Gregmal

i probably used confusing terminology. that's just how I informally described my rebate/discount agent. she presented herself as a cheaper alternative to redfin (our rebate was 1.6%). not sure what you mean by whether or not redfin is okay for higher end, but i'd just say that the listing agent has to show the sellers your offer. if you're worried about competitiveness in a bidding war and someone at a traditional agency disfavoring you because our agent is from redfin, that is possible, but the listing agent would be taking a lot of risk to do that (re their license). we got some snide "who are you working with..."oh i've never heard of her" at open houses, but our money was still green and our offers were considered. all this depends on your market, it's competitiveness/quirks etc. Means Pauls got a nice house!

Sold some MX. Paid down some margin. Started GILT. sold remainder MX. Go private at $29. $26 is good enough for me. How many stocks are you holding Greg? Seems like you have a bit in everything and baskets of SPACs and REITs. Right now probably between 50-60. Its segmented though. Top 6 ideas are close to 100% weighting(which includes about ~40% in BRK) and top 10 is about 115%. On top of that Ive got low 20%-ish allocation to pre deal spac but thats negligible in terms of capital at risk. Got a trading and tracking basket currently sitting around 25% which is lower than normal but Ive been trading a lot less this year since the setup I'm seeing is ripe and has a long runway. REITs(or RE related companies) are probably around 60-70% of my assets. Also got another high teens allocation to shorts/puts. Altogether it roughly works out to being fully margined BRK(a bet I found sound making at the 230s level), and slightly less than 80% invested otherwise one accounting for short/hedge positions. Numbers are roughly calculated without looking at a thing since last week so yes, I'm well margined, no Im not doing anything too insane, yes I like to be aggressive with conservative stuff and be a pussy with aggressive stuff....Cheers.

Sold some MX. Paid down some margin. Started GILT. sold remainder MX. Go private at $29. $26 is good enough for me.

Dolan: MY companies! GC: Yes Mr. Dolan but there are procedures, laws, and code of ethics. Dolan: Theyre Mine! GC: Yes but you have shareholders. Dolan: But I own the companies. GC: You do, but there's rules you have to follow. You cant just take from Peter to pay Paul Dolan: But I'm the owner GC: Janice call Goldman and have them put together a merger agreement.

I'd personally lean towards saying it doesnt "really" matter all "that" much. The pressing need right now for E is cash to build the Sphere. You can use the N cashflows and also DTA to accomplish that. Ideally, yea N belongs with S....but thats really for sale purposes. Which the first thought often is that all these spins complicate eventual asset sales. But I think thats overthinking it. If Dolan wanted to offload the Rangers with the RSN, different public entities really wouldnt effect that. He controls them all and the bankers IMO would likely just divvy up the cash based on valuations ascribed to the assets from an accounting standpoint. Dolan is probably not a great owner of the franchises from a fans POV. But as a shareholder I think he's been reasonable if not pretty good. But these spins(and now mergers) honestly resemble a spoiled child just chaotically utilizing dad's various businesses with little regard for the ownership details. "I'll have this here, oh and some of that. Put this there, and ah, that over there. And yea, Janice!, go figure out how to fix the books to reflect it all!"...

The degree to which they've been hyping the shit out of these "new strains" and emphasizing words like "mutant" and phrases like "potentially deadly and contagious" is all one needs to see to know something fishy is up. Basically reads like a stock promotion type of deal. Press releases written by stock promoters getting paid to help the company insiders sell shares. "possibly evading new vaccines", "possibly more lethal", "possibly more contagious"....fuck off. They say "possibly" to lie without having repercussions. I woke up today and "potentially" a plane could crash into my house. Potentially my computer could blow up. Potentially a bear coming out of hibernation could walk into my house, sit down at the dining room table, and order my wife to make him waffles..... however none of those things are any more likely to occur today than they were yesterday, but when you take liberties with words and have no desire to be ethical or honest, you can deliberately create clicks by presenting things in specific ways.

