NYC gets doxed: stories you may have missed

You probably heard about New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani officially moving forward with plans to open taxpayer-funded grocery stores by the end of next year. These locations will offer essential items at 30% discounts from typical market rates.

According to Mamdani, they won’t do notable damage to the city’s privately run stores. According to the city’s privately run stores, however, they most definitely will.

That’s why the Multicultural Business Coalition – an immigrant-led group created to fight the plan – has already said it will file to sue.

“The mayor doesn’t seem to want to sit down with us,” Chairman Frank Garcia told The New York Post. But he “won’t be able to bully these lawyers we are going to bring in.”

One has to wonder if another group of businesspeople are looking into similar legal recourses after Mamdani essentially doxed them. He’s been a very busy mayor this week, to say the least.

In this case, he published a video on X telling the rich to check their mailboxes when they’re “back in the five boroughs” since they’ve “got mail” concerning his newly secured pied-a-tierre tax.

Then his administration published a list of allegedly unoccupied, non-primary NYC residences worth $1 million or more… A list that includes their owners’ full names along with the addresses.

That’s another story The Post covered, with Council Minority Leader David Carr (R-Staten Island) telling it this was “a reckless and foolish move, especially considering there are potentially thousands of properties on this list that do not qualify as second homes or whose owners will successfully dispute their inclusion.”

Incidentally, Carr’s own home was included on the database. Other properties are owned by Hollywood director Woody Allen and Sex and the City actress Cynthia Nixon, who campaigned passionately for Mamdani last year.

I guess them’s the breaks sometimes – and definitely one more reason why I’m avoiding investing in New York City (or state) at this time.

When you’ve got a contrarian streak like Wide Moat Research does, you get used to opposition. It really doesn’t faze you much after a while.

Then again, it’s always nice to see when affirmation actually does come along.

That’s how I felt after reading Yahoo Finance’s Morning Brief on Tuesday morning – particularly the part about Apple (AAPL) and how it’s (largely) back in the stock market’s good graces.

For months, investors looked down their noses at the iPhone maker since it wasn’t spending as much money on artificial intelligence (AI) as its Big Tech compatriots. But all of a sudden, that disdain has switched.

As Yahoo Finance wrote:

So how does this affirm Wide Moat Research?

We’re always stressing the importance of investing in fundamentals, not market sentiment. And far too much of the AI trade has been exceptionally sentiment-based, which is why many tech stocks are faltering now.

Investors are finally looking at their balance sheets instead of just their hopes and dreams.

Sometimes we’re rewarded instantly for maintaining that mentality. Other times, as Apple investors have discovered, it can take months or more for the market to realize what should be obvious.

Regardless of the timeline, it always eventually pays off to stick with quality. No matter what.

We all know that artificial intelligence needs storage space, hence the intense demand for data center facilities. But that’s not the only kind of commercial real estate (CRE) it relies on.

As I explained in Thursday’s article, “every AI model also depends on:

And battery storage facilities, or battery energy storage systems (BESS), as well. These properties are designed to store unused electricity for when it is actually needed.

Whole companies have sprung up around this service, including Invenergy, Apex Clean Energy, Canadian Solar’s Recurrent Energy, EQT Infrastructure’s Cypress Creek Renewables… and Aypa Power, which Brookfield Asset Management (BAM) just announced it will be purchasing for $7 billion.

Currently owned by Blackstone Energy Transition Partners, Aypa comes complete with 6.5 gigawatts (GW) of operating and contracted capacity, plus a 20 GW development pipeline. And while this deal takes it from one asset manager to another, I’m thinking some of its other competitors could one day become real estate investment trusts, or REITs.

There are already more than a dozen REIT categories recognized in the U.S. alone, including non-traditional classifications such as timber, cell tower, and cannabis. Other parts of the world, like China, have toll road, and sewage and waste treatment designations. And I’ve been speculating for a while that we could soon see airports, locomotive networks, and amusement parks make the switch as well.

So why not battery storage facilities? As AI demand grows even bigger from here, it could become quite the lucrative category for operators and investors alike.

Happy SWAN investing!

Brad Thomas
Editor, The Wide Moat Daily

Big Tech earnings season is in full swing, with obvious short-term winners and losers.

Microsoft (MSFT) impressed, for example. Meta (META) did not, showing no proof to increasingly skeptical shareholders that its AI investments will pay off.

It’s easy to get reactionary when stocks are climbing 9% here or sliding 9% there in a single morning. But that’s why The Wide Moat Show is digging into the details on six particular forward-looking plays.

These stocks have intriguing profit potential backed by solid fundamentals – not just hope or hype. Click here to see what Brad and Nick uncovered this week, including a hyperscaler you may have overlooked.