Blog Archives

And Kobe Lived

Kobe Bryant Lived

I want to start off by expressing my deepest condolences to the families of the nine victims of the devastating helicopter crash that took the lives of Kobe Bryant and his daughter Gianna.

I imagine that the death of Kobe will be one of those events in life that we will always remember where we were when we heard the news.

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The Last Decade in Charts - Here Come the Roaring 20's

Charts

With the 2010s having come to an end and the roaring 20s starting I thought I would look back over the past decade to convey key trends that impacted the economy and apartment investors.

I would summarize it as a decade of continued aggressive Federal Reserve involvement in the economy through continued low-interest rates and expansion of its balance sheet.

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Trauma and Intelligent Investing

Trauma

Traumatic events can hold great sway over our lives. They can trigger reactions that are often times not healthy for us. I was at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles and saw someone speak who was born in Brussels in 1943. For the first two years of his life,

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Growth and Stability – How Could Apartments Ever Be Obsolete!

CWS Apartment Communities - Growth

Last week we held our annual investor meeting and we had a record attendance of nearly 600 people (including employees). I told the audience that if we can grow our attendance by 7% every year that by the time we have our 100th annual meeting (this was year 49) then we should have over 11,000 in attendance.

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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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Monday Motivation, Being Robotic and Interest Rates

robotic

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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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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The Media, Earthquakes, and Market Crashes

Market-Crashes

I have written before about how investors overestimate the probability of extreme negative outcomes. The author of the study I referenced in that blog post has teamed up with his famed Yale colleague Robert Shiller and another professor and published a new working paper called Crash Beliefs from Investor Surveys.

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German Negativity

German Yield

Mohamed El-Erian, the former CEO of PIMCO, said recently on CNBC that if you want to know what’s going to happen to U.S. long-term interest rates, then all you have to do is look to Germany. And so that is what I did.

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Fire My Metaphor for Earnings News: Catalytic Regeneration

Canyon Fire earnings news

There’s a regional park near my house that I like to hike. It has beautiful scenery, a lot of hills, and a number of people on the trails that conveys a feeling of community and self-care. Its topography and large size allow for many different trail options in terms of length,

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