Chris Mayer is the Managing Editor of Agora Financial and Editor of the Capital and Crisis publication.
Mayer breaks down the unemployment numbers for us and whether it is actually getting better.He then discusses the benefits of traveling around the world to get an investment story. Given the instability in the emerging markets, Mayer assesses whether this is the beginning of the next global financial storm.
Chris Mayer learned the art of valuing companies the hard way — clocking a decade as a corporate banker while also earning his MBA. He never lost money on a single deal. In 2004, he founded Capital & Crisis, making his one-of-a-kind research available to the general public. His second letter, Mayer’s Special Situations, launched in 2006, expands his coverage and focuses on spinoffs, thrift conversions, stocks from around the world and more.
Chris has been quoted many times by MarketWatch and has been a guest on Forbes on Fox, Fox Business, CNN Radio and Russia Today TV and has made multiple CNBC and radio appearances. He’s also contributed to The Washington Post. Chris travels the world looking for great ideas and insights for his readers.
Chris shared his investing wisdom in two books. His first, Invest Like a Dealmaker: Secrets From a Former Banking Insider, covers time-tested essential principles of investing. World Right Side Up: Investing Across Six Continents takes you on a round-the-world journey from Brazilian farmlands to Dubai’s gold souks, from Chinese shopping malls to South African markets. His big ideas will power your portfolio in the years ahead.
Chris has prepared a SPECIAL video for our listeners. He shares SEVEN incredibly safe stocks that you should buy now. Chris believes these stocks will multiply your wealth 20 times over. Visitwww.GrowYourWealth.info to find out what these companies are.
That’s www.GrowYourWealth.info.
ANNOUNCER: Welcome to Creating Wealth with Jason Hartman! During this program Jason is going to tell you some really exciting things that you probably haven’t thought of before, and a new slant on investing: fresh new approaches to America’s best investment that will enable you to create more wealth and happiness than you ever thought possible. Jason is a genuine, self-made multi-millionaire who not only talks the talk, but walks the walk. He’s been a successful investor for 20 years and currently owns properties in 11 states and 17 cities. This program will help you follow in Jason’s footsteps on the road to financial freedom. You really can do it! And now, here’s your host, Jason Hartman, with the complete solution for real estate investors.
JASON HARTMAN: It’s my pleasure to welcome back Chris Mayer! He’s been on the show before, and you’ve benefitted from some of his great insights. He’s managing editor of Agora Financial, and the editor of the newsletter Capital & Crisis. Chris, welcome. How are you?
CHRIS MAYER: I’m great, thanks for having me on, Jason.
JASON HARTMAN: My pleasure. Are you coming to us from Baltimore today?
CHRIS MAYER: I’m actually in my home office in Gaithersburg, Maryland, which is about 20 miles northwest of Washington, D.C.
JASON HARTMAN: Uh huh, good stuff. So you’re enjoying all of this global warming this winter, huh?
CHRIS MAYER: That’s right, we’ve got snow on the ground right now.
JASON HARTMAN: I’m of course being completely sarcastic when I say that. So, good. Well, let’s maybe jump in first, and I want to ask you, Chris, a little bit about unemployment. The book How to Lie with Statistics was probably invented after watching the government. And the way people are just totally misled by these numbers. What are your thoughts?
CHRIS MAYER: Well, the unemployment rate is a great illustration of that. You know, the official numbers now show unemployment going below 7%, 6½, or whatever it is. But if you look into those numbers a little bit, a couple things jump out at you. Really, the big change is the drop in the labor force participation rate. Which just means that there are a number of people who are willing and able to work, but have just stopped looking, and dropped out of the statistics. So, that labor force participation rate was, just to give you some numbers, it was around 66% in 2007, and now it’s fallen to just under 63%. And it’s showing you—maybe that doesn’t sound like such a big difference, but we’re back to where we were in 1978.
JASON HARTMAN: Well, so we basically have the Carter administration all over again.
