Financial Thing

I’ve been on X for 10 years but only started posting regularly recently. I decided to share a few real estate projects I’m involved in to inspire and highlight the challenges along the way. I’m not wealthy. My income is unpredictable because I’ve spent years avoiding the 9 to 5. Time and freedom mean everything to me. I’ve funded projects by investing when I could and keeping my expenses low. I’m 52, no dependents. I’ve tried multiple careers: touring club DJ, web developer, real estate investor. Most businesses failed; others I walked away from. Some just paid the bills. I went bankrupt in 2011, wiped out by the 2008 financial crisis. Lost 3 condos, 5 acres of city land, and a house, all bank foreclosed. I was 50% leveraged, 100% my fault. Learned the hard way that banks don’t care about you, so you have to be your own bank. I also loaned over $100K to a friend who owned several bars (don’t do this). No collateral, 30% interest, and six months later he filed for bankruptcy and fled the country. Lost everything. Another expensive lesson. Now I’m throwing darts at the board one last time, hoping one lands. Still battling thoughts of failure every day. Trying to retrain my brain to glass half full mode but it's hard. Project 1: Small lakefront lot in Central Florida. Planning to build a 2,500 sq ft spec home to sell for profit. I’m not a GC but working with one. Purchased with two others in April 2025. Permit applied for in May, approved in October. City delays and some GC errors slowed things down. Hoping to start construction soon. Project 2: Buying pasture land in Alabama with a partner to build a niche rental property and add RV spaces. Totally outside my comfort zone, but nothing ventured, nothing gained. Project 3: Invested 5 figures as a silent partner in a townhome flip purchased in January 2025. Was told it would take 6 weeks, but it’s now October and still not complete. I’ve had zero control and learned a lot about what not to do as a passive investor. Follow along if you want to join me on this journey. Hopefully you’ll learn something from the wins and the mistakes.

@jnpayne How do you just move to Spain? What’s the visa requirements?

Last year, I moved my family of five to Mallorca, Spain, and it was one of the highest ROI decisions I’ve made as a founder. Here’s what I gave up: ➝ Cancelled or scaled back all 1:1's to monthly ➝ Frankly just dropped the ball on lots of things ➝ Muted slack channels where I wasn't a key stakeholder ➝ Assigned owners to projects and stopped poking around ➝ Removed myself from operational meetings where possible Here’s everything I gained back: ➝ The discipline of writing everything down ➝ Rebuilt my fitness routine from scratch ➝ Extended time off screens / amazon ➝ More presence with my kids ➝ The me my wife married ➝ Stillness. The only thing I lost was the version of me using the office to avoid the rest of my life. And if you look at our growth on a graph, you'd never know when I moved. If you're a founder thinking about a move like this, the cost can be huge. But so can the upside.

@CKCapitalxx We haven’t had a cable box for years. Tv comes through internet router now

