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.

Short Years and Long Days

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That look like about a ’77 Ford to you, Wendell?

It could be.

I’d say it is. Not a doubt in my mind.

The old boy shot by the highway?

Yes, sir. His vehicle.

Man killed Lamar’s deputy, took his car, killed that man on the highway, swapped for his car, now here it is and he’s swapped again for God knows what.

That’s very linear, sheriff.

Age’ll flatten a man, Wendell.

Yes, sir.

I suppose I could have realized this much earlier, but it took tastytrade’s YouTube channel for it to hit me. Looking out at the world from these eyes and spending precious little time in front of any mirrors, I have spent my adult life assuming I looked more or less like this.

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IPOs and Tops

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Considering the exceptionally expensive IPOs coming at us, such as SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic, I was curious as to historical examples of hotly anticipated IPOs and their correlation with market tops.

The clearest historical examples are these:

1. Palm / dot-com IPO wave — March 2000

This is probably the strongest example. Palm’s carve-out IPO from 3Com priced at $38 on March 2, 2000, opened at $150, traded as high as $165, and closed at $95.06 on its first day — a 150% first-day gain. Within the same month, the stock had already fallen more than 50% from its first-day close.

The mania was extreme enough that Palm’s first-day valuation created the famous “Palm–3Com stub” anomaly: Palm traded so richly that, arithmetically, the rest of 3Com was being valued at a large negative amount. Chicago Booth describes this as an extreme case of mispricing.

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The Customer’s Yachts

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I know how sensitive you he-men snowflakes can be, so I’ll preface this by saying this post is in no way a violation of my pledge not to offend you pantywaists until November 1st. I’ve been exceptionally self-censorious, even though most of you actually would prefer I not, according to the poll data.

Having said that, this post’s title is based on the old joke about the father showing his son the yachts of the great brokers of New York City, to which his son asked, “But where are the customers’ yachts?” (You’ll note by the placement of the apostrophe that the lad had enough sense to distinguish between a singular and plural possessive).

The current chief executive of the federal government has made many billions of dollars while in office through various and sundry methods. Some of these schemes allow the investing public to participate. The man has made himself exceptionally rich, but I must ask: what about the rubes who bought into these various opportunities? Where are THEIR yachts? Tell me that.

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Cold Comfort Tim

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There seem to be some consistent realities in the market recently:

  • If there’s good news (even made-up) about Iran, the market blasts higher;
  • If there’s bad news about Iran, the market slips a tiny bit initially and then recovers all the same;
  • Semiconductors lurch higher every day;
  • I remain 100% short, no matter what slings and arrows are hurled at me;
  • My portfolio creeps higher

That last bit is both strange and encouraging. I well recognize all other Slopers have given up (under the guise of “ya gotta play both sides”, but they’re only on the bull side), but not me.

I’m not playing along, and the freakish ability of my portfolio to get a little stronger each day is both heartening and weird. Want to buy Micron? I won’t get in your way.

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