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 Sunday Night Shrug

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Hey, I guess I should be grateful everything isn’t raging green to new highs, right? Not yet at least.

In the least surprising event since someone released a hammer and it fell to the ground, equity futures erased the majority of their Sunday shock drop. On the heels of the mega-rally of the past few weeks, the news over the weekend would normally have crashed equities, but as I stand here before the opening bell, futures are down about half a percent or so. The universal ticker symbol is now BFD.

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Suffer!

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Our Sunday sermon is going to be about something I think about quite a lot, which is the nature of suffering. Let us begin our examination of this topic with some notable precepts from various world faiths.

Buddhism
The First Noble Truth (Dukkha) describes suffering as a fundamental reality to be understood and overcome: “Birth is suffering; ageing is suffering; sickness is suffering; death is suffering; sorrow and lamentation, pain, grief, and despair are suffering; association with the unpleasant is suffering; dissociation from the pleasant is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering…in brief, the five aggregates of attachment are suffering.”

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American Okey-Doke

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Many years ago, the great George Carlin spoke of a tendency in this country, no matter what the circumstance, to assume that in the end everything would work out. We’re trained to believe it via our television shows, our musicals, and our movies: in this three-act play we call life, everything is going to be all right in the end. He referred to it as the American Okey-Doke.

This is precisely why, in the fact of news this weekend which should have the markets crashing by many thousands of points, we have equity futures that have flipped by about half a single percentage point.

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The Worst Good Feeling

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On this momentous morning, which could either be one of the most important inflection points in market history or another Taco-driven bore-fest, I’d like to discuss an important phenomenon that I’ve experienced more than once in my life. It is best described in steps:

  1. I uncover a spectacular opportunity by way of my charts
  2. I write about it and position myself in that investment
  3. I am expecting it to “behave” perfectly, but it moves against me to a small degree
  4. I become disillusioned and frustrated that it is not doing what it “should” do
  5. I dump it at a loss out of exasperation
  6. It moves against for me a little while longer, making me feel good I’ve made the right choice
  7. It then proceeds to make precisely the kind of magnificent move I predicted the entire time
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