One year ago today: January 22, 2024,bends, cracks, or won’t fit.
Five years ago today: January 22, 2020, dog tag ransom.
Nine years ago today: January 22, 2016, four days since November.
Random years ago today: January 22, 2007, the bike that save me.
Is it going to snow here? Mild insomnia kept me up and looking over the wares, focusing on Caltier. They have an interest in 15 properties, you can view them on-line at Caltier.fund. Their website goes on about affordable housing. Most people know it has been a crisis situation since 2008. Everybody who can afford to buy already has, leaving over half a million homeless. My opinion on that is divided.
As for Caltier, they remain my largest investment. They operate secretly, for example see this picture. It is the Courtland in DC, which I think will be a ghost down if Trump fires enough of the deadweight. On the other hand, maybe Caltier knows this and picked this up at a real bargain. I discovered Caltier is short for Calculated Tiers of Income, whatever that means. I finally (I think) figured out what the percentage means on the Caltier statements. It is the total income over the total investment without any weighting for how you got there. But only for the previous 24 months and I’ve been with them 26.
I’ve invested with them just over two years, and I have $19,500 equity and have $2,300 in dividends, which is 11.76% but only 9.99% of it in the past two years. Clear as mud. Now to the reason Caltier is getting all my attention. On the portfolio page that spells out my investments, there is a small drop arrow appearing in the far left column. And the number of transactions leapt from around 60 to 932.
My guess is that it has something to do with SEC regulations. REITs are required to pay out most profits monthly and maybe they were doing it slightly wrong. I audited June of 2024 and these add up to $12.40. I’m kind of artificially awake so I will track this down tomorrow. Caltier may have been told to pay out more to meet some SEC parameter. And whoever codes their web page is a moron and does not know how do add adjusting entries. Each month they appear, they are backdated to the same dates. Taking that route is insanely complicated.
By noon, I have isolated and downloaded the mystery transactions, which now count 988. My instinct tells me Caltier has run afoul of some obscure regulation or is changing their reporting method. This is not something you do on the fly. There are too many transactions at once to digest, I will slow down. Could this be why my analysis of the percentages did not agree with theirs? Are they trying to go back and patch up a repeated mistake? That’s a quagmire and even coders are not quite that dumb.
Checking the news, the Davos event in Europe reports attendance has dropped by half. The closely related luxury call girl business is down 61% per Furguson, th UK bloke who monitors such things. The JFK files were slated to be released this afternoon. I’ve heard nothing about it. The US military has deployed one thousand troops to defend the border. One lousy thousand.. Rumors say the mass roundups of the worst of the worst illegals is underway, but the MSM is deathly silent. North Carolina flood victims who were living in tents and hotels under Biden are now moving into furnished apartments thanks to Trump. CNN and NBC have been quietly laying off staff.
Monroe, Lousiana.
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This afternoon’s material is not for everyone. It concerns analysis of an on-line chart from a real estate investment house. Boring as hell, but still the most important event of the slot and thus gets recorded. On the other hand, you might be amused by my thinking. Here is a sample of the 988 “dailies” I’m looking into. You’ll agree if you have something else to do, now is the time to go do it.
Cancel today. I’ve spent hours on the Caltier figures, and if I know databases, they have millenialized themselves into a corner. Once again, there is nobody in charge, each little department trying to cover its ass in isolation, throwing the others off. I can see right now their biggest mistake is allowing their coders to go in and make direct changes into the history of the data. That’s the first stupid idea of an amateur trying to save time. The mistake is letting their coders use one of the existing fields to flag their changes. When I record a transaction, I add an extra column for each different type. D is the dividend column, Q is the equity column, and so on.
What they’ve done is try to use a single column for these codes, which we old programmers call a gang bang. The first guy went in and flagged all his transactions as “reinvested”. The second guy flagged all his as “complete” including those changed by the first guy. Now when the first guy comes back the next day, all his totals don’t add up. No wonder this is taking them forever. No Boomers on staff. If you see my spreadsheets, you’ll often see an extra page called CFR.1 or CFR.2 This is something coders would not get, it means “check for reasonableness”. If you don’t have an intimate understanding of what’s going on, you are basically screwed.
