I am in no way superstitious and my position is not any bigger than other positions, but it is being plopped into the same pool as homebuilders and financials and I want my money working in winners. I hope it marks the bottom, sure does not seem that way.

I assume I will be back in full at higher prices, and have kept a quarter position on because I am only selling out of being a wussy and having an opinion.

I don’t gamble and I try to avoid trading based on feel.

I do have some experience so my feel comes from the sour mood developing on Wall Street. Bonuses will likely suck. They should.

Markets climb a wall of worry so the old adage goes, but what about ignorance and panic? I think ignorance and panic lead to the blame game and the blame game is never good for the market. Wall Street works better when the brokers are on offense.

Trust me, they are on defense !

As ‘marketing guru’ Seth Godin aptly points out in this post :

All real estate brokers working today have thrived in an environment in which the price of a house increased on a regular basis for fifty years. Fifty years. Of course, it’s not just home sellers, it’s us, too. Consumers have built their financial lives around this shared belief.

With home prices dropping for the first time in…forever, I am more focused on defense. Unwinding ‘shared belief’ could be ugly. Because this trend has gone on so long, the rookies are going to be absolutely annihalated.

My wife is a bankruptcy attorney…a good one. When I asked her to read this New York Times piece on the mortgage crisis , it reminded her of the RTC and Savings and Loan crisis. Lovely how history has repeated itself in such short order, this time on massive steroids.

We have a major oversupply of housing and development. It will take time. Those with cash and a good eye are going to amass untold new fortunes.

There is definately some leadership in tech and I am staying the course, but I am not looking to get back on margin anytime soon.

Interesting cocktail for sure. September is shaping up to be a wild one.

O.K…that’s a stretch, but a man can dream. Zillow has a soft spot in my heart for pushing my dream closer to reality .

I am reminded of the two idiot brothers Duke and Duke who want the machines truned back on to unwind their losses. I would not put that past Bush and Cheney :) .

I asked the good folk at Zillow to create Zillow 1.0 for nostalgic reasons so people could look back at their prices from 2006. They laughed of course, ROFL to be exact, but there is a model there!

I can’t do it all for them.

PS – Before all the agent hate mail remeber if you are good, this post does not matter. I speak in generalities.

It was the same story for travel agents and stockbrokers and they have become dinosaurs, those remaining offering much different and BETTER services than the old days.

New York Times is finally jumping on the bandwagon. A pretty good article entitled : “The Last Stand of the 6 Percenters”.

The coming drop in home prices will drive a nail in the agent bubble and we have the internet to thank for that.

I need to find a search on Zillow for the homes of California real estate agents. There will be some bargoooons :) in the coming months.

I am long some Ebay, Adobe, Akamai and Apple and Yahoo tech big cap. I own some Rydex healthcare, XLV and Ambien maker SNY. I am not short anything at the moment in my accounts. I am not as happy as Tim to see the summer go :)

Ben Stein is a great financial writer, but maye best known for his signature line: “BUELLER, BUELLER.”

He has a great article in the New York Times that calls out against Management Buyouts and the Private Equity Firms that make it happen . Here are his 5 main reasons:

• Management self-interest
• Breach of fiduciary duty
• Conflicts-of-interest
• Lack of full disclosure
• Insider trading

It is the weekend’s must read and Roger over at Information Arbitrage, a smart hedge fund dude himself, gives a detailed analysis of the wonderful piece himself .

Unless laws change as it relates to MBO’s, look for private quity firms to grow and grow.

A good interview of Paul Graham of YCombinator, a successful VC who agrees with me that we are not in an internet bubble .

About a year late with this information, Barron’s has an article on housing entitled : “R.I.P., housing market?” . The shame is they cover their asses still by adding a question mark. No longer it is only a magazine worth skimming these days.

If you can’t eneter the site – here are the key paragraphs and links:

If you’re trying to buy or sell a home, chances are you’re taking the market’s pulse on a daily basis. For the rest of us, the Housing Bubble Blog (www.thehousingbubbleblog.com) might be a good place to start. Blogmaster Ben Jones posts several times daily, penning lengthy tomes with lots of links to regional and national housing-related stories. On Aug. 24, the day after the Commerce Department announced that existing-home sales were down 4.1% in July, Jones pulled in links to related stories from publications as varied as Fortune, the Reno Gazette-Journal and the Marco Island Sun-Times. These links take you to the full story.

Other housing blogs worth a look include HouseBubble.com (www.housebubble.com), which posts links to key housing stories daily, and Housing Panic — The Bubble Blog with Attitude (housingpanic.blogspot.com), hosted by a “former homeowner” and “expat,” or expatriate. As promised, attitude abounds — about housing, politics, the Middle East and more — along with comments from readers. There’s some intelligent discussion here, but this blog is not for readers easily offended.

You can learn from my market blogroll. Pretty much everything you need. No subscription costs.

It is hard to see a bubble when it is occurring. It is hard to imagine that we had back to back bubbles so close to themselves. Nasdaq – and now the unwinding of the housing bubble. The housing one is a scary one that no one seems to be talking about lately. I am actually shocked. Talk has turned instead to technology stocks. It is likely a big headfake. Just too much real damage and deflation in the industry to ever really make a comeback as a whole.