Its funny but recently I was talking with a fellow investor in the E and S entities and it was a bit perplexing how brutally MSGE was trading of late. So on $120 to $105/110 it was like "yea, people are selling the rumor because its definitely possible"...but then down to 90 I was like "ok so either this isnt the reason for the sell off and perhaps theres other reasons, or there is some massive insider trading going on here"...guess it was indeed the later although I dont really have a problem at all with the ratio/all stock aspect. Over the years if theres one thing to have learned here is that nothing with these entities actually stays confidential.

I'd say it effects most people because folks have been told to stay locked in their homes. Folks have had their businesses shut down while still being required to pay property and business taxes. Folks have been fined for trying to work out at a gym. Folks have been given citations for walking alone on a beach. Folks have been told they arent allowed to travel or leave the state. Folks have been unable to buy basic food or groceries at various points. Folks have been forced to beg for stimulus money.... And personally in my case, Ive been in a state thats part of a region that has fucked things up so badly and financially slit its own wrists and keeps doubling down on this failure and now their solution is to further pick my pocket to pay for the things they claim they need to do in order to get out of the mess they and only they were so adamant about creating.

And as if that was signaling a top, BTC crashes. ~20% from the ATH, nearly 100% YTD, and more than 10x since lows 52 weeks ago....interesting definition of a crash.

To be fair though, I dont think there are many folks more guilty of undermining public confidence in a vaccine than the two folks currently holding the title President and VP, along with a lot of their friends and allies. At the end of the day, everyone needs to make an assessment for themselves and thats all there is to it. I never got a flu shot until I had kids. Certain things, much like trades or investments, set themselves up differently to everyone. I just dont see the merit in making ones decision on anything a public figurehead says, or even on the supposed "wellbeing of strangers"...is it fair to me my income gets ransacked because poor people cant get it together, or because my governor who I didnt vote for and dont support wants to push bogus programs I want nothing to do with? Maybe they should be more considerate too! Right? Nope, thats not how the world works. Take care of yourself and your loved ones. Do everything you can for them and everyone else, in one context or another, can fuck off or learn to do the same. I'll let this comment be my last here as I already feel like this is wading into politics and I dont really care all that much, like I stated earlier. I got the vaccine because it was important to the people who's opinions I value. And thats it for me. Every should have their own say.

I think a lot is situation dependent and definitely very area dependent. Im not personally a huge office bull. I think if you're willing to take the office risk you're better off just betting on well located retail. Boston for instance has a huge life sciences crowd....thats not going anywhere. NY financial district? LOLz But generally speaking I like Flatt and BAM is a jockey bet for me. They have enough on hand to made things work as everyone just saw masterfully executed with BPY. Could the whole thing topple over? Its always possible. But again I think you have to account for monetary policy being accommodative and I have a decent bit of confidence in a return to normal. After the easy money was made in coastal urban office in November I basically exited most of that stuff and just swung some of the allocation into BAM. Lazily, I'll let those guys handle it and more onto greener pastures myself, as far as company or asset specific investments goes.

If you look at whats happened with a lot of assets, I think its a very real scenario where you can have secular headwinds and as you stated, lower occupancy rates, while still seeing much higher asset values. Especially for hard assets. So I would just raise the question, is it possible your fears come true but that buying these assets at certain prices still provided both a margin of safety but also just in general, a satisfactory return profile?

Sold some Oct $7.5 puts on APTS, and picked up a few more shares. Small add to MSGE as well.

Looking back a year...I find it absolutely amusing that Flatt was dead on...when EVERYONE was at best like "yo guys just talking his book"...and at worst people thought he was lying....so far, he's nailed it. Office hasn't done too poorly and retail/hospitality especially has killed it since the vaccine. Bruce is bossman. Disclosure, I too was quite skeptical of his enthusiasm, albeit investing in a lot of the same type of stuff. Long live the king.

Everyone on my wife's side of the family is a nurse. So probably preferential treatment lol. My attitude was that I'll get it when its available and I dont really care too much when that actually is. Could be next year for all I care. Mother in law said they had an opening and booked me for the following week. Shrugged my shoulders and said "ok"...its more important to other people than it is to me but in terms of peace of mind, especially for others in the family.....it is what it is. I'd also caution anyone that they seemed to make a very big deal about "keeping the card"....the doctor indicated that doing so may be helpful for traveling in the future....