Opened a long position in $HLIT today. This is the most interesting monopoly setup I have seen in a long time. Every cable and internet provider in the world has the same problem. Physical hardware. Cable access boxes sitting in facilities and in homes. Each node costs thousands of dollars to deploy. Every 3 to 5 years that hardware becomes obsolete and has to be physically replaced. Trucks rolled. Technicians dispatched. Hardware swapped. Over and over forever. The capex never stops. For a large cable operator running millions of nodes that is a multi billion dollar recurring cost that never goes away. $HLIT built the solution and it is so obviously better that I genuinely do not see how this does not become the standard for the entire industry. Their cOS platform virtualizes the entire cable access network in software. The operator buys the platform once and runs it on standard off the shelf cloud hardware. No proprietary boxes. No truck rolls for upgrades. No hardware replacement cycles. Capacity scales with a software update. New features deploy remotely overnight. Maintenance becomes a predictable annual subscription instead of a massive unpredictable capital expenditure. The economics for every operator on earth are impossible to argue with. Buy expensive hardware every 3 to 5 years forever. Or buy software once and pay a fraction of that in annual maintenance. The answer is obvious. Every operator that runs the numbers converts. And once they convert they never leave because ripping out the software layer running your entire broadband network is not something any sane operator does. That is the monopoly. Not a monopoly imposed by regulation. A monopoly created by switching costs so high that once you are in the ecosystem you are in permanently. And the market they are going after is enormous. Every cable operator. Every internet service provider. Every telecom running broadband infrastructure globally. All of them facing the same hardware problem. All of them needing the same solution. The numbers are already showing the conversion is happening. Q1 2026 broadband revenue up 43% year over year. Beat guidance by nearly 20%. Operating profit up 115% year over year. 150 customers already on the platform serving 45.7 million cable modems. Rest of market bookings up 78% meaning this is expanding well beyond the initial tier one deployments. Backlog and deferred revenue sitting at $582 million up 87% year over year. Full year 2026 guidance raised to $475 to $495 million. Gross margins at 52% and expanding as the software mix grows. They just sold the video business for $145 million. Pure play broadband software company. One focus. Clean balance sheet. Now think about the ceiling. There are hundreds of cable and broadband operators globally who have not yet converted. Every single one of them is a future customer. The platform is cheaper. The economics are better. The switching costs lock them in permanently. There is no logical reason for any operator to choose hardware over this. If $HLIT captures even half the global broadband infrastructure market the revenue numbers look nothing like what they do today. 52% gross margins on a sticky recurring software business with a massive untapped global market and switching costs that make churn nearly impossible. This is one of those setups that in five years people will look back on and ask why it was not more obvious. Long $HLIT. Not financial advice. DYOR.

@lindsay__stamp So the move to Florida is off then?

The older I get the more I realize that living close to family is the most underrated life hack. Seeing your siblings get married, have kids, and raising your families together is a huge blessing. I wouldn’t trade it for anything!

@X. This is ridiculous

@MyLatinLife Because there isn’t much to do in Barbados?

I don't understand people who go international vacations to just sit by a pool and read books. Bro this trip to Barbados is costing you like $800 per day and you're just going to sit by the hotel pool and read books?

@YodaStockInvest @Sandeman52 Take it from a twice divorced male. She probably isn’t the “one”. She’s the one for now.

@Sandeman52 What if I think she's the one bro? I plan to be together for life so need to be a team I think its a pretty negative thought to think its definitely not

Should I share my portfolio with my girlfriend or not? My situation: I’m 22 years old with a portfolio worth 200k

My @Tesla 2024 Model 3 isn’t perfect. Strange clicking as plastic behind AC air vents cool, slight rattle under the steering wheel, skipping wiping blades that replacement and windshield cleaning doesn’t fix. But FSD trumps all the flaws. It’s like having a chauffeur. I rarely drive manually anymore. Until you’ve driven a Tesla with FSD for a while, you won’t understand.

@lindsay__stamp Happy wife happy life

My wife wants to go on vacation to Turks and Caicos and I want to throw $10,000 into bitcoin so we compromised and we’re going to Turks and Caicos

@BLKMDL3 People it’s the Spring update not an FSD update

Huge wave of 2026.14.6 rolling out. Check your apps

@ParadisLabs When do you take profits versus holding?

How can I give back & help you guys more? Maybe if you drop some tickers under the comments to this post, I'll post some research in a few days for the most liked/commented one? Just genuinely want to help!

@scottmelker Not my experience. Love driving my car every time.

Short story. I bought my dream car. It felt great for a few days. Then it mostly sat unused. Then it became an annoying expense. Then I sold it and realized, once again, that material items bring me no joy.

But I thought Stocks only went up?

