TB75

Passionate about markets since 96' | Hobbyist trader here to learn | Guided by God, Proverbs 3:5 | Not financial advice

[TB75 @Tbran75]

It's pretty tough to beat today. Met some amazing people and got to be a part of something special. Thanks, @leadlagreport. Congrats on $fmkt. Few.

[Jason @JasonGB23]

We got flying cars before the Bears got a 4k yard passer. 😆

[Caleb @CalebSol]

Me managing my $183 portfolio

[Rudy W. Giuliani @RudyGiuliani]

🚨 TODD BEAMER, UNITED 93 PHONE CALL: "LET'S ROLL" 🇺🇸

Todd: Hello… Operator… listen to me. I can’t speak very loud. This is an emergency. I’m a passenger on a United flight to San Francisco. Our plane has been hijacked.

Lisa: I understand. Can they see you?

Todd: No. There are three that we know of. They have knives — razor knives, like box cutters. Someone announced from the cockpit there was a bomb. It sounded fake.

Lisa: Your name?

Todd: Todd Beamer. United Flight 93.

Todd: They killed one passenger in first class. They forced most of us back. Fourteen of us here. Five flight attendants. The guy with the bomb ordered us to sit on the floor.

Lisa: Are you okay?

Todd: We’re going down… wait. No. We’re leveling off. We changed directions. We’re flying east again.

Todd: A guy named Jeremy called his wife. She told him two planes hit the World Trade Center. Lisa, is that true?

Lisa: I have to tell you the truth. It’s very bad. Both towers are gone. A third plane hit the Pentagon. Our country is under attack. I’m afraid your plane may be part of their plan.

Todd: Oh God. Lisa, will you do something for me? Call my wife and my kids. Promise me you’ll call.

Lisa: I promise.

Todd: Our home number is… You have the same name as my wife. Lisa. We’ve been married ten years. She’s pregnant with our third child. Tell her I love her. I’ll always love her. We have two boys — David, he’s 3, and Andrew, he’s 1. Tell them their daddy loves them and he is so proud of them. The baby is due January 12th. I saw an ultrasound. We still don’t know if it’s a girl or a boy.

Lisa: I’ll tell them. I promise, Todd.(Lisa patches in the FBI.)

Agent: Todd, your plane is on a course for Washington. Best guess is the White House or the Capitol.

Todd: I understand. I’ll be back.

Todd: Everyone knows this isn’t a normal hijacking. We have decided we will not be pawns in their plot.

Lisa: What are you going to do?

Todd: Four of us are going to rush the one with the bomb. Then the cockpit. A stewardess is getting boiling water. We’ll take them out.

Todd: Would you pray with me? [They pray the Lord’s Prayer.] Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me.

Todd: God help me. Jesus help me. Are you guys ready? Let’s Roll.

SOURCE: @SterlingMSnow

[TB75 @Tbran75]

@leadlagreport Hampster clan!!!!!!!!!!!!

[TB75 @Tbran75]

@leadlagreport As one!

[TB75 @Tbran75]

@FinanceLancelot @puckrin You think rates can move that high without the system breaking? @FinanceLancelot

[TB75 @Tbran75]

@leadlagreport Great work!

[TB75 @Tbran75]

@leadlagreport When shit hits the fan maybe you’ll be in the movie.

[TB75 @Tbran75]

@ScottBarrettDFB Ask grok

[Antonio Linares @alc2022]

The stock market will run a test every once in a while to see how much of a pussy you are

[TB75 @Tbran75]

@leadlagreport Needed to hear this today.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am the Chairman and CEO of Vornado Realty Trust. Eighty-four years old. Seven buildings in Midtown Manhattan. I said what I said.

I said "tax the rich" is the equivalent of a racial slur. I said it at REBNY. Into the microphone. Eight hundred people. Median net worth in that room was north of $240 million, I know because our CFO ran the guest list through a Bloomberg terminal as a joke, and then it wasn't a joke. And when I said it, twelve people applauded. The rest nodded. One woman in the third row mouthed, "Finally." I saw her.

Sharon, my communications advisor, Columbia, $430,000 a year, very bright, Sharon wants me to walk it back. She drafted something. "Mr. Roth's comments were intended to highlight the emotional impact of political rhetoric on business communities." I read it. I put it in the trash can on my desk. Not the recycling. The trash. Here's my clarification: I understated it.

"Tax the rich" is worse than a slur. A slur is just a word. It doesn't come with a CBO score. Nobody is introducing a bill called the Racial Slur Implementation Act of 2026. But there are seventeen active proposals in Congress, I had Sharon count them, seventeen proposals designed to take more of my money. My money. Mine. Money I acquired by being better at acquiring Manhattan commercial real estate than anyone alive for four consecutive decades. That is not a crime. That is a record.

I pay property taxes on $18.2 billion in assessed assets. $412 million a year. Say it again: four hundred and twelve million. I carry that number. It's the first thing I think about when I see a protest sign. I think: I pay more in property tax than the entire annual budget of the city of Fort Lauderdale. I looked this up. Fort Lauderdale: $408 million. Steve Roth: $412 million. I am a small city. And the city doesn't get screamed at.

