Transcript:
Tom Vaughan:
Hello, everybody, welcome to Monday. The S&P 500 hit another all-time high today: It was up .43%. That is the fifth all-time high in the last six trading days. The market’s in a really good spot; and it’s really going well. And really, the whole reason the market’s doing well, is because we’re in the zone where inflation is less likely, and deflation, or even recession, is also less likely: We’re right in that middle; right where you want to be. And with the lower interest rates, there’s not a lot of other places to go: Bonds aren’t paying that much, and the banks aren’t paying that much, and so people are moving into the stock market; and we continue to see really good strength.
A couple weeks ago, we had a downturn: It looks like it could have developed into something, into a bigger downturn; especially since it was August. And here we go: We ended up with recovery pretty quickly. Everybody was talking about how slow August can be, and that’s true, but this August again, we were up 3% so far on the S&P 500 for the month. So, really good: We still got another day to go here before the month closes out.
But last August, we did well, too. And so that’s why you got to be a little bit careful about the seasonality issues. People talk about, “sell in May and go away,” and “buy back in November.” And, I’ve looked at those year after year, and I don’t know that it’s very good trading strategy, at least from what I’ve seen; so we’ll see how things play out here.
But it is very strong; today was really strong: Apple hit an all-time high today. There was some great things happening today, and I’m very excited about what’s happening. The Federal Reserve has done what everybody was kind of hoping, in that they’re very clearly stating that they would like to start to cut back on the bond purchases at the end of the year, but they also stated that they want to be careful; and that they want to make sure that they don’t do things too quickly, to kind of kick us back down the hill, so to speak, and whatnot. And they also talked about kind of decoupling the bond: Cutting back on bond purchases, and the raising of interest rates; and there was some concern that might happen a lot faster. And they’re trying to separate those two pieces out, which I thought was very good.
So, the speech that was made from the Jackson Hole conference, which wasn’t actually in Jackson Hole, but was very well received. And we saw that on Friday, we’re seeing again today; and really good things are happening as far as that goes. So, we’ll have to wait and see what goes on, but right now the stock market is definitely a good place, and it’s been good for quite some time. A lot of the things that we had hoped to happen this year definitely are happening. So anyway, let’s look forward to seeing what’s going to happen tomorrow and look forward to talking to you then. Thank you.