The housing market is showing signs of multiple personality disorder... the two things that could bring real estate to it’s knees near-term… and Facebook lays an egg and gets scrambled on Wall Street. I’m Bryan Ellis… this is Episode #301 of Self-Directed Investor Talk.----Hello, Self-Directed Investor Nation… a lot to get to today, after a bit of a hiatus. Today’s show page is SDITalk.com/301, so let’s jump right in, after a quick word from our sponsor, the Self-Directed Investor Academy.Have you ever noticed that there’s just not much in the way of really great training material out there where self-directed IRA’s and solo 401(k)’s are concerned? Oh sure… all of the IRA companies provide “education”… but their end is clearly so you’ll give them your business. And there are a few books written by attorneys using the native language of attorneys which is a strange dialect of Latin known as “YesButProbablyNo”… but if you’re an intelligent person who just wants the hard truth about how to use self-directed retirement accounts while squeezing every penny of value out of them you can… even when that may not be in the best interest of your IRA company… well, SDI Academy is for you. SDI Academy is a private membership group that produces video-based Wealth Guides about the exact topics that self-directed IRA and 401(k) owners need to understand… totally free of the murky babble you see on the internet. I think you’ll particularly enjoy their trainings on how to pick the right self-directed retirement account for you and how to pick the best self-directed IRA company for you… because the results you’ll end up with are probably VERY DIFFERENT than what you’d expect… and so, you’ll really get TREMENDOUS VALUE. For a limited time, listeners to SDI Talk can get a FREE 3-day membership to the already-inexpensive but inordinately valuable SDI Academy by visiting SDITalk.com/academy. That’s SDITalk.com/academy.Ok people… we all know that the overwhelming top asset class choice among self-directed retirement account owners is real estate, so what I’ve got to share with you will be quite directly relevant for a very large swath of you… say, 100% of you! Hehehehe.This past week, some new economic numbers came out that suggest the housing market is slowing down… the evidence cited by sources like the very entertaining but not always accurate CNBC informs us the reason for this is a slowdown in boiling-hot markets like L.A. and Denver.  For some reason I’m not entirely sure of, I’ve linked to the cutesy video CNBC made about this over at SDITalk.com/301.https://www.cnbc.com/video/2018/07/26/housing-market-slows-down-real-estate-housing.htmlBut this very morning, July 30, 2018, the National Association of Realtors reported that pending home sales rose more than expected after a relatively soft selling season so far this year. Conflicting news, it would seem.Not really. There’s more to it below the surface. And I, your humble host, will pull back the curtains for you now.What we have right now, folks, is a situation where real in many of those hot markets, real estate prices are still increasing, but two other statistics have changed: The rate of increase is less than it has been in years – like in Dallas, Texas – and the number of home actually being sold is falling off too, like in Southern California, where CoreLogic tells us that there were SUBSTANTIALLY fewer home sales of all types have sold this year versus last… as in, a whopping 11.8% fewer home sales this year versus last.So it’s strange… you’ve got rising prices, but decreased activity.Now I could totally go into geek mode on you with this stuff, but I’ll tell you what I think is happening from a very practical perspective:What we have is a real estate market that has boomed and boomed and boomed such that it looks like the mortgage meltdown of 2008 never happened at all. That’s only 10 years ago now… and practically NOBODY is sitting on a real estate loss anymore, if they just held on.