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.

Hit Piece

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Early in 1993, next door to Prophet’s first office in downtown Palo Alto, there was a computer store. It was kind of a shady place. The guy who owned it wasn’t very honest, and it was clear that he was pretty fast-and-loose with what he sold, how he treated his customers, and how he ran he business. He was basically kind of a scumbag, from what I could gather. He just gave off that vibe.

One day, I saw a man in front of the computer store picketing it. He had a big sign he was carrying that said something like “This store sold me a broken computer and won’t refund my money” or something like that. I honestly don’t remember the sign, but the thrust of it was that this customer was so unhappy with how he was treated that he was actually picketing the place. I’d never seen anything like that, nor have I since. The guy was basically doing what Yelp does, except it required him to march up and down the sidewalk with a homemade sign.

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PREMIUM: Divided I Stand

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Note: This post is special enough to be labeled a premium post, which means that it is (with the exception of the paragraph you are reading now) visible only to paying subscribers. If you would like to try a risk-free subscription to get immediate access to all premium content, as well as the dozens of other features exclusive for paid accounts, click here to explore the choices. Everyone is welcome to continue chatting in comments below (or, for a more free-flowing experience, please use SlopeTalk).

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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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