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.

Gaming the Recession (by Silver Singularity)

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Hello, Slopers!

First I would like to thank you for your kind words, I was very happy to see you appreciate the previous content. Hopefully that will end up having a positive impact for some if not all of the community.

Now, after having seen that the FED is (most probably) at its most restrictive stance in decades (pressure index), not only on the interest rate front but also doing QT at a $90B per month pace making the case for the highest probability of a recession in a long time, three main questions are left:

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Markets Two (by Silver Singularity)

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To see Part One of this post, click here.

In fact it preceded 3 of the last 5 recessions 1982 1990 and 2007. Not a bad start considering that the 2020 recession was a very special one.

Now even if 1990 was a recession year it can be considered as a soft landing, things ended up really well at that time and there’s another period that you should take a look at: 1994 when Greenspan aggressively raised rates without causing a recession.

When you look at the chart the pressure index was raised well above the red line and for a relatively long period of time, why did we end up in a no-landing scenario?

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Markets One (by Silver Singularity)

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Note from Tim: the Sloper known as Silver Singularity was kind enough to construct an epic post, which I am breaking into two parts. The second part, which is a doozy, comes out tomorrow. Everyone be sure to thank SS for his post, and encourage him to keep at it!

Let’s start by the guiding principle. What can we expect from a leveraged economy in a rising interest rate environment using current and past data/cycles?

Having lived my whole career as a trader in a low interest rate environment combined with monetary stimulus and listening for a long time to people like Peter Schiff, I was finding myself in the camp that the FED and the ECB were toast.

That is to say they, too, were in the same predicament as the BOJ and couldn’t raise interest rates anymore… even a tiny bit.

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The Invisible Man

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Whenever I’m feeling particularly nostalgic or, as recently, severely melancholic, I get out my old high school yearbook from when I was a senior. In the words of Paul Simon:

Sonny sits by his window and thinks to himself
How it's strange that some rooms are like cages
Sonny's yearbook from high school
Is down from the shelf
And he idly thumbs through the pages
Some have died
Some have fled from themselves
Or struggled from here to get there
Sonny wanders beyond his interior walls
Runs his hand through his thinning brown hair

My hair isn’t thinning, but the rest of the imagery is spot-on.

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Journey Without End

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Long-time readers know how much angst I have about holiday weekends. This time it’s worse. Much, much worse, for obvious reasons. If I could, I’d just beam right over to July 10th after recovering from a hellacious H1 2023. Yet my desire to retain readers, and my neurotic work ethic, forbids it. Thus, I’ve got to think of something decent to say. I’ve come up with a topic, but it won’t keep you satisfied for a week, although maybe long enough to allow me to catch my breath and dream up some other posts.

It has to do with Prophet, my former company and, in my life, what passes for the most successful thing I’ve ever done. I founded Prophet on July 1, 1992 and sold it on January 26, 2005. It was hardly an overnight success, but I’m very proud of what we accomplished, and it was the only real business I’ve ever created in my life. What I mean by that is that it had an office, employees, revenues, and – – gasp – – profits.

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