Transcript:
Tom Vaughan:
I’ve, of course always like to start with a summary of what I saw happening with the market this week. Really amazing week all together. And let me show you a chart here just for starters. So here’s that, you know, year to date S&P 500 chart. And Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday or up Wednesday was really up. Thursday, we took it all back. And today, you know, we’re kind of down to near the lows of where, at least this morning anyway, near the lows of what we hit back on Monday morning. And so one of the things you might notice, if you look closely at this chart is that we’re kind of challenging the same low point, more or less around 4100 ish on the S&P 500. And so on 24th of February, there’s a low point there, that was the invasion date of, you know, for Ukraine. And in the morning, we hit a low there, and then Monday and then today. And so it’s we’re hitting what’s called support, that just means that, you know, there’s people willing to buy it that level. So when the price gets there, they come in, and they buy and the price jumps back up. But one of the problems you’ll see is when you keep hitting support over and over again, you can actually dry up that support, I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see that happen and have us come down next level supports, you know, about 5%, lower than where we are right now.
And so that you know is part of the process, more or less what we have happening here is just this giant battle between opposing forces, and one group that believes that things are going to be okay. And they want to buy at these lower dips, and another group that believes that, you know, we’re going to head into recession and you know, need to sell when things run up and such, too. So with that in mind, really, this week, one of the biggest pieces, what was what’s happening with the Federal Reserve. So they met this week, the chairman, the Federal Reserve came out Chairman Powell, and spoke, talk to the American people, which is kind of interesting to watch, just really about inflation and how they’re going to try to fight inflation. And then there was a question and answer session that happened. And I thought the questions are really good this week, this particular time. And of course, Chairman Powell does a really good job of answering those questions.
So the overall summary was that they’re going to, they just raise rates, another half a percent. He talked about raising rates, you know, another half percent for the next two meetings, June and July meeting, and that they’re going to start to sell some of the assets that they had on their balance sheet starting June 1. So as you probably recall, the Federal Reserve was buying Treasury bonds and buying mortgage bonds to create liquidity, now they have about $9 trillion worth of those bonds on their balance sheet. And so now they’re going to start to sell them or let them expire and fall off, which would create a more restrictive monetary environment, right. And so that’s what they were doing. And then in the commentary, he was saying that he felt that the economy was very strong, the job market was strong, the consumer households were very, very sound right now. And businesses were very sound, financially, and spending and all these different things that they’re looking at. And they felt that they could push down on the economy by raising interest rates, and letting these bonds fall off the balance sheet. And the economy would not kick into recession, they should be able to push down, get inflation down without causing a recession, right. And so that was very positive, the market moved up very strongly on that day, over a little about almost 3%, basically, for the S&P 500, for example. And one of the big catalysts was that they basically said that they weren’t going to do a three quarter percent increase at these future meetings that wasn’t on the table at this point in time.
Obviously, things can change. And we’ll see what happens there. But that’s what really seemed to get things rolling on that particular day. So you know, that was all good. It seemed very clear. I do like the clarity that we’re starting to see, we now know what’s going to happen with the balance sheet and all these things. But the question and answer period was excellent. And it was one question I thought was very interesting. And that was that Powell had been talking about trying to lower the demand to meet the supply to kind of create this balance that would then create a lower inflationary environment. And so the question was, what happens if the supply doesn’t come up? Or even falls down further, for example, because China, which is kind of a huge part of our supply chain continues to lock down, or the Ukraine war continues to create problems in the supply chain? What happens with that if the supply starts to come down or stays doesn’t meet you? Are you still going to push demand and push interest rates basically up To make that match up with supply, and if you do that, will that cause a recession? He didn’t really answer it was sort of a, I thought it was sort of by a political answer. And the reason you can’t really answer that is because it’s probably yes. And that’s the one big danger right now is that, you know, supply doesn’t come to meet them on if you’re going to decrease demand and supply isn’t coming up to meet and that could be difficult to deal with.
