Preface to all three parts: 2017 has been an exciting year for Slope, and I went looking among the literally thousands of posts this year to find what I considered the most intriguing. I earmarked twenty-one of them, and since that is too much for a single post, I’ve broken them into three equal parts (I’ll publish the other two before the year is over). Here, then, are the first seven of my favorite posts from the year and a few words about each one.

• The End of Invention – an angst-ridden post about my dread of boredom and desire to create something new (I didn’t realize it at the time, but SlopeCharts would cure this).
• Ramsey’s Year-End Review – a very detailed roundup of Ramsey’s year of binary trading
• Fear of Boredom – Clearly the angst from the earlier post was eating me alive at this point.
• Keeping It Real – in which I go off on Dennis Gartman on his flip-flopping and, shall we say, revisionism.
• They’re a Person Too – behaving decently toward your fellow human beings.
• Stupidity Unwound – an analysis of the Trump effect.
• Finger on the Trigger – a guest post about depression, suicide, and strength.