Signs we’re near the top: -US stocks ATH -Home prices cracking -Consumer spending/confidence = low -Inflation back in play -Mega cap companies & indices (Kospi) moving like meme stocks -Long pipeline of mega IPOs (SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic) -Record margin debt What am I missing?

Caught up w/ a friend that makes $1,000,000 managing a family office Absolutely killing it so I asked what they’re doing: “holding index funds (voo, qqq), amzn, google, meta, apple, berkshire, robinhood… and recently bought pltr and now” Crazy paying someone that much to make 1-2 trades a yr

The white collar apocalypse we’ve been fearing is here… Tech employees are completely screwed How screwed? On a scale of 1-10 probably a 12 The only people more screwed are students that’ve been preparing their whole lives to become software engineers What comes next?

Signs it's very late cycle: -Middle class tapped out -Dining out = luxury -Layoff accelerating, hiring frozen -Mega IPOs lined up (ie. SpaceX) -Defensives ripping (gold/silver/Korea) -Risky assets unwinding -Home prices cracking -Card delinquencies elevated What am I missing?

Chicago office buildings continue to get massacred... A landmark Chicago Loop office building recently took a massive ~90% 'haircut' The 1.4M SF building sold for $41M or just $29 per SF It last sold for $306M in 2018, per Crain Absolutely brutal

Buying US rural/farm land in the path of growth is the most irreplaceable asset in the world There's ZERO substitute to owning land in the most powerful country in the world Ai/Claude or any new tech will not change this It's wild that hundreds or thousands acres of pristine land in the US can be bought for just a few thousand dollars an acre Is there an asset that's actually more irreplaceable?

Barry Sternlicht gives an insightful view about the challenges of real estate right now - and how to still make a lot of money in the current environment Here's what he said: "I think people, as they always do, tend to look in the rear view mirror and they look at a suboptimal performance of the real estate asset class across the last 3-4 years. Nvidia goes up a trillion dollars in four months. Like the hot kids on the block are everything AI, everything chatbot, etc... There are meme stocks that go from zero to $7 a share on a tweet. Crypto - there's worthless coins with $20 billion dollar market caps. There's a coin called Useless. It's [literally] useless. It debuted in March 2025 and it went to a $700 million value. And the coin says "we are completely useless" In real estate people get rich but it's boring. You get rich holding on to it over long periods of time. It's not a day trading asset. The country right now is very impatient. So people want to play the hot thing. Real estate looks sort of sad in your portfolio right now. The only thing it beats is treasuries. And even then, it's not even beaten that. But you'll do well picking properties in the right cities... Everything is micro in real estate. For example, I built a building in South Beach. The first lease was $54. It's on the beach, and nobody built a new office building in 20 years. We leased it up in the pandemic. It's 100% leased. A tenant actually needs to grow, and they called us last week. They're paying $125 and we'll re-lease it at $175. I mean, you can still make a lot of money if you get the micro market right."

You have to put 100% of your net worth into ONE stock or asset and hold for the next 5 years What are you picking and why?

The fast-food industry is facing a MAJOR reckoning Mediocre chains (BK, Arbys, Sonic, KFC etc) will likely close thousands of locations in 3-5 yrs - here's why: -Middle/lower class are tapped out -Rising labor food costs -Stale food -Dirty stores / bad service -Ozempic Wendy's is just of one of many facing extreme headwinds

Red Robin has lost ~90% of its value over the last 5 years You can now buy the ENTIRE company for just ~$60 million They used to be one of the most beloved spots for kids, teens, and families... Where did it go wrong for them and can they turn it around?

Amazon has been a HUGE disappointment since Jeff Bezos stepped down as CEO in 2021: Amazon: 15% vs. Nvidia: 803% Google: 141% Apple: 89% Meta: 80% S&P 500: 57% Nasdaq: 54% MSFT: 43% Buffett clearly doesn't like it Bring Bezos back and the stock will go on an EPIC run

Monster Bev is one of the most remarkable stocks: $10,000 invested in 1985 = $49M today $10,000 invested in 2000 = $20M today They're quietly near ATH while the world chases the next big thing It's a reminder that you don't need disruptive tech to see generational gains

$10k invested in AMC at their 2021 peak would be worth just $17.21 today Unfortunately, it looks like theatres are completely dead and never coming back Where did it go so wrong for theatres?

From 2002-2012, John Arnold's fund compounded at a STAGGERING 100% annually In 06 alone, it famously made 300% In 07, at just 32, he became the youngest billionaire Here's how he did it: "At the time when Enron went down, Enron was the largest natural gas trader. I was the head trader at Enron. And so I had a very big reputation in the business. New York Times wrote a story in early 2002, talking about the amount of money that my trading book had made in 2001, which was in excess of $600 million. And so all of a sudden, it kind of validated me externally. And so I started getting a lot of calls from people saying, Enron went down. There must be a lot of opportunity in this space. Can we invest with you? And second quarter of 2002, there starts to be a new scandal hitting the papers on Enron almost every week including on the power trading side. And so that was a very different operation than what I was doing, but it was close enough to where all the potential investors kind of stopped calling me back. Because they don't know what's going on. They don't know if my track record was real or not. They don't know if I'm going to be tied up in court proceedings for years.... When I got started in the summer of 2002, I had $8 million from 3 investors one of which was me... From 2002 to 2012, we compounded over 10 years 100% a year on average. We had some years that were 300%, had one year that was pretty much flat, but on average. 100% a year..." Absolutely STUNNING

Chamath's recent comments about Warren Buffett reminded me of this report - In 2023, ProPublica published reports stating Buffett personally traded stocks during periods overlapping w/ Berkshire's trades Buffett himself has not publicly addressed the report in detail and Munger defended Buffett’s integrity calling the suggestion of personal profit from such trades “implausible” I don’t think Chamath’s comments explain Buffett’s pre-2000 outperformance, but clearer explanation of the ProPublica reporting would still be helpful, IMO

JUST IN: Chamath Palihapitiya makes a big claim that Warren Buffett’s insane pre 2000 returns may have benefited from access to information asymmetry not available to the public Here's what he had to say: "In 2000, we introduced the law called Reg FD. And what was the point of Reg FD? It was basically that if you're a CFO, you cannot talk to an individual stock manager and tell him something that you then don't tell everybody else. Essentially inside information. That used to be not illegal. I won't say that it was legal. I would just say that used to be not illegal. You call your CFO buddy, he says, "hey, how you doing?" He goes, man, "Quarter was a blockbuster." You would go and buy the stock. And starting in the 2000s, it became illegal. And there used to be these networks of information arbitrage that took advantage of this. Now, this is an example of Warren Buffett's returns, pre and post Reg FD. Now, what do you see? His returns were double the market returns when this kind of information sharing was legal. And the minute that it became illegal and you had to basically act on the same edge as everybody else, his returns went to the market return. He generated zero alpha. In fact, he probably on the margins lost a little bit. So this is the single best investor in the world. This is what happens when you have information symmetry. So it's just meant to explain that markets when there's asymmetry. Billions and billions of dollars will be made in asymmetry. The prediction markets today, unless they are regulated out of existence or shut down, will look like the stock market pre-Reg FD."

JUST IN: Bill Ackman's Pershing Square has failed to beat the S&P 500 over the last 5 yrs -SPY: 73% -Pershing Square: 65% All that DD and work just to underperform a passive index fund It's a reminder that it's VERY difficult to beat the S&P 500 over a long time horizon