THE CRITIQUE

CMCT's SBA securitization — a REIT restating its capital structure while quietly repaying $8.5 million of a $56 million securitization with no explanation, and, per the piece, "the investor call reportedly had no questions.

Warby Parker and Wheeler REIT — doing the math on Warby Parker's brick-and-mortar expansion pace ("~15 years or mid-2039 of national domination unless something changes"), and flagging Wheeler REIT's third reverse stock split in a year, buried in a forward-looking-statements footnote.

Estée Lauder doing less, The RealReal can't do anything, and everyone is sad about Chinese not spending — Estée Lauder's $471 million goodwill impairment on Dr. Jart+, and The RealReal's restructured debt covenants, delivered with an "Earning Call Bingo" scorecard for corporate buzzwords.

Two REITs are unconventional, and one is just paddling along, all having a bad year — Creative Media and Community Trust's leverage jumping from 5x to 13x in a single quarter and a covenant breach, alongside a sharp read of Hudson Pacific's own jargon-heavy investor language ("that's a lot and involves a WeWork-esque ethos").

FinTech, Growth, and Trouble — the collision between fintech companies, the small banks that give them payments-system access, and federal regulators over BSA/AML violations, naming names (Piermont Bank, Sutton Bank, Blue Ridge Bank, Cross River Bank) and pushing back on the industry argument that compliance is just a growth obstacle — written from the other side of that argument, as a former bank regulator.

Play-to-Earn & GameFi: The New Online Poker Boom? — a preview of an upcoming 10-part series tracing the 2003–2011 online poker boom through Black Friday 2011 to today's Play-to-Earn and GameFi economies. Same pitch, same underlying question: does regulation catch up before or after the bubble does.