There are some stocks which are simply impervious to pain. Yesterday, for example (which feels like about a decade ago at this point) was a big down day, but if for some reason you were only looking at Amazon or Netflix, you would have had zero idea. None. They just keep going up or, at worst, go down a few pennies.
The same can be said for Apple. The world’s most crowded trade hasn’t suffered any negative effects from its crowded-ness. I mean, just LOOK at this:
As a younger man, I truly believed that those individuals who didn’t have the drive and intellect to hack it in the world of free enterprise were relegated to low-paying, boring jobs in government. Whether city, state, or federal, I figured the dullest among us would wind up with a direct-deposit paycheck from some bureaucracy and just slum their lives away with a steady diet of paperwork, fast food, and watching tee-vee at night.
How wrong I was! The City of Palo Alto makes clear that it’s ME who is the moron and the clerks in city hall that are banking coin! What a fool I was.
And I know we’re all supposed to get misty-eyed at these “civil servants”, especially police officers and firefighters, who hang out at the station house risk their lives every day on our behalf, but I’m sorry, when a fuckin’ firefighter is getting a third of a million bucks a year, the world’s gone wrong.
Good morning, Slopers, and greetings from oh-so-dark Palo Alto. My dogs gaze at me longingly for their walk, so I’ll just send this out and get the day rolling.
Before I begin, let me say a few of you prefer to jump right into the blog posts (a la the old Slope), so I have a suggestion: bookmark this URL as your Slope page: https://slopeofhope.com/page/slope-blog.html – and that’ll take you right to the blog with the most recent at top.
Looking at the ES, it’s interesting that over a period of five months, we have gone…………….nowhere. Sure, there’s been volatility (albeit ever-diminishing) and about a 350 point range, but just look at that arrow. With all the mayhem that’s been going on, the S&P was a little under 2700 in mid-December and it’s a little under 2700 right now. It’s getting dull again!
Anyone who has ever opened up a newspaper is all too familiar with the flowery language real estate agents will use to push their wares. Here in Palo Alto, with housing prices at historic highs, the thesaurus is in heavy use. Increasingly petite properties at ever-rising prices are becoming more difficult to perfume with prose.
This morning I stumbled across this beauty:
It has been heartening this week to see that bonds are, at long last, started to weaken again. Looking at the intraday chart, you can see the breakdown, particularly in the form of lower highs.
