The Leverage of Subprime

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 $35.24 on the $6 which is 587% and you can live with that ...

Real Estate Will Get Worse

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. ...

Real Estate iShares IYR

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 then I suggest you get the Van Tharp book. If you want just focus on long term investing, get the Random Walk Down Wall Street book. ...