Like the Psychopath-in-Chief said, I’m getting tired of winning………here are a dozen of my favorite short positions right now:
The Dirtiest Dozen
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.
Silver Hunt (Part 1 of 3)
Preface: due to the intense interest in silver these days, I have decided to share a chapter from my Panic Prosperity and Progress book which focuses on the Hunt Brothers and their attempt to corner the silver market in the late 1970s. I hope you enjoy it.
Precious Metals and the Destruction of a Billionaire
The stunning bull market in precious metals in the late 1970s, followed by its swift collapse, has a fascinating and remarkable history. The roots of the event date back to the dark days of the Great Depression, when President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 6102 which outlawed the “hoarding” (that is, the ownership in almost any form) of gold by any person or other entity within the United States.
Prior to this order, gold was intricately intertwined in the nation’s currency. U.S. dollars were convertible into gold on demand, and this convertibility had helped constrict the velocity of money severely. Roosevelt recognized that inflating the money supply was essential to turning the economy around, so he took the extraordinary step of criminalizing private ownership of gold as one of the steps to decouple the precious metal from the nation’s currency.
(more…)Mega-Metals
Slope is approaching its twenty-first birthday, but I’ve got to say, across those twenty-one years, my ratio charts related to metals are probably one of the best calls ever made here. I would not shut up about those things, and although it took months of grinding away for them to take off, once they took off, they just wouldn’t stop. This morning, for example, silver is up yet AGAIN to lifetime highs:
The Red Hills of Georgia
It was only one week ago that I wrote a post called Advantage: Bulls, in which I decried the hopeless situation for the bears. Woe, woe be unto you who dare, as did I, the endless advantages our bullish brethren possess!
Well, if you have even a lick of sense, you know that when the likes of Tim Knight throw his arms up at any possibility the market would ever fall, you should buy every single put option you can find. Because what followed my defeatist and self-pitying post was more than predictable……….
Calvin and Hobbes and Locke
This is a long one. But enough about me. To lay the foundation for this post, allow me to state a couple of strong beliefs that I possess. Please keep your hands and feet inside your vehicle at all times as we move through these thoughts. Here we go.
Birth and Projection
The first is that I believe people are, on the whole, born and not made. That is to say, nature constitutes a person’s personality much more than nurture. A one-hour old baby is almost identical to the same human eighty years later, except that he’s acquired a bunch of real-world knowledge along the way (plus has gone through a million different versions of his body along the way).
For example, I’m a dog person. I was born that way. It wasn’t because, unlike my own children, I was surrounded by dogs from birth (N.B. the first word out of my children’s mouths wasn’t ma-ma or da-da, but dog; I have a special pride in that). Although I had a couple of dogs during my youth, they weren’t really “mine” and I hardly remember anything about them. However, when I reached adulthood, my first instinct, shared with my girlfriend (now wife of many decades) was we have got to get a dog. I was born that way. So was she.
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