Gregmal

Just wanted to bump this on the one year anniversary of some of the greatest contrarian indicators of all time here of COBF. The genius authors of these can remain nameless however the March-June pages here were quite something! Third and fourth weeks of April last year there were folks making claims such as( some paraphrasing): "I hope you & your kind are active participants in the market for sure" April 26, 56% return had you listened! Better answer for him: "If you truly think the whole world is wrong and you are right, the futures market opens at 6 pm EST" March 15-basically the bottom "If you are as confident as you are that you are correct, the financial markets are providing you plentiful opportunities to profit handsomely. " Mid March....Yup, plentiful indeed. "President Cuomo"....this didnt age well! "I don't commit to numbers in the face of rapid compounding and wide uncertainty, but I do sell my stocks and go to cash when I sensed this disaster unfolding". Thats too bad On Michael Burry and Mr. Cuomo: "Well he went in big on Gamestop and Tailored Brands, so not surprising." "Galileo's investments in Gamestop and Tailored Brands need the Church to listen! Galileo may be suffering from an acute case of incentive caused bias (Even Newton wasn't immune to the whims of the South Sea Company)... But yes, what Pres Cuomo is already planning...a strategic reopening." "Presidential--with a capital 'P'. Somebody jelly of President Cuomo, wants to capture the political upside of Cuomo's stellar management". LMFAO! Ooops! "The market has provided ample opportunity for those who missed this in March to cash out with the S&P now where it was in October 2019. There should be no valid excuse for these people if they lose their shirts." Late April..sooo prescient "So Sam Zell, Buffett, and Icahn are cautious on the sidelines and on the other side you have folks like Bill Ackman. Take your pick..." Well...Ackman did 70%. Buffett barely broke even, Icahn sucked wind, and Zell...who cares? "and then they'll cry and talk about "who could have predicted this". Whelp....obviously some of us could have, but not all of us! S&P since then? One of the truly great, generational, perhaps even once in a lifetime buying opportunities... ~+56% over the next 12 months The cream eventually rises to the top and the turds get flushed down the toilet and go away. As they say, never in doubt! Nostradamus! Always certain! I hope you all were invested in the markets! If not, just remember, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure! Just ask Taleb. Buffett and Icahn were both bearish. Only stooopid people buy stonks during a pandemic! Dumb aphorisms for the win! And yea, I 100% did flag these posts at the time to throw them in peoples faces down the road. When people run their mouths they deserve accountability. Cheers

Isnt this kind of how it starts? They have trouble getting staff, cant meet pent up demand, and as a result wages must go up.

Exited modest sized, long held, fully margined positions in V, DPZ, ARE. Good time to be bolstering liquidity, IMO.

Started a plain vanilla short on NFLX. ~1.5% position.

They'll likely be exploited. The irony in all the US/China drama is that the US basically created the monster that is China because we saw benefits to low wage labor, cheap products, and exploitation of their resources. So we incentivized and put the wheels in motion and now they just kind of figured out how to push us back/cut us out....and we're outraged.

picked up a few NVR

I have both. S just seems relatively cheaper with much less risk. Just less of a catalyst/reopening play. Dolans done mighty fine in regards to creating shareholder value over the years, so Id expect that to continue. EDIT: also added a few JOE today

You're certainly not alone. People looking for homes cant buy homes at reasonable prices. Investors cant buy crap at a reasonable price either. Home builders cant build fast enough. Corporations have an increasing need to place money somewhere and real estate has always been top of the list. Nothing is stopping this freight train. All one needs to do is make sure they find something in the ecosystem to invest in this tailwind, and beyond anything else, just avoid execution risk/bad management. Outside of that its easy and straight forward and probably going to be a dominant theme for at least the next half decade but probably much longer. Again, Canada has been in a so called "housing bubble" for two decades.

A friend jokingly told me that he read something basically stating that you are significantly more likely to be physically hurt or killed walking through parts of Chicago than you are from getting covid. This seems to be acceptable though as I havent really heard anyone making a big deal of this nationally. And the only shots related to this certainly dont provide immunity. These things dont go away overnight. Or even in years. I've seen the same thing with respect to NYC as well. Ultimately, these places make their beds and now lie in it. Despite this, suburban NYC metro area real estate is pretty hot right now. A lot of moving pieces here but the main thing is that coastal cities dont offer what they used to. I grew up regularly hanging out around and in NYC. And like another posted said about Chicago, at this point I dont even know if I'd want to bring my kids there for a day trip.

If there is no relevance to his thesis then it just comes off like excuse making, which seems to be the case with every letter.

Added a bit more of MSGS.

