Gregmal

Like shit the amount of times I’ve been at Shop rite and heard stay at home moms using “prices are crazy” as something to block the isles chatting about except I see their carts and it’s like you definitely don’t need 80% of the junk in that cart and if you got store brand you’d save 40% but hey, inflation is a bitch right? Or the folks who whine about car prices and it’s like wait, am I seeing something or did you just dump your 3 year old car for a new one?

If someone gives me money today and then I get subsequently taxed for several years after, in a roundabout way that sounds like an interest rate like cost. If I get an advance on my future earnings today, I have no business complaining about the hit to cash flow because I’m paying it back later. It’s a very similar phenomenon. It’s hardly the end of the world. The inflation story is done and been done for a while now and that’s why most of this stuff is just being shrugged off by the market and now people are moving into the recession fixation. 3-5% inflation for a little while isn’t going to be some gargantuan gotcha like catalyst that takes 50% of the markets and causes blue chips to trade to 12x. It was a cute story while it ran with the bogus cpi prints from early 2022 into September or so, but that’s it. Saying stimulus doesn’t count because it got spent is also silly. Of course if people spend their money it’s not there anymore. People got big one or two off pay raises in many cases probably equivalent to 40%. $2000 a month was pretty common for some folks. Others got free rent. Pauses on their mortgages. You know how many years of 5 or even 10% inflation is needed to square that into a net negative? Not to mention, as I’ve pointed out so many damn times now, some things went up in prices. Others are choices. Complaining about McDonald’s is bullshit when you can get 18 burgers for $25 at Costco and yea, that’s still a nothing burger even if those $25 burgers go up 5-10% for a few years.

Uhm what does $600-$2000 per month on a percentage basis for those eligible equate to? So much more goes into this that is completely ignored. A married couple with three kids making $60k a year is still probably wayyy ahead of inflation based on what kind of breaks they got during COVID. Regardless of weather inflation hammered them hard with the $6 Heinz ketchup since now they have enough money to not buy the store brand which is like 10% more expensive today than it was in 2019. Sitting here talking about this years inflation and this years pay raise completely ignores the totality of the situation and all that has caused it. And it is wholly silly because I guarantee you 95% of the population is incapable of noticing 1-2% variances in anything so acting like folks are going broke because of 5% yearly wage gain against 7% inflation is absurd.

Exactly. This whole thing has been a disgusting exercise of the haves trying to screw the people who for the first time in decades finally had momentum as far as jobs and wages went. Clear as day the inflation that came from covid shutdowns and stimulus was transitory. Dont listen to the people who want to tell us $75 oil is evidence of an inflation driven energy crisis lol. Now we are seeing people who have been shorting the market, hoarding cash, or selling doomsday subscription services screaming bloody murder cuz the average annual raise is 5% instead of 3% and because its not cheap to go to restaurants anymore. Corporations and elitists are pissed they have to pay for labor and especially pee on blue collar labor that they feel entitled to. Waiters and bartenders shouldn't make shit. Landscapers should be $15 an hour. Electricians and plumbers shouldn't be charging $150 to show up. Thats largely what this is about. Theres no crisis here and never was. It was largely an illusion because guess what? When you give the average person $1000 a month for a few years, of course prices are gonna go up. Especially when half the country is refusing to function normally.

Come on man. It really never ends, does it? Months endlessly and scrupulously mulling over rounding errors and fractions of percentages. Have gotten people where? To 3000 SPY? Real inflation over 5% is a problem especially if its volatile. But clearly as we ve seen post covid, that all was fueled by things now abated. Stable Inflation under 5% is a nothing burger. Especially when we fixate on month to month which will produce normal gyrations any sort of ridiculous conclusion can be drawn. If .3 goes to .4 or .2....why should anyone give a hoot? Although the story gets more exciting if we can take that .1% increase from .3 to .4 and headline it as "sticky inflation" thats beginning to "accelerate" again. Nobody in their right mind currently sees widespread or accelerating inflation. Frankly, there is more deflation occurring right now than inflation.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/27/powell-duped-by-russian-pranksters-claiming-to-be-ukraines-zelenskyy-.html LOL how pitiful. Seems the Russians didn’t want the short sellers and hedge funds having all the fun. They duped this fool too. Biden needs to can him.

