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.

Tesla Reflections

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I wanted to toot my own horn a bit – – God knows none of my subscribers are going to do it for me – – and reflect upon my recent Oh-my-God-accurate Tesla predictions to illustrate good old charting in action.

Let’s start off with this premium post that I did on November 5th. Pure and simple, I called a top. I didn’t hem and haw like some Elliott Wave goon. I didn’t say maybe it’ll go up, maybe it’ll go down, time will tell. I said it’s topped out. Not only that, I did so in the midst of the stock raging to levels never seen before. In retrospect, I called the top within literally a few trading hours from its absolutely top tick.

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Just to show how bold – – some may say reckless – – this call was, I present to you the chart at the time. I challenge you to find anyone else on this planet on 7 billion people who made such a call. Just me. Just here on Slope. I called the top when everyone else was embracing the “base case” of TSLA going to $1800.

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The Scale of Time & Space

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Recently I felt the urge to read something substantial, so I scanned my bookshelves and selected Paul Kennedy’s 1989 survey of 500 years of political and economic history called The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. Of course, the book came out just before an absolutely remarkable dozen year period in which the entire world was turned upside down several times. It is precisely the kind of book I love reading: jam packed with tales of the flow of monarchs, political leaders, economic cycles, wars, and discoveries. My highlighter pen has been quite busy the past couple of days.

This book got me thinking about how difficult it is for humans to think in real terms about just how big, small, long, or short things in our lives are. As an example, I believe we consider periods of time as far, far longer than is appropriate while at the same time have absolutely no honest image in our heads about how incredibly tiny we are and how gargantuan space is. It’s a matter of scale, warped, I believe, by our own failures in perception.

Let’s take this history book, for example. 500 years might as well be 500 million to most people. It seems like an incomprehensibly long period of time, mainly because our own lives are limited to about 75 years or so. Our own lifespan seems to be “the known universe” as far as we are concerned, so reading about events from, say, the year 1550 is little different than reading about the Big Bang.

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Why I Cashed Out

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On Tuesday morning, I closed my my crypto positions at Kraken, wired all my profits to my checking account, and let the original principal remain at Kraken in plain old cash. I’d like to explain why.

First, here is what the crypto market (represented by Bitcoin) and the stock market (represented by the SPY) were doing until a few months ago. It doesn’t matter which is which; the point is that they each went their own ways.

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A Friend’s Brush with Death

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Preface from Tim: from 1992 through 2008, I worked at the company which I founded, Prophet. A couple of days ago, my star engineer from those days wrote me out of the blue. Since I hadn’t heard from him in many years, he wrote me of a relatively recent experience which I considered amazing. I asked his permission to share it, which I have done below. The only changes I have made are deleting, for instance, the actual name of the hospital. Here we go:

Back in March, 2019, I went on a ten day vacation to Panama. While there, I caught a virus, not a coronavirus, it was an adenovirus. But think of the worst case scenario Covid patient, short of actually dying, that you’ve heard about during the pandemic, and that’s essentially what happened to me.

I was feeling unwell my last few days in Panama. Once I got back home, things only got worse. I got home March 27th, 2019. By March 31st, having already gone to an urgent care and visited my doctor, I had a friend drive me to the ER of the hospital closest to my house [redacted]. Within a few hours, they told me they were transferring me into the ICU. They asked me who should make medical decisions for me if I got to a point where I could not make such decisions. This is when I realized something really bad was happening.

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