Transcript
Hello, everybody, welcome to Thursday, the S&P 500 was down .15%. Today, it actually opened up around 1% negative and went down a little bit more than that, and then spent the rest of the day kind of fighting its way back, almost got all the way back ended up, you know, a little bit of a downtrend right at the end. But I really was interested today to see kind of the breadth of what happened. So you know that the downturn was pretty shallow, but it was pretty wide.
So in other words, if you look at the 415, stock ETFs that I’m following about three quarters of them were down today, again, not a lot. But that breadth matters, too. It’s another piece to watch for, besides just how much something goes down, how many are going down. But probably the biggest story for me today really was two of our targeting indexes were up, we had the US construction piece that was up 1.2% today. And then we had the pet care that was also up today. And so I think that’s really interesting. Those were both chosen, because they did well in September’s downturn. And they’re doing what I would hope they would do in some of these down days. And they would continue to plod forward with some positive returns. And that’s a really powerful piece for the portfolios, you know, we don’t have everything in one place. And we’ve got some diversification there. And that’s what’s kind of showing, of course, bonds did pretty well today.
Treasuries have been on a run here for a while. And that’s good. We have a lot of treasuries, and they’ve been underperforming pretty badly actually, compared to the other bonds. Again, I keep treasuries in the portfolio, because they generally go up when the market goes down. Now one of the problems that will happen with treasuries right now is that the rates are so low, they don’t have as much room to go up. And so because when rates come down, the prices go up. But when there isn’t as much room to come down and rates, the prices don’t move as much, so they won’t be as spectacular as they have been in the past as a parachute. But they’re still better than a lot of the other things. When everybody’s really nervous about things, they don’t want to buy corporate bonds, they don’t want to buy municipal bonds, because they’re worried that those you know, entities won’t be able to pay. They want to buy treasuries, because there’s an expectation that the US would be able to continue to pay. So that paid off today as good. And that actually paid off this last couple of days where the markets been down.
The Treasury has been doing quite well. So I think we did pretty well today all together again, even though it was a down day. I think we’re just kind of waiting, the market seems to be settling down a little bit. And maybe he’s waiting for see what happens with the election. So we’ll see how this plays out. But I look forward to talking to you tomorrow and we’ll see what goes on then. Thank you very much.