Gregmal

Well said. I sympathize with both. And I’m tired of our scumbag politicians monetizing stuff like this.

To your credit man, you don’t look a day older than 50 so whatever you’re doing is clearly working!

Think it’s just getting a feel for stuff. For instance pretty early on I was able to see that almost every time I looked at an investment from purely a valuation standpoint my conclusion was proven wrong. So I stopped doing it and the end result improved drastically. Conclusion was easy. There’s was more to investing than just textbook taught valuation approach. Overtime you just see certain behaviors are cyclical and conditioned so you can immediately thrown them in certain buckets as far as categorizing your inputs. For instance in 2021 it was pretty common to hear people lamenting “you just can’t short this market”, which pretty much is always a sign you wanna short the market lol. This kinda stuff just requires experience more so than high level analytics.

I’ve always viewed it in phases. 15-30 give or take was about pure hedonism with financial independence underlying the motives on the back end of that stretch. I definitely aced those objectives. 30-55 or whatever is purely about being the best parent possible for my kids. Doing well on that front, so far. 55+ I have always kind of valued way less than the first two phases. I’m honestly not even sure what I’d want for myself outside of lower quality experiences I had in the first two phases. Maybe that changes, idk.

Avoid them, ignore them, or if confident enough, take the other side of them. Most obvious example is related to stuff that looks “expensive”. If I’m looking at something and see the PE I can just laugh and go “nice Greg. Excellent proprietary work there. Definitely arriving at a different conclusion than every other jerk off with screen access!”. At which point I’ll look for other more unique analytical angles, or simply move on. Overall biases are an asset because you know this is often prevailing sentiment and if you can manipulate that you’re already going against the consensus

There’s correlation. People who work too much and are frugal for some far down the line purpose are often not maximizing the quality of life aspect. I’d much rather be 30 and on the more liberal side of spending and experiencing life than 50 with financial freedom but a tedious previous 30 years of existence

Nope. Happiness IMO at 27 is worth multiples more than at 77. For one, when you’re 27, 77 is not guaranteed. 2, your physical capabilities at 27 easily allow for higher quality engagement than at 77. Three, the opportunity set at 27 is far greater. Four, you have plenty of time to earn the money back. Think about anything worth doing. Sports, partying, fucking, crazy trips with friends and family. No way in hell 77 is the same as 27 with regards to the quality of any of those activities. People need to have balance but skew their resources to where they are in life and appreciate both the opportunities and the limitations.

Just flip em into the election. Easy trade.

When everything is on the line, people hustle. Today’s generation is simply too comfortable. The only reason I became worth anything is because coming out of school I had nothing and no safety net so working the way I did, and doing the things I did to my body to make it happen were fair trade offs. Say 100 hour 5-6 day work weeks with a 90 minute daily commute to most people and it’s a hard pass. For me it changed my life.

Isn’t this just indicative of concentration of wealth and wages for the majority of the population not keeping up with cost of living?

The biggest benefit of the mortgage is it allows the common man access to an asset they’d almost never otherwise be able to afford. If the housing market was all cash, or short term loans, first time homebuyers would have to be in their 40-50s. Even with housing prices drastically lower, how many people can come up with $200-300k cash before 40? In and of itself, that is peace of mind. 30 year, fixed. Equity grows, debt declines. In the instance of the 25 year old with an inheritance, who cares if occasionally the rent doesn’t cover the mortgage. You have one job, and that’s it. Make sure the mortgages get paid every month for 30 years. You don’t need to think about exact IRR or capital allocation. You don’t need to worry about appreciation. You just get the dang bill paid and assuming 0 appreciation over 30 years which is virtually unheard of in the US, you have a $2m nest egg 10 years before everyone else is retiring.

Well yes, a mortgage imo can be both an asset and a liability. I also think it can double as an efficient savings vehicle. If you are 25 and dumb and say inherited $300k I’d say go buy a collection of $2m worth of property with 30 year fixed rate mortgage. Rent it out. Your retirement at 55 is secured.

