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.

Conformist Contrarians

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One of the great ironies of this life is that everyone considers themselves a “contrarian.” And why wouldn’t they? Would you prefer to say, “Oh, I’m a mindless sheep that just follows the crowd.” But that’s what almost everyone is. Their inability to utter those words is another thing which makes them all the same.

Here is a layered chart you won’t see anywhere else on the planet. The blue line is the INVERTED SPY. The grey line is the PAID SUBSCRIBERS to my beloved Slope. The correlation is as plain as can be: when the market strengthens, people ditch me; when the market weakens, they embrace me. Because…….”contrarians.” Pretty funny stuff, really……….

Pains Thus Far Unfelt

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You have almost certainly moved before, like from one house to another. If your experience is anything like mine, what happens is that you start with the big stuff, such as beds, cabinets, the dining room table, the chairs, and so forth. Only a few hours into the move, you look around and figure that you’ve made so much progress so fast, that this thing will be over in no time!

But as the moving progresses, things begin to slow down exponentially. You pack clothes into boxes. You start to clear out the garage. And then, God help you, you start to go through all the bathroom and kitchen drawers. The things you’re packing getting smaller and more multitudinous. Plus, whereas early in the process you neatly and carefully labeled each box with tremendous detail, by the 50th box you’ll just writing “STUFF” on the side with a thick black Sharpie. The point is that what seemed like it would be done swiftly is actually taking forever, because the clearing-away of things takes longer and longer, so much so that you eventually figure, screw it, I can just leave some of this junk behind.

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Chamath Prodigy

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Most of you are probably acquainted with the name Chamath Palihapitiya, although I seriously doubt any of us could spell it correctly without at least a few tries. He is the billionaire financier who is considered the King of SPAC. SPACs, of course, have become the laughingstock or the financial universe, because they were obviously just a scammy way for undeserving companies to come to the public markets without the scrutiny of a normal initial public offering.

In the space of a couple of years, Mr. Palihapitiya has moved “from hero to zero” as the entire fleet of investment vehicles he was touting have come crashing to Earth. One will not be surprised to know that the chap managed to cash out of some of these items, here and there, since, I suppose, he wanted to give other people the chance to make big profits as well.

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