Episode 451: Housing Comes Center Stage

I really do not know how today’s Dividend Cafe is going to be received. I obviously believe in every word of what I have typed or I wouldn’t have typed them, yet I have found two things to be the case in my efforts at thought leadership in matters of markets and economics:

(1) People sometimes do not like it when I veer off of a stock market focus, and

(2) People do not like hearing what they do not want to hear

The first one is more problematic when it comes to things like the bond market or public policy or monetary policy or alternative investing – the excitement of the stock market sometimes has to take a backseat to other matters that are absolutely integrally connected to it!

But the second one is what I am worried about today. In over 20 years of professionally stewarding client assets, I have never seen investors be as emotional about any “asset class” as they are about housing. And if all that meant was “people are nostalgic and protective about where they live” – that would be one thing. But that is not what I mean. Opinions about the residential real estate market are, shall we say, sometimes laced with emotion, sometimes perhaps delusion, and often with various presuppositions that are hard for me to make sense of at times.

Housing is back front and center in financial discussions, and all I want to do today in the Dividend Cafe is make sense of it, and give you some wisdom and insights that I believe will be useful in a holistic commentary of the day. So to that end, I work. We’ll still be friends if anything I say bothers you.

Let’s jump into the Dividend Cafe for a special Housing edition …

Links mentioned in this episode: DividendCafe.com TheBahnsenGroup.com