Transcript:
Tom Vaughan:
Hello, everybody, welcome to Monday. Today was a really great day actually, it’s almost a green shirt day. The S&P 500 was up 1.4%, but it was a green shirt day, actually, for the Dow, which was up almost 1.8%. That’s the best it’s done since March of this year. And then the Russell 2000 Small Cap Index was up 2.2% today, so. Really good moves today all together, especially after, kind of the carnage that happened from last week. Again, last week, we had the Federal Reserve talking about the possibility of raising interest rates in 2023. We had one of the Federal Governors come out on Friday, and say that they might raise it before that, and of course, the market took a pretty big dive on Friday, for those comments, and so what we’re seeing today is the Fed Governors coming out, and I think we’ll see this all week. They’re coming and doing different interviews, and really trying to talk down the process that they’re going to use to raise rates, and that it’s still just a guess, and all these different types of things.
But this is exactly the same thing that happened last time, where the market reacted negatively, to the Fed meeting, and then they came out the next week and started talking positive, and things started to do well, so. The focus today was on the reopening stocks, which actually hasn’t been the focus for a while now, for the last four weeks or so. And really, that’s why we saw the Dow and even some of the small cap stocks do so well, we’re seeing some movement there. We saw the 10 year Treasury, the yield went up, which is what you kind of expect in this environment as a whole. So, altogether, what we’ve done right now with the portfolios, is that we’ve put a big chunk into the overall indexes, the total stock market index, and the Vanguard’s S&P 500. And then ESG, we have the same versions of those, but they’re screened for ESG for Environmental, Social, and Governance, and we’re building those positions up, mainly because the market is kind of vacillating back and forth. I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised tomorrow, if we didn’t see the growth side do well, and that’s kind of how it’s been going.
So we still have, you know, four or five pieces of the value aspect, the reopening stocks in there, and then we have four or five pieces, depending on the model that’s also in the growth side. So, we got a better balance right now, we’ll see what happens going forward as far as that goes. But really, really good day today, very pleased with how things worked out, and I think that one of the things I mentioned last time on Friday, I still think is important, is that when the Federal Reserve talks about raising interest rates, it’s because the economy is good, and ultimately, that leads to higher earnings, and it’s only a problem when they’ve raised rates quite a few times before you start to really see issues. Now you’ll see volatility as they’re raising them, but these big types of downturns are only happening after you know, literally 15 to 30 different rate increases. We haven’t even had one yet, and they’re not talking about doing that until 2023 at this point, so we’ll see what happens. But anyway, that’s what’s happening today. Look forward to see what’s gonna happen tomorrow, and we’ll talk to you then. Thank you very much.