Hello everyone and hope you all had a wonderful Christmas.

Spent our time with family, friends, a little bit of gazelle action, but that’s a-ok.

Time to fire up the diesels for 2025.

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Personal Finance

Turn of the year brings about the ol’ new years resolutions.

My go-to’s, in no particular order:

1. read more, exercise more, eat healthy

2. do fun things with family, close and far

3. get golf handicap down to single digit

4. learn how to hit a proper drop shot on the squash court

5. be the best dad for Juila Sofia and husband for Mj

6. quit a couple vices that have plagued me for years

7. acquire 1-2 commercial real estate investment properties

8. continue growing family investment corporation

9. double newsletter subscribers from 900 to 2,000

10. double social following from 5,000 to 10,000

11. earn more, spend less, invest the difference

12. be fucking lion, not a gazelle (ok, gazelle sometimes 😊)

And if any of you want a simple investing checklist so you can get off to a rocking start, download my guide here (or click image below).

🎁 Get $25 when you open a Wealthsimple account. Use my referral code: PRGS3Q

Stock Markets

Pro tip for 2025 investors: Be prepared to stay the course during a market crash.

Stock market up 20-30% in one year feels great.

But we’ve had some turbulent days and weeks.

Remember August? When the stock market fell the most in 1 day since COVID 19?

Or a couple weeks ago when J Powell indicated interest rate cuts may start slowing which tore the head off the Stock Market (and Bitcoin)?

Wonder, too, about the fact that valuations are historically very high (buffet indicator, price to earnings ratio, etc) and forward returns may “look” bleak? Meanwhile, 2025 analyst consensus targets for SP500 are +10%—how do those square up? Is there going to be another stellar year? Or finally a crash to write about?

All I know is as day follows night, the world is going to print bad news and fear will be placed in your eyes.

If people are not prepared to stay the course during a market correction, be it short or of long duration, then they shouldn’t be investing at all. Likely they are in a glass case of emotion because they are spending more than they earn, they have a big fat mortgage they can barely afford, tons of credit card debt, insisting on eating at restaurants.

Put aside the fact that if someone has ANY credit card debt, they should NOT be seeing the inside of a restaurant, living this way is precarious.

And if you are trying to invest at the same time, the minute a stock market correction ensues, you will be scared into making a horrible mistake. Buying high and selling low. Literally the antithesis to investing.

Just understand that creating real wealth in the stock market is a game of consistency and patience.

Do that and you will actually be rich. Mark my words, and tame your emotions.

For additional help, please consider taking my investing course. It’s helped many and might just help you, too.

💝 Newsletter subscribers get 10% off the Simply Investing course with the code: SIMPLYINVEST

Real Estate

When you see an announcement that a $30 million real estate transaction has completed, you probably think - oh, that must have been easy.

It’s not.

I review well over 250 real estate investments each year.

Some of them are garbage (over priced, bad locations) or not our primary focus (development).

Some of them are interesting—of a ‘value add’ nature—and those require a bit more thought.

I signed about 75 confidentiality agreements this year to dig in. Of those 75, I actually modelled about 30-40.

75% of those didn’t hit the return profile after all. 25% did, and so we sent in around 10 serious LOIs (Letter of Intent to Purchase).

We got close on a few, but either out-bid or not to the satisfaction of the vendor; maybe next year, as much of this product will circulate for years without transacting as vendors try and test the market.

We got one to second round LOI stage, ultimately losing to a group that could pay an extra $500,000. Most of your future profit is made on the buy side, so eventually, we hit a point where the financial model broke down. Frustrating, but common, and we must maintain our discipline.

Finally, we got one under binding contract after a third round LOI, beating out our competitors by minutiae.

Reputation, pedigree, and relationships are absolutely critical when acquiring commercial real estate.

Unlike the stock market—where anyone can see live ‘bid/ask’ quotes for a stock, including level two volumes delineated by brokerage house—in real estate land, none of that is publicly available.

So relationships are paramount in order to acquire the best information that you can act on.

This whole process of syndicated real estate investing is hard work, and lucky if you get one or two great deals, especially in this ‘slower’ real estate climate.

So anyone that balks at an acquisitions fee, politely respond—hey Mr Investor—you try buying $30,000,000 of real estate without getting absolutely rinsed.

1 Quote

A Question

What are your new years resolutions?

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Thank you

Eddie Gudewill, CFA

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