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.

Stock Market Melt Up Continues

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As Anticipated, Gold Lurks, Changes to Come in 2024. The macro market backdrop is not likely to go the way trend following market watchers currently anticipate.

In fact, with patience it could turn out to be like shooting contrary fish in a barrel. The stock market rally – which NFTRH had anticipated a year ago on a larger basis and since October of this year for its next leg on a more compact time frame – is doing a wonderful job of holding to its seasonal pattern (see below). The rally is sucking in the holdout FOMOs who, one by one are falling for the dual pleasantries of a softening Fed and by extension, a Goldilocks-like “soft landing” scenario for the economy.

Goldilocks was eventually caught by the 3 bears
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Best Posts of 2023 (Part 2 of 9)

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Here are some of the very best posts written on Slope in the year 2023. To read a preface about what this list means to me, please read part 1, located here.

Best Posts of 2023 (Part 1 of 9)

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I’m getting old. So is the Slope of Hope. It seems hard to believe, but in just a few months Slope will begin its 20th year. That fact is on my mind because every time I do one of these end-of-year round-ups, I ask myself: how much longer are you going to do this? Sometimes I wonder if I’ll be clicking a Publish button when I’m on my death bed (which is, as Norm told us years ago, a piece of furniture you should never buy).

My mood at the end of 2023 is vastly different than it was at the end of 2022. In fact, looking at some of my posts that year, I am dumbstruck and embarrassed at how arrogant some of those posts were. Let’s just say 2023 has cured me of that illness, at least for the foreseeable future. Having mentioned the sin of arrogance, however, I will now immediately say one or two things that will sound decidedly in that category.

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The Self-Driving Experience

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I first wrote about Tesla – – – a car very few people had heard of at the time – in March of 2013 here on Slope. The post was simply an examination of my experience of buying my Tesla Model S and my impressions of it (which were extremely positive). I’ll just mention that the $90,000 I put into the car would be worth $9,000,000 today if I had simply bought TSLA at the time instead, but, umm, let’s not go there. Suffice it to say that my gushing, glowing over-the-top review of Tesla was spot-on, and that the company has been insanely successful.

Thus, being such an early adopter, it’s rather odd that only now would I be getting into the whole full self-driving thing, but I have an excuse. My car was incapable of it. The hardware was too old.

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