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.
As the bear market continues to swing its scythe across the idiocy of the past dozen years, one notion I’m glad to see get laid waste is the Crazy Hair Equals Genius theory. I suppose the pop culture notion of Albert Einstein is the foundation for this, but the big winner in this delusion over the past decade was Alex Karp, who usually looked stark raving mad and, thus, was assumed to be a super-genius. As Palantir stock makes plain, however, this has been an unalloyed disaster.
Before I decided to shell out money each month for YouTube Premium, I would constantly be burdened with the task of listening to a commercial for a company I grew to despise, merely because their ad was so insipid. The commercial was from Carvana, and I can hear to this day to idiotic “origin story” they offered (“People said we couldn’t sell used cars online, but we knew we could, so we went to work….……”) Even more annoying than the ads was the ridiculous gimmick of having a huge car “vending machine” where a person would put in a gigantic “coin” and have their car brought down to them in a big elevator.
But, annoyed as I might have been, it was hard to argue with their success. CVNA was the kind of ticker symbol that people adored, and the stock went from $8 to nearly $400. In other words, if you had just invested $8 billion at the IPO, you’d have almost $400 billion at the peak. Anyway, I couldn’t explain their success, but you can’t argue with a chart.
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Just in case you weren’t convinced about what a catastrophe the FAANG stocks have been, here’s the ETF based on them:
