Rob Topping

It can get lonely when you're the only one pounding the table with a STRONG BUY. But successful investing isn't about following the herd. It's about having the conviction to stand apart from it. As Benjamin Graham famously said: “An investment operation is one which, upon thorough analysis, promises safety of principal and a satisfactory return.” Conviction comes from research, not consensus. Happy SWAN investing! (My $SKYH @SeekingAlpha article in the comment section below)

I just voted for JB Pritzker for Governor, and Democrats up and down the ballot. I can’t believe anyone wants to change direction. The truth is, Illinois is doing great. The highest taxes and the lowest state credit rating? That takes dedication to our values! We could have used more of that $170 billion in tax hikes since 2017 to pay down debt. Instead, Illinois led the nation in spending growth during Pritzker's term. That’s investing in people! Why let yesterday’s bills interfere with tomorrow’s promises? JB doubled the state gas tax and made future increases automatic. That’s what I call sustainable funding! Some people still complain about potholes, bridges, and our national ranking not improving, but infrastructure takes time. Fortunately, the tax increases don’t have to wait. We believe corporations should pay their fair share. Unless they’re negotiating an incentive package, like the $536M announced for Gotion, the Chinese battery-making company. In that case, working families should help cover the cost. That’s economic development! Small businesses should try being large enough to negotiate. Thank god the Invest in Kids scholarships expired on his watch. We need to protect public schools from competition! Poor people should just become richer if they want school choice. Protect the teachers' union monopoly at all costs. JB repealed Illinois’ Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act and protected abortion after viability even when her life isn’t threatened. Nine months? In labor? Compassion towards women shouldn’t have a due date, or be conditioned to a health need! Pritzker signed gerrymandered maps. Politicians should pick voters, not the other way around. Protecting our Democratic majorities protects democracy. We can’t advance our agenda if voters keep getting in the way. Some people complain that Illinois lost more than half a million net residents to other states during the Pritzker administration. I call that sharing our prosperity! Other states get experienced workers and taxpayers, and the rest of us get the opportunity to contribute even more. Compassion, investment, and four more years of competent Democratic leadership. The results speak for themselves! I also voted for every tax-hike referendum on the ballot, and you should, too. Illinois needs to maintain our #1 tax burden ranking somehow. And socialist programs come with a price tag. JB should run for President and bring these results to the whole country!💙🗳️

Seven Portland Hotels The Royal Sonesta Portland Downtown sold for $6.83M, ↓94% from its previous sale price of $108.3M in 2016. Hotel Zags sold for $10M, ↓79% from its previous price of $47.5M in 2013. The 455 room Hilton Portland Downtown and the 327 room Hotel Duniway Portland have been REO since 2023. Together appraised at $58.1M, ↓83% from their value of $340.3M in 2019. The Hotel Deluxe reported a new appraisal at $16.0M, 34% of its valuation of $47.2M in 2015. The property has reported negative cash flow for five of the past six years. Hotel Vance in Broadway Tower was taken by the lender last year. Portland Marriott Downtown Waterfront sold for $30.1M ↓64% from its price of $82.8M in 2013. #CommercialRealEstate

God only knows what happens next week after midterms 🤦‍♂️

Coming to the USA in 2028 if not sooner. Don’t blame the voters for doing this. Blame Trump for failing to follow through on the promises he made to voters in 2024.

🚨🇺🇸Federal judge blocks DOJ attempt to throw out THOUSANDS of California votes from alleged non citizens. Clinton-appointed judge, David Carter called it an unprecedented attempt by the federal government to target and intimidate states. "Never before in American history has the federal government, on the eve of an election, sought to coerce a state and local government to abandon their own Constitutional elections procedures and bend to the will of the Executive Branch.” Federal prosecutors filed the lawsuit two weeks before the midterms using unverified lists to target over 20,000 voters. It comes right as the DOJ tries similar moves in Washington and Alaska. Source: Reuters / Writer: Bri