CHRIS MAYER: We’re back to where before women got a vote in the workforce. If you do the math, the true unemployment rate is probably somewhere around 11 or 12%, if you assume a more normal labor force participation rate. So, yeah. This is a case where the official number is that the unemployment situation’s getting better, but the reality of it is much, much different.
JASON HARTMAN: But how do we account for the things—I mean, look it. In 1978—maybe I’ll take the government’s side of things here for a moment. In 1978, we didn’t have this sort of independent contractor mentality. Nowadays, I mean, it’s just—it’s like a free agent country that we live in, and there’s all kinds of great websites that are just enabling this more and more. Of course employers like it, because they don’t have to contend with ObamaCare, and lots of regulation, OSHA, etcetera, etcetera. So it’s fantastic for employers. Employees, or I should say contractors, like it, because they have more freedom and control over their lives. So, it can be a real win-win deal. But then you add to it the fact that we’ve got all these websites nowadays like Uber, of course, and Lyft. These are the companies that are really changing the whole taxi industry, and giving that a real run for its money. You know, it’s like, TaskRabbit, where people can do odd jobs. And there’s just all sorts of things. There’s so many of them, I can’t even think of them all right now. But you know what I’m talking about, right? So, how do these people show up in the labor participation rate? Do they show as unemployed?
CHRIS MAYER: No, those people would show as working. The employment figures break up into full time and part time workers, and those also include contractors and self-employed. So, I think that’s accounted for. I know what you’re saying about differences between now and say ’78, and I do believe in what you might call 57 flavors of capitalism. I mean, the markets do change, and the capitalism we have now is different than it was in the 70s, different than it was in the 50s, when you had much stronger labor unions, for example. So, all those things change, a lot. But I think—yeah, there’s probably 20 million people who, for whatever reason, are willing to work and can’t find work, and I think that that speaks to some sort of broader, macro problem somewhere.
JASON HARTMAN: I most definitely agree with you. And the other thing about it is, and I would venture to guess, but again, I just don’t know—and some of the other sites, of course, are Elance, Fiverr, things like that as well. But, I mean, it’s really more about like how much are these people earning, you know? A lot of these independent people doing these odd jobs, they’re really not making any money.
CHRIS MAYER: Well, that’s true too. When people—you break down what people are making, and even the jobs that we’re creating now, when you break it out into higher paying jobs and lower paying jobs, I mean, clearly the growth is on the lower end. And that’s the other tricky thing about these numbers, is that even the numbers that I’m using when I talk about the labor force participation rate, they also lie, to a certain extent. Because there’s no qual—the point you’re making—there’s no qualitative accounting between differences of jobs—working at a very low paying job versus one that’s a much higher paying job with benefits. And the other thing they don’t take into account is that it’s harder to figure out, as we have a lot of people who are in prison, right, who are incarcerated. We have people who go to school. And these people also don’t count in the labor force statistics. So, we know when times are tough people go back to school, and again, that would mean—
JASON HARTMAN: They kind of hide in the womb of college, right?
CHRIS MAYER: Yes.
JASON HARTMAN: They want to make sure they can accumulate enough ridiculous student loan debt.
CHRIS MAYER: Yeah, that’s another bubble that’s—
JASON HARTMAN: Yeah, talk about a disaster. That’s just such a scam. I mean, these colleges are so overpriced nowadays. And the government did it. The government caused this. Basically by government-insured student loans, they made a lot of money available in the marketplace, and of course the most obvious and simply definition of what creates inflation: a big supply of dollars chasing a limited supply of goods and services. And so, you look at college inflation vastly outpacing both stated official inflation, in terms of the CPI, and real inflation, even.
CHRIS MAYER: Yeah, that’s 100% right. It’s like housing all over again. It’s the same way they engineered the housing bubble.
JASON HARTMAN: With Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Yeah.
CHRIS MAYER: Sure. Sure.
JASON HARTMAN: Yeah, it really is. This is what people just don’t understand, especially people on the left, is that this is just—all these programs are just another way for the government to pick winners and losers. I mean, think about it. They enrich a whole bunch of mortgage brokers, people that are in the student loan business, collections agencies, university professors, student housing people—
CHRIS MAYER: The textbook companies—
JASON HARTMAN: Oh, textbooks, oh my God. What a scam.
