Blog Archives

CWS at 50: How We Have Survived and Prospered for 50 Years

CWS Investors

Last week we had our annual investor meeting for CWS. This was a huge milestone as we celebrated our 50th anniversary. The attendance was a record with more than 600 people taking time out of their busy lives to join us for dinner and presentations from the CWS principals.

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Newton's Third Law and Repo Madness

Fed Repo Newton's Third Law

It’s been said that markets go up like escalators and drop like elevators. There is also Newton’s Third Law which states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. This is where the Fed comes into play when markets drop like elevators.

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Bessembinder: A Fascinating But Skewed Study

Bessembinder

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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Modeling A Recession

recession

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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Charlie Munger, Robert Hunter, and Worldly Wisdom

Charlie Munger, Robert Hunter Worldly Wisdom

“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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What Movie Are You Creating And Watching?

Barry Ritholtz 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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Rent Control - Then and Now

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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More Haikus

Haiku

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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A Memorable Cab Driver and Eavesdropping in Austin

cab driver Austin

I was in Austin a couple of weeks ago and had a very interesting cab driver who looked like one of the wild and crazy guys from the classic Saturday Night Live skits played by Dan Ackroyd and Steve Martin as the two brothers from Czechoslovakia.

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Economic Gain, Treasury Pain

Treasury Yield

It’s been a brutal couple of weeks for Treasuries as the following headline from Bloomberg attests to on September 13th.

Bloomberg Treasury Dive

10-year yields bottomed on a closing basis on September 3rd at 1.47% and have shot back up to 1.90% as of September 13th.

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