Ive read the book as well and its a great read, but I mean does it really take a genius to realize regulator action is a poor bet? Ackman nailed everything about Herbalife and got nowhere. Regulators do not want to kill companies or cause too much disruption. Having had a business a while ago that regularly had to interact with regulators, I can tell you that they love going after the small and irrelevant companies hard. Many people believe they are in favor of consolidation as it makes their jobs easier. They just dont take action nor wish to fight with companies that can push back. And thats just the way it is. Its just remarkable to me, how people like Einhorn refuse to learn or adapt and rather just sit there for eternity claiming they are right and everyone else is wrong. Allied wasnt even that great of a short and realistically, it only blew up because everything else did due to the fallout of GFC. Not because Einhorn was eventually right. I thought his Lehman work was some of his best and most timely.

Man, I'd love to own 170,000 acres in the panhandle if thats the case.

Hilarious. Will it ever end? https://seekingalpha.com/news/3682289-greenlights-einhorn-takes-on-lax-regulators-gamestop-short-squeeze-in-q1-letter Basically "I failed to learn anything and missed some big potential catalysts and lost a ton of money shorting.....again. And its everyone else's fault"

I was watching Yellowstone the other day; first series/show in ages Ive actually gotten into....naturally the sheer beauty of the setting led me to looking at RE in that area and around nearby places in MT, WY, and ID. The prices are as breathtaking as the views.

Just wait and see. Learn from our Canadian friends. You're just trying to buy yourself a home. Thats basically where everyone is at right now. Wait til everyone and their mother owns 5 condos! Its one of the surest things Ive ever seen in my life. Famous last words, I know. But everything is lined up, from wealth inequality, to yield desperation and insurance companies. The little guy is gonna start seeing wage increases and thats going to set off the powder keg.

This guy is a fool if he thinks we're in a housing bubble in the US...You currently have a generation of "never buy" now wanting to buy. Decade in the making supply constraint after a once in a generation economic reset. Whats the average credit score of people getting mortgages today? How many people do you know with multiple speculative housing projects/investments? Because the heavy majority of the folks Ive heard from are simply dying to get into THEIR OWN primary residence and cant. The 2005 bubble was on the back of 6% mortgages. Today we are at 3%. There's going to be a massive runway for housing based purely on demand, and nothing is stopping it. If we're in a bubble with housing, its top of the first inning.

Small starters in BOMN and Z. The latter of which I finally decided to make the shift from psychologically being a bear and disliking many of the traditional metrics...and realizing that 1) its been a great investment over the years, and 2) if my housing thesis plays out this will be a gloriously good investment. Will see how it goes.

No issue with ads, as long as they arent jammed inside a post like what was happening before. I dont want to deal with reading a flow through idea and then having my train of thought disrupted by some stupid add, then scroll down, and continue the same idea. But outside of this, I dont think its an issue and also realize its probably necessary to keep the lights on and am all for it. Would be easier if it could be a user choice. I would pay not to see any. But you force everyone to take that option, you'll kill the site and user base.

This is basically a regurgitation of the classic MSM favorite headline of "he doubted the virus, AND THEN IT GOT HIM!" that we've seen a million times over the past year. However its void of the basic fact that the numbers are the numbers and while young people can get it and die, it is extremely unlikely. There will be casualties, but its no reason, at least in the land of the free, to take control over everyone's lives, and punish or vilify anyone who disagrees. Theres' plenty of gyms and owners, such as the one in NJ Murphy has levied over $1m USD in fines against, who are fine and just want to work/run their business/be left alone by big government. There's nothing wrong with subservient academics, they have a place and serve a purpose...but they certain dont belong in the discussion of how to run economies or manage people. Its like saying analysts should run hedge funs. If they were any good at it, they'd be doing it.

I can literally make up a reason for doing anything and claim I'm trying to save lives. Believe me, I heard non stop here in NJ from Phil Murphy over the past year about how we're "saving lives"...except, they weren't. NJ leads the entire USA in death rate. There is more excuse for error in the beginning. But once there was a handle on the subject, it's entirely inexcusable to keep doing things that so horrifically infringe upon peoples rights. Maybe in other countries...but not in America. Let alone continuing to lie to people and use slogans like "saving lives" that have zero proof or substance by the way of evidence or by comparison to others. These people knowingly turn it into a "we're saving lives" issue because who is going to argue against that? And no one in the media will call it out. But if we go by the numbers, they didnt save anything in excess of what others did without all the nonsense. And they should have cut it out a while ago, but chose not to. And yet, its amazing, in a really messed up way, that despite such blatantly power hungry, attention seeking, self aggrandizing, personal ambition driven snakes, people still credit them with "saving lives".