And more importantly, the Federal Reserve doesn’t, you know, really influence supply. That is there’s outside influences, they can lower people’s wants and demands, but they can’t, you know, really move, you know, the supply side. So it’s very interesting, they spent a lot of time talking about jobs and opening job openings as being a big problem. There’s 11 point 6 million jobs open right now, which is an all time record, again, seems like every time they report that numbers at a new high, and what happens then is what’s called wage cycle inflation. So, you know, so many open jobs, nobody’s taking those jobs, they’re desperate to get the people in. So they start paying more, you know, offering more on these new jobs, of course, that maybe works, people come into work. And then the companies have to charge more, because they’re paying more for the labor. And of course, now we’re all out purchasing these things. And those things get more expensive. And the labor comes back and says, Hey, we need more money. And it’s this upward cycle to what happened in the 1970s. So what they’re really trying to do is drive down the number of open jobs, ultimately, by slowing down the economy. So I mean, if there’s 400, people that want to fly in an airplane, and the airline can’t get pilots, and they can only get one pilot that can fly 200 people, that’s a problem. So they can’t get two pilots, which is what they need. They only get one. And so what are they going to do? Well, they’re going to raise the prices on those plane tickets, until there’s only 200 people that really want to pay that much for a flight. And so you have to then try to drive down demand, right? So maybe there’s only 300 people or 200 people that actually want to fly because the economic situation isn’t as good as it used to be. And you also need to get that, you know, supply chain up, which in that case, means more pilots. Right. And so that’s, that’s the big issue. It’s really interesting to see how this is going to play out as far as that goes.
So I think you know, it’s going to take some time here to figure out who’s right in this particular battle, you know, are we going to have a scenario where supply does increase, the demand dissipates enough we get back into a better band for inflation, without recession? Or is the Federal Reserve going to have to push so hard that the only way they can get inflation down is by causing a recession, it’s very important to the stock market, the average rate of return in a downturn without a recession is 15%, which is right around where we are now, the average rate of return in a recessionary situation is negative 36%. So this is where we’re at right now. Just trying to figure out, you know, what’s going to happen here, and something we’re gonna be watching. I will say, I think it’s much more important right now to watch the supply side, we have a very clear picture of what’s going to happen, I think, on the Federal Reserve’s path, right? And that can change, but at least they spelled it out very well. What we don’t have a clear picture of is what’s going to happen on the supply side, how’s China going to deal with these lock downs? What’s going to happen in Russia, Ukraine and other situations that might come at us? So, you know, looking at shipping, and shipping rates, and trucking trucking rates and all these things, and then also looking at whether there’s a spread, we know we’ve been buying goods, mostly, we haven’t been doing services as much the service is start to pick up and does that start to allow some, you know, lower prices, or at least less gains in prices on goods? And so you know, those are things that we want to watch for, as well.
So, there is one other key kind of interesting piece here. And this is a American Association of individuals investors Ay ay ay ay, does a survey, regular basis since 1987. And they ask the people, how many of you think the market is going to be higher in six months? And so if you go back to 1987, there’s only been four other times where the number of people that said they thought it was going to be higher in six months was less than 20%. So the last two weeks, we’ve had less than 20% Just like these other four situations only five times since 1987. Is this happened? And I know it seems kind of weird. If you think about it. Everybody thinks the market is going to go down. Maybe I shouldn’t be in the market. Well, that’s true to a certain point until everybody gets on to one side and too extreme of the situation, because it only leaves the bye Here’s to come back in and move. And if you look what happened in these other four situations was 1988, two times in 1990. And one time in 2016. If you look out to the one year chart here, 100% of the time the market was up a year later, the average rate of return was much higher than the average rate of return for the s&p was at 23.51%. And so this, these scenarios are something to watch for. The other thing is, we’ve never had three weeks in a row, below 20%.
So I think next week, it’ll be interesting to see what happens with this particular survey as far as that goes. But keep in mind that, you know, if you’re nervous, lots of people are nervous. And sometimes enough people get nervous, that’s when it turns the other way and starts to come back up. So let’s see what happens. I do feel like we’ll probably have some continuation to the downside. But we might start to see some pop to the upside, because there’s really nobody left to sell at some point in time. So anyway, that’s what’s happening with the market so far this week. In my opinion, it’s still a time to be cautious, but also a time to kind of hang in there and really see what’s going to play out and how this is going to work as far as that goes, mainly because once things do start moving, they can go really, really fast to the upside. I mean, we saw just a super powerful move on Wednesday, for example. So if you’re gonna, you know, sell everything and then try to jump back in, you can easily miss out on some of these really big updates if they happen. So better to have a well diversified portfolio, hang in there, wait for things to kind of play out and settle out. Because everybody’s running around like they know what’s going to happen, but we don’t so we have to kind of wait and see. So anyway, look forward to talking to you next week. For what I see then. Thank you very much.