Gary Carmell
In reading @jesse_livermore’s latest and always brilliant missive/analysis, he referenced and linked to a study by Arizona State University professor Hendrik Bessembinder entitled “Do Stocks Outperform Treasury Bills?” It seems like a pretty ludicrous question since our capitalist system is supposed to reward risk-takers.
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Gary Carmell
Last week were engaged in our annual planning process. As part of this, we come up with key assumptions regarding the operating environment for the next three years or so. Interest rates, of course, are a huge variable in our business and dominated much of the discussion.
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Gary Carmell
Over the past year or so I have watched a number of video lectures from Rabbi Manis Friedman on YouTube. His clarity and insights have been very helpful for me in many different aspects of my life. Given that it was just Thanksgiving and it is a time to reflect on gratitude and giving I thought I would share one of his insights and how it has impacted my life and philanthropic endeavors.
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Gary Carmell
“What is elementary, worldly wisdom? Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ‘em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form.”
— Charlie Munger
For me,
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Gary Carmell
For many years I have wanted to read the book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience but think I have subconsciously put it off because of the author’s unpronounceable name (at least to me) for fear if someone asked me who wrote it I wouldn’t be able to say his name.
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Gary Carmell
I must admit that I was struggling to find the motivation to do this week’s post after three straight weeks of travel and a particularly busy seven days that included late-night business dinners for a number of them. Woe is me. I only bring it up because all of us face those times when we don’t want to do something and yet after we do it we inevitably feel better about having taken on the challenge.
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Gary Carmell
Scott Adams is someone I follow and I appreciate his insights about persuasion and human nature. He often says that everyone is living their own movie. They write the scripts and they have cast them with characters they have developed with personalities they have created for them.
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Gary Carmell
With rent control being passed in California, Oregon, and New York, government intervention in rental housing is heating up. This is something we have been predicting for a number of years given the housing shortage and relatively stagnant wages for lower to middle-income earners. We also had a lot of experience with it when we owned manufacturing housing communities where it was much more widespread than apartments so we had a sense of the conditions that would lend itself to rent control pressures.
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Gary Carmell
Roneet passed one year ago today. I wrote the following for Roneet’s memorial service.
In the book of Genesis the chapter discussing the death of Sarah is called “The Life of Sarah” while the one dedicated to the death of Jacob is called “And Jacob Lived”.
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Gary Carmell
Please note that since the S.E.C. thinks some of my blogs crossover in terms of promoting CWS or making investment recommendations, they now need to be reviewed by our Chief Compliance Officer before being posted. As a result, after this week I anticipate that future blogs will be posted on Tuesday.
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