Good article on "the science"... https://zeynep.substack.com/p/the-gaslighting-of-science In regards to your point, Richard, you can compare to the US vs Canada deaths and draw conclusions. I am sure they are there. But I dont know if we get to the root of the issue entirely. The leading states by death rate are NY, NJ, MA...Ones that stole peoples rights, talked about "saving lives" and then led the country is deaths....So the approach can obviously not be viewed as a "success". For all the talk about density, which is valid, especially with airborne transmission, you have things swinging equally back to the other side in places less dense. For instance NYC is massively dense. But everything was closed and people trapped in their homes..not allowed to see friends or family. Not allowed to work out. Not even allowed to go for walks at one point. In FL, there's obviously less density, but troves of young people, many still living at home, running out to bars, restaurants and parties at will and then coming home. While its hard to quantify the +/- for each, what is clear is that usurping the rights of people and yet not showing any material benefit justifying it, is one of the biggest injustices in American history. And we talk about the facts, but it was clear very early on, like the above piece laid out, what the approaches should have been to take meaningful action. And yet, the politicians, the scientists, and the experts, did nothing but double down on failure, grandstand at their daily "look at me" press conferences, and hired help to book all their tv appearances. When they "changed their minds" or got "new info" they made it into a media spectacle. They could have easily reversed course or changed the approach, but they let personal incentives get in the way. Its a disgrace and they should, but won't, be held accountable for it.

^Exactly. So in pretty much any scenario(or less emphatically, most highly probable scenarios) real estate, especially of the residential variety....wins. That said, come on down to the US. Our housing bubble 2.0 party is just getting started, and should run for a good decade or two from here.

I am not referring to Cigarbutt but I think the general gist of your comment alludes to a major issue that has largely been scrubbed and/or ignored. How badly the experts, the scientists, and the doctors have gotten this. How much they have undermined the very system of healthcare, medicine, and science. Repeatedly, from the get go, they've made outrageous predications. They've repeatedly jumped up on the podiums they've been given to spew viewpoints and narratives that have been unsubstantiated and downright wrong. Yet, they've continuously been given passes for this. The greatest example being the "wear masks, dont wear masks, no wear them actually, wait wear two!" from people like Fauci. Who at the very same time was doing every talk show he could appear on and attending baseball games. But it goes well beyond that. "Oh its spread by contact. Oh actually no, just by standard flu like transmission. You can stop ordering Clorox products now!". Its been a total embarrassment, meanwhile, they are the first ones to arrogantly snide people, or condescendingly preach at how irresponsible and stupid anyone who questions things like masks or now "the vaccine" are. The slogans about "savings lives" via vaccination when actually, no, when vaccinated you are just asymptomatic...whoops! The best we get in terms of accountability is a half assed mea culpa about "the facts evolving" or how actually they are absolved because while they said what they did, they kind of minced words and were purposely vague or noncommittal. The lockdowns were a total disgrace and now its coming out to an undeniable degree that the motive behind them was impure. As if you need anymore evidence, now see Whitmers take on it. None of the "experts" can explain why the states doing it the right way have similar/better figures than the states abusing people. They just ignore it. Here when people hear things they dont want to they scream politics. But this has nothing to do with politics. I asked my brother, a real PHD doctor(you need to distinguish these days because of all the academics trying to take credit for being a Dr) why these people made such fools of themselves. He had a good point in saying "doctors are by very nature people who need to be told their direction. They spend their 20s in school and you either regurgitate whats in the books, or you fail. Then you spend a big chunk of time in residency...working for BSDs and doing exactly as you are told. Where to show up, how long to work, etc. You have zero say in anything. And even once you get past that decade plus of molding, you are subject to "information" and "data", which is largely derived from the same academic institutions, pharmaceutical companies with agendas, or like minded peers. Its a process and if you want the white coat, you have to become subservient to it. There is also a big emphasis on being noncommittal, and you are trained to pitch people the worst case scenario" So I think a lot of the issue is simply why we care what these people have to say? They're trained by nature to take what they are fed by "their sources" and to basically look down on others. They either dont have it in them to take a real, concrete stance; or when they do, go way off the deep end in terms of negativity and pessimism. Perhaps folks just need to rely on common sense instead of "expert" opinions? I've basically said since day one back in March 2020, live life how you wish. How am I doing it? Wear a mask, dont go around hugging everyone, and do exactly what you would have been prior to this whole escapade. Worked well so far. Cant say the same for the folks who have literally wasted significant portions of the last year taking direction from master(while master continues to live the high life).

https://www.yahoo.com/news/michigans-virus-cases-control-putting-152045172.html Interesting. Michigan, one of the most egregious states as far as draconian measures are concerned; is a total disaster. Yet, unlike last year, she's not locking things down. Hmmmm. Whatever could be at play here? Meanwhile, Arizona.....