/Silver ratio preceded the March disaster, made an ill-fated bounce pattern in May-June and then got hammered by the 24/7 liquidity spigots opened up by a desperate Federal Reserve and Trump admin. They are desperate because the inflation MUST take hold in order to keep the system from unwinding to its fundamentals, which of course are nothing but robo-printed (funny) munny (political commentary withheld from this post, but insert what we all know here if you’d like…).

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Label Day Weekend

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As usual, on Labor Day, I am at labor. And, joyfully so, because I love my Slope, and I love my Slopers. And I am delighted to roll out to you the very last feature from the dearly-departed former creation of mine, ProphetCharts, which I had always wanted to also have in SlopeCharts: labels.

Good organization is a way to keep your trading world well-managed and opportunistic. SlopeCharts was built to appeal to well-ordered, well-organized traders, and there are multiple ways to assemble, gather, and annotate both tickers and charts with information that will help you toward this goal.

One vitally important method is Labels: that is, the ability to create, in an ad hoc fashion, and apply any labels you see fit to any particular ticker symbol. Several things should be noted about this feature:

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