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.

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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American Whirl

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I’ve written about American Girl before, such as this post. For those unacquainted with American Girl, it started off as a doll-based means for girls to learn about different periods of U.S. history, but it has developed into a phenomenal retail success story of overpriced Chinese-made junk sold in branded stores in high-end shopping malls (like, oh, say, the Stanford Shopping Center). It’s a big deal for the 9-12 year old crowd.

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Me So Einhorny!

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Greetings from the Starbucks on the Google campus, which is cram-packed with people and laptops (these aren’t Google employees, naturally; just slobs like me; I hang out here a lot because there’s a Tesla supercharger here, and I can suck down all the electricity I want for free).

Anyway, when I saw all the chatter about how Keurig Green Mountain was getting its balls blown off after-hours, I was reminded of a post I did way back in November. The post relayed the news that, at long last, famed hedge fund manager David Einhorn was throwing in the towel on his GMCR short position. Here’s a snippet from that post:

0805-givesup

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