CHRIS MAYER: It’s like $250 to buy textbooks. I was amazed!
JASON HARTMAN: Yeah, and they’re not published on Kindle. I mean, for all these leftist college professors who are concerned about the environment, and teaching things like sustainability, you would think they would be into digital publishing, right?
CHRIS MAYER: Yeah, right.
JASON HARTMAN: Unbelievable. They’d rather cut down the trees. It’s such hypocrisy, it’s ridiculous. But, one of the other parts of it is, just in the standard labor market, you know, how do we account for the person with a college degree that’s working at Starbucks or waiting tables? I mean, they’re dramatically underemployed, aren’t they?
CHRIS MAYER: That’s right. That’s the magic work: the underemployment number, which is people working in jobs that are substantially beneath their skill level. And it’s very difficult to measure that. I don’t know. But I suspect there’s quite a bit of underemployment.
JASON HARTMAN: I would totally agree with you. And one of the things this says, is that it says our semi-socialist system that we have now does a very poor job of allocating resources. And I’ll give you a great example of that. You know, I mentioned Uber a few minutes ago. And I don’t know if you use Uber yourself. I think it’s a fantastic service, and I love it. And I got in a car, took a ride, and struck up a conversation with the driver, and he’s—you know, I said, do you do this full time? What do you do? What’s your story? I always like to know this stuff. And he says oh no, I’m an industrial engineer, I just can’t find a job. You know, I talked to another Uber driver who was—he was in investment banking for a very short time before the financial crisis hit. He worked in New York. And now he’s driving a car. Not a good highest and best use of people’s talents, right?
CHRIS MAYER: No. No. Those are tough problems to solve. The other thing is that you don’t hear people talk about is just the difficulty in starting a new business. And there’s been lots of stories about that, and some of them are ridiculous, but they kind of illustrate the point. And I remember reading one story about the girl who got hassled running a lemonade stand somewhere. You know? So—but it is true that for small businesses, the increased regulations make it very expensive to hire people, and that can’t help.
JASON HARTMAN: Right, right. And that’s another thing. The more regulation you have, the more you force the corporatocracy on people, and the more you limit entrepreneurship, because you know, only the big players can afford to comply, right?
CHRIS MAYER: Yeah. In some ways I wonder if the government likes it, wouldn’t prefer to have it that way. Because when you’re part of a big company, you’re easier to keep track of, easier to count, and all that kind of thing.
JASON HARTMAN: Fewer things to keep track of. I mean, look at this. If they reduced the number of banks, which they seem to be doing a relatively good job at, given the whole crisis, and the way it’s played out, there’s more of the economy just comes under the government’s control. You regulate fewer parties, it’s easier to do, easier to keep track of them. You’re certainly right about that. Yeah, I would agree with you. But you know, on the good side, Chris, I mean, in many ways, it’s a lot easier and less expensive to start a business today. And I’m talking about technology and software, software as a service, based in the Cloud. A lot of that stuff has just gotten incredibly cheap. I’ll give you my own example. Years ago—well, not that many years ago. Maybe four years ago. My company—we had a very expensive Microsoft exchange server, and a lot of maintenance fees go into maintaining it so that everybody can have email accounts and shared calendars, and now, you can just use Google Docs, and it’s free!
CHRIS MAYER: Well, my own story is similar. I remember 10 years ago when I started Capital & Crisis; I started it with basically $300 to get a website up and running so I could take people’s orders, and things like that. And you know, that was all I had to do, and I was off and running. And that was the best $300 I ever spent. Incidentally, I wasn’t trying to hire 10 people either, which is part of the distinction we’re talking unemployment.
JASON HARTMAN: Right, right. So, the incentive now is to just use technology, not hire anybody. And if you do hire anybody, have them as a contractor, because the government makes it too hard to have them as an employee. It’s really amazing. It’s really amazing. Tell us what you’re up to nowadays. You’re going to Ireland soon, to check out a company, right?
