ARCHIVED COMMENTARY
The Jersey Shore
For edition of September 12, 2006
What amazed me most during my recent visit to the Jersey Shore was that a house in Longport, easily the most boring town in America for any kid who grew up there, had just changed hands for $7 million. I don’t know who the buyer was, but it would not likely have been a “local,” since anyone who grew up in or near Longport, as I did, would never have paid such an exorbitant sum for a home there. They couldn’t give Longport homes away during the early 1970s, after the first New Jersey casino referendum went down in flames. Even houses just a stone’s throw from the ocean, at the southernmost tip of the island, would sit on the market for years, unsellable seemingly at any price. At the time, you could just as easily have acquired for a pittance nearly any property on Absecon Island, a 7.8-mile spit that includes Atlantic City and the three downbeach boroughs of Ventnor, Margate and Longport.
(Click to greatly enlarge)
Atlantic City was the same dump then that it is now, except without the casinos: Camden with beaches. Would you believe there was not a single supermarket or movie theater in Atlantic City from around the mid-1970s, when even John’s Bargain Store pulled out, until fairly recently. Now there’s a grocery store, but still no neighborhood movie house. Some town! However, the lily-white boroughs were another story. They are typically referred to by out-of-town newspapers as posh suburbs of Atlantic City. I grew up in Margate and always considered Longport, with its broken-down bayside docks and Ozzie’s grocery store, the epitome of deads-ville. Ocean City, the next island to the south, wasn’t much better – a place where the local cops lay in wait for cars that exceeded the speed limit by two mph. They didn’t issue many tickets, even to high schoolers – they just wanted someone to talk to in the dead of Ocean City winter.
Sinatra’s Cottage
These days, Ocean City and Longport are among the hottest real estate markets in America. Clifford Perlman deserves some of the credit for putting the latter on the fast track. The casino mogul needed a place to entertain when Caesar’s Palace opened in the former Howard Johnson’s hotel in 1980, and the home he built in Longport filled the bill, Vegas-style. It even included a guest cottage for the likes of Frank Sinatra, a frequent headliner at Caesar’s who was notoriously finicky about accommodations. If memory serves, Perlman spent no more than $4 million or so building his Longport digs. If it were to go on the market today, it would probably fetch a price equal to the total value of all Longport real estate, circa 1973.
As for Ocean City, it had, and still has, the distinction of being the only dry town in New Jersey. No surprise, then, that the Circle Liquor Store, just across the bridge in neighboring Somers Point, was for many years the highest-volume liquor store in America. Ocean City’s strongest selling point is that it is probably the most wholesome town in the USA. Walk up Ninth Avenue, or on the Boardwalk, and you’ll think passengers from a Disney cruise had just disembarked.
Post-Apocalyptic Resort
In contrast, the crowd on the Atlantic City boardwalk looks like it wandered in from a movie set festooned with the trappings of a post-apocalyptic world in which the rule of law had been replaced by the law of bling-bling. My advice to anyone who visits Atlantic City has been the same for twenty years: Skip the casinos and go to the White House sub shop, one of the few destinations in the Garden State that could truly be described as “world class.” Try the pizza at Tony’s Baltimore Grill, too, and you will have seen it all.
There’s a lot more I could say about the Jersey Shore, including the alarming fact that the water level has been rising, as detailed by my friend Glenn at his beach blog, and that sand is no longer being replaced by deposits from the Hudson River. But I’ll save it for another time. In the meantime, if you visit the Jersey Cape, stop in at the Marion Inn and catch my friend George Mesterhazy’s super chops at the piano; or north of there, Danny Fogel’s on the Hammond B-3.
I’d intended today to write about how $10 million homes on both U.S. coasts are now as common as centimillionaires at the peak of the dot-come boom. Am I the only one who thinks that this is the very height of insanity?
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Vancouver Seminar
Registration forms for this October 28-29 event at the Fairmont Waterfront will go out within the next ten days, so if you haven’t yet let me know of your interest in attending, please do so as soon as possible by clicking here. Here are some further details:
FAQ
When will the Hidden Pivot Seminar be held?
There are four seminars scheduled over the next four months, all on weekends. The first will be in New York City on October 14-15; the second, in Vancouver on October 28-29; the third, in San Francisco on November 11-12; and the last, in Sydney on December 2-3.
The class takes two full days, then?
Yes, from 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday. After an on-site brunch the second day, the remaining hours will be devoted to an informal Q&A session.
Can I take the course online?
We do not offer an online seminar at this time, but this may change if demand warrants it.
Is the seminar open to those who do not subscribe to your Rick’s Picks advisory service?
The course is open to subscribers and non-subscribers alike. However, I encourage all seminar students to subscribe to Rick’s Picks, if only for a month or two, so that they can become familiar with my methods and trading style. Also, the archives and educational pages offer a useful resource for learning about my proprietary methods prior to the seminar.
How can I sign up for the seminar?
You can request a registration form by clicking on the blue hypertext line under “Last Call!” above.
How much does the seminar cost?
Tuition for the two-day event is $1,500, This covers course materials and extensive post-grad mentoring in a real-time chat-room held during market hours.
When is the money due?
A deposit of $300 is due with the registration form. $100 of it would be non-refundable, and the remaining $200 would become non-refundable six weeks prior to the session.
How about the remaining balance of $1,200?
It would be payable by two weeks prior to the session and would be refundable. A check is preferred, but you will be able to use a credit card for an additional administrative fee of $50.
What will I learn?
The goal of the course is to enable students to master the Hidden Pivot method and to use it to forecast price reversals at least as accurately as experts who do it for a living. In addition, you will learn to use some basic risk management strategies and to leverage swing points with puts and calls. If you’re interested in what my subscribers have said about hidden pivots, click here.
Can someone who knows little about trading or technical analysis benefit from the seminar?
Although many professionals have taken the course, it is an ideal place for the novice to start, since it offers a relatively simple, stand-alone method of forecasting and trading. No prior trading experience or knowledge is required.