My effective tax rate last year was 11.4 percent. I say this because I believe in transparency and because I'm not ashamed of it. The rate reflects the legal structure of real estate investment trusts, depreciation schedules Congress established in 1986, and carried interest provisions that both parties have voted to preserve for forty years. I did not write these laws. I organized my entire financial existence around them with the help of nine full-time tax professionals who have offices on the 38th floor of 888 Seventh Avenue, which I also own. Their office is in my building. Their work protects my buildings. This is not a loophole. Sharon calls it a loophole. I've told her: a structure maintained by nine attorneys across four decades is not a loophole. A loophole is something you slip through once. This is architecture. This is the foundation. This is the building.

Last Tuesday, same as every Tuesday, I walked past 1290 Sixth Avenue. My building. And there was a man. Same man as last week. Same sign: "Billionaires Pay Your Fair Share." He was standing on my sidewalk. My literal sidewalk — my company owns the ground lease. He was maybe thirty. He was wearing a jacket I would estimate cost $60. My lunch that day was $114. For one. I am telling you this not to boast but because these are facts. He has decided I'm his enemy. Based on a number he saw on a Forbes list. He doesn't know what I pay. He doesn't know what my buildings cost this city in construction jobs and lease revenue and foot traffic. He knows one number. He has made one judgment.

I see him every Tuesday. I've started to notice things. He brings coffee from the cart, not the Starbucks. He has a backpack that looks heavy. He doesn't look unhealthy. He looks like he probably works somewhere, but not on Tuesdays. I've wondered: does he have a job? Does he have a building? Does he have anything that depends on him the way 4,200 employees depend on me? I suspect not. And yet he has opinions about my tax rate.

I gave $22 million to charity last year. The Met. NYU Langone. Mount Sinai. I gave a building to NYU. Not money for a building — a building. The Steven Roth Residence Hall. It houses 400 students. That man with the sign has never housed 400 students. He hasn't housed one. He gives cardboard. I give structures. This is not a comparison I'm making to flatter myself. It's just arithmetic.

When I said what I said at REBNY, I was saying what every person in that room believes and none of them will say publicly because they have communications advisors and the communications advisors all went to Columbia and they all say "unhelpful." I'm eighty-four. I'm too old for helpful. I'm too old to perform restraint for people who hate me for something I can't change.

I didn't choose to be rich. I chose to be good at one thing for a very long time, and this is what happened. You don't punish someone for that. You don't legislate against someone for that.

My net worth fluctuates between $3.8 and $4.1 billion depending on the quarter. I fluctuate more in a fiscal week than that man on my sidewalk will earn in his life. Both of these are facts. Only one of them is considered polite to say.

They want me to apologize.

I'll be dead in ten years. Twenty if I'm lucky. And they'll still be renting my buildings.

[Dirt Cheap Banks @dirtcheapbanks]

My wife left me in the spring of the year I bought my seventh community bank. She said I had become unreachable. She was correct. I had spent the previous eleven months reading 20-year charge-off histories for a $62 million market cap bank in eastern Tennessee and I had, in a literal sense, stopped hearing her when she spoke.

I was not ignoring her. I was underwriting. There is a difference, but it is not a difference that matters to the person on the other side of it. She took the dog. She took the good couch. She left the filing cabinet, which contained, among other things, 14 years of annual reports from banks in towns she had never heard of and would never visit.

I sat on the bad couch for a long time. Then I got up and I kept buying the banks. The Tennessee bank was acquired 31 months later at 1.8x tangible book. The return paid for the divorce and the couch and a down payment on a house I live in alone.

I do not recommend this life. I am describing it, not prescribing it. But I will tell you that the banks never left. The banks paid their dividends every quarter, on time, for 14 years, through two recessions and one pandemic and one divorce, and the banks are still here, and the banks will be here when I am not, and there is a version of fidelity in that which I have stopped trying to explain to anyone who has not felt it.

[TB75 @Tbran75]

@chigrl Thank you for this!

[The White House @WhiteHouse]

Proud to be an American. 🇺🇸🇺🇸

[TB75 @Tbran75]

@leadlagreport Amen.

[TB75 @Tbran75]

@chigrl @cvpayne @FoxBusiness Looking forward to watching!

[TB75 @Tbran75]

@PeterLBrandt @IBDinvestors @PeterLBrandt how do you trade this?

[Roman Helmet Guy @romanhelmetguy]

I just want everyone to understand that America has not been trying. We bully our smart kids. We spend 1000 times more on special education than gifted and talented programs. We eliminated honors classes in the name of equality. We even came up with a replacement for phonics so stupid that half our kids can’t read. Then we take the smartest kids that survive this system, and we racially and sexually discriminate against them for entry into college. Then we do that again when they apply for their first job. And again for every job after that. Then we undercut them in favor of foreign labor that’ll do worse work for cheaper. Most kids see this and just say “fuck it” and focus on sports, or trying to be an influencer, or just give up on trying altogether. Meanwhile in places like China every kid spends 16 hours a day studying trig tables or gets the belt. Yet America is still number one. In everything. There is so much latent potential in the American people. We have tried before. We crossed a continent and carved this country out of clay. We recrossed the oceans and conquered the world by accident as a favor to our friends. One day (hopefully soon), we are going to start trying again. America will wake up. Don’t be on the wrong side when it does.