CHRIS MAYER: Yep. I’ve been following a company called Kennedy Wilson for a couple of years. I recommended it to my readers when it was around 10 bucks. It’s about 25 now. But they’re a big property manager, basically now, and they were early investors in Ireland in 2010 when they were still coming out of their crisis. I mean, the Irish property market really got whacked, and from the peak in 2007 to the bottom in 2008, 2009, property prices across the board fell 60, 65%, and rents suffered a similar collapse. And so I’m going over there—they’ve bought probably a billion and a half worth of property over the last couple years, and I’m gonna get a property tour there, and there’s a lot of other opportunities too.
There’s a couple of listen REITs, real estate investment trusts, that have come on in Ireland. Ireland just recently approved legislation allowing for the creation of REITs, and those are popular vehicles with investors because they’re shielded from corporate taxes and pay out 90% of their earnings as dividends. So, the Irish market’s starting to turn. I think, for example, I was just reading today how the office market is up 20%. Prices last year in rents were up 27%, and those were off very low bases. The most interesting thing about Ireland that I like to tell people is that it’s become a very international market. If you go to Dublin, it’s kind of on the doorstep there of Continental Europe, and there’s a lot of corporate buyers who are willing to set up their regional headquarters in Dublin. Google was one of the first to buy; in early 2011, they put their European headquarters in Dublin. And there’s several hundred companies that have their headquarters there now. So, I’ll know a lot more when I get back, but that’s one of the areas I’m looking at now.
JASON HARTMAN: So, what type of properties are they buying? I mean, they’re still in the acquisition phase, right? Or are they more in the management phase?
CHRIS MAYER: They’ve bought a lot of apartments, and then there’s also office. And there’s different REITs to do different things. So, one of the REITs is buying residential, and I’m always—I’m skeptical about the residential in a public entity like that—
JASON HARTMAN: Tell us why. That’s very interesting you said that, because I got my own opinions on this. But as we’ve seen, and you’re talking about the United States now? Or Ireland?
CHRIS MAYER: Well, in the United States I was skeptical, but I’m gonna carry over that skepticism to Ireland. Maybe it’s different there.
JASON HARTMAN: Right.
CHRIS MAYER: But the basic model—I know there was a handful of REITs that became public in the US that invested in residential housing, and a lot of people liked that idea, because they thought US housing was cheap. But it’s not really a good model to run in that kind of format, because it’s very labor-intensive, and it’s not something that scales easily. It’s one thing if you’re a REIT and you buy a dozen apartments where you’ve got thousands and thousands of units, and you’re able to scale up and leverage that. But I don’t think that’s gonna be the case in residential housing. So you’re talking about portfolios that have tens of thousands of homes, scattered across many states—I mean, I cannot imagine how that can be efficiently managed.
JASON HARTMAN: It can’t.
CHRIS MAYER: The REITs also have their costs for running these things really low. I mean, you’re an experienced real estate person, so you would laugh at what they have in there as their numbers for turning around a house so they can lease it. In some case I’ve seen figured as low as $500 a house. There’s just no way.
JASON HARTMAN: Oh my God. Not even close. So they’re—so, shareholders invested with these REITs on the basis of them thinking they could spend $500 a house to rehab it?
CHRIS MAYER: Absolutely. Some of them, absolutely, that’s the case. And you know, really, when you look at the returns these REITs will make, it’s just—I just don’t think it works. It’s not attractive. And then also, there’s a lot of fees. You think about, when you’re running a public company, you have to pay for a CEO, a CFO, you’ve got auditors, you’ve got lawyers, you’ve gotta get corporate headquarters somewhere. These people have to be paid, they’re not cheap, and it’s just not really efficient.
