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.

Daring to Look Evil in the Face

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gulad

As some of you may recall, I learned about Jordan Peterson and his work less than a month ago, and I dived into it feet-first. One book that he mentioned repeatedly, which likewise I had never heard about, was The Gulag Archipelago by Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

I figured, well, Peterson thinks it’s an incredibly important read, the author won a Nobel prize, and some scholars consider is the best non-fiction book of the 20th century, so, yeah, maybe I should buy it. So I did.

I am only 10% of the way through the book, so it’s somewhat presumptuous of me to write a post having anything to do with a book whose surface I’ve barely scratched, but even with this modest exposure, I have some thoughts I’d like to share based on what I’ve read so far and what thoughts it is conjuring.

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Their Original Upright Positions

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Many times have I affirmed my fondness for my chosen profession (if we dare give it such a lofty name) in life. Slope’s blessed subscribers make it possible, and thus I am allow to to do what I love – – think, write, and create – – all under the guise of gainful employment.

And yet this weekend I was thinking about a very different kind of work………….

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The Passport

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For weeks, I’ve been mentioning a certain something in my life that’s been going on and which has, on occasion, interfered with my normal routine. I’ve hinted at it during my tastytrade show, and I’ve mentioned it off-handedly in the comments system. Now that it has an ending, I’m ready to tell the tale. (TRIGGER WARNING: If you do not have utter and complete disrespect for anyone who works for any government, you might want to give this entire post a miss. I have a lifelong disrespect for all civic employees. Every single one. So, like I said, I would suggest perhaps you pop over to the Kardashian website or something instead. Kiss, kiss………………..Tim)

The Trip Forthcoming

As long-time readers know, the vast majority – – virtually the entirety – – of our family’s travel is due to fencing. Our children are elite, internationally-seasoned fencers, and we’ve been to a dizzying number of cities and countries to the sport.

Now, having never been an athlete myself, I’m not sure what kinds of places other athletes go, but when it comes to fencing, I am convinced the organizers of any of these events pick from a list of the world’s least desirable locations and choose those for the venue. I’m not going to enumerate them, but let’s just say that, were it not for fencing, I’d have never visited any of the cities are countries to which we had traveled.

In that spirit, the next trip up was in…………..Romania. You remember them, right? The impoverished former member of the Eastern Bloc whose dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu, was so hated by his countrymen that, when the USSR fell to pieces, he and his wife were shot to death by his own army on Christmas Day, 1989. So, true to form, the fencing destination was a former Warsaw Pact shithole, and a place no one would ever want to visit. Ever.

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PREMIUM: Using Division for Vision

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NOTE: This post was taken out from “behind the paywall” on December 20, 2022.

The realm of technical analysis is often presented in a way which is unnecessarily, and unhelpfully, complicated. The basic tenets around good charting focus on supply, demand, support, resistance, and trendlines. Using a very limited palette of tools, a skilled chartist can glean great insights from long-term charts about possible directions and their likelihood.

One interesting “twist” to the world of charting is using the same tools and techniques on ratio charts instead of standard charts with a single data series. Any given financial instrument can be divided by another, and although the resulting chart might be interesting, it might not be at all useful. For example, one could divide the price history of Apple (AAPL) on a daily basis for the past forty years by the price data for the commodity wheat over the same timespan, but as unrelated as those two things are, the resulting chart would likely be pointless.

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