I was once told that the best time to start a business is in a recession. The reasoning behind it is that the business would get stronger once the recession is over. Essentially you’re starting at the bottom and can only go up from there. From my experience, this is true. I’ve started several businesses over my life and have closed several businesses too. Some were better than others too. I (we) still have our real estate business but it’s morphed more from a real estate investing business to a holding company.

I just read this CNBC article that Ray Dalio is going long Gold. He believes that the markets are undergoing a paradigm shift and he might be right. The operative word is might. His fund’s been taking losses this year but appears to be recovering this July as gold perks up. Why is gold perking up? There’s a lot of economic and poltical uncertainity happening right now thanks to Trump, the Chinese Tariffs, and many other things.

I want to share my experiences as a Real Estate Investor (REI) and expert in the engineering field as a way to help novice real estate buyers. My wife and I made a lot of mistakes when we started buying properties. Now, after a few years we’ve gotten it down and are ruthless when evaluating a property. We’ve bought a house from auction, written short sales documents for banks, bird dogged, and researched flood prone properties as a way to get smarter about being real estate investors.

It’s been a long time since I wrote anything related to Real Estate (RE), especially about flipping houses. I heard on Bloomberg yesterday that the real estate flippers are exiting the market as fast as they can because the real estate market is starting to slow down. That’s interesting news because of my personal history with RE. I have been a real estate investor that wanted to be a flipper but got caught in 2007 slowdown.

The r/investing sub cracks me up sometimes. This guy has had enough of the sub because all it spews is how great Buffet is and dollar cost averaging. If you ask me, all the things he complains about are good. ETF’s are good, low cost(ish), and easy to get in and out of. Dollar cost averaging has really helped me build a good size 401k nest egg but it required consistency and time.

Passive investing saved my life in many ways, but not in the way you think. It didn’t swing from the trees like Tarzan and snatch me away from a charging Rhino nor did it give me a Flu shot. It did it in two main ways: Saving my time and avoiding costly mistakes. How? Read on my friend, read on. I know many people that lived through the Real Estate boom and implosion in 2008.

Boy oh boy the real estate market is back with a vengeance. All of my Architect and Engineering friends are busier than right before the 2007 meltdown. Building additions, knockdowns, and the like are flooding in. It seems that everyone just woke up this year and got busy. Flippers are back And the Flippers are back… My real estate investing friends (aka Flippers) are snapping up house at County Court Houses for pennies on the dollar, cleaning and fixing them, then flipping back onto the market.

I roamed around a lot when I lived in New Mexico and I came across several ghost towns. I loved finding them out in the middle of nowhere and poking around in them. If I had more time I would probably researched the reason why they were abandoned but we didn’t stay too long at them. Usually they were on private property and had big “KEEP OUT” signs and we had to always watched out for a Rancher with a big rifle.

Ugly posted this interesting LA Times article his Del.icio.us link role a few days ago. It seems that people with upside down mortgages (where your mortgage is greater than the value of your house) are voluntarily letting their properties be foreclosed on. A homeowner who can’t sell his house tells the L.A.Times, “Foreclose me. … I’ll live in the house for free for 12 months, and I’ll save my money and I’ll move on.

I’ve been laying low for a while now with respect to buying and flipping foreclosure properties. You might think that I’m nuts because everywhere you turn now you see and hear about the parabolic rise of foreclosures in this country and the end of the RE world. Although foreclosure activity has picked up and more houses are now being repossessed by banks, I still haven’t smelled enough blood and desperation out there yet.

Sherry posted an excerpt from an article she read in my “Real Estate Will Get Worse” post. The author of the article, Jackie Corr, points out an interesting leveraged strategy that is very plausible why hedge funds have been posting out of control losses recently. If you buy a stock for $36 and sell it for $72 four months later, you’ve made 100% on your money. If you add $30 of borrowed money to $6 of your own to buy the stock at $36 and sell the shares at $72, your profit is $36, but you’ve made 600% on your $6 of which the hedge fund takes a percentage, roughly 2 percent or 72 cents, so your profit is now $35.

I used to flip foreclosure properties leading up to the height of the RE bubble. It was tough work finding these properties, marketing to them, and then screening the potential sellers. Since I didn’t have the capital to buy the properties myself, for cash, I had to get an investor involved and made a few bucks at it. I learned a lot but realized that it was too time consuming so I stopped.

Could the trend party in IYR be over? Maybe. A lot of information can be gleaned from observing a price chart, mostly technical information. A lot of traders/investors forget that fundamental and sentiment information also drives prices up or down. Learn Stock Trading, Investing, and Risk Management There are a handful of financial and trading books that have made a HUGE impact on my investments. If you want to trade and learn about money and risk management that I suggest you get the Tharp book.