Gregmal

So even Burry can see CPI probably going negative. And he s got one eye.

1. IBKR offers a loophole with friends and family, IIRC up to 15 accounts 2. a doorknob can pass it 3. can you right click a mouse? That and like $45 4. breathe 5. If you have enough of your own money to be comfortable and are any good at investment you shouldn't "need" anything. Even a few hundred K if you can do 20-30% thats generating multiples of the average persons annual salary in little time. The real question is whether you want to deal with lawyers, paperwork and regulation. Ive preferred to just stick to LLCs or SPVs if folks Im comfortable with want to partner up on one off basis. Otherwise whats the point? I dont charge friends and family for my opinion or some help. So it would be all downside and headache.

Good lord. I couldn’t do that if those things were plastic and said little tikes on em.

So translating it, basically 95% of people are buying a stock quote when they think they’re making an investment and get all flustered based on irrelevant day to day stuff; the other 5% realize they’re buying a business/asset and realize short term quotes are pretty meaningless. No wonder the rich get richer. Imagine if Bezos had an aneurism every 5-10% fluctuation in Amazon stock since 1998?

Wouldn’t really call it a best idea but would imagine both VRE and INDT come off the board. Otherwise IDK TSLQ?

I’ve never understood the institutionally inspired obsession with fretting or fearing volatility. You should only be investing money you don’t need. And if you don’t need it who cares about what’s literally just one of the features of the stock market? I can’t think of anything that probably costs investors more money over the course of a lifetime than trying to avoid volatility.

Overall was probably one of my finest years as far as actual investing went. Performance was below my annual averages and definitely not 2021 or 2020 type numbers but overall the ebb and flow of this year required a whole lot more focus. Outside of Q2 it seemed there was always something working and also always opportunity to put capital to work. Commodity/Oil/War boom Q1, China pop in early Q2, buyouts on APTS, CNR, BKEP, RFP, and kinda buyouts/bids on VRE and MANU as well as plenty of other names I didn’t own that supported certain key drivers that made investing elsewhere easy. Index shorts I staggered well and then pivoted to the TSLA and AAPL shorts once it kinda seemed like the CPI fear was peaking. Sitting tight on APTS and PSTH into June and July also worked. Not even sure why I did other than for tax reasons; I almost always chuck stuff once the bulk of the story is done but for whatever reason didn’t and that capital was a huge source of new investment in H2. Longer term holdings moved around as you’d expect from stocks with those profiles. PCYO got overdone but came back a bit. AIV thrown out despite fundamentals improving. Then corrected. MSGS did what you’d expect. MSGE was really the only head scratcher that I’m still not quite sure I fully grasp the reasons for the severity of going $85 to $40 in 6 months. JOE kinda behaved how I would anticipate given the overall market narratives but I’m confident I backed into that appropriately and now have like 5x the position I did earlier in the year. The Berkshires and Fairfaxes shined as well, this is their environment so that’s expected too. Disney was a bag of shit that I would probably label my only real mistake on the year. I felt the shift at $135 and decided I needed to ignore that so I could be a “long term investor” and ate dirt when it was avoidable. Zillow too I just wasn’t looking at the right stuff and then failed to really take action decisively. Also stubbornly kept buying VIX calls even though it started becoming apparent over the summer they weren’t working. Went like 1/20 with those fuckers and at a certain point forgot rule 1 of trading….you know it’s over when it stops making money. Biggest gains again really came from the places we are told we shouldn’t go….margin, options, leverage whatever. Being able to 10-20x a single digit position is really a game changer as far as managing risk goes. I even flipped my car to Carvana. So, put another one in the books.

Also totally unaccounted for are all the mom and dads house dwellers and pandemic stunted 20/30 year olds. And guess what, they don’t want boomers McMansion or 1950s colonial. They want an all white, 1800 sq/ft 3/2 with 11 Ft ceilings and a crazy kitchen. It’s gonna be fun.

There’s no way out and the Fed is just making it worse. There’s a building shortage. We need builders to build. Lowering rates massively so demand stays crazy and builders pump out 2m a year is how it gets fixed. And with the actions being taken by the Fed homebuilders just sit on their cash hauls from the last few years and play the price/waiting game. Existing home owners ain’t selling unless they absolutely have to, and even there they’ll likely just rent it. So if you’re an owner of these sorts of assets it’s almost impossible to lose here. Lower rates equal higher prices and higher rates are translating to higher rents and more future demand. The key metric to look at this year was the average monthly payments. Records highs. That whole equation just keeps bursting higher.

Look at November and December new listing of existing inventory. Pretty much nothing came to market anywhere, even on a seasonally comparable basis.