JASON HARTMAN: Yeah. I couldn’t agree with you more. And you know, Chris, one of the things I believe in is very similar to one of your books. You’ve got a few books now I believe, right? But one of them I love is, Invest Like A Dealmaker. And the philosophy—pardon me if I just ruin this. Just interrupt me anytime. But it seems to me the philosophy is, look at the intrinsic value of something, right? And invest—and there are other parts of it. But that’s one of the parts I really like.
CHRIS MAYER: Yeah, and the other key part of it is, always invest with owners. That’s one thing I always emphasize.
JASON HARTMAN: Right, yeah. With people who have skin in the game.
CHRIS MAYER: Absolutely. Because, you know, stocks are not designed necessarily for you to make money. So, if you invest in a vehicle that a guy runs it owns 20% of it and he put a lot of his own money into it, well, then you might have something interesting there.
JASON HARTMAN: Stocks are designed for the promoters to make money. For the vast Wall Street conspiracy to make money.
CHRIS MAYER: A lot of people make a lot of money in common stocks, and not necessarily the common stockholder. So….
JASON HARTMAN: Yeah, right.
CHRIS MAYER: You have to be careful, but I think they can be wonderful investments, and I mean, I’ve been doing this investing my own money in stocks for 20 years, and I’ve run this newsletter for 10, and done very well. You just have to know what you’re looking for. You have to be very sensible about it. You have to do the old Ben Graham Warren Buffet style.
JASON HARTMAN: Value investing, yeah.
CHRIS MAYER: As if you’re owning a piece of a business.
JASON HARTMAN: Right. And that is a great point. So, what you were saying—I predicted long before these institutional players got into our market, I predicted that they wouldn’t like it, that they would pull out, and now we’re seeing some signs of that. I don’t think the cycle’s complete yet. But, the reason is, is like, we help people do direct investment, where they buy properties and they own them and they have managers, but they gotta manage the managers. So, it requires some attention, you know. One of my philosophies is that there’s really no such thing as a passive investment. At least not one that works. Because you always have to pay attention. You always have to be educated. If you are a stock guy, you gotta be reading this stuff, you’ve gotta be subscribing to the newsletters, you’ve gotta be getting involved and staying engaged and following this stuff. And so, one of the things I say to our real estate investors is, embrace the fragmentation. One of the things that keeps the big institutional investors out of the residential—the smaller residential side of the business—is that, you know, it’s so fragmented. They’ve gotta work with so many different parties, and you start to cross state lines in different cities—it’s just a very dysfunctional, fragmented industry. Which is good and bad. It’s terrible for institutional investors, but it’s great for the small investor who wants to buy 20 properties. I mean, that’s an awesome retirement game for them, because they can handle the fragmentation.
CHRIS MAYER: I agree 100%. And it’s like we were talking about before off the air, about how it’s intensely local. That’s the other thing. You know your markets. So, you have a tremendous advantage when these outside international companies come and they’re relying entirely on third parties and they really don’t have any feel for the neighborhood, or the directions different areas are going, and you have that image.
JASON HARTMAN: Oh, and I will speak to that too. We have some private equity groups and some hedge funds that will buy properties through us, and basically what they’ll do is they’ll have a rep that’ll cover four, five states—yes, I did say that. Four or five states—and that rep’ll say to our investment counselor, just provide me a list of 20 or 30 properties, and I’m gonna go down that list in Excel format. Here are the headers, here’s what you need to put in, and they’ll just buy them. And frankly, Chris, they overpay. I mean, I’ll be the first to tell you, they’re just not that picky. They don’t really—it’s not their money; why should they care?
CHRIS MAYER: Well, I’m just gonna say that, a lot of these guys, they have a big pile of institutional money they have to put to work, and they’re not gonna be particularly careful about each property the way you or I would if we were buyers. So…and most cases you’re right, and it also isn’t their money. They’re managers. They get a fee for the assets they manage, and they don’t have their own skin in the game in that particular investment.
JASON HARTMAN: Yeah, it’s just a whole different deal. So, they’ve gotta do big scale stuff. Office buildings—insurance companies for many, many years have always liked office buildings, and big things like that. And the yields are much lower, but it’s just more manageable, when you can manage a one million square foot portfolio versus you know, a bunch of thousand square foot single family homes. That’s just an unwieldy thing to do, right?
