John T. Reed’s news blog

WSJ’s home buying hater Nicole Friedman is still on the job. Today’s front page article laments that the number of homes sold went down. Is the WSJ mainly a periodical read by home builders? Nope. It is mainly read by the 80,000,000 home OWNERS, not the nation’s 412,020 home builders. .She says unit sales are down because of “stubbornly high interest rates:” 6.96% now she claims. “Stubbornly?” She is anthropomorphizing the mortgage market? I think those rates are set by a Fed trying to knock down inflation. Do homeowners want inflation knocked down? I am sure they like appreciation in...

Diversification in finance is not understood properly. There is no such thing as generic diversification..You diversify for a particular risk. For example, going from owning a rental house to owning a duplex gets you some CREDIT diversification: two tenants whom you hope will pay the rent instead of one..What about diversifying by buying a second rental house in an adjacent town? That gets you a little bit of MUNICIPAL LAW diversification and first CASUALTY diversification. If the first town passes rent control but not the second, you have diversified from municipal risk and you have reduced the risk that a...

Reed’s rules of investment1. No one can predict future asset values.2. If it sounds too good to be true, it is not true.3. Minimize or eliminate transaction fees.4. Minimize or eliminate gains taxes.5. Minimize or eliminate income taxes.6. You should own multiple uncorrelated assets.7. Some of your assets should be hedges against inflation, like real estate, coins, foreign currency, forever stamps, inventory, raw materials.8. Some of your assets should be hedges against deflation like coins, preferably coins with high-melt value to face value ratios so they also protect against inflation.9. Borrow a mortgage to buy a principal residence from a...

Bengals RB just got hurt deliberately sliding at the one yard line. Correct clock management. Game is tied at 17. 1:31 left 2nd & goal They should try to run the clock down to :03 then kick the game-winning field goal so the game clock ends while the kick is in the air..But QB Burrows got a TD. That is actually WRONG. 1:29 left for Broncos to come back and tie or win. Bengals LOWERED their win probability by getting the TD instead of running the clock down as far as possible then kicking the FG..Broncos get TD with :08...

When a team scores a TD then fails to kick the PAT, next time they score a TD, they go for 2..WTF?.The rule for going for two is you do it when the probability of success is greater than twice the probability of getting one..If you can succeed at two more than twice as often as you succeed at one, you should ALWAYS go for two..What does failing to get one after one TD have to do with whether to go for two on the next? Not a damned thing..Should you ever go for two when your success rate at...