John T. Reed’s news blog

I am down to my last carton of Youth Baseball Coaching books, so I perused it to see if it needs updating. It does not. So I will just reprint it. . That is a great book. One reader said he read all the books on the subject and mine is better than all the others combined. I know. I read them, too. . You can see that testimonial and a bunch of others at https://www.johntreed.com/collections/john-t-reed-s-baseball-coaching-books . My football books enable coaches who lost every game to win their Superbowl the following season. That’s because football is a highly coachable...

Except for an evening wandering around Juarez, Mexico with my West Point senior class in June 1967, I had never been to mainland Latin America. I also spent a cruise day in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Juarez 1967 was a freak show. The most memorable feature of it was a club where a woman let a donkey have sex with her. I did not go to that show but some classmates did and confirmed it. Oookay. That was not in my previous exposure to Mexico—a Dennis the Menace comic book based on the artist’s taking his family there. The most incongruous...

Today, I ended one of the most important chapters in my life: newsletter writing. Started as a summer job During the summer of 1976 between our two years at Harvard Business School, we had to get a summer job. “Had to” in the sense that we needed the money and in the sense that it was required by the curriculum. A member of the MBA class of 1976 started a newsletter called Real Estate Investing Letter and offered a summer job writing it. Another guy and I were given the job of writing the first year of it. That ending...

I graduated from West Point and got an MBA from Harvard Business School. I have worked in the fields I write about and researched them thoroughly. I only write about subjects where I think the existing books are incorrect or incomplete or both.  My books typically differ from those of other authors in a number of ways: more real world, for example, my baseball coaching books tell how opposing coaches try to cheat in the player draft more iconoclastic more thorough more tell you what you need to know; not what you want to hear more ethical and legal more safety conscious (mainly applies to sports coaching books) as much emphasis on risk management as reward ...

Net worth and a declining loan-to-value ratio on your portfolio. There is a huge difference between having a net worth of $3 million in free-and-clear real estate and the same net worth in a portfolio of $20 million of real estate where you owe $17 million in mortgages.Also, don’t just pick an impressive round number like I did. More is not the goal. Enough is.How much is enough? Show me your shopping list of stuff you need but cannot now afford. Most people laugh that they would have no trouble sending $ million or so. “Show me your shopping list,”...