The mobile home park year has a rhythm. Residents start the year broke, having spent what they had for the holidays. An infusion of cash comes in around in February, when tax refunds arrive. Seasonal work opens up during the summer. Things dry up in the run-up to the holidays in late fall. Lot rent …
Ross Perot said that, if you listened closely, you could hear a giant sucking sound across the United States. That was the sound of YOUR jobs going to Mexico. Hell, you didn’t even have to listen hard. It was like the roar of the sun, all around us, everywhere and nowhere. Once you noticed it, …
Nassim Taleb is a bloviator, but he is often right. His hedge fund, Empirica, which made money by placing bets on fat tails and black swans, finished far in the black when it wound up in 2005. Taleb won big when equity markets tanked in 1987. A successor fund to Empirica, to which Taleb was …
From the Santa Fe Writers Project Quarterly, a publication based in Baltimore.
An old friend called me recently. I was surprised to learn that he had written a well-received song called mobile home. I was more surprised to learn that he now lives in a manufactured home in upstate New York. I first met Noah when he was a sixteen-year-old high school student and I was a …
Early this morning, my phone farted and told me that Sam Zell died yesterday. I understand that he breathed his last at the moment when I hit ‘enter’ to send the post that I wrote yesterday, replying to the Guardian article that savaged his management style. Chat GPT – write an obituary for Sam Zell: …
In 2009, a writer in Slate said that the James McMurtry song Choctaw Bingo should be the new national anthem, because it describes life for the majority of Americans in the post financial downturn gig economy. The music is not much to listen to, but the lyrics are brilliant. In the song, McMurtry (son of …
Here’s how you make money in mobile home parks: Here is how residents of underperforming parks can have access to clean, safe and affordable housing: A pattern emerges from the murk of the data. The market for mobile home parks fluctuates. Ten years ago, you could borrow at four and a half percent, buy a …
The Thousand Islands Duty Free Store on Hill Island near the Alexandria Bay Bridge across the Saint Lawrence River has a few one-liter bottles of Wild Turkey Rare Breed that it is selling for $38 CAD or $31 USD. That is not a good price. That is arbitrage. Here’s how Breaking Bourbon describes Wild Turkey …
Content Warning: This is not a post about the manufactured housing industry. This is a post about option pricing. Readers looking for the usual crap can click here, here or here. In the fifth and sixth seasons of The Crown, now-King Charles is played by Dominic West. This causes cognitive dissonance. Dominic West is …