bizaro86

If you're seriously considering buying real estate outside of the Canadian city where you live I'd consider Calgary. It's cheap compared to most of the US, and VERY, VERY cheap compared to Toronto/Vancouver. When you add oil at $85 the near term picture looks pretty good. Also, if you ever plan to do the "leveraged recap" plan mentioned above mortgages i Alberta are non-recourse as long as you don't get mortgage insurance. But 20% down in Alberta is probably the same $ value as 5% down in TO. Since you're still in Canada it'll be easier to get a mortgage with your existing banking/credit info. I'm biased (I own quite a bit of Calgary RE) but I also haven't been this excited about the setup for RE here since 2009.

Spent some time looking at this, and will answer my own question for the benefit of others. It is MUCH more user friendly than screener.co in terms of entering data. I've become used to the idiosyncrasies of screener.co, but after 5 minutes I'm probably just as fast with this. Plus its considerably cheaper. So I've cancelled my screener.co and bought the Tikr annual subscription instead. The one piece of feedback I have is that for some screener variables CAGR isn't a good metric, and instead a trailing average is better (and that's something screener.co does do). For example, I often screen on Return on Equity. And I like the 5 or 10 year average ROE quite a bit better than the prior year or any CAGR based metric.

Has anyone used both this and screener.co? I have had a screener.co subscription for a number of years, but am thinking this might be a good replacement with some added functionality. Anyone used both?

Can one have a vision fund without being a visionary?

I dont think inflation helps utilities at all. The primary source if value is the regulated rate base, which is denominated in USD and guaranteed a return. Inflation makes the real value of that regulated rate base smaller.

I'm not saying they did well- anyone who owned AOL at the peak should have sold immediately. But AOL shareholders ended up with a lot more money than they would have otherwise had. Some of their losses got transferred to to Time Warner shareholders. It seems to me that if you have very overvalued stock the best capital allocation is to sell as much of it as possible. A stock acquisition is a backdoor way of doing that.

I think Berkshire has mostly not issued stock because the shares have mostly been fairly valued to undervalued during their history. There have been a few times they got pretty high and iirc thats when he did stock acquisitions (ie BNSF). A stock acquisition can be very good for shareholders if done with overvalued paper. For example, Steve Case doing the Warner deal may have generated more value for AOL shareholders than any other corporate action ever. The value was all transferred from Time Warner shareholders.

I have cable broadband, but would switch to the telephone company broadband in a heartbeat if it was cheaper. They both laid fibre in my neighbourhood, but so far every 2 years when our deal is up my wife calls and says we'll switch if they don't give us another deal and they do every time. We've lived here for 12 years and never switched or paid full price.

The Canadian brokers all sell order flow - so your order is sitting at a HFT awaiting a match.

Yeah, if you're planning on doing more than one trade outside of N. America it probably makes sense to sign up for IB.

I've spent an unreasonable amount of time trying to solve this problem in Calgary. The newsstand at the airport used to be the best place for it here. I have nothing constructive to add, but if you figure it out please post!

So the remainder of this basket is now worth a very nominal amount of money. It worked out ok for me, as I took more than my initial capital out when I sold down in the spring, but wasn't a success compared to the returns in the rest of my portfolio. That said, it did help me keep a steady hand as everything went up and to the right, so it probably added some profits that way. I'm looking at re-upping here. SPAK options have gotten so illiquid/expensive that I don't think they make sense any more. I'm probably going to re-up with the other names in the original post, and maybe some straight SPY OTM puts. Any other things people think are overvalued and/or have cheap puts I'd be very interested in hearing !

Thanks for sharing that. I never lived in a dorm, but that looks at least as nice as many at the school I attended. We also had no need for surfboard storage. It seems to me that indoor space might be less important in a climate where that is a valuable amenity.

My returns in my RRSP have been much, much greater than the interest rate on my mortgage.

I had a number of millennial tenants split up and move out to two separate addresses during covid. Although I don't think any of them were legally married. I'm a millennial, and it seems in general among my friends that the people who actually get married are pretty serious about it. But many people are cohabiting (using less housing as a result) without being married.

Are electricity and phone service already included in NYC rent? Those are almost always tenant paid here.

My understanding is the same as yours. Personally, I'd rather use a points or cash back Mastercard or visa and then transfer money out or IBKR once a month to pay it when due.

I think an arb etf has the chance of permanent loss of capital in a downturn if deals break and market valuations go lower.

I don't have any insight to why the operator is who it is, but the shutdown here is probably not capex related. Large energy facilities take turnarounds for maintenance often, usually either annually or biannually. You need to shut it down to inspect the pressure vessels, do the major service on compressor engines, etc.

I guess I don't understand how you can have ghost cities with buildings full of empty apartments and also have rising residential real estate prices that are pushing people out of the market. Are developers just building where nobody wants to live? Why would they do that?

If you wanted to lower housing prices for affordability reasons, wouldn't encouraging more residential development (aka supply) be the best way to do that?

Financing your education becomes a much more palatable option vs working if your post-grad probability tree includes a branch with the loan getting forgiven.

No, you can only redeem for the $10 when they make an acquisition and vote on it, OR when they hit their deadline without doing one. Deadlines for each SPAC are in their prospectus, generally 1-2 years. If you know approximately when you need the money you could select ones with deadlines just before then. The process of redeeming through IB is a bit complicated, generally you have to DWACs out the shares (for which IB charges a fee) and then wait a week or two for the cash. Depending on the amount of money involved you may be better off to sell to an arb right before the deadline, can usually get $9.98 or so.

How much risk of loss could you take, and is there any flexibility on timing of when you need the money? I own BRK and COST, but both could easily have a 30% drop during your hold period. As a cash alternative for that timeframe I'd buy a diversified bunch of SPACs. There are lots trading under $9.70 - buy low, and either sell if they pop or just redeem at $10. Gets you a better return than short term fixed income with similar risk.