Of course a lot of it is overblown. Offices in general are melting ice cubes. MF and retail in decent MSA are fine. Self storage is fine. Maybe industrial is a bit overdone but so what after the run it’s had. Just avoid office and be extra careful with blue cities and states and you’ll be fine.

That is awesome. Congrats.

LOL now big tech getting a bid. Every million people trying to be market timers and who does it best? the guy who sold Enphase yesterday!

PEP starting to show how sinister that inflation is on the bottom line. They call it “organic growth” these days.

Shit, for a moment I thought @dealrakerfinally saw the light and decided to take advantage of the life changing yields on Tbills!

Rates haven't fallen all that much though. 30 year fixed is still mid 6s.

bbbbbut I dont know how a non traded REIT works and thought they were going bankrupt bc of BREIT redemptions!

Thanks. There are definitely parallels and many things I learned via sports earlier in life have helped me with investing. Discipline, pattern recognition reading the plays, taking high risk/high reward shots. Throwing one in the dirt on 0-2, etc.

Yea the premiums are surprisingly large on both sides, especially given where the VIX is and has been. Between this trade and selling HHC puts at 75 and lower theres just been a ton of juice which adds up. I havent been doing anything heroic, just running the post covid CLF trade where you short near duration puts and buy longer duration calls to varying degrees and variations. Just sucks NVR doesn't have options LOL. Couldn't have done it without all the housing experts. Any of them have tip jars?

Have any of the experts that promised us massive write downs and impairments told us when exactly this is happening? Did they update their spreadsheets? These things continue to print money. Brrrrr

I dunno Spek. Did you see their "Who we are" slide? You and I have made mistakes in our investing lifetimes, but these guys? Busting out all the right moves at just the right times. Track record of many, many successes and zero failures, plotted elegantly over many, many years. They must be very rich. You sure you wanna take the other side of the trade?

Man, every Tom, Dick and Harry now knows how to play the game. Just proclaim that the Fed won't have any credibility unless they do what we want them to. Dont mind our positioning LOL "Until the Fed corrects its errors with respect to the country’s fifth largest bank, it cannot be credible as a banking regulator"

Yea successful investors certainly do not look at their investments and think of things within the framework of "cashing out" LOL. Thats like literally a degenerate gambler mentality. Successful investors simply "accumulate".

We ve got a motivated seller! Wonder if they’re willing to throw in a dozen homeless people you can’t evict from the lobby for good measure!

Bbbbut everyone is high on hopium!

Now imagine what it was when the stock was at $3000 and all the value bros were buying it?

End of the day, my house, my rules. My judgement…which is what I’ve lived and died by my entire life. To each their own. If people have a problem with how I live I’d simply ask them why they feel it’s their business? Reminds me of an incident maybe a decade ago. After I started my own business I had my own office and would always bring my dog to work. To get there obviously he sat in the car. One time I had to run a quick errand and I decided to run into Staples to grab some office supplies. Given it was 55 degrees outside and I’d be no more than 5 minutes in the store…I left my dog in the car. I come out and some whacko lady is on her phone screaming about how someone locked a dog in a car and she then starts yelling at me and I just look at her and calmly said “bitch, my dog probably eats better than your kids, although I’m skeptical you even have any kids if this is how you spend your time. Either way, don’t worry about him”. And I left. Why does everyone need to worry about everyone else’s business. Just be meticulous and robust about handling your own.

Yea I still see the MF demise argument hinging on assuming every brand new unit is gonna share the same fate as outliers like this where the properties are mediocre and the buyers total dumbasses. Separately, while I don’t own any yet…KRC is pretty damn interesting.

Yup. Like mentioned a bit back, the better life gets for people, the more it seems like folks need to come up with problems. In itself, a mental disorder. The school shooters and the transitioning teenagers with identity issues….very often happen to be….middle class white kids. You can see gangs are a derivative of poverty. Some of this other stuff, a derivative of things like boredom or levying high expectations on someone not able to handle it. Ever heard of the alcoholic housewife?