Gonna fly high tonight

LOL NYers are even more deranged. The forced blank stare and attempted condescension when asking “why would anyone want to live in Florida”…when 1) deep down you know they know why and for some reason it bothers them, and 2) it’s like yo, go ask your mom! …. literally; in the northeast, for anyone of any means, it’s just a given that at a certain age you go south with the only question being whether or not you keep the summer home.

Nothing Dillards wouldn’t tell you. NY/CA people largely live in bubbles thinking they’re superior to everyone and that they are the center of the world with everything/everyone else underneath them and envying what they have. In reality their world is rapidly changing. They just haven’t come to terms with it yet. It’s so much easier to fall back on “we’re the best” and “Florida’s always been boom/bust”.

And I generally agree with David Tepper and he might be right. But 1) he’s also David Tepper and 2) he’s also fully invested and levered.

The Ivys are special. But they’ve all been selling expertise that works great in theory and then fails in the real world for decades because folks buy it. I’ve never seen someone consistently forecast anything for something as useless and ambiguous as a 500 company collection of stocks repping “the market”. It’s like folks who buy lottery tickets. “You ever win those scratch offs?” Lol I mean not to pick on Kyle Bass but he got popular in June and July and came nowhere close to being right about his forecasts; has done dismally with anything publicly traceable all decade, and nevertheless marches on unabated and unashamed still touting the same crap. In fact, Cathy Wood in 2018 or whatever was more correct/precise with her Tesla price target(hitting it like 3-4 different times although continuing to up it the whole way)…that should say something to folks about the stupidity of the guessing game. Bizarrely, the only guy I’ve seen who changed his stripes recently was Prem Watsa. Finally just shut his mouth and stopped pretending to be a macro expert, sure he covered his shorts at the top, but otherwise just basically packed it in and decided to invest in his circle of competency and the results the last few years have been very good. So IDK, I’m just perplexed when I see folks continuously trying to play this game. You don’t beat the house. Definitely not over the long run, if you’re playing their games. Successful investing isn’t “guess” the collection of 500 stock weighted average earnings, “guess” the multiple, wait aimlessly until it goes way below that, buy, then “guess” next years 500 stock weighted average earnings, “guess” next years weighted average earnings multiple, and then wait endlessly til it reaches that to sell. Like what’s even the point in trying to do that?

This would work if these people weren’t horrendously wrong for basically eternity. The formulas can’t be all that successful if it’s right once a decade. Blind squirrels have better hit rates than that.

Adds to Nintendo, Disney, GS, GOOG to close out the year.

The previous “bottom” multiple was like 70x or something. So idk but on top of the obvious laziness of refusing to do individual securities analysis, I just find anchoring to a mid teens multiple and then just playing the addition, subtraction then division game to be ….the epitome of pointless guessing. I mean with all the Ivy League geniuses running WS, is the answer really just plain vanilla 3rd grade division and multiplication? I think not. It’s far easier to just find a satisfactory price to pay for a stellar business or asset and then get on with your life.

I take it you’ve never done a private securities deal before? You’re probably better off bc of it, but regardless, the paperwork alone is reason to run. And that’s at boutique firms. At the powerhouse firms? Odds of 0% chance are greater than the odds being a 1% chance. LPs get sucked into stuff all the time. Largely because they’re suckers. Which is why they sign all those docs almost regardless of term.

I love reading. Always have. However I’ve never been able to finish books easily. Once I get through enough of the story to which things lose their mystique and become predictable my mind checks out and it’s on to the next one. Last few chapters are just there for others to stay preoccupied with while I get a head start on the next story.

Your storytelling skills are improving. Anyway, I can’t believe people still care about this. The stuff you wanna own already bottomed. Chew on that.

Prices can and in many places will come down. But the effects of this are negligible/overblown. Homes aren’t a day trading vehicles and every sale is a one and done. No one gets a margin call cuz the Z estimate went down 10%. Most people buy them to live in. New build is really the only variable and between the backlogs and advance notice given to pretty much everyone on rates, the idea that anyone is gonna get caught with the pants down is silly. On top of this, institutional SFH rental is just getting started. The “big payoff” on this iteration of the “the big short” isn’t to the downside.

The funniest part of it all is that 2000s housing bubble and GFC was built upon 6-7% mortgages and subprime. And today we have 6-7% mortgages and 700 FICOs but for some reason folks are asking Michael Lewis to follow em around in anticipation of starring in the Big Short 2.0…..

Merry Christmas

Yea homebuilders are less than perfect investments. Talked a lot about them with a bunch of folks H2 last year about it and it was fairly clear if volume stopped there’d be better investments. But now? Thanks to the pissants rushing in on a busted GFC 2.0 thesis, the price and expectations got reset to a very favorable level. The CLF 2021 trade is money here. Just short slightly OTM near dated puts and buy longer dated calls is how I’d approach it.