Blog Archives

Here We Go Again - Another Wild Ride for Stock Markets

Stock Updates

[UPDATED – January 25, 2017] The DOW opened today above 20,000. The rally from 19,000 to 20,000 was one of the fastest in history. What do these numbers mean? We need to look back at the following from 2015 looking at the historical data.

Last week [August 2015] was one wild ride for stock markets around the world.

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Power to the People? The Role of Insecure Growth

insecure-Power-to-the-People

One of the driving forces in the economy and society that has made us bullish on apartments is what I like to call “Insecure Growth.” It’s a situation in which the economy continues to grow, albeit slowly, jobs are materializing, and households continue to be formed and yet there is an underlying insecurity and anxiety about job security and how long one might be in a particular location.

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How Did We Get Here? Life Post Election

Election

“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.”

-Alan Watts

David Byrne famously sang “Watch out, you might get what you’re after” in Burning Down the House.

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Deconstructing Paranoia or Shadowboxing with the Fed

shadowboxing

I am a great admirer of those who have the ability and inclination to deconstruct great performance as well as negative ones too. Charlie Munger is famous for inverting. If you want to learn how to live a great life it can be just as valuable to educate oneself on the characteristics and quality of a miserable life.

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Top of Mind Charts and What They Show

Charts

I am a huge fan of the Daily Shot. It is a daily composition of charts and interesting news clips that allow subscribers to get a very good feel for what is going on around the world in stock and bond markets,

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Averting Disaster-When a Financial Bubble Bursts

Wall StreetThis week [April 2015] the NASDAQ finally exceeded its previous high reached in March 2001. Here is a graph that shows what happens when a financial bubble bursts.

NASDAQ Composite Index Financial Bubble

Since 2009, however, it has been essentially a straight shot upward as if nothing were going to get in its way from reclaiming a new high.

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Good Intentions and The Lollapalooza Effect

Lollapalooza EffectThe old adage is that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. As Ben Graham said, it’s not the bad ideas that do you in, but the good ideas that go too far that can do the most damage. A perfect example of this was the drive for more Americans to own homes,

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Quantum Treasuries in a Quantum State?

Quantum TreasuriesThe discovery of the quantum is one of the great breakthroughs in science. It helped transition our understanding of how natural phenomena work from Newtonian mechanics to quantum physics. In this whacky world of infinitesimally small particles, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle was formulated which postulated that a scientist cannot simultaneously know the position and momentum of a particle because trying to measure either one will affect the results of the other.

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China Export Challenges & U.S. Interest Rates

China Export

[Updated – May 4, 2016] As real estate investors, we’re obviously big consumers of capital, particularly debt financing. Given this, it’s important to have a view (hopefully a correct one) regarding interest rates. I look at many indicators to help me gauge where I think rates may be headed.

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My Random Thoughts and Observations This Week

Random-Brussels Attack

Rather than diving into deep philosophical exposition and heavy economics, I thought I would go a different direction this week and share some random thoughts and items that have caught my attention recently.

My 14 Random Thoughts

Garry Shandling

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