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.

Deadbeats

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This post isn’t going to get me any nominations for a humanitarian award, but here goes…………..

My family owns a number of rental properties in the San Francisco Bay Area. The apartments were acquired decades ago at cheap prices, and they have been good sources of monthly income. The tenants were reliable and paid on time. The “Past Due” column in the monthly report was always a row of 0.00s. Until recently.

I scrolled through the latest report, and I saw entries like this……….

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The Legend of D.F.V.

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About a year ago, not that many people had heard of WallStreetBets, and even fewer people frequented the place. Sure, as an investment subculture of the Internet, it was a fairly big deal, but the growth and media presence over the past year has been stunning.

This post isn’t about WSB in general but about one user in particular: he goes by the R-rated screen name of /deepfuckingvalue, but for the sake of semi-decency, we’ll just refer to this anonymous trader as DFV. I’m also going to assume that “he” is a “he”, since the male/female ratio of WSB is about a billion to one.

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Cruel & Unusual

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For obvious reasons, I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for stock market bears. Something has been going on recently which compels me to comment on this topic, and it’s probably an event in our little subculture here that you know about: the saga of Citron and GME.

Citron appears to be pretty much a one-man show, that man being Andrew Left, and its specialty seems to be in the most classic tradition of short-sellers, which is to discover frauds (or at least very shaky businesses) which are overvalued and profit from their demise. Their most famous recent target is GameStop (GME), and it hasn’t been demising at all:

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The Devil, You Say!

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In late May of last year, I did a post called The DMC Challenge which had a very simple premise: I would take a hypothetical $500,000 wad of cash and put all of it into my best long ideas and best short ideas, evenly distributed among every symbol, and see what happens. When I did the post, the first comment was:

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Well, it’s been almost eight months, so let’s check in on the Devil May Care portfolios!

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Harmony at Gunpoint

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Over just two days, I read the newly-published book We Have Been Harmonized cover to cover. For anyone interested in China, global economics, or high-tech surveillance, I heartily recommend it. The book is superbly written, well-researched, and comes from an author who is an expert in the field. In this post, I would like to explore some of the topics covered in the book.

For starters, I offer a philosophical question: Is there such a thing as a universal, indomitable human spirit? In other words, are all human beings imbued with the desire to live their lives freely and express themselves without fear of reprisal? Or is this notion simply coming from the head of someone like myself who has been blessed with life inside a western liberal democracy his entire life?

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