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.

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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Macro Changes

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The following is the opening segment of this week’s edition of Notes From the Rabbit Hole, NFTRH 381…

A picture is worth 4-plus years and thousands of words, and the picture below has a lot to say. I’ll say some words as well, since I have kept them bottled up for years in an effort to make sure we operate with discipline as opposed to gold bug style emotion.

The bear market and subsequent inflation-fueled credit bubble early last decade was when I first started paying close attention to macro markets (as opposed to stock trading, which I had done for a few years prior) and how they operate. Having seen well paid professionals lose half of my IRA in 2002, I took over all of our finances and never looked back. But I needed to understand how markets worked and that has been a challenging and rewarding endeavor, not to mention an ongoing learning experience.

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What’s In a Name?

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This post is about reputation and its persistence………..especially if it’s a bad reputation. Companies have brands, and so do people. If you don’t think so, stop for a minute and consider the “Bill Cosby” brand. Five years ago, what kind of thoughts came about with that name? Oh, stuff like The Cosby Show, Jello-O Pudding Pops, Fat Albert, comedy, positive family role models, and so forth. How about now? Well, you can figure that out for yourself.

Likewise with the likes of Chipotle, which used to be the absolute darling of Wall Street until a very, very tiny little problem called e. coli showed up.

0203-CMG

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