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.

ChatGPT: the NFT of 2023

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Let’s get this out of the way first: the product’s name is dumb. I’ve heard enough people stumble over the name, get it wrong, or not remember it at all to know that, from a marketing perspective, the name sucks. In case you’re interested, it clumsily stands for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer.

But we’re not here to talk about product names. This company, OpenAI, and its principal product, the aforementioned terribly-named invention, has been slathered all over the news for weeks now, and any company that is even vaguely associated with AI has seen their stock explode higher.

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Judge Me in One Month

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Go ahead. Mark your calendars. Bookmark this page. I’m prepared to be judged by the group’s one-month-older selves. Because this week was unhinged and, in retrospect, will be seen as idiotic. Let us take two specific stocks.

The first is Buzzfeed. This was one of the many SPAC Wrecks of last year, losing about 98% of its value. It was a garbage stock. A wreck. A low-volume pile of trash. And deservedly so.

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Within Range

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Yep, we’re going to talk about Tesla again. Why? Two reasons. One, I’ve found that financial instruments are like people – – you get along well with some, and not-so-well with others. My experiences has shown me I get along with Tesla. I tend to understand it. The second reason is that I believe Tesla’s behavior is enormously influential to the psyche of the entire stock market. Now that we’re past the TSLA earnings report, we can consider this effect, which at the moment is very positive.

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Mr. Wizard’s Epic Post (1 of 3)

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Preface from Tim: Our beloved Mr. Wizard composed an enormous post, long enough to be seen from space. I have broken it up into three roughly equal parts, to be published over the course of the weekend. Hearty thanks to Wiz!

Predicting the S&P

Can We Do Better Than Highly Paid Analysts?

At the end of every year, fund analysts and stock pundits fall all over themselves predicting ever higher and higher prices at where the S&P will close for the coming year. These predictions usually go something as follows: “Our analysts estimate S&P earnings for 2023 will be $240. Coupled with a conservative PE of 17.4, we believe the S&P will close 2023 at 4176.”

So we have an “estimate” for the first number, earnings, and a guess for the second number, the PE multiple. How well do these analysts do?

To be blunt: not very well.

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Thrust THIS

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Let us think back to Slope’s darkest days. That would be, oh, about 48 hours ago. Those were grim times. The bulls seemed to own the market again. Bears had been beaten across the face fairly consistently since October 13, 2022, a day I shall remember until my last breath. Sentiment on Slope was turning fiercely anti-bearish and, God forbid, even anti-Tim. And, as always, people came out from the woodwork claiming that, being better than the rest of us, they were never bearish nor bullish, Nay, nay. They simply made money, no matter what. Every single time. Thus pitying us poor saps who actually had an opinion. And, as a topper, they trotted out some retired money manager in his 70s who had created some weird-ass arithmetic hack called the Whaley Breadth Thrust which was supposed to be God’s gift to investors and was correct 100% of the time, even though it sounded like it was taken straight from the Kama Sutra. Thus, they claimed, a New Bull Market was here, and bears were about to get destroyed, as they most deservedly should be.

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