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.

Leslie’s is Drowning

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I’ve got a swimming pool at my house, and in that pool is a cleaning robot. For those of you who also own cleaning robots, you probably know they are made of a bunch of plastic parts which (i) break easily (ii) cost three cents to replace (iii) cost an insane amount of money at the store.

For most folks like me, when a part breaks, they just shrug their shoulders, trundle off to Leslie’s Pool Supply, and pay a ridiculous price just to deal with the damned thing. Again, this is just a plastic part that probably costs less than a dollar in materials to create.

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You Go First…

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While it is always tempting to defy strength, it usually goes badly. For instance, Starbucks was a lousy stock, and I bought puts on it, and those puts doubled in value. Costco, however, is a fantastic stock, and it’s insanely overvalued (a p/e of 55 for a seller of giant mayonnaise jars and packs of AAA batteries), but I’ve lost money trying to go against it. I will say, long-term, this price looks like it’s just BEGGING to be shorted, but I’m not touching it. Maybe you should.