John T. Reed’s news blog

On Friday's, the WSJ has a "Mansion" section. It is what it sounds like—expensive houses. . My most recent book advocated doing all your real estate investing via your principal residences and moving up to a more expensive one whenever you can do so safely. . . Generally, that would have you end up with a $5 to $10 million dollar house. But I also said NOT to buy more than one acre of lot nor more than about 3,500 square feet of interior home. . The Mansion section has some houses that comply with those two rules, but most...

WSJ's reporter in charge of bad-mouthing homes as an investment, Nicole Friedman, is having another big celebration of a tiny price movement. Front page line graph showing a steep plummet from the top of the graph to the bottom..Whew! What a horrible investment performance a home has been!.Uh, you need to read the description of what the graph depicts. You should probably write this down to decode it. This is a graph of the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller National Home Price Index showing the first year-over-year price decline in 11 years in April..How much was that decline? Wait for it...2%.Is there...

The “Numbers” column in the Saturday WSJ says basically that 30 million people, mostly young men, have dabbled in crypto and that five to six million bet their life savings on crypto and that this popularity means all the bankruptcies and lawsuits may not mean crypto is heading for oblivion. . Bull! 42% of Americans smoked in 1964. That was about 50 million, mostly men as with crypto. It is now around 12%. Conclusion? Things that are stupid being popular does not mean they are immune to the predictably resulting bankruptcies, prosecutions, regulations, and death rates. . There was a...

A stock broker recently told me his firm could protect me from losses in the stock market. When I immediately asked how, he essentially fled the discussion. .I said it sounds like selling short (buying put options)..I have also said that I take an insurance rather than an investing or gambling approach to finance. My approach to impending high or hyperinflation is to essentially “buy insurance” against it..The investing approach would be to buy gold or TIPS bonds or maybe stocks in companies that do a lot of exporting..The gambling approach would be to hock everything to borrow up to...

When my sons were in elementary school, I thought I need to write a book for them that tells them what I have learned about succeeding in life—in the real world. . When our oldest son Dan hit high school, I got to work on it. That book is called Succeeding, now in its third edition. . Most, maybe all, of the other such books, are nothing but pep rally, rah rah, everyone can achieve any goal to which they set their mind. Success, or lack thereof, all comes from how you think about it and how you think about...