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.

Trump as Spectacle

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I’ve made a conscious decision to pretty much move on from the silliness of Trump towers, erections, pants tents and other Trump-centric commentary after having fully wallowed in it last week and incorporated it into NFTRH 421, which is a serious piece of work that also worked in these themes.  I am actually very concerned that we have put an unqualified spectacle in the White House; a product of American TV and leveraged ‘capitalism’.  A media star.

Here is a screen shot of page 41.  It’s the Society of the Spectacle.

nftrh 421, page 41

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The Erection

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featured.trumpThis is the opening segment to this week’s edition of Notes From the Rabbit Hole, NFTRH 421, a 48 page work-through of the immediate post-Trump landscape.  While we had fun with the Trump hysteria throughout an ultimately serious analytical report, I look forward to marinating in the post-hysteria atmosphere and coming up with well defined market directions, whether they be born of new macro fundamentals to be, or contrary sentiment driven possibilities, which are also in play…

People who have read me for years know that all sorts of buzz phrases (Inflation onDemand, Armageddon ’08, etc.) and some off color writing can find their way into my work, especially when writing publicly. I do not think highly of the Federal Reserve system, the average politician or even many US Presidents through my lifetime. Formally, I do respect the office and ultimately by extension, even a President I may not happen to like. It’s been that way much more often than not, after all.

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The Morning After

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Good God, this is a late start for me, so I’ll make this quick (as a comment cleaner; plus molecool has an awesome post waiting in the wings). I am kind of surprised at how much of a bounce we got overnight (although I feel like less of a putz since I’m 30% in cash). I am honestly still in a state of complete surprise. I can only imagine what the faces of just about every person in the SF Bay Area must look like right now.

Oh, and let’s not forget all the predictions (thanks, 2sweeties for this):

1109-nytimes

Fundamentals

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Someone on Quora asked me how I used fundamentals in my analysis. Here’s what I wrote:

The short answer is: I don’t. But let me lay out a couple of points.

First, absolutely at the heart of technical analysis, in my opinion at least, is that all the knowledge that can be had is already built into the chart. The chart represents the perfect presentation of the balance of supply and demand for a particular financial instrument. To assume that you can have some kind of special insight above and beyond what everyone else on the planet has already put into that price chart is, to my way of thinking, arrogant in the extreme.

And how would fundamental information – – even inside information – – be reliably helpful? As I am typing this, the markets are closed, but Facebook got hit pretty hard after hours. From a fundamental standpoint, this makes little sense – – they absolutely blew away all the revenue projections and earnings projections. Their fundamentals were astoundingly good. And yet their stock is getting monkey-spanked. The chart was far more predictive of that than a desk full of fundamental analyst reports could ever be.

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