Transcript
Everybody, welcome to Monday, the S&P 500 was up .65%. Today, very wild ride, most of that game came in the last 20 minutes, which will be really interesting to see what happens tomorrow with that. The Nasdaq was the best index today, which really shows kind of what happened today, which was the growth was the big winner. If you go back to last Monday, it was value. And then the next Tuesday was growth. And it’s been every other day for six trading days in a row right now, kind of the battle back and forth between these two, we did make some changes to the portfolios today, really leaning into the theme of recovery. And so as you guys remember, if you’ve watched this for a while, I usually like to generate themes. And then I go out and look at the charts to see if the trends are there. And in this case, the answer is yes. So the theme of recovery revolves around finding things that are going to do well, that have, you know, a need for the virus to be under control, and especially things that maybe haven’t done well for a long time so that they’re fairly cheap.
The other theme around recovery is that we’re probably going to get at least in the short term, a big inflation push, which will drive up the value, you know, the yield on bonds, but also drive down the value on those bonds. So the adjustments we made today, we’re to get into more of those types of stocks that should do well, for example, one of the things we added today was a leisure and entertainment exchange traded fund. And this is pretty cool, you know, has Disney restaurants, restaurants suppliers, movie makers, movie, you know, houses, all of these