About a week ago, I wanted to watch something (out of the corner of my eye, as I often do during my trading day) that wasn’t Bob Ross or one of the movies I’ve seen a thousand times already. I fired up Netflix, and I decided to watch The Smartest Guys in the Room, the Enron story, whose trailer is here:
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.
Suicide Blonde
I was amused yesterday evening to read about the implosion at Theranos, which is located right here in my beloved Palo Alto. Elizabeth Holmes has been the darling of the business press for years, what with her flowing blonde hair, big blue eyes, and slender neck peeking out of the Steve Jobsian black top. Like Holden Caulfield, I have no fondness for “phonies”, and she seemed like one to me.
The thing is, the phenomenon of attractive women leading high-tech companies is a relatively recent one. On the surface, we as a society will pat each other on the back about how progressive we are, now that we have unvarnished gender equality, even at the highest echelons of corporate power. But let me just spoil your little party and tell you something. The reason men gawk at photos like this……….
The Day I Gave Up Forever
It has been ten weeks since the market bottomed on February 11th. To me, it feels like ten years. It’s been a grueling, awful grind, but it didn’t get really beyond-belief miserable until March 17th, when Yellen went uber-dovish and patterns and trendlines started getting smashed like turkeys being thrown from helicopters.
As I sit here now, the last decent down day we had was back on April 7th, and otherwise the market is just grinding higher and higher, in many cases making highs never seen before in human history. I really thought we were done with all this; that, as I put it, “the wind was at our backs.” Well, the central banks learned their lesson in 2008, and they’re not just going to roll over and let market forces take control. No way, no how.
Midnight Cowboy
It’s a good thing I didn’t look at my iPad in the middle of the night, because I would have flipped out. When I went to bed, the ES was down 16 points. At one point during the night session, crude oil and the ES has almost entirely erased their post-Doha losses.
I couldn’t believe the action overnight. When I first saw it, I had to assume that the Doha participants had sent out a press release saying it was all a big misunderstanding, and they, in fact, had a signed deal. But…………no. There was no reason (except, probably, for central bank frantic buying of every asset in sight) for the bounce. Just……………..bizarre.
As you can see, oil almost completely healed its wounds from Qatar.
Filthy Lucre
When I was a boy growing up in Louisiana, our youth group at church had us do an enlightening exercise: we all fasted for a day.
Now, not eating anything for 24 hours isn’t a huge deal. No one is going to die from hunger. But for suburban kids accustomed to eating three meals a day, plus snacks, it’s a big change, and having access to only water quickly gave us a small sliver of empathy about what it would be like to actually not have a choice about being hungry.
When we met at the church the following night, we had all been fasting 24 hours. At that point, 
the minister picked about six kids at random, had them walk up to the stage, and he gave each of them a McDonald’s bag with a meal inside of it. They joyfully ate their meal, while all the rest of us watched on with true envy. It was the first time I knew what it was like to be jealous of someone who had something to eat when I was hungry. That is a memory that has stuck with me my entire life.
I will now tell you another story from the past to lead in to my general point.
