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.

Deep Tracks

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As a starting point, I suggest you take a quick look at this post from a decade ago as well as this more recent one. They both relate to something I’ve written about a number of times, which is teens hurling themselves in front of trains here in my otherwise gentle town of Palo Alto.

It happened again this week, with one Summer Devi Mehta, a young person at Palo Alto High School who threw herself in front of CalTrain at 10:13 on Tuesday morning. What’s quite unusual is that Summer published a suicide note for all to see before she killed herself. It reads as follows.

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Silver Hunt (Part 1 of 3)

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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.

Precious Metals and the Destruction of a Billionaire

The stunning bull market in precious metals in the late 1970s, followed by its swift collapse, has a fascinating and remarkable history. The roots of the event date back to the dark days of the Great Depression, when President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 6102 which outlawed the “hoarding” (that is, the ownership in almost any form) of gold by any person or other entity within the United States.

Prior to this order, gold was intricately intertwined in the nation’s currency. U.S. dollars were convertible into gold on demand, and this convertibility had helped constrict the velocity of money severely. Roosevelt recognized that inflating the money supply was essential to turning the economy around, so he took the extraordinary step of criminalizing private ownership of gold as one of the steps to decouple the precious metal from the nation’s currency.

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Mega-Metals

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Slope is approaching its twenty-first birthday, but I’ve got to say, across those twenty-one years, my ratio charts related to metals are probably one of the best calls ever made here. I would not shut up about those things, and although it took months of grinding away for them to take off, once they took off, they just wouldn’t stop. This morning, for example, silver is up yet AGAIN to lifetime highs:

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The Red Hills of Georgia

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It was only one week ago that I wrote a post called Advantage: Bulls, in which I decried the hopeless situation for the bears. Woe, woe be unto you who dare, as did I, the endless advantages our bullish brethren possess!

Well, if you have even a lick of sense, you know that when the likes of Tim Knight throw his arms up at any possibility the market would ever fall, you should buy every single put option you can find. Because what followed my defeatist and self-pitying post was more than predictable……….

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