Tim Knight from Slope of Hope's blog

Maybe I'd have more followers if I tore a page out of the BI playbook, but I think I'd rather try to keep following ZH's lead and just try to write well, succinctly, and - if possible - with a bit of novelty.

I've pondered in the past how much we really know ourselves, or each other.

Now that, thank God, the Facebook IPO is behind us, effective immediately, new Federal regulations expressly ban the following terms within the fifty United States and its territories:

A reader sent me a link to a video of Slope mascot AJC. I didn't want to watch it, but I glanced at the text summary, which stated:

"Abby Joseph Cohen, Goldman Sachs' senior investment strategist, says shares are set to hold value for the long run but may cheapen over the summer."

OK, so this lady (it's a lady, right?) gets paid millions upon millions of dollars for observations like this. So let's disect this a bit. She (again - sorry to trouble you - we're talking about a she, correct?) says that shares are set to hold value for the long run butmay cheapen over the summer.

Only half a year ago, Groupon was the talk of the town. It was the biggest, hottest IPO on the horizon,and it was the darling of the social media industry. Imitators were everywhere, but there was one giant that was far ahead of everyone else: Groupon.

Well, one glance at a stock chart will show you just how much the biggest, hottest IPO has been embraced since it went public. I offer you the following

Late last year, I paid a visit to Josh Brown ("The Reformed Broker") and had a pleasant chat. I went to his blog a week later and put up a comment, shown below, stating my belief that Facebook's IPO day would mark an important turning point in the market.

I just finished reading the best-selling Coming Apart by Charles Murray. I confess to not having heard of the book until I saw it in the store, but the cover of a champagne glass and a crumbled beer can instantly suggested to me that I was going to enjoy this new examination of the United States and its sociological disintegration of the past half-century.

I feel almost inclined to apologize for the number of times I trot out the gold bugs index analog, but - - well - - I think it's important. Week after week, this analog has held together and strengthened itself. Here's a grid chart comparing the 2005-2008 period (top) to the recent market history (bottom):

Below is the broad view of igold bugs ndex symbol $HUI, which shows how the analog has strengthened recently. The key, of course, is to break beneath that lower horizontal line. If we can do that, life gets interesting in a big hurry.

The always-enticing Abby Joseph Cohen serves as the eye candy to this key crack in the Dow's uptrend.

This is my third post I've done about Color.com, the "company" into which mentally-challenged venture capitalists poured $41 million. Good luck on seeing any of that back, fellas.

In my first post, written eleven months ago, I introduced you to the firm and its, errr,  product. In a follow-up post, I wrote about how the company - - which I guess found that no one wanted to use their crappy creation, $41 million in the bank notwithstanding - - repositioned themselves with a product that struck me as even less useful.

I believe the EUR/USD is going to approach parity within the next year. All the nonsense we've seen in Europe over the past couple of years is going to start giving way to reality, and even with Helicopter Ben's efforts to devalue the US dollar, the Euro is going to do a better job pushing its way down.

I've seen a lot of chatter lately about the interview with Andrew Schiff in which he complained about how hard it was to get by on just $350,000 a year. The "smaller bonuses" environment on Wall Street is hitting the well-off in ways that the middle class finds, shall we say, unsympathetic. There are, last time I checked, 1228 comments on this one story, pretty much all of which tell Mr. Schiff to get stuffed.

"Next up on CNBC - - an octogenerian fund manager who completely missed the boat on technology in the late 1990s and, since the early 2009 bottom, has underperformed the S&P by 50%. Stay tuned!"

So how many people do you think would stay riveted to their flat-panel Samsung to watch that? Not many, I'm guessing. But if the aforementioned gent is named Warren Buffett, the entire nation comes to a halt and hangs on to every word. A quick glance at Amazon yields 2,100 results when one does a search on his name (including the surprisingly-titled Warren Buffett Invests Like a Girl: And Why You Should, Too).

I'm not a very good hedonist, I guess.

Here I am in Las Vegas, and to my way of thinking, everything I hate about the human race is conveniently compressed into one tidy package.

And I ask myself: what's my problem? Why do I let places like this get to me so much? I mean, after all, why should I care what other people do with their time and their lives? What business is it of mine?