Transcript:
Tom Vaughan:
Hello, everybody, welcome to Monday, the S&P 500 was up .3%. Today, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but it was really good for today because it was down more than 3%. Early in the trading session, the NASDAQ was down 4.9%. And actually ended up point 6%. These are good signs in a downward moving market like we’ve had, where you get these kind of rallies that come in and reverse for the day. So we’ll see how that plays out. But there’s quite a few things pushing negatively on the market. And that’s why we’re seeing these downturns this year. We’re, of course, have this Ukraine and Russia situation that’s going on, that’s a bit scary. Historically, those types of things have not impacted the economy and the stock market has often dropped because of the fear of what might happen. But then once the you know, situation is kind of examined a little bit further economy doesn’t fall stock market comes back. We saw that happen with Afghanistan, we saw that happen with the invasion of Kuwait, for example. So we’ll see how that plays out.
We also have a situation where the Federal Reserve is meeting this week. And so we’ll have to see what happens. They come out on Wednesday, we’ll see if they stay, you know, with their kind of harsh rhetoric about inflation, or do they soften that up a little bit considering what’s happening here with the stock market. And then of course, this week is the really big earnings weeks that big companies like Apple and Microsoft and Tesla are reporting earnings this week. So we’ll see how that goes.
So far, earnings have been good, kind of expecting those companies to do fairly well. But we’ll wait and see what happens there. I do find it kind of interesting that on Monday mornings, we often have some big downturns. I wonder if it isn’t related somewhat to what’s happening in the Cryptocurrency market. Cryptocurrency markets don’t close. They’re up open 24/7. So if they’re coming down during the week weekend, you know, maybe people feel more negative about the environment and they’re selling their stocks, or they have high leverage on the Cryptocurrency, which they can do because it’s not regulated. And they’re having to pay off that leverage because of their losses by selling their stocks. So we’ll see how that plays out as far as that goes. So we were able to take advantage of what happened today. We rebalanced very near the bottom of this market. It was what I described on Friday, as long as you have a stock market that’s coming down in an economy that’s still doing well, earnings are still doing well. You continue to rebalance the portfolio, we did change one position we decided to purchase Microsoft, we were able to get that at $284 A share inside of the IRA type accounts that have 40% or more stock exposure. We bought it at 284. It’s now 296. That turned out to be a really good purchase.
I do think that the market probably has some more downside in it. You don’t normally see this much downside that just turns around very quickly. Although we have had that happen quite a few times in the last year and a half, where we got these kind of little V recoveries. But we’ll see what happens here. I was impressed with what happened today and very excited about that very happy that we were able to get in and do some of that rebalancing at a really good point, actually. So hopefully that continues to you know, work out for us. Still watching for that overall downshift trend to a downtrend, we went from an uptrend to what I call a sideways trend that we’re in right now to you know the possibility of a downtrend, but not happening yet. So we’ll just watch for that. So anyway, great to be able to talk to everybody and let me know let you know what we’re doing here. Very interesting day today. We’ll have to see what happens this week. But I look forward to talking to you tomorrow. Thank you