The human predilection for big round numbers is unceasing. On Friday, when the Dow crossed 50,000 (see all those big round numbers??) for the first time ever, the cult distributed this:
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.
Deep Tracks
As a starting point, I suggest you take a quick look at this post from a decade ago as well as this more recent one. They both relate to something I’ve written about a number of times, which is teens hurling themselves in front of trains here in my otherwise gentle town of Palo Alto.
It happened again this week, with one Summer Devi Mehta, a young person at Palo Alto High School who threw herself in front of CalTrain at 10:13 on Tuesday morning. What’s quite unusual is that Summer published a suicide note for all to see before she killed herself. It reads as follows.
(more…)Sweet Smell of Success
Just a quick post to state it’s important not to get hung up on the past success of a financial asset. Below, for example, is a sensationally successful stock. It went up almost every day. It went up hundreds of percent. Everyone was making bank.
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.
(more…)Fading Optimism
Happy First Trading Day of 2026, everyone. Most folks are still on holiday, except for your intrepid head of Slope who works 365 days a year, so it should be relatively quiet. The big top on the /NQ is mighty sloppy, but I think this spike higher we’re witnessing is little different than the nonsense we saw on December 31st. Just a gaggle of “everything’s going to be SO great in the new year!” optimism that abounds when people have to replace on calendar with another.
