My torts professor was old-school. Short, pudgy, longish gray hair, black-rimmed glasses, Santa Claus beard. He was one of eight people who graduated from the law school summa cum laude in the decades between 1969 and 2007. He clerked for Thurgood Marshall, worked as general counsel for the United Mine Workers, and has taught torts …
Beavis, Butt-Head and the Manufactured Housing Industry Read More »
Imagine Caesar took his troops to the Rubicon, crossed the river and then, a thousand paces later, turned back. The Senate did not know what to do with him until the leader of the Parthians offered to act as an intermediary. He retired to Cappadocia with a few hand-picked troops, where he lived out his …
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 …
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 …
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 …
There are two reasons I regret not having served in the military. The first is that military service gives people license to bend the English language. Why say ‘A’, ‘F’ or ‘R’, if you can say alpha, foxtrot or Romeo? The -FU acronyms, like SNAFU, FUBAR and TARFU, are like rhyming slang with free beer …
Content Warning: The following post contains a disquisition about option pricing. Readers who are sensitive to this type of content, or who seek salacious details about park residents, decaying infrastructure, baseball bats and large men chasing other men wearing diapers should turn to other posts on this blog. In the climactic scene of the movie …
Everything You Wanted to Know About VIX But Were Afraid to Ask Read More »
An Ordinary Day for a Manager of a Manufactured Housing Community Everyone should at least flip through Edward Tufte’s books once. The first book that Tufte published is called The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. The second is called Envisioning Information and the third is Visual Explanations. They never get boring, but they all come …