Transcript
Hello, everybody, welcome to Wednesday, the S&P 500 was down a little bit today .03%. As you know, it broke its five day run yesterday. Unfortunately for us, we broke our six day run in improvements on our average account today, we were actually down about .62% in total, still very, very good. I have some numbers for what’s happened so far this year. If you look at all of the stock positions, ETF or individual stocks that are in all of our accounts across the board, our average rate of return is 12.7%. So far for the year, these numbers are as of yesterday, and they do not include a subtraction for fee. The fee is different by account depends on how much money you have .4% up to 1.5%. So you’d have to take that out, but still really good numbers. Because if you look at what happened with the stock market on the cross the broad basis, what we call the class blended benchmarks, it’s only up 5.1%. So we’re actually 7.6% ahead of the broad market more than double the rate of return just in this five and a half week period. So you know, a little snapback today is probably appropriate.
To be honest, if you look at the bond markets, kind of a different story, we’re actually down .4%. But the overall broad bond market is down .8%. So we’re actually ahead of that too, by point 4%, I do think the bond market is going to be a much more difficult place to create return this year. Because you know, as interest rates start to go up, you know, we’ve seen the 10 year Treasury, the rate go from roughly point 6% to about 1.2%. And so that makes the value of bonds go down. And sometimes the value goes down faster than you know, the yield will come up in terms of your payout. So that’s how you get a you know, small negative so far, I expect that to continue, I think there’ll be some pressure on there, you know, rates are so low, they don’t have much room to go any lower. So they’re going back up a little bit, which is not a bad thing altogether. And I think the strategy for bonds is really pretty straightforward. You move into these Treasury inflation protected securities, which generally do well, better anyway, when things are you know, interest rates are going up. And then high yield bonds, again, they’re, you know, more attached to the stock market, to a certain degree than the bond market. So they can do well in higher inflationary period here that we could be heading for.
Now, you just have to be careful with those, because they can go down, you know, a little bit faster than a regular bond type thing. And so we’ve been using stop losses on those to try to protect, you know, some of the downside, and I think it’s going to take some different measures than normal to, you know, squeeze some money out of the bond side of the portfolios, especially for you know, those accounts that have a lot of bonds in them, then, you know, we really got to focus on that aspect. But we are doing so well on the stock side, that it’s sort of overwhelming, some of the bond pieces that we’ve had. And I think our overall average rate of return is 8.9%, you know, again, as of yesterday, before fees, with a 66%, exposure to stock and the rest in bonds and cash across all of our portfolios. And we have 10 different risk levels from 10% stock all the way to 100% stock, both what we call traditional models and ESG models. So you know, there’s a whole bunch of things in there. We also hold on to a lot of what we call legacy positions, which are different things that people brought in themselves. And you know, we continue to work that but all those are in those numbers.
So today, very interestingly, the Federal Reserve Chairman, Chairman Powell, spoke, every time he speaks, the market goes down, at least recently, back when the market was falling apart, he was talking about, you know, the economy is great. I wouldn’t bet against the US economy and all these things. And, and now that the markets up, it gives him some room to try to talk about how soft the economy is, because he’s trying to encourage, you know, the stimulus pieces to come through. The feds been trying really hard and doing a good job on trying to support the market. And of course, he’d like Congress to do you know, something also. So we do have this $1.9 trillion stimulus that’s hanging out there that, you know, probably get through here pretty soon as some as far as that goes. So, I will say that every time he’s spoken, the marks come down, but then the next day, it’s gone up. So it’s not really a big deal, as far as that goes, but that’s what we saw a really kind of erratic motion today, on the minute by minute chart with the S&P 500, which is not unusual when the Fed Chairman speaks. We also have had 80% of the S&P 500. Sorry, S&P 500 companies report their quarterly earnings so far. They have had a really good report, the average has been 17% higher than the expected earnings. So really fantastic.
There’s a lot of great things going on, that are happening here. As far as that goes and you know, that is why the market itself is up five It, we’ve done better just because we’re in the right areas, we did see a sell off today for 3d printing. But that’s to be expected went up so much. And I think it needs to consolidate a little bit. It is in front of the big trend that I’m seeing right now, which is really just kind of this, what looks like redoing in the manufacturing worldwide robotics, artificial intelligence, 3d printing, you know, those types of things that are involved in the manufacturing process. I’ve really been moving strongly here for you know, for this year, I think that’s probably because companies are, you know, moving in that direction. So, really fascinating day all together. I think, you know, it’ll be interesting to see what happens tomorrow, and I’ll talk to you then. Thank you very much.