Nifty Fifty Capital

@PittsburgWizard @asymmetricinfo Except the difference is that Massachusetts has a flat 5% tax under $1 million too, so everyone pays something. The message a broad based income tax where everyone pays something (even if the rich pay more over $1m) vs a tax that affects only 25,000 taxpayers is quite different.

@asymmetricinfo This hunch is not born out by case studies of this policy. They did this in Massachusetts already. There are now more millionaires in the state. Rich people like well funded public services too.

I suspect that Washington State will see more capital flight from the millionaire income tax than they would have from a broader income tax even if the top rate was the same, because the signal it sends is “You are the only people we are willing to tax. Get ready.”

@mattyglesias I don't know if it's that relevant of an indicator. Retail was more bullish during the COVID crash than institutions and hedge funds as well, sometimes retail can be right although I personally think we keep going down from here.

Sometimes I randomly think about just how insane this lineup truly was. Prime Cano batting 7th lmaoo.. What a time 🥶

@mikesimonsen Thanks for posting this information. Always interesting to see so much useful data in effectively real time.

Well folks, let's call it a strong finish to the year for real estate. 📍Inventory is slowly, steadily improving over last year. 📍Sales rates are climbing each week too. 📍Price cuts are falling. 📍Prices are inching up. The signals for the housing market as we roll into 2024 are pretty much all positive. But it’s not all positive. As home prices show signs of increasing this year, that means our affordability crisis shows no signs of abating any time soon. That’s this week’s Altos Research video. [video link follows below] 📍Available inventory of unsold single family homes fell to 513,000 over the holiday week, per the season. It's now 4.4% more than last year. 📍Each week a few more sellers than last year ease into the market. Since we’ve been so supply-constrained, I interpret more sellers as positive. 📍A few markets (eg Texas) look like inventory levels will get back to pre-pandemic levels maybe this year. Most are still very constrained. 📍Notably, the number of sales happening each week is climbing right along with the inventory. 📍There were 20% more(!) new contracts started this holiday week compared to last year. 36,000 vs 30,000 📍AFAICT, there is no imbalance between new sellers and buyers. Buyers are there. 📍In fact, the total count of homes with contracts pending is now, finally, greater than last year. 📍258,000 single family homes in contract. 2.4% more than where we ended 2022. 📍That implies growth in the number of home sales for all of 2024. We’re definitely past the worst of the housing market recession. 📍Buyers are buying at these current prices, too. 📍34.8% of the active market has taken a price cut from the original list price. This’s down 150bp from last week and is right in the normal range. 📍Price cuts peaked in November 2022. The corresponding low in sales prices happened in April 2023, five months later. Fewer price cuts now implies reasonable sales price stability through mid-2024. 📍The median price of single family homes in the US ended 2023 at $415,000. Almost 3% above EOY2022. 📍The price of the new listings came in at $355,000 which is 5% more than a year prior. January 1 is the lowest price point in each year’s cycle. 📍Depending on which home price measure is your favorite, home prices will conclude 2023 up 3-6%. We call it 3%. 📍Assuming mortgage rates stay stable in the 6s or low 7s, these trends are poised to continue for 2024.

@TidefallCapital @StockTalk416 Yeah, OER lags so much that if it was replaced by something that actually measured current rent growth, we would be under 4% now.

@StockTalk416 housing coming off like a rock shortly (1/3rd of cpi), goods prices falling, now a banking shock, i think inflation will run below 5% over that period

@ecommerceshares Bing used to be default search on iOS and I believe it averages less than 5% of mobile search share during those years. Do they really want to Apple Maps 2.0 to their user experience when they can pocket a $15B a year for doing nothing?

So when are we going to see Tim $AAPL Cook launch his Siri chatbot and strike $GOOGL from the other side? Or ask for some incredible amount of money to keep using Google, which Google will have no choice but to pay?

@moseskagan @callicrates_ It is, but it ignores the additional compliance cost to taxpayers since even successful audits of corporations and partnerships are time consuming and expensive to defend. Could easily have the net cost as negative overall with folks spending time responding to doc requests.

@callicrates_ Return on incremental enforcement $ is like guaranteed 2x

Pretty disappointed in the tone on FinTwit the last few days. Have been audited & it’s awful. But the govt isn’t something someone else does to us; it *is* us. & *our* govt needs to collect taxes, some people cheat given half a chance, & that means we need a functional IRS.

@vinipux313 @StojBoj @blind_nut Right, doing something like this as the sole breadwinner vs your wife's income likely puts you in the top 1% of HHI is a different perspective. I have a friend at a non-profit that tells people to follow their dreams, which is easy to do if your spouse is a partner at Wachtell.

