Transcript:
Tom Vaughan:
Hello, everybody, welcome to Thursday, the S&P 500 was down .9% today, unfortunately taking back a chunk of the gains that were made yesterday. The S&P 500 was just one of the indexes down. Unfortunately, the NASDAQ actually gave back a little bit more of its gains from yesterday. So this is what’s going to be happening, in my opinion, a little bit like what we saw before, in the past, when we have these types of scenarios, there’s this kind of big churn. A lot of tech stocks are sold growth stocks are sold right down today, even though they were bought yesterday, and sold in sort of the cyclicals the Dow type stocks did a little bit better, you know, that type of stuff. And so people are trying to figure out, you know, what’s going to work.
Unfortunately, it’s going to be very difficult to tell, especially because we’re still in the middle of a pandemic. So, you know, one thought process would be that we’re going to see this, you know, higher inflation, fantastic growth in demand, and all these things are going to happen. And so the Federal Reserve is going to start to, you know, raise rates and cut back on stimulus. So you’d want to be in kind of more cyclical stocks that would do better, maybe reopening names, and those types of things. And in the bond market, you want to be more Treasury protection securities, which did well today also. But at the same time, you can have a situation come along with tha a variant of some type that slows things down enough where, you know, they’re not even able to raise rates as much as they think they will.
If you look at the bond market right now, it’s not moving up very much. And what that says is the bond market doesn’t see the economy being quite as hot here in the future. What they call the yield curve is a little bit flat right now, which is another sign that the bond market doesn’t think that inflation is a major threat. And that’s an issue for the stock market. So we saw this in 2018, when when when the stock and bond market thinks the economy isn’t going to do that, well, the Federal Reserve is talking about raising rates, they’ll think, well, that is going to do the worse. And so that’s one of the things that happens, and there’s this give and take. I was actually still pretty impressed with yesterday’s conversation from the Fed Reserve, especially in the area of flexibility. I think that the stock maret is kind of discounting that, in the past, the Federal Reserve just kind of marched right on through and kept raising rates, maybe even beyond what they needed to, and that’s caused, probably, in my opinion, the 2000, the 2008 downturns, and that’s the concern right now. It’s legitimate, but it’s one of those things we have to wait and see.
So the strategy here, in my opinion, is to have kind of all of the stocks, you have the value stocks, the cyclical stocks, you have the growth stocks, you have the tech stocks, you have all of these pieces, in what what I call these total stock market indexes. 89% of our current allocation in the stock market in our models, is in that total stock market index, we have a couple of individual stocks to make up the other 11%, you know, but the main emphasis here is that it’s very difficult in this environment to tell what’s going to work and what’s not, because the crosscurrents are unprecedented. This is not a normal recession recovery. This is a re-opening -that’s different. This is a pandemic -that’s different. So these are the things that we’re all going to have to kind of go through as far as that goes, you know, we’ll have to see how this plays out.
But altogether, I think, you know, there’s still some basics here, that are important to understand. And that is the fact that even if they do start raising rates, rates are still very, very low. And there isn’t going to be any place else to go with the money. And money’s still going to come and move out. And we’re still going to see some economic growth, I think, because we saw so much gains in household net worth 36 trillion, you know, in gains since March of last year. That’s a lot of money. People feel wealthier. And you know, they’re gonna spend some of that money. So you know, there’s some pieces that are out there, but these, that’s one side of the crosscurrents and say kind of kind of keep track of all of these different possibilities.
And right now, for me, you know, this total stock market concept of having essentially all of the stocks that are out there is probably the place to go seems like the best strategy to me in these types of situations. So I look forward to seeing what’s gonna happen tomorrow. We do have the show tomorrow. If you want to join us from 12:15 to 1:00 o’clock, I do a summary of what I saw for the market for the week at the beginning of that show, too. So look forward to seeing you then. Thank you.