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.
Greetings from 7 miles in the sky from your beloved host. Let’s take a step back – — a few thousand steps back, actually – – and drink in a very long view of the stock market. We’ll use the S&P 500 as our observed entity. Here it is below, spanning several decades, with three major tops tinted.
All I wanted was to sing to God. He gave me that longing… and then made me mute. Why? Tell me that. If he didn’t want me to praise him with music, why implant the desire? Like a lust in my body! And then deny me the talent?
This will be the most personal post I’ve ever written in nearly thirteen years of doing this blog. Indeed, I’ve been debating with myself whether I should ever do this post. There are people I know will read it whom I’d prefer not be aware of these thoughts. It would be much easier, as well as risk-free, to simply yammer on about some stupid chart or something. For whatever reason, however, I feel compelled to express myself.
OK, time to unload………
It is Monday evening, and ever since the closing bell, I’ve been seeing story after story about how that piece-of-shit company SNAP is now below its IPO price. Huge publications – – hundreds of times larger than our beloved Slope – – are making hay out of this big event, with such headlines as this:
Since it’s a Sunday (and in front of a quiet holiday week), I thought I’d write about blessings. In particular, blessings disguised as misfortune. To do this, I’ll share a couple of personal stories, each of which involves my former company, Prophet.
In August of 1993, a little more than a year after I started Prophet, we were hit by a devastating burglary (this is all detailed in my video documentary about the company which you can see here). It pretty much erased all the progress we had made since starting the place, and it took us about a year to recover.
At the end of our recovery year, my partner had had enough. He wanted out. This was terribly worrisome for me. He was my only partner, and he had all the technical talent. I was just the marketing and business guy. So his departure seemed like it would snuff the place out just when we were starting to get back on our feet. It seemed like very bad news to me, and he told me the (very modest) sum he woudl require to be bought out of his share.
If, one happy day, the world is engulfed in financial cataclysm and mayhem, we can remember back to the days when the turd-throwing apes at places like CNBC were pushing stories like this:
