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.

The Bad News Bears

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“if this guy owned a funeral parlor nobody would die!” – Gordon Gekko

A hurricane got me thinking about something that’s been kicking around in my head recently. Allow me to explain. As many of you know, ZeroHedge takes on a couple of different guises. When markets are falling, which happens from time to time, they focus on the markets and anticipate just how far they should fall (which invariably is much, much farther than they actually do fall). When markets are strong, like recently, ZeroHedge simply focuses on Any Kind Of Bad News, since the markets aren’t providing any.

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Breathtaking

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I’m sorry to keep harping on the Gartman topic, but the more I explore this, the more fascinated I get. I’m seriously wondering if I’m wasting my time with all these charts. It seems so much easier to just watch for Gartman Pivot Points.

Out of curiousity, I went to Google and typed “gartman letter” to see what the results would be. The first few results were links to his site, but the first non-native link was this recommendation from May 12 of this year. (For some reason, he’s always interviewed by Melissa Lee, who consistently has this exact expression, and he’s always got a goofy pocket handkerchief; see below.)

0918-gartm

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Apple Loses Its Cool

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The Tao of Steve

In the movie “The Tao of Steve” (2000), the lead character associates the name “Steve” with cool, charismatic men such as the actor Steve McQueen. Apple (AAPL) co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs was famously cool and charismatic, and when he passed away three years ago, investors wondered what impact that would have on the company. As we now know, Apple rocketed to new highs over the next few years. The company had a product pipleline in place, and a wide moat: the convenience of upgrading to a new iPhone, for example, and keeping all of your data and apps, was and still is a powerful inducement to remain an Apple customer. Reactions to Apple’s San Francisco product launch event on Wednesday, however, suggest that Apple may have finally ran out of the residual Steve Jobs cool factor.
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