CHRIS MAYER: And the other thing is, they should do that. Because then their size also allows them to finance those things at usually very, very favorable rates. So it works both ways, you know. It’s—every investor has almost their own little ecosystem they should stick to, and when they’re up in their world with those big office towers and multi-billion dollar deals, it can be very economic.
JASON HARTMAN: Yeah, right. Definitely. Well, tell us what your thoughts are about emerging markets, and where we’re going. Are we just in a calm part? I’ve long called this a fake recovery. I don’t think this is a real recovery. But that has implications that are not all bad, though. There are opportunities, you know, always.
CHRIS MAYER: Well, I mean, emerging markets are one of those things that’s like talking about housing. It’s so different. The markets are so different. When people talk casually about emerging markets, they’re lumping together a lot of very unlike things: Brazil, and Turkey, and China, and so on. But yeah, I still think—I think there are some opportunities. I think emerging markets are generally—you have to be very, very careful, especially now, because I think the emerging markets as a group, all of them are under pressure, because there are fewer dollars going out abroad than there were, and they depend on US dollars as a reserve currency. And in many cases they’ve borrowed heavily against it. And so as we have periodic problems like Turkey, where they have dollar denominated debts—they don’t print dollars, and so it becomes a problem, and their currency is crashing. We’ve had a whole bunch of different emerging market currencies tank. But you know, there’s still interesting opportunities. I’ve talked more recently about Vietnam, Mongolia is a really interesting economy. So, you do have to kind of pick your spots. And I’ve traveled to all these places, and that’s one of the other things I do—I’ve probably been to more than 30 countries over the last, I don’t know, decade since I’ve been writing this letter. And many times I’ve been back two or three times or more.
JASON HARTMAN: So when you go to these countries, tell us how your trip goes there. When you land, you get off the plane, you probably check into your hotel, and then you probably have to take a nap, because that’s what I have to do when I travel overseas. A very deep one for about two hours. And then I wake up and start to adjust to the time. And then, are you—you’re going to their office, and talking to the board? What are you doing?
CHRIS MAYER: Well, normally I do a lot of prep work ahead of time. So—and I’ll certainly have at least one contact there that I know well who will help me get meetings, and will, you know, help give me some good kind of guidance on the ground as to where to go, what to see, and help me get those meetings. But yeah, a typical one would be, I meet with at least a—I like to meet with a good mix of people. So I like to meet with some investors who are there. Either fund managers or private investors. Then I’ll meet with—I usually like to meet with the large banks, a broker, and then there will usually be some companies that I like to see. And then there’s other times where I also want to leave plenty of time to just wander myself. So I’ll go through certain markets and just visit, see how things look and feel, and those kind of trips can be great, and they give me just a ton, a real wealth of information. And then I might not recommend anything initially on a trip, but I have that databank now, you know, and I have those contacts. And so, I’m ready, and I have some knowledge when opportunity does come along to go ahead and pick something out.
JASON HARTMAN: I think that’s great, and I think it’s great that you make the point, Chris, that you leave some time for just wandering around and getting sort of a sense. And I gotta tell you, that’s so important, to just have some unstructured time, so you can get a sense for the place, and talk to some people that aren’t affiliated with anything. Because I would assume when you come out and you visit these companies—I mean, they’re really putting the dog and pony show on for you, right? You’re a guy that could recommend their stock, and bring them a lot of investors, and you’re kind of like a member of the media. When the media walks in, you want to make a favorable impression so they’re gonna say good things about you, right?
CHRIS MAYER: That’s right. I would say much of the time it’s that way. Sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes in these markets they just don’t really—they don’t really entirely get it, and they’re not—I mean, I’ve been to plenty of companies in some of the emerging markets where they don’t really have an investor relations person, and they don’t have that function. They don’t think about it that way. They don’t pitch their companies in the same way that we think of. And so, those an be enlightening meetings, the things they’ll say and tell you.
