Reggie Middleton's  Instablog

When I first came out with the PPD research (which I released for free as a public service, may I add), many were doubtful as the market was literally manipulated upward. I feel by blog's patrons were confusing the alleged "scam's" fundamental viability over time (and ability to avoid regulatory discipline) with the overall movement of the market. As you can see below, things are not going well for this company. If one had faith in the research and rolled puts and protected shorts over, one should start seeing some decent gains. If I am right and this market is simply in a bubblicious bear market rally, any aggressive action by the SEC will drive this beta driven stock into the ground, making what you see today and last month look like an actual rally. Hey, it couldn't have happened to a better company.

Prepaid Legal press release:

Last Saturday I posted some thoughts on investing, NY real estate, and my macro outlook -  Boo!!! Will Halloween Scare the Market into Respecting the Fundamentals?, and I will continue that rant today since it leads into my most recent endeavors  - gathering shorts and puts in the commercial REIT space again. These positions were very lucrative in 2008 and the first quarter of 2009. Be aware that they are like private equity investments and take time to develop. My first bear positions were in 2007 (residential homebuilders and mall owners). It took about a year and a half to come to fruition, but threw off a blended return of about 400% - Mostly from GGP going bankrupt after I loaded up with puts and shorts at around $60. Well worth the wait in my opinion. Examples of the research that powered this and other related gains are available at the end of this article for those of you who are not familiar with my work.

I received this message the other day through the messaging system in my site:

I just received this email and thought my readers may find this of interest.  DDR is the company that was featured in the "bailout" post (Here's a Big Company Bailout by the Taxpayer That Even the Taxpayer's Missed!), a must read if you haven't done so already:

It's bound to happen if regulators don't stop playing hide the sausage and don't start forcing banks to take their medicine. First, a quick recap of the nonsense currently taking place. This post is designed to convince banks that they are considerably better off taking their medicine now than going on with the government endorsed plan of pretending your not sick and risking major surgery, plus chemo and radiation just a year or two later. My next post will be a selection of REITs that didn't make my shortlist, followed by a new REIT report for subscribers that will explicitly show property values of each and every property in said REITs portfolio (and potentially the lender or CMBS/mortgagee pool collateralized by said properties - that's right, someone may be called out).

Thus, the first of the two reports for subscribers will probably be pushed off until next week. We had a problem sourcing market rents for some of the properties in the REIT's portfolios and I prefer to use actual numbers in lieu of assumptions so it took a little longer to populate the models as well.

I will discuss the rejects from the short list today, though. One aspect of crystallizing the thesis is dealing with the obvious manipulation that is occurring in the REIT space (see Here's a Big Company Bailout by the Taxpayer That Even the Taxpayer's Missed!) as well as government complicity in the purposeful opacity of the values of the mortgage assets (see the FDIC "Prudent Commercial Real Estate Loan Workouts" guidance issued Oct 30th, as reported by the WSJ: Banks Hasten to Adopt New Loan Rules and the new FDIC guidance that states performing loans "made to creditworthy borrowers" will not require write downs "solely because the value of the underlying collateral declined").

There is also the issue (as the previous link illustrates) of the sell side apparently hell bent on pumping this sector, which very well may succeed in further separating price from value, and fiction from fact. See Is Goldman Preparing To Upgrade The REIT Sector? It is quite possible that I may issue a direct challenge of research and opinion, comparing my work and thesis directly against the titans of Wall Street, eg. the (overly) esteemed Goldman Sachs. I will need very high volume (new) media outlets to counter their reach, but I believe I may be able to accomplish that. Stay tuned, this may very well get interesting!