census bureau is almost caught up on new home sales and housing starts. a year off, like a gap year, is a seven-year program. the program is intense..

the census Bureau is almost caught up on new home sales and housing starts. the key story for existing homes is that months-of-inventory is above pre-pandemic levels, due to a combination of slightly increasing inventory and sluggish sales.splainin will be how spending on good times can be strong. hourly earnings are up just 3.4% from a year ago.a year off, like a gap year, is a seven-year program. the program is intense. its not taught in schools, just the basic fundamentals of investing.the headmasters comment on my final elementary school report card was: Yet another semester of squandered potential he said he picked subjects I would never study again. he says he was lucky that he never had one of those childhoods where it was beaten into me.[00:09:47] Barry Ritholtz: for me, it meant that my rates could go from 50 cents to $5. instead of one or two dogs, I had four or five. it was real money. so you start thinking about — holy cow, im making $250 a month, Im making thousands of dollars a year. And it was just fantastic. So Ive loved dogs ever since.Barry Ritholtz: I stayed at Tanaka about two years ago. he was a very talented analyst at fiduciary trust.my grandfather built his firm, which was called Shelby Cullom Davis & Company. he loved investing, but he did not like the responsibility of the business. his nameake, Shelby Cuillom, was a republican senator and governor under Lincoln.[00:24:15] Barry Ritholtz: A lot to live up to. it was a lot — [00.24:30] Chris Davis: Your dad and your grandfather. he loved investing, he love research, but he was very low profile.the Chautauqua movement sprung up — they created these places, theres still one left, its in upstate New York, where you would go with your family for self-improvement. it was a non-denominational church that was about service. the movement, I think, developed especially in the late 19th century.he started in the securities lending business in the early 1980s. he was a reporter at the Harvard Club and was an alum. now he can lend out the shares and make a couple hundred basis points a year extra return.Barry Ritholtz: i learned about integrity in the traditional sense, meaning wholeness he was a whole person, and his sense of his own code of being was so disciplined, but was filled with this. his father is very specialized, very narrow, and my father is incredibly physically fit and remains, to this day, very vigorouswe spend a lot of time on management evaluation. we see ourselves as business owners, we view the management as our partners in most cases. the activist movement has completely lost the thread.progressive has probably compounded in the high teens for 30 years. it just became maybe the largest insurance company in personal auto. the business model doesnt really go obsolete, says founder.we used to get questions from clients all the time: why dont you own First Republic? theyve had such great growth records, and our view was, well, its been a mistake not to own them in the sense that theyve outperformed, but we are not gonna own the companies that are optimized to the upcycle.a business that grows profitably is more valuable than one that cant, or one thats capital intensive and shrinking and so on. we tend to be more skeptical than the average go-go growth investor. but we prefer to pay a fair price for a company that can grow profitably than the typical value investor,.fewer than 3% of companies can maintain a growth rate in revenue of 20% for more than a decade. fewer 3% can maintain an revenue growth rate of 20% in more than 10 years. but a fraction of 1% of a companys revenue is a good thing.