The West froze about $300 billion of Russia's money within days of the 2022 invasion, but it couldn't seize a single bar of the 2,300 tonnes of gold sitting in Russia's own vaults in Moscow. Every central bank on earth watched that happen. So when Jamie Dimon tells a country it was dumb to pull its gold out of New York, he's arguing against the biggest money lesson of the decade. And his argument is the same one that built the largest gold vault in the world. He said that country has three armies within 400 miles, while gold in America is protected by two oceans and the US military. In 1940 that was exactly right. When German troops landed in Norway on April 9, 1940, Norway's central bank started trucking 50 tonnes of gold out of Oslo that same day. It got to Britain by ship, then crossed the Atlantic in batches, split between the New York Fed and Ottawa. Belgium wasn't so lucky. The Belgians handed 198 tonnes to the Banque de France and asked for it to be sent to the United States. France shipped it to Dakar instead, Vichy turned it over to the Reichsbank, and Göring had the bars melted down. That's why the vault under 33 Liberty Street exists. It sits 80 feet down on Manhattan bedrock, and by 1973 it held more than 12,000 tonnes. Every country that put gold down there was betting the worst thing that could happen to it was a tank crossing the border. The vault holds about half that now, roughly 6,000 tonnes worth around $780 billion at today's price. And when you look at how central banks have lost reserves lately, tanks barely show up. Venezuela has been trying to get 31 tonnes out of the Bank of England since 2018. British courts spent years arguing over which Venezuelan government even owned it. Afghanistan had about $7 billion at the New York Fed, some of it gold, when Kabul fell in August 2021. The Fed froze it, and half of it eventually landed in a fund in Switzerland. Add Russia and that's three countries in about four years that lost access to money they'd parked abroad, and not one of them lost it to an army. So the gold is leaving, and the countries taking it aren't the ones you'd guess. France pulled its last 129 tonnes out of New York in January without shipping a single bar. It sold the old bars there, bought fresh ones in Europe, and booked a gain of roughly €12 billion along the way. The Dutch took about 78 tonnes out of New York this year. The share of central banks keeping gold at the New York Fed dropped from 17% to 14% in a single year, according to the World Gold Council. Try Dimon's 400-mile test on Amsterdam. Every army inside that circle belongs to a NATO ally, plus Switzerland. I doubt anyone at the Dutch central bank is losing sleep over the Belgian army. To be fair, he's got a point in the Gulf. Iraq's army walked out of Kuwait's central bank with 3,216 gold bars in 1990, and Kuwait only got them back after a war and a UN-supervised handover. No army is getting across the Atlantic to rob Manhattan, and Dimon's right about that. The scenario reserve managers plan for is a phone call to New York asking for their gold back, where somebody on the other end says no. On that call, the ocean is on the wrong side of you.

On @fox32news tonight I broke down Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s “fair share” budget, and a recent conference on Chicago bankruptcy hosted by @ProfSchleich.

Two out of three men would rather give themselves an electric shock than sit alone with their own thoughts for 15 minutes. That's a real experiment. Psychologists at the University of Virginia ran it back in 2014. They put people in an empty room with no phone and nothing to do but think. The only thing in there was a button that zapped them. Each person had already tried the shock beforehand and said they'd pay money to avoid feeling it again. A quarter of the women pressed it anyway, two thirds of the men did, and one guy hit it 190 times in 15 minutes. So picture this guy. He makes pottery in a tiny Yorkshire village, in a studio with no phone signal. He doesn't listen to podcasts or music, and the radio only comes on once in a while. That's basically the shock experiment, except his version lasts the whole workday. His friend asked what goes through his head all day and he said "well, pots mostly." I'm pretty sure most of us would be hunting for that button before lunch. The same researchers stumbled onto what fixes it. When they gave people boring hands-on stuff to do, people liked that way more than sitting there thinking. Their best guess is that a mind with nothing to work on starts chewing on itself, replaying old arguments and running through everything you're bad at. A couple of Harvard psychologists later measured how often that happens in real life. They pinged 2,250 people through an iPhone app at random times and asked what they were doing and whether their mind was on it. People's minds were somewhere else 46.9% of the time they were awake. Whether their head was actually in what they were doing predicted their mood better than the activity itself, and daydreaming about nice stuff didn't even help. Clay is pretty much built to keep your head in it. You feel what it's doing through your fingers the whole time. Use too much water and a wall slumps on you. Let a pot sit too long and it dries past the point where you can trim it, so the clay ends up setting your schedule for you. Your phone pulls the other way. Gloria Mark at UC Irvine has been timing how long people stay on one screen for about 20 years, and it's dropped from around two and a half minutes in 2004 to 47 seconds. When something knocks you off a task, her data says it takes about 25 minutes on average to get back to it. So "pots mostly" is about as good an answer as the research says a person can give. His head and his hands are on the same thing all day. Two thirds of the men in that lab hit the shock button rather than spend 15 minutes alone with their thoughts, and this guy spends his whole workday in there with nothing but a lump of clay to keep him company.

🚨 ABSOLUTE BLOODBATH IN GLOBAL MARKETS $10 TRILLION has been wiped out from global stock markets from their yearly highs. 🇰🇷 South Korea: -43%, wiped out $1.15T 🇮🇩 Indonesia: -42.39%, wiped out $0.40T 🇹🇷 Turkey: -29%, wiped out $0.12T 🇨🇳 China: -19%, wiped out $2.90T 🇭🇰 Hong Kong: -18%, wiped out $1.10T 🇯🇵 Japan: -15.45%, wiped out $1.20T 🇮🇳 India: -10.84%, wiped out $0.57T 🇺🇸 USA: -2.95%, wiped out $1.99T