Interesting points from everyone. One really does need to wonder and be skeptical of much of the handling, especially the motive. For instance you had 25% crowd capacity at sporting events in FL/TX etc, back in December and January, meanwhile in NY they didnt allow ANYTHING until a week or two ago and even still, its only 10%....when calls for doom and gloom are made, and the makers of the calls are WRONG, you NEVER get a mea culpa or an apology....you just get the next iteration of the agenda driven story or some stupid aphorism like "better safe than sorry". Much like how Ive regularly, for most of my career heard people saying the "doing this or that" in the markets will "eventually blow you up"....except when it never does they never eat their words they just double down on an unprovable reiteration of their same academically inspired jargon...at some point you have to just say fuck em. Theyre the ones who have no clue what they are doing. Which for private persons/businesses, is OK...as capitalism weeds this shit out. For public officials who have control over peoples lives....its entirely NOT acceptable. Personally, Dr. Fauci was saying no masks at the height of the panic in March/April 2020 and now after being vaccinated he's wearing not one, but two masks. All I know is I dont want to be like THAT GUY.... I got the 1st shot a few weeks ago and am scheduled for the second one next week. I've done enough shit in my life that if a vaccine does me in....so be it.

Who needs to study market cycles/bubbles. You basically got the full thing condensed into the past 18 months with SPACs. Right back to where we were in 2019....except for the whole 500 empty shells currently looking for deals thing.... I/we went from getting 1-2(maybe 3 on occasion) IPO offers per month in 2019 and most of 2020....to seeing 3-4 per week the past few months. Haven't done one since maybe mid/late January. No point anymore. Part of me wonders if the sheer glut of these things on the books at certain shops may create some sporadic opportunity a bit lower than the normal 9.9-10 figure. Generally, you'd have unlimited supply of institutional takedown for the dollar volume but lack of shareholders necessary to get the IPO launched. Once retail got into the game it became inevitable things would get wild. But retail also aint holding $10 paper for 18 months for 2%. If you start seeing 9.7 of so it could be quite enticing...practically free money if you can utilize the 1% margin at IB. Of course IB seems to charge you to split the units(never tried myself), but most other shops still do it free of charge. Might even make sense to hold the units at IB and then ACAT individual positions to a Fidelity or whatever where they can be split up for $0.

Fidelity to launch a BTC ETF. Who's next?

People receive money to give blood, jizz, etc all the time. Lots of people take money in exchange for carrying someone else's baby or for participating in medical studies, etc. Plenty of of people in general, even with their normal jobs...do things they dont want to, in exchange for money. If the virus is as serious as many claim, this should be a no brainer but like many other things involving government....it seems to elude them.

https://nypost.com/2021/03/23/business-leaders-warn-7b-in-proposed-tax-hikes-could-wreck-ny/ They just cant help themselves. And the Sun Belt will continue to be the benefactor. Its almost an inevitable. If you are an institutional investor...whether a fund looking to take private, or an insurance company just looking for an asset to provide a somewhat hedged against inflation income stream....why would you even want to bother with places that have rent freezes, rent controls during normal times, eviction moratoriums, and high taxes? My expectation is that premier assets in business friendly states will eventually demand significant premiums to the traditional low cap coastal markets. The premium has always been associated with safety and predictability of the underlying asset and its cash flows. Which is no longer the case in many of those markets. ~80% of PAC revenue comes from top 5 markets in terms of population growth and net migration. ~75% of PAC multifamily is FL/GA/TX.....

They really should have just gave people vaccination checks instead of all this "do nothing" stimulus money.

Let me join the party. A bit of BABA I'll have what theyre having!

https://seekingalpha.com/news/3675669-spac-market-is-a-lot-of-out-of-control-barry-sternlicht-says Its all going to play out in a very predictable way.

Last year was a record year for spac. Something like a 350%+ increase in IPOs from year prior(after basically nothing happening in Q1). Last I checked, 2021 had already produced 30% more IPOs than 2020....shit is kicked as the kiddos say. Buying units close to, or under $10 is still a reasonable proposition, depending upon the setup, IMO. But the expectation needs to be reset.

Meanwhile Google cant buy a stupid fad watch maker without the world stopping. And everyone hates FB just cuz....amusing. Long MSFT/GOOG anyway.