JASON HARTMAN: You mean, they’ll say dumb unguarded things?
CHRIS MAYER: They’ll say unguarded things, right. And they’ll say things that will make your skin crawl.
JASON HARTMAN: Like, give us an example, if you would.
CHRIS MAYER: Well, I remember being with one company, and they were telling me about how they monitor their drivers, the trucks they have going delivering goods from one place to another, because they would often stop and siphon off gasoline, and then they would tell me stories about how they had to fire this guy because he was letting his cousin use the truck. So, it suddenly becomes a situation where you just sense that they really don’t have very good controls about what’s going on. And it would be a very difficult situation to invest in.
JASON HARTMAN: Yeah, that’s for sure. What are your thoughts about the global financial system? I mean, we talked about how it’s all local. We talked about all that stuff. I’m just kind of wondering what’s next. Everybody is. Are we on this road to slow recovery, or is the other shoe about to drop?
CHRIS MAYER: Yeah, well, that’s really the big question. Everybody wants to know, what’s the next thing, right? Because when—you know, I can recall in the late 90s it was clear there was a tech bubble going on, and there was an easy thing to identify and sidestep. And even in 2007, a lot of us knew—I certainly knew, and wrote about—the housing bubble that was going on. And we were avoiding banks, and avoiding homebuilders, and staying away from a lot of property. So, what is it this time? And there really isn’t a good answer. I mean, I think that what it may be is just to say that credit is cheap, and so, it makes everything seem about—it sets everything in boom mode, really. And so that makes it really difficult. I think that the, at least speaking from the stock market side, that the stock market is frothy. It’s—there’s a definite cheerful consensus. I just know from myself from finding bargains, it’s been very, very difficult this year, and even last year it was really hard to find good bargains. And that usually tells me that we’re near some sort of peak.
JASON HARTMAN: Yeah. And it’s the old thing, you know, invest when everybody’s fearful, and sell when everybody’s optimistic.
CHRIS MAYER: Yeah. There’s not much fear out there right now, I’ll tell you that.
JASON HARTMAN: Do the opposite of the crowd. That’s a good idea. Chris, give out your website. Tell people where they can find out more about you. Is it the grow your wealth one?
CHRIS MAYER: Yeah. www.growyourwealth.info. That talks about what I call the coffee can portfolio, which comes from an old article in the Journal of Portfolio Management from 1984, written by Bob Kirby, and he had this idea about long term investing, which I go into, and it’s very fascinating, it’s an easy thing to implement. And you know, you can find all kinds of things. I write for the Daily Reckoning, I’m a columnist there, and that’s free. You can check out www.dailyreckoning.com as well.
JASON HARTMAN: Fantastic newsletter, by the way. And I love it. Yours, Capital & Crisis, and Daily Reckoning are both fantastic. Anyway, good! Chris Mayer, keep up the good work, and the website is www.growyourwealth.info, www.growyourwealth.info, just want to point out that’s a .info, not a .com, so, www.growyourwealth.info, and Chris Mayer, thank you so much for joining us today!
CHRIS MAYER: Sure, Jason. Thanks for having me on. It was fun.
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ANNOUNCER: What’s great about the shows you’ll find on www.jasonhartman.com is that if you want to learn more about investing in real estate in different markets, there’s a show for that! If you want to learn 17 ways rich people think and act differently, there’s a show for that! If you want to know how to get paid to borrow, there’s a show for that! And if you’d like to know why Amsterdam doesn’t take dollars, or why pools are for fools, there are even shows for that. Yep! There’s a show for just about anything. Only from www.jasonhartman.com. Or type in Jason Hartman in the iTunes store!
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ANNOUNCER: This show is produced by the Hartman Media Company. All rights reserved. For distribution or publication rights and media interviews, please visit www.HartmanMedia.com, or email [email protected]. Nothing on this show should be considered specific personal or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate, or business professional for any individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own, and the host is acting on behalf of Empowered Investor, LLC. exclusively.
Transcribed by David
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