Real Estate Investors Are Focusing on Europe For the Beginning of 2024💲

🐺 Hi pack-mates,

This is Howling Markets,the entertaining podcast host that discusses all kinds of complex financial news in a simple and fun way!

Today we will be covering:

• What Is a REIT? 🏡

• Solana Surpasses $100 As its Stellar Performance Continues! 🔝

• Real Estate Investors Are Focusing on Europe for the Beginning of 2024 💲

• Equity and Debt Markets Daily Update ⚖️

• And more!

Market Watch 👀

What is a REIT?

A REIT, or Real Estate Investment Trust, is a company that owns, operates and generates income from the management of real estate properties.

 REITs are structures as mutual funds, meaning that they are an investment pool that collects investors’ money in order to perform a certain investment strategy and share its profits.

Real Estate Investment Trusts are an innovative and exceptional way to get started in real estate with little to no capital. One of the main challenges of becoming a real estate investor is having the capital or being able to bear the high interest rate conditions of a mortgage in case of a low credit score.

Additionally, real estate properties are extremely illiquid and in the case of adverse financial conditions they can be subject to a fire sale at an extremely low price.

On the other hand, most REITs are publicly traded, making the investments extremely liquid and accessible at a relatively low price. Also, the majority of REITs does not focus on a particular niche, but rather they diversify across industries and countries.

By doing so, they solve the diversification problem commonly present in the real estate sector.

Solana’s Surpasses $100 as its 2023 Stellar Performance Continues!

We have recently talked about the exceptional performance of Bitcoin and Ethereum, but which cryptocurrency has managed to perform the best in 2023 up to this point?

In the precious newsletter we noticed how bitcoin has gained around 160% since the beginning of the year while Ethereum has “only” jumped by 90% in the same period.

However, one of Ethereum’s main competitors, has become extremely popular due to the very capable blockchain it operates on and it has achieved more than ten times the returns of Ether.  This is the case of Solana which allows to perform many more transactions per second at a much lower fee, causing Solana’s trading volume to surpass Ethereum’s!

All this optimism has caused the price of Solana to Skyrocket since the beginning of the year. On the first of January the price closed at $9.99, oddly similar to the prices you might expect from a shady convenience store that doesn’t want to set $10 as a price.

Well, in this case it would have been best to jump on this shady price, as on the 23^rd of December the price closed at $107.94, marking a Year-To-Date gain of 980.84%.

Most notably, on the 24^th the price has pushed significantly higher, reaching $118 before retracing back to around $109, showing that the coin is fully capable of closing the year one thousand percent higher!

On the other hand, this long wig up is also a strong sign of weakness and a potential reversal might occur. Do you believe that Solana has what it takes to close 2023 with a 1000% gain?

Today’s Howling Question

Well, the Year-To-Date performance of Solana is crazy, but I believe that it is even more absurd if we only focus the gains that the coin has realized since the second half of October.

By looking at the above chart, how much do you think Solana has gained between the 15^th of October and the 23^rd of December?

a) 50%

b) 100%

c)  200%

d)  300%

e)  400%

Try to answer the question by yourself, and then check the correct answer after the last interesting news!

Real Estate Investors Are Focusing on Europe for the Beginning of 2024

Blackstone, the world’s largest commercial property owner, allocated more than 55% of their portfolio to European properties. To the more real estate oriented investors this immediately struck as an odd decision, as the firm mainly operated in the US and usually only allocated 20%-30% to European investment opportunities.

This behavioral shift in Blackstone is a clear signal that a lot of real estate investment opportunities are appearing in Europe, but why?

The reasoning behind this trading strategy traces back to the central bank policies and the difference between Europe and the US. The Eurozone, since its inception, had always been characterized by a stable and low inflation and extremely low interest rates.

However, the recent surge in inflation and the subsequent central bank tightening policy has caused interest rates to shoot up. As a result, the Eurozone, used to lower rates, got hit extremely hard and it is currently suffering a significant financial distress, further magnified as the central bank stated that they are not yet discussing to ease their policy.

Because of the higher rates, many people in Europe have been forced to sell their real estate investment properties at a lower price, to avoid fire sales, insolvencies and extremely high interest rates.

Then, large investment pools such as Blackstone stepped in to collect the pieces at a bargain price!

Do you believe that also smaller investors should step in the real estate market, or that it is still too risky and they should stick to REITs instead?

Equity and Debt Markets Update ⚖️

And now, our daily markets update!

On Friday the same undecisive behavior continued in the stock market. The SPX has closed 0.17% up for the day, but with a very particular candle showing that the price had tried to move both higher and lower without any success.

However, the only clear aspect of the situation is that stocks have lost their bullish momentum, so each day that passes a retracement looks more and more probable unless new bullish news come out of the blue.

On the other hand, bonds are having less trouble in reversing after the bull run. On Friday the 10 year US government yield has increased by 0.23%, beginning to form what could look like a bottom in yields.

Do you think that by the end of the year we will have a clear reversal in at least one of the two markets?

Answer

The correct answer is e) 400%!

More specifically, between the two dates Solana has gained 391.98% in just 69 days. By doing some simple math, it is possible to conclude that Solana has gained on average 5.68% each day since the 15^th of October.

Howl-Worthy Memes 😂

🐺 See you next time!

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