Costa Rica, 2025
Lana Del Raye’s Turn the Light On has been a favorite song of my mine for nearly a year - long enough that you start to fear the shine is rubbing off the pronounced affect each listen provokes; the song slides by a little quicker, a little more unnoticed; subtle at first and then obvious. Always a sad turn of the cards.
I’m reading All the Pretty Horses, having just finished a book I really enjoyed that I can't recall at the moment. Audiobooking a Michael Lewis book on the crash of 1929, as he and many others try to establish, or at least warn against, the parallels and similarities of the boom we are experiencing now with those of studied history. For while the past doesn’t always repeat itself, there are similarities many times. Artificial intelligence is big and life changing for sure, but so were railroads, airplanes, telephones, radios, cars, televisions, indoor plumbing, the computer, internet/broadband, cell phones and hundreds of other examples - most if not all of the abovebeforementioned were viewed as so society-changing with a potential consumer market so large as to accommodate any level of investment or speculation.
Turns out history teaches us a simple fact - that two opposed things can be true at the exact same time - that the consumer market was large enough to accommodate generations of growth in the respective industries, and at the very time produce cycles of creative destruction, a pruning of the winners, a liquidation of the losers, retrenching and then growing again.
The retrenchment is painful because the bull markets and go go times last longer than they should and investors get greedy, abandon diversification, chase gains, and sometimes borrow to amplify gains. Even conservative investors can capitulate to the FOMO and reduce their strategic diversification and chase the hefty gains everyone else seems to be booking.
New barn house in SuCo in private lake community, for sale.
4000+ 4/5 bedroom barn house for sale in Kerhonkson on 30 acres.
Installed a modular pool in Narrowsburg from our company Catskill Modular Pools.
Then bam, the music stops, the musical chairs are quickly filled, the Titanic lifeboats are loaded up in a frenzied and inefficient fashion, and panic sets in then you really have a circus as people who know they’ve pushed the limits of their risk tolerance sell into the down market, accelerating it, and then it feeds into self in a vicious cycle.
That’s when it’s good to have cash on hand.
The stories that will be written about this crash and correction when it happens have been heavily foreshadowed - the big ETF’s which were supposed be a model of diversification became very top heavy with the big tech stocks to boost returns; that the market gains for the last few years were easily seen as deriving from only a few of the many stocks in the market with the rest of the market lackluster or worse.
The thing that will suck is that a lot of the people that will be hurt by a 3-5 year correction are the boomers who kept their 401k’s a little too aggressively for a little too long and now living off a sizable nest egg reduced by gyrations of the market.
Thanksgiving family gathering.
I really don’t know why I care, I just find it interesting. I can write intelligently about the market psychology like I have above because I can self-examine my own inclinations and have done enough reading about it, past and present, to put it into context. But big picture stock market risk, my over-all portfolio, even if the whole thing was disproportionately and overweighted in Technology, still leaves 60% in other things, mostly real estate.
Broadly diversified, mostly pretty liquid real estate. Some homes, some rentals, some land, some income producing, some spec homes, in multiple states, multiple markets, 15-25 real estate investments with a lot of disconnectedness among them, so there would be little contagion in a downturn. And the relationships to keep the whole thing steered well. An income coming in from business, rents and mortgages held.
I’m becoming pretty bullet-proof, which for someone who hung out on a shaky tree branch for the better part of 2 decades, that’s an interesting feeling, and even after it sort of became clear that’s where I was heading, it takes the brain a few more years to overcome the dopamine and stress that feeds the appetite of the day, and then at some point each individual who did spend decades gambling gets to decide individually if they would like to wean themselves off that mainline fix, or live in that zone of perpetual stress and anxiety that can fill lots of hours in a day in a productive and consequential fashion.
But for me, individually, I’m not looking for a ‘performative retirement’ or 3rd Chapter - I’m looking to be able to sit still, both body and mind, and let life and its ups and down pass through me as a river flows. Any activity can be approached with a need to instill it with an edge, or a rounded smooth pure vida playbook.
Speaking of Pura Vida, I’m on my way to Costa Rica, Guanacaste Region, with my wingman Eli, Lucas and two of his friends. This is my 3rd or 4th trip down and I already wish I planned more time for it.
New Ranch house in Narrowsburg NY, for sale.
It’s funny this life I’m living with these leisure expenses - as someone who has watched business and personal expenses closely for a long time, for a real reason of survival - a nag of scarcity tags every dollar I spend, every day. The feeling may linger, may pass quickly, may be hardly notable, or may be pronounced, but it’s there. I’m not the guy who doesn’t feel the sting of spending, even if I stopped really noticing how much things cost awhile ago - on a personal front, business-wise I spend intelligently and never look back at amounts that dwarf anything I'm doing personally. That’s a transition too - from scarcity spending mindset to enjoying the freedom of responsible spend-thriftiness. You hear a lot about that from retirement / financial advisors- how a life time of savings makes the twenty years of spending without income in retirement a tough mental pivot. I can see that.
Mi casa en Milford.
The amount of strategic thought, and then execution/implementation my Catskill Farms teams has undertaken over the last 3 months has been extreme, and spread out across the new talent I have both in the office and in the field. From scouting land, to making deals on that land, to the contracts and due diligence (surveys, septics, etc…), to house/land pairing, to building permits to foundations and frames and land clearing and driveways - across 3 or 4 counties. Feels good to be killing it again, at this level, with this type of precision - both client-based and construction- based. You can have all the hard-earned experience you want, but you can't even begin to leverage that well without a good team with talent and potential and attitude.
And potential is important to me because no matter how good you are at Catskill Farms, I got something new for you to learn when you begin to understand your current tasks at hand. No one literally has ever left my employ with real progress in their skill set and marketplace attractiveness.
One night in this tree house not far from playa del coco.
Stopped by to help a client Bill test out his fireplace since he was having a big dinner party and it never been fired up before - they live mostly in Southern CA. It was a masonry fireplace from top to bottom, as opposed to an 'insert'. Old school process and craftsmanship. Thing drafted and burned amazing.
