@jeffye888 Thanks for writing this article! I’m a big believe in $open and have a sizable position. It’s great to hear your thoughts. Your tweets on $open are always very insightful.
@RandianCapital $open has a better bull story imo… and it hasn’t started yet.
Perhaps with AI, $SNAP can make the business a lot more efficient, it’s on my watch list.
$upwk with a FCF of 53m$ and EV around 1.09b$, this is a company trading a 4.4x FCF/ EV. The market is pricing AI will disrupt their cash flow generation… I’m willing to be contrarian on this one. I think businesses will need more help setting up and maintaining their AI workflow.
President @realDonaldTrump and @SecScottBessent, and @pulte, I have a simple idea on how to lower mortgage rates and spreads:
One of the unique features of U.S. conventional mortgages is that they are prepayable at any time without a penalty.
While this feature is attractive for homeowners, it comes at a significant cost as buyers of mortgage backed securities (‘MBS’) require a significant increase in spread to compensate them for giving the borrower the option to prepay at anytime.
Why don’t Fannie and Freddie also offer non-prepayable mortgages where if the borrower wishes to prepay the loan, he would have to pay a prepayment penalty?
I asked one of my friends who is an expert and large investor in MBS what the estimated savings today would be on a 30-year Fannie/Freddie mortgage if the borrower would be locked out from prepayment other than by paying a penalty?
He estimated that the savings would be about 65 basis points.
So a borrower could have a choice:
Obtain a 30-year prepayable mortgage at today’s ~6% rate,
or at a 5.35% rate, but with the obligation to pay a prepayment penalty if he/she refinanced in the future.
The loan could also be made to be portable so that if the home is sold, the new borrower could assume the loan and no prepayment penalty would be owed on a sale.
While the ability to prepay is a valuable option, locking in the 65 bps savings upfront over the life of the mortgage may be the difference between the borrower being able to afford the home and not being able to.
You could imagine that there could be different versions of this product where the lock out would be for 5 years, 10 years etc. (with different levels of savings for each, the longer the lockout, the greater the savings) and the borrower could custom design the mortgage and its prepayability to meet their life plan.
As you know, commercial mortgages work this way.
Why couldn’t the same approach be used for home loans?