@StojBoj @blind_nut “There’s obviously some truth to that”? Look I’m not hating nor discounting the journey, but if your wife is bringing in an anesthesiologist salary, it’s not “some truth”, it is the only truth and probably the sole reason why you were able to take such a risk.

Confession time: I’m over 50, a financial planner & advisor, and I don’t know when I’m going to be able to retire, or exactly what retirement is going to look like. How can this be, you ask? Because life happens. Spoiler alert: none of us know the future. 1/15

@Noahpinion I think we can argue semantics on what's a subsidy, but you also have capital gain exclusion up to $500k, GSEs offering low rates, FHA/VA loans, homestead exemptions at the state level, for tax wonks you don't impute rental income as an owner, sometimes deductible prop. tax etc..

Housing is not highly subsidized by the government; though there's a mortgage interest tax deduction, it's generally outweighed by property tax. As for renters, few get help from government.

@John_Hempton @Noahpinion I don't disagree, but that's a bit like saying "not every POTUS is bad, just look at George Washington." Not the best example if you have to go back to the 18th century.

@Noahpinion Please look at US Presidentials. And some British Prime Ministers have been amazing. Pitt the Younger anyone...

Why is every single British prime minister a hapless goober?

@ValueStockGeek @Molson_Hart It still surprises me when we get a death certificate for trust & estate reasons for some of the older folks which lists the decedent's education and the old timers have the high school/GED box or in rate cases, even below that checked off. Sure, some of it is degree inflation.

Has finance always been one of the best careers or is that a recent phenomenon? You hear old-timers like Jeremy Grantham say stuff like “in the 60s, it wasn’t fashionable to go into finance like today”. Engineers/math phds joining hedge funds is a new phenomenon, no?

@seanschuerman @schmangee And she still won 75% to 18%. She's not at risk.

@schmangee She had 15 million spent against her in 2020

@SardonicCanuck @StockTalk416 @TidefallCapital @MetaNewsroom Shareholder base skews towards GARP folks that see money being lit on fire, but the tech is exciting and if Tesla was doing it IMHO there would be drooling. I think it's likely a boondoggle, but the price more than reflects that today anyway and I could be (happily) wrong.

As we build toward the metaverse, we're researching how to develop a virtual reality display system where what you see in your headset is as vivid and detailed as the physical world. Mark Zuckerberg just shared the details here facebook.com/zuck/videos/35…

@vannapalooza @StockTalk416 @LeveragedLayman Ah, must be the difference in Canada vs the US. Down here sold means closed, but usually takes around 30-45 days so I was thinking 10 days was a really quick closing here, but it sounds like sold means basically "pending" or "under contract"?

@Lizquidity For a good gaming laptop, I would say this is the best deal right now, it's a upper-mid tier laptop that will play pretty much anything today on good settings and should last a while: walmart.com/ip/Lenovo-Legi… It's available for about the same price on Amazon as well.

my gf wants to turn me into a gaymer girl. i need a good computer for this. what do i get to do the job, frens? don’t suggest i build a computer i’m not going to. ^_^;

@vannapalooza @StockTalk416 @LeveragedLayman Looks like it closed 2 days ago.

@FairweatherPhD Right, that's where I think age comes in. If you are young enough then long-term the stock market should do better in theory, but if someone was 50+, IMHO would be better to just pay cash and treat it as a better yielding de facto bond allocation.

@RealNiftyFifty Stock market is down from last year though. So people who took that strategy are down. (Over a longer time horizon the stock market will surely go back up though.)

If you had the cash to buy a home right now, would you do it, or would you get a mortgage and buy stocks with the cash?

@FairweatherPhD It's a close call though and pretty conservative, if this was last year and we were looking at sub 3% rates, then it's an easy decision to put it in the stock market. I would say ~5% is the tipping point for me personally even if it's very likely suboptimal.

@FairweatherPhD Think this depends on personal factors like your age, percent of the house as your total NW, etc...but I would pay cash because a risk-free after tax 5% or so (assuming that's the mortgage rate today) sounds pretty good if you already have a fair bit in equities.

@DadInvest @stkbullgod You feel a lot of guilt because you obviously care about her a lot. It's rare that there's a relationship where someone doesn't have to make some professional sacrifices and it's ok to feel guilty, but I'm sure she wouldn't want it to get you down.

@stkbullgod She was accepted to UofL med school but declined to follow me to DC. I have a lot of guilt about that. Her parents will never forgive me for that.

A lot of the shit on my wife’s deal I’ve just locked away. But I will say the doc who stabbed my wife in the back publicly said “maybe if [she] went to medical school then we could actually talk”. Former MA made these cookies and sent to wife from NYC. She’s beloved by many.