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.
Back in mid-December, as I was thumbing through the Sunday Wall Street Journal at a fencing tournament, I read a lengthy, in-depth analysis of General Electric. It was quite a damning piece, and it was long enough to be a novella. I tweeted out this image from the paper, since I found it funny that GE had paid for an advertisement that the WSJ decided to put right next to this corporate tear-down:
A wonderful interview with one of my favorite people in the world.
You know the saying about a great book: “I couldn’t put it down.” That’s how I felt about the documentary I watched last night.
I didn’t intend to spend ninety minutes watching it: I was going to bed and, out of curiosity, thought I’d watch a minute or two. But I watched it, spellbound, until the very end.
The documentary is “The Greatest Party That Never Happened”, and you Netflix subscribers can watch it. Here’s the trailer:
A favorite bit from Buster Scruggs with some mesmerizing dialog:
Many years ago – – 2008, in fact, when Slope was a mere three years old – – I showed a chart with the cover of the book Richistan on it. It was a book that was published almost to the millisecond of the housing bubble top.
During the summer of 2018, I was nauseated to see the launch of the wildly popular movie Crazy Rich Asians, which had the same money-as-pornography zeitgeist to it. I’ll just let this chart speak for itself:
On Monday morning, I was thumbing through the Wall Street Journal, and their featured editorial insisted that Powell heed Trump’s demands and stop raising interest rates. It was interesting to see how they described the bailout from the financial crisis of 2008:
One fun thing about the end of the year is all the “year in review” type articles that come out. One that just printed is from Barron’s, in which they show how their trading ideas did compared to the target. Here we are:
The bottom line is that the recommendations from the finest minds of Wall Street produced a loss of 2.2% as compared to a benchmark gain of 1.9% from the S&P 500. They describe these results as “so-so”, although I think readers may have more color language.
Of course, Slope has its only little comparison here, and I’m pleased to say that we’ve got a positive 26% spread versus the S&P. Or, even if you were wise enough to short the S&P at time these measurements began, you’d still be ahead by 7%. Take that, Barron’s!