Companies can healthily take on debt at 20-30% net debt to EV. They can go 4x EBITDA. People can do the same if the know what theyre doing. Similarly having net asset value/cash while carrying a mortgage is pretty much the same as not having one except you have the benefit of liquidity and optionality. Mainly I think its psychological.

In this scenario, couldn’t you arb it? Like rent your primary with the super low mortgage, net money on the rent, and then instead of buying fixed income pay cash or heavy cash allocation towards a second place?

Office was never a great asset class and it was a joke to see 4-5 cap prints for the better part of 2014-2019. Meanwhile grade A grocery traded for 7-8 and warehouse near double digits. Both the Wall Street crowd, and the academics, just had no clue what they were doing because they were still living in the 1980s.

I think that’s an angle of looking at things that wants to retrofit bearishness into justifying a lack of investment. There has and continues to be plenty of reasonable value in the market.

Yea its a world class operation. Non traded REITs have existed forever. They're scummy vehicles, and they've always had redemption caps. I guess some of these folks just found out about them recently and cant process that a stock quote isnt a mark for a real estate asset, and that theres not really anything abnormal going on for the non traded reit at BX. Its also amusing because I dont see how one can whine about BX, without winning 10x more about BAM.

I have no skin in the BX game but this is a stale and lazy piece. A “journalist” asks “analysts” and people shorting BX for some edgy material…yawn. It’s flawed and ignorant and has been because it relies on two stupid assumptions. BREIT should be dependent on stonks for its valuation, and that BREIT = BX. Neither are true.

If you’ve got a decade I like the warrants way better

I wouldn’t have a problem with it. I don’t sell my time by the hour because it caps my potential. You want something done, you pay for it. Not some idea of how long you own somebodys time for.

The pre COVID and post COVID housing markets are two totally different things. The fact that builders didn’t built and younger people put off homeownership is why we’re in a market where the only way out is incentivizing building. Builders aren’t building more than they need to right now, because of rates. If rates drop and demand spikes they’ll lose all discipline

The Fed and many elitists will argue that the answer to that person being disgruntled about not being able to eat out, or it being more expensive to do so, would be to make it so that more people cant eat out and less people work at those restaurants. I dont even know how this shit flies. Well, I do, and again its because they can just say "inflation" and 90% of people dont question it or dig any deeper. But its crazy. As Ive argued before, by far, the biggest and most problematic inflationary impact on everyday people is housing being so expensive, and that is entirely because of the Fed and their interest rate crusade. If the Fed dropped rates back to 2-3% you'd see so many houses built that we'd probably have a sizable housing market correction in the next 3-5 years.

And thats fine. They've created certain words, like inflation, that people are conditioned to just accept. They say inflation, and people immediately think "ooh, bad"...If "inflation" is largely driven by expensive restaurants...so friggin what? No one is forced to eat out...I mean we act like its something that everyone is entitled to...but what about the people working at the restaurant? Theyre just trying to make a living. Theyre probably not going out to eat 2x a week. Its nonsense. The majority of the wage price spiral theory is invalid because as we got more industrialized, especially at scale, you can pump out as many of most goods as you want for little incremental cost. Obviously you cant produce more chefs and bartenders like that, but again, employment is good, not bad.

Uh huh. I mean its plain old manipulation and outright fixing the game by the ruling class when you get down to what it is at its core. Because who does what during the downturns? The lower end people have to complete for fewer jobs and often work multiple jobs. The middle class aspirer who's just able to afford the house or the car no longer can, and the rich people buy vacation homes and distressed assets like its Christmas...

Because workers have been getting screwed on wages for decades. Wages have not kept up with anything. So I think its total BS that a bunch of elitists now view wage grow as bad because god forbid its more expensive to enjoy the luxury of going to a restaurant or a bar...yeah, lets tank the economy to stop it...absurd. Its up there with them blocking the CPRI acquisition on the basis of people being entitled to $300 bags...where does it end?