Transcript:
Tom Vaughan:
So I always like to start off the show with just kind of a summary of what I see happening in the market. And although I was gone, one thing that I always do is keep track of what’s happening with the portfolios and with the market, and it’s been a really good week. And I think the theme of the day has to be just how strong the market has been really amazing. All together if you look at this year, the market has been marching up at a very nice pace without much interruption. Even this last downturn that we had was down 5.9%, from high to low in the September / October movement. And it should have been more in my opinion, when you’re facing a debt ceiling issue, like we were there, it easily could have been down 10% or 15%, but it wasn’t. Again, that shows some of the strength. And then once they made a resolution on the debt ceiling, we have had an amazing movement forward. Very, very strong, very strong. Matter of fact, yesterday we hit all time highs on the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ, which was great. After hours yesterday, Apple and Amazon reported, and their earnings and revenues were less than expected. And this is pretty rare, actually. For Apple, for example they haven’t missed on their numbers since 2018. Both cited the same thing, which is just supply chain constraints. And this is something we’ve been talking about for quite a while. Apple said that they could have sold $6 billion more in the third quarter, if they could have had the products to sell.
So theoretically, this is still a fairly good problem to have. That means that they have more demand than they can meet. And I do think those things will work their way out. The opposite, where you have not enough demand for the products that you have to sell, that’s much worse. So this is still a quasi good environment. But I think one of the things to look at here is that even though we had those downturns in those two stocks, the market’s still doing quite well today. It’s almost up right now. It was up a little bit. And so again, showing the strength of this market, and there are a couple of catalysts that I don’t think are being talked about. Number one, is really this issue with momentum. So, we’ve got a scenario where the market is really moving, it’s sort of like a big battleship, and it’s very hard to turn that around. And sometimes you’ll get some movement and some waves that come. But generally speaking, this thing is just marching along. And so again, focusing on the positive side has been an advantageous position to be in during this market.
But one of the other things that’s driving this market right now, is the fact that these two bills are coming out from Congress. And they’re not driving the market, in my opinion for exactly what people think which so most people think, okay, hey, this is going to come out, they’re going to spend this money. But if you really look at those two bills, they’re spread out over eight and 10 years. I don’t think there’s going to be a massive economic impact immediately, because of the amount of time that those are going to come out. Actually I hope that there is a good impact, and I hope that because they’re spreading it out, it keeps inflation low. But what really happened that I think a lot of people aren’t paying attention to at least from the stock market standpoint, is how they’re going to get the revenues for those bills. They have now taken off the corporate taxation. So originally, they were going to try to get taxes on corporations to up to 28%. And then they moved that down to 26%. And now they’re not going to change it. So that is a good thing for the stock market. I’m not trying to be political here as to what we should be doing. But if you look at the way the stock market works, when you increase taxes, you decrease earnings on those companies, and earnings are one of the biggest drivers for where the move the stock market forward. So when you tell the stock market that was thinking at one point in time, taxes might go up on corporations that they’re not going to go up, you’re going to see an upward moving stock market.
The same thing about capital gains. Originally capital gains, were going to be ordinary income, and then we’re going to move the tax bracket up an ordinary income would have been 39.6%, on capital gains above $400,000. Then that was changed and it was moved down to 25%, and now they’re not going to change it at all, staying at 20%, which makes capital gains and stocks and real estate, in that case, also advantageous asset classes. And so that, again, is an area where people are going to continue to move money towards those. So those two things have happened here in the last 10 days. You know, the bills that are out there, you have to be careful, because you know, it’s a constantly moving target, but they are seem to be narrowing it down. And it looks pretty unlikely that they will include either one of those taxation issues in this particular go round with these two bills. Again, that’s a positive to the stock market as far as that goes.
So I guess lastly, my main point is just unbelievable. So you’ve got the scenario right now where interest rates are basically still at zero. There’s very low competition to the stock market. When CDs are paying a half percent instead of 5% or 6%, and bonds are paying such small amounts, that really drives money towards the stock market. And so when you see low interest rates, the stock market and real estate market are two good places to be. Yet throughout this timeframe, we have had people saying that we’re going to have the biggest stock market crash in history. I know I saw several headlines said it was going to happen in October. Today’s the last day, trading day, of October. We did not have the biggest stock market crash in history. I don’t know where these guys are coming from. Because the environment that we’re in is very “Pro-stock market.” That could change. I will let you know when I think that changes.
But I do think that the you know those people all the way through going back to March 22, when I started this have been dead wrong. And those people that focused on what was happening on the positive side, and can kind of balance out their overall view of what was happening in the market have done a heck of a lot better. They results have been better. And one of the things we did back in mid-June, is we stopped trying to chase the trends that worked so well, actually, the in 2020. We’re still seeing the same thing. We’re not seeing trends that are maintaining for very long, not long enough to grab on to. So we moved into a broad market indexes, and that’s been working great. And I still encourage those of you who are trying to manage some of this money on your own, to take a look at those broad market indexes. Because the money is moving around, from large to mid, to Small Cap, to growth to value, to different industries just too quickly, and it’s not staying anywhere for very long. There’s no place to grab on to, per se. And generally you just buy it all. And it’s going great as far as that goes. So that’s the strategy. I still think that’s a good strategy. I do think trends will reemerge at some point. But part of the reason trends are having trouble is because we don’t know what’s happening. Are we having inflation? Are we not having inflation? Are we going to have a situation where the Delta Variant comes out with a different mutation or whatever it is. We’re still working through this reopening and trying to figure out what’s going on. So anyway, that’s what’s happening this week, and I really enjoy the chance to be able to chat with you about this and look forward to to chatting again about it next week.