Search Results for: palo alto

Crude’s Fallen Arches

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Good morning, everyone,. I’m pleased to be back in Palo Alto and surrounded by my monitors again. I’m particularly delighted to see so much red on the screen, even though, based on last Friday’s knitting-needles-through-eyeballs insanity, I’m waiting for the proverbial other shoe to drop (or shall I say other shoe to float up in the air, because that’s about how much sense the Post-Draghi-WTF-Rally made).

Crude oil in particular has been getting fricasseed lately, and we are at a crucial juncture, which I’ve tinted. When crude first whooshed past this area on March 7, energy bulls were thrilled at the breakout. This breakout level must hold, however, otherwise we have – – yes, you guessed it — a failed bullish breakout, which sets us on the path to the low 30s.

0315-crude

Ingrate

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A week ago, I did two things in the same day which, in both cases, I had never done before: (1) I went to Cleveland; (2) I flew across the country and immediately flew back the other way.

I had never had any latent desire to visit Cleveland, particularly in the dead of winter, but fatherly duty compelled me to do so, since I had to escort one of my beloved children to a fencing tournament and, in turn, escort a different beloved child back to our fair town of Palo Alto. It was during the return trip that we enter the topic of this little post.

While waiting at the Cleveland airport, I had the need to swiftly get to our gate in order to secure adjacent seats for me and my child. The airport resembles a linear accelerator, since it’s very, very, very long, sort of like a mile-long hallway. I was beginning to traverse this length when a woman pulled up in an electric cart that looked like this:

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The Best of the Best (Part 1 of 3)

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Preface: 2015 was a dynamite year for the Slope of Hope. Some of the year’s highlights:

  • The celebration of our 10th anniversary;
  • A surge in the popularity of Slope Plus, our subscription-based offering
  • A king’s riches in fantastic posts from many authors, the best of which I am highlighting during this long weekend. (Slope has had literally tens of thousands of posts in its lifetime).

Here are today’s highlights, some of which you might want to re-read. This took a huge amount of time to put together (to say nothing of the time it took to write the posts in the first place), so I hope you enjoy it.

  • The Charlie X Solution – my response to the Charlie Hebdo killings. I think this is some of the finest writing I’ve ever done. Sadly, the world has not taken me up on my brilliant plan.
  • Perfect Palo Alto – in which I examine the hiring of guards at the train tracks to try to reduce the number of Palo Alto high school students throwing themselves in front of locomotives.
  • Learning to Learn – some lessons I took away as I tried my hand at binary trading.
  • Top Tick Tyler – in which I rant about how ZeroHedge seems to inadvertently call major turning points, and how their dire predictions really never come true.
  • Relativity – a very interesting success story about how my method of trading was able to prosper in the face of what seemed like very dire circumstances.
  • The Time Warp Again – if I may say so, an incredibly good post about how much the Silicon Valley has changed since when I was in my teens.
  • Ten Years of Hope – celebrating Slope of Hope’s 10th anniversary
  • Negative Interest – in which I despair about my almost total lack of interest in the market at the time. Not surprisingly, this was almost exactly the peak of the entire world of equities.
  • It’s Not Getting Any Smaller – my take-down of gold kooks who used this tired phrase as an excuse for their lame-ass, always-goes-down investment.
  • Do You Want to Know a Secret? – wherein I tear apart another idiotic startup.
  • God As a Dog – a tear-jerking post about the death of my beloved Kobe. Tissues required.
  • Transports Less than 2% Away From Failure – here I call for the Dow Transports to begin dropping hard. I, umm, was correct.
  • Silicon Shark Jumps the Shark – a brilliant overview of the so-called Startup Castle. Out of curiosity, I clicked on the link, and it goes straight to a 404 page. Figures.

Well, get busy – – go read those that look enticing!

The Good Guy Won

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I have the privilege of being a neighbor of Mark Zuckerberg (although I admittedly haven’t seen him around as much as I used to back in the days of Prophet), and for understandable reasons he is far and away Palo Alto’s most famous citizen. He also happens to be the 7th richest person in the world, with close to $50 billion in Facebook stock.

I was heartened to read just now (or “moments ago”, as ZH likes to say) that he has announced he plans to give away virtually his entire fortune (at least 99%), which coincides with the birth of his first child, a girl named Max (!)

This astonishing act of sharing will hopefully be an inspiration to other zillionaires. I think Zuck has wisdom beyond his years, because part of him recognizes that his founding of Facebook was largely a matter of very good timing and very good luck. The fact that Facebook didn’t exist until Facebook (the commercial Internet had been around over seven years already) is pretty amazing in itself.

Let’s just be collectively thankful that Mark won his legal battles against the others who claimed Facebook was their idea and their property. I daresay that I would not be typing up a post right now congratulating the Winklevoss twins on their generosity in giving away 99/% of their assets had they prevailed in their assertion that Facebook was, in fact, their creation. Congratulations, Mark and Priscilla!