You’ll also find new columns to the left. Caltier dopes use the credit union brain fart of listing the transactions upside down, newest on top. So the first new column assigns a number to each entry, then the second column is that number turned upside down, oldest to newest. Now I can work with the details in chronological, but sort the whole sheet back into original order if I have to find something listed that way.
I’ve isolated these new transactions and they total $3,470 which does not anywhere near match any other totals associated with this account. While I was able to isolate this data in less than an hour, it is hard to imagine the monumental effort taken by Caltier to create it that way. I suspect Caltier just spent a few million dollars doing what I could have in no time—had they asked instead of being tight-lipped about what in hell is going on.
Are we getting anywhere? Nope. Most of the transactions occurred at 3:00 or 4:00 o’clock, indicated they were batch commands. There is some sort of monthly pattern, with as many as 15 transactions on a single day near month’s end, but only some months. I’ve been at this all day, pausing only to nip to the kitchen for coffee, tea, and leftovers. I’m heated up paprika rice, which reminded me of my casket shop, which I closed when my buyer disappeared. I let this local yahoo watch it once in a while if I had to do a shop or something. Then I heard a rumor he was an old bullshit artist trying to get on disability. Sure enough, the day I told him I could not use him anymore, he collapsed on the door stoop and had passersby call the ambulance. Along with this ambulance arrived a government agent who spent a half hour trying to trick me into saying the old fart was my employee.
I didn’t fall for it, but I do recall how persistent at agent was. Orwellian, I’d call him. Did I pay him? Nope. Then why was he working here? He wasn’t working here. What did you give him? Free coffee. What would you estimate as the value of that coffee? Zero, it was free. Where did you buy the coffee? I never said I bought it. Then where did you get it? I don’t remember. The scam was if he could establish I was an employer, I could get nailed for non-payment of required government medical. I discovered later he [the old fart] had tried this scam on several places, which made me dislike the government inspector even more, because he would necessarily have known what was going on.
6:30PM Aha, we have a match. When sorted by date, at least some of the small transactions match the month’s total under the “completed” column. What are they thinking? There’s another match already, the transaction dates seem to match the offset of the dividend dates, which are not always on the last day of the month. It’s beginning to melt. I will sort the CFR by the flags in the “uknown” column by date, then by type, and add some control breaks. (The spelling “uknown” this is not a typo.) We’ve seen this database error before. Somewhere.
Aha again. There is a match. It would seem that for each dividend payout was a total of smaller increments in each period. I can’t spot it yet, but the number of transactions seems to grow as we move further from the first dividend. That is, by the sixth dividend, there are six more small transactions, but it varies—and there are obvious errors. Please don’t tell me Caltier is trying to go back and enter each clients account with each of these transactions, which I call “the dailies”. That would be a freakish amount of work.
7:14PM I see the first error matches May, 2024, the exact month the fund went on pause. Followed by a flurry of these small transactions. What could it be? We know all those did not take place at exactly 4:00PM on the distribution date. Could it mean Caltier has decided to begin paying in real time instead of monthly? This would not explain the number of transactions recorded as $0.00, but those could be placemarkers. I see the most common count of these dailies is 59 per month. I can’t think of anything that cycles at 59 per month. Let me see if those months have 30 days, and the 60th transaction is the total.
That is a possibility. They started off trying to report weekly, then realized it’s a short step to make it daily. Let’s go back and look at May 2024 again. Nope, no obvious correlation. But we’re getting close. Let’s remove the equity transactions and look only at the Caltier internals. Time. We will take a long break and try again.
Maybe tomorrow. The heater keeps the room toasty. I fell asleep sitting in the chair. Woke up at 11:40PM. Just read Trump directed all 93 US Attorney Generals to prosecute anyone who disobeys an Executive Order. Trump has learned well.
ADDENDUM
Melania Trump’s wedding dress weighed 66 pounds. When the South African government cancelled the use of the Afrikaan language at universities, the Whites build their own university. Yep, just thirty years ago, South Africa was building nuclear reactors.
