Sweet

What if we have already seen the big wash out? We are four years into this bear market. And as you hint at, extend and pretend might work. If the excess supply of commercial real estate is taken off the market the demand problem will solve itself.

Is anyone here looking at office REITs or commercial real estate more generally? I think it’s worth exploring the pros and cons of making a longer term bet in this space. It’s the one sector that hasn’t had a post pandemic bounce. I keep hearing people saying there is another shoe to drop but there is a decent chance we are close to a bottom. Banks are rolling debt tied to office buildings rather than eating the losses in the hopes the sector turns. Some of these office spaces are being sold for housing development. Other buildings are being sold at a huge discount. But I have to ask how much worse can it get here? If you think a lot worse why? Rate rises would be bad, AI is possibly a drag, another recession would certainly be bad in the short term but ironically good long term (see below). I know of those office jobs will never return again but I don’t believe office real estate is going to stay empty forever. I also think the working from home trend will reverse when the labour market swings in the favour of employers again who demand workers return to offices i.e. recession and rise in unemployment. I was looking at some REITs that specialise in office real estate. Boston Properties, Inc. (BXP) are Kilroy Realty Corporation(KRC) are trading at 2009 lows - that’s compelling to me. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/BXP/ https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/KRC/ I found during the oil bust that it’s often better to pick the higher quality plays. Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc. (ARE) is at 2018 prices and about 40% off the highs. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ARE/ Plus you are getting decent yields on these which reinvested might make for good returns. I’ve only just starting looking at this and i’ll post more thoughts are I dig in further.

Not as much now, the girls have been replaced by the babies!

The metric might be true when you add in all the luxuries of many households. Some households are of course struggling but I’m not referring to them. I used to hang with a bunch of guys in who earned broadly the same as I did and who managed to spend their entire pay each month on girls, drugs and drink. I was saving about 70% of mine. Today those same guys are still living paycheck to paycheck with little to no savings all as a result of their own choices then and now. Paycheck to paychecj in 2024 is not the same as it was in 1984. If this is supposed to be some metric of how terrible the economy is doing, or if the rich - poor divide, they can suck a dick.

Is it Chubb? I’ve not seen anyone predict that, not on COBF or financial media.

Interesting article from John Huber about big tech capex and how it may impact future earnings: https://basehitinvesting.substack.com/p/big-tech-capex-and-earnings-quality

I thought this was an interesting thread and echo’s my own thoughts - that not selling great businesses is so important: Their 13F is as you would expect: https://whalewisdom.com/filer/akre-capital-management-llc Speaking of 13Fs I think Berkshire files tomorrow and we could find out the identity of his secret purchase

I just found the camp my uncle was in by searching the archive available online. I wasn't aware they held this information. He was Stalag VIIA Moosburg and was liberated by the US 14th Armoured Division. Never knew that until now. What was your fathers health issues for the remainder of his life?

The POWs didn’t get treated very well. Apparently it took a very long time for my uncle to recover. I don’t know what camp he was in or what American unit liberated the camp.

Nobody said the Allies fought the war to save the Jews Dinar. Netanyahu didn’t say that either, otherwise I wouldn’t have a quarrel. Netanyahu said ‘nobody came to our aid’ in reference to the Holocaust. That is demonstrably false irrespective of the motivation of the allies. My uncle was in the British army and was captured by the Nazis fighting his way up Italy, he spent the rest of the war in a Nazi POW camp. The Americans weren’t fighting the war to save my uncle, but it was the ‘yanks’ as he called them, who liberated his POW camp and provided food and medical assistance - he was 7 stone and weeks from death. He was forever grateful to the Americans. And that’s the problem I have with his comments. Unbelievably ungrateful. You and others have focused on motivation of the war and not the outcomes. The Jews of Europe were saved by the allies in same way that my uncle was saved from starvation in a POW camp by the Americans, even if the war wasn’t about either of them.

What’s the argument? That the allies should have diverted bombers to bomb the concentration camps?

People from New Zealand, to India and Canada were involved the in the war before the US joined. The theatre of war was also multi-continent before the US joined. I get what you are saying but your arguing that we refuse a date well agreed upon.

I do think a lot of this is coming from the current difficulties with Biden.

Kristallnacht, which I admit I had not heard of, is not the Holocaust. I said earlier that many Jews found refugee in countries like the UK and US (and others) before the war began - is that not aid? I didn’t say the war was started to save the Jews - it couldn’t have been since the Holocaust occurred after the war began. The claim Netanyahu made was in reference to the Holocaust (from late 1941), of which he said ‘nobody came to our aid’. Yet it was the Allies who liberated the Jews from concentration camps, ended the Holocaust, and saved what was left of the European Jews. As I stated, Netanyahu’s comments are ungrateful and disrespectful of those ‘gentiles’ who laid down their lives to defeat the Nazis.

That’s not what happened. The timeline was World War Two started in 1939 and the Holocaust began in 1941. War therefore had already begun. Unless you believe the allies could have performed a miracle and rapidly won what more could have been done? Without the war waged by the allies few European Jews would have survived because it was the allies that stopped the Holocaust. So sure, keep believing nobody came to the Jews aid, the fact is that many are alive today only because of those ‘untrustworthy’ gentiles (Netanyahu’s words) in WW2.

I’m all for promoting the idea of helping yourself but not by shitting on the memory of the allied soldiers that saved what was left of European Jews from extermination. World War Two had already begun when the Holocaust started in late 1941 and when the Final Solution was a policy of Germany in 1942. Prior to that, when the Jews were being discriminated against, many left Germany and came West as refugees to the UK or the US. Whatever the motivations for WW2 beginning, claiming that there was no party coming to their aid is wrong. There were millions coming to their aid. There was no Holocaust when the war started.

He’s not making an accurate statement. Millions died slowly clawing back territory from the Nazis and he’s in a podium claiming nobody came to help them? How many European Jews would be if not for the effort of the allies? It’s ungrateful and downright disrespectful to the cemeteries full of brave men:

I admit to be to be angered by this pricks comments. Referring to the Holocaust he claims “no nation came to our aid”. It’s an astonishing attempt to rewrite history.

Yes, crazy performance but I understand that he kept his fund on the smaller side deliberately. His methods and strategy might not have worked at scale.

I’ve no idea on any of the those questions. Simply saying that the tweet might not be the bull story it first appears to be.

Is this supposed to be bullish? Each of the hoorahs ending in disaster.

Exactly

That I’ve noticed it’s price action leads the general market ever so slightly - I not recently.