But I digress. Bill Cara’s very detailed post chronicling his one-year posts from pre-peak to post peak on the housing industry, full with charts and links and comments is a priceless graduate class in market behavior through a bubble cycle .

It is not a 300 page history book filled with boring dribble. it is a good 10 minute read that will walk you through all the thinking and signs and the fall. THAT IS – UP TO TODAY.

The rest is a mystery. Maybe we go back to all-time highs, maybe Armageddon is on it’s way now that interest only loans will be ratcheted up. Who the f@#ck knows. I do know that history suggests that what led the previous cycle will not lead again.

If you were not caught in the hype, you were o.k. If you don’t bottom fish, you may miss out on opportunity at best.

I take the signs as they come. For now, commodities are still trending and certain health care areas are strong.

Today’s assignment is to print out Bill’s post and all the links and remember the blueprint. They all look the same.

He swings for the fences and his positive attitude is o.k. for that style.

Mark is as honest about losses as anyone so it always pains me to have to break the truth to him.

A month or so ago, I posted that he called me all bummed about Apple . He had bought 2,000 shares at $84 and the stock was in the high 50′s. He wanted my advice. I said – read my blog :) Seriously, I remember posting that night that Apple was real close to bottoming based on the Mark Factor and went on to rally 18 points.

I know he punted it, but did not ask him last night. WE WERE TALKING LAND – RAW LAND.

Mark has become a bit of a raw land baron on the west side of Phoenix. So far West, I joke with him that it’s East LA :)

He has been killing it the last 18 months and I could not be happier. Every time we talked I said – “So Mark – take the money off the table and lend it out! What the hell so you know about raw land.

Last night was a different story. We were talking carrying costs and slowdowns and UGH! He is seeing the other side of a true bubble – THE UNWINDING.

Let’s just say that my advice last night was to – HIT THE BID!

I know one thing for sure – HE AIN’T.

I love him.

I am happy to be on the sidelines but do wish I was short.

Here is why this market is tough:

1. Volume is anemic

2. No leadership – I guess Utilities and Consumer Stocks, but these are not super exciting growth areas to get all margin sloppy :)

3. ALL the big moves are to the downside

4. The nervousness is high, but the MEDIA is ignoring the market difficulties.

5. Oil is at record levels, but the stocks act pretty lifeless.

6. The mood for September will be nasty. I know I am not happy to be done with my great summer.

Degraaf at Lehman has some more meat if you want to go DEEP and look at the charts! Click on the link right below.

Lehman1.pdf

Doug Kass has been trading for 1,000 years – mostly from the shortside. He has survived and THRIVED.

I was ear to the TV trying to hear what he had to say and picked this up:

1. Never have Americans been more leveraged to their homes

2. New home starts are down 18 percent, but in the average slowdown, they DROP 51 PERCENT

3. The real estate market will suffer a hard landing that obviously has begun

4. He is short the multiplier stocks related to housing – Like private mortgage lenders and Bed Bath and Beyond

5. Short other retailers

6. Hedge Fund businesses are a short. He is short Bisys

Doug is someone worth listening to for his long-term trend thinking. I have been shorting the Retail Index (RTH) on and off and will be watching for another entry using Puts.

I covered the Real estate market last night so great minds thinks alike :)

Math always matters in the end and the math does not pencil out for owning over renting based on today’s pricing. PERIOD!

As I stare out at the San Diego skyline from Coronado I am amazed and concerned at the amount of troubled high rise deals that I see built and underway. How many $800,000 condos can the world digest. Graduating students and young families can’t afford nor want to live in them, and although the country is aging and the dollar is weak, the supply is just too great. I think we are long past the point of digestion.

My uber smart friend Blair and I are constantly discussing the end of this real estate boom. Although our business is lending, we are amazed at the length and strength of this cycle.

As the “nerds” speculate about the web 2.0 “bubble” (NOT), the true “bubble” that is real estate speculation, has begun the long unwinding phase.

If you take a look at the one-year stock charts of any homebuilder (I randomly chose Meritage Homes and Toll Brothers), you will see the unwinding of this boom in the “leading eyes” of the stock market.

PAY HEED!

A this cycle has lasted longer than most, the “newbie” factor is as high if not higher than the stock market boom of the late 1990′s.

The housing boom and unwinding offers MUCH more danger than the stock market boom as people’s net worths have never been more intertwined with their homes.

I do stand by my long standing opinion that the commercial boom will end with foreigners holding the bag. American bankers are still THE BEST at dishing the CRAP to the foreigners at the top. As the dollar is likely headed to much lower levels in the forseeable future, this boom could last a while longer,but I am focused on the apartment and commercial REITs as the boom unwinds.

As proof that the market occassionally makes sense, compare the charts of the homebuilders I linked to above to those of these commercial and apartment REITS – SLG and EQR .

As you can see, not all real estate stocks have cracked.

RENTING WINS FOR NOW!