Tesla FSD V14.3.2 is a regression version IMO Nag is far worse Follow distance still too close Speed profiles are inconsistent (see below) Car camps in left lane Had several stab braking incidents and jittering steering wheel Annoying pop up happens when I disengage at destination Still love FSD but hope @tesla_ai fixes these issues soon

@FurtureRichKid Well first sign for me, I don’t know a single person who uses the retail SOFI products but that might be nothing 🤷‍♂️

@financialthing Elaborate haha Let’s connect🤞🏻🤞🏻

As a 25-year-old with $90,000 invested, if I put $45,000 in $SOFI and $45,000 in $AMZN. Would I outperform the market for the next 10 years? My pick - Absolutely

@WalkerAmerica @carlabitcoin Gorgoeous beaches and quiet Grayton Beach area. More to do Clearwater / Tampa Bay. Even more Miami Beach

Need to get the wife out of the Midwest this winter after the year she’s had… Any Florida experts out there who can recommend the best area to snowbird? @carlabitcoin

@lisa01750863095 Patience isn’t the hardest part. Picking the winners out of that huge stock list is. And if you buy them all, you’ll probably average less than an index fund.

The U.S. government, hyperscalers, and $NVDA are literally telling you that the future will be dominated by the following 10 groups of stocks. Space： 1. $RKLB 2. $FLY 3. $SATL 4. $PL 5. $ASTS Critical Minerals： 1. $USAR 2. $UUUU 3. $MP 4. $UAMY Energy： 1. $AMPX 2. $TE 3. $EOSE 4. $BE Memory/Storage： 1. $SNDK 2. $MU 3. $WDC 4. $MARM 5. $SIMO Defense： 1. $ONDS 2. $OSS 3. $PLTR Optical sector： 1. $AAOI 2. $AXTI 3. $LWLG 4. $LITE 5. $COHR Quantum： 1. $IONQ 2. $QBTS 3. $RGTI AI Infrastructures： 1. $NBIS 2. $IREN 3. $CIFR 4. $ALAB Semiconductor： 1. $AMBQ 2. $NVTS 2. $MRVL 3. $AMD 4. $ARM 5. $WOLF： Nuclear： 1. $OKLO Hardest part of investing is having patience. Once you master it and compounding will change our life!

@Leo_Traydes Nonsense. When the market corrects, you’ll be glad you held some $VOO

Hot take - $VOO and chill is a waste of time for people under the age of 30 ESPECIALLY with the current Tech Boom we’re in🤷‍♂️

A good portfolio should have 10,000 bottles of aged whiskey, 500 unworn Rolexes with tags, box and papers, 25 gold bars, 100 BTC and 1000 Intel shares.

@BlackPantherCap Be careful. Investors are moving in and out of the next hot sector / stock very quickly. Most aren’t in it for the buy and hold anymore and will use you as exit liquidity the second things turn red.

I’ll only say this once: The next 1 to 4 years will determine whether you build generational wealth or spend the rest of your life watching other people live the life you could have had. NEW infrastructure is being built *right now.* AI, Robotics, Automations. Its all HERE. This is not a drill. This is not hype. This is THE window of a lifetime. The physical backbone of the next economy; power, compute, orbit, optical networking is being funded, contracted, and locked in right now. The capital is moving. The deals are being signed. The positions are being taken. The only question is whether your name is on any of them. You want to know what this moment looks like from the other side? It looks like 2010 and you didn’t buy $AMZN. It looks like 2013 and you didn’t buy $TSLA. It looks like 1995 and you watched the internet happen to other people. THIS is that moment. Right now. Today. And it will not wait for you to get comfortable. So here’s what you need to do. Wake up. Handle your 9-5. Run. Lift. Eat clean. Be present for your kids. Be there for your wife. Every hour left after that? >You research< Not scroll. Not watch. Not casually browse. You study like your family’s financial future depends on it. Because it does. Be obsessive. Think deeply about it. Or follow people who think deeply about it. Study what the world needs to build next, and which companies sit at those bottlenecks. But don’t sleepwalk through the most important investing window of your generation. $IREN $NBIS $CIFR $AAOI $RKLB These are positions in the infrastructure of the next 20 years. The kind you hold while everyone around you panics. The kind you look back on in 10 years and can’t believe you had the chance to buy. Most people will miss this. Not because the information wasn’t available. Not because it was too complicated. Because they didn’t take it seriously enough. Don’t be that person. The window is open. It won’t be open forever. -BP Reminder: this is not financial advice.