Gregmal

Added a little more to Fairfax. Love buying the breakouts

Ok even simpler. How many people, if given a piece of land, would even know the entire process to go about building? how much would it cost to simply go through the approval process? And how long would it take? It’s disgraceful.

Yea awhile ago I owned Simon and part of the not expected but certainly possible super bull case was something along the lines of that stuff and perhaps some government allocated funds incentivizing the development. Nothing has happened yet but it makes sense. Development cost is a bitch though and Simon guys are too smart to foot all of it themselves. So I just revert back to JOE who has county and state pay for tons of their shit and then for the rest gets 40 year HUD loans at 3-5% fixed rate. More reasonably though, housing is solvable, but the people who make the rules are housing people and won’t kill the golden goose. Everyone whines about government stock trading….stocks are small time. They all own tons of real estate.

The Fed and the Institutions buttfucking the middle class can be seen no clearer than what is your traditional starter home. You own one? Great. You got some equity. Good. We ll lend to you, against that equity for 10%. Or we ll cash you out at market. Don’t you dare get inspired though…waiting for you is the rental market where you can keep paying us. Or….well, that forever home you planned to buy now costs double what you had planned on and haha we got you because even if you want to get back into your starter home, it’s 50-75% more expensive on the monthly carry. So don’t get ambitious you peasant.

Not if you ignore the fangs stuff

Doubled WHR.

Housing is the most obvious “this is ripe for disruption” market, and yet…it’s been almost impossible to disrupt. There’s a reason why, and that’s not changing anytime soon.

Yea in a lot of ways this is all actually really similar to what occurred last year, even down to the monthly timing or it all. More or less nothing changed but people started screaming and guaranteeing recessions are imminent and those looking at “the market” can only seem to stare at Fang stocks. It’s all rather stupid and boring. Waiting for something real to happen.

Whenever the recessionistas are wrong they just make up another excuse or find someone to blame and then kick the “call” down the road another Q or two.

I do and I’m hoping to refine that shortly.

Yea I just make it a point to at least buy a little bit almost mandatorily over a decent chunk of time. With discretion can buy a lot but always be buying something as long as it’s within your price range. Also complement this with selling puts.

Are these levels psychological or something? What’s the big deal between 4.80 and 5.01?

There’s different approaches, but the issue isn’t that Fairfax was wronged by short sellers, it was. But Prem can’t really sit around complaining about short sellers when he himself is openly boasting about shorting stocks. If he’s off minding his own business, and the scummers attack his company, that’s when you go to war. But like Icahn recently with Hindenburg, or the Ackman Herbalife saga, when you play certain games, what goes around comes around, especially on Wall Street. Like many, I’m glad he’s moved on and is killing it sticking to his knitting.

As far back as I can remember and as long as I’ve been posting here I’ve basically just said if people are uncomfortable with an index they should just split it all between Berkshire and Google and then DCA. Between the fear and the stubborn need to know it all people cost themselves fortunes. I don’t really get what the point of it all is. Even with the Berkshire and Google strategy, I’m sure there’s people who would make an argument…”well if you bought Microsoft in 1999” and all you can do just throw your hands up and get back to focusing on investing versus figuring out how to be super smart and prolonging your work career another decade by all the “prudent” forecasting.

Offer you a trade; your NW will increase 40-50% over 5 years with minimal effort…. Ok great, sign me up. But it will pull back 10-20% from the peak at some point…. Nah bro I’m good. Like I can’t even believe this crap is floating around on an investment forum.

All sorts of subjective adjustments can get made, kinda like non gaap earnings, to justify whatever one’s agenda is. No one is guaranteed returns and returns aren’t always linear. But the force is strong, so what can I say? Fear the pullbacks and avoid equities…5% CDs will fast track retirement for sure.

Housing is still and always generally has been about location. NYC suburbs just have no inventory and not a ton of land to build on, plus unfriendly political headaches attached to any build request. It also comes down to who’s doing what and where. The big nationals have huge advantages because they can give incentives and do rate buydowns to entice people. That’s probably more ideal to them in todays market where they’re making 2x where they made on a SFH in 2018. Regional and local builders, idk, it’s area dependent. I follow closest the northern NJ and NW/SE FL markets where your smaller/regional builders are well capitalized and disciplined. And there’s enough money in the area to just wait for your buyers. Now, if you’re in Albany or inland Carolinas? I mean without knowing those markets hugely well, I’d say your pool of demand is smaller and the who will blink first quandary will settle itself sooner than later and be downward in terms of price direction. My guess is new build stays generally strong across the board. Older stuff in super tight markets, like Bergen County for instance, does well. But older stuff in general is probably what softens quite a bit when rates come back down. There’s a lot of “boomer homes” that just dont appeal to the newer demographic

The direct stimulus payment IMO only really proved the trickle up economics theory, little else. Of course the people getting them were better off than had they not, but thats really where the wealthy creation for the majority of Americans started to accelerate. Its given, spent and then transferred to asset owners. Fairly simple.

Seeking Alpha a decade ago used to be great. Today it’s total garbage.

It’s so clear Powell is just lying and/or an idiot when you listen to what he’s saying. Like I wish they didn’t have the corrupted crew of media and “reporters” handling the Q&A because all itd take to blow him up is one real comment/question. Jerry, you’re insistent on this 2% thing, and the only thing between you and it, is housing. Housing remains highly elevated, almost exclusively because of you and your rate hikes. How do you reconcile this?

Good to see both on and off this board the great minds all kinda see where this is going lol. Premier hard assets and trophies for the 1% will do what they’ve done for thousands of years…

Yea 5% ain’t the new normal, it’s the old normal. We ain’t moving far off it til we need to. Welcome to the cycle. Really wasn’t and isn’t that big a deal if you paid attention.

Yea the whole “average American is struggling” thing was total bullshit. Said it from the start. Think really the most plausible excuse for all this was that the Fed basically wanted to get the monetary and rates situation back to “normal” which is pretty much what they’ve done. They needed an excuse to get off 0, which while fun, was unhealthy.

I actually hit the structure specifically out of this fear. Rather than a straight index short I got both IWM puts and then MGK puts in the event there was divergence. Didn’t want to be banking on just SPY or QQQ and just figured both could work, or one could work, and in either event using options I’d be ok.

I bring this up because it’s part of a theory that has been gaining more traction; that these ultra companies are basically becoming the bond subs because of their moats, inflation protection, and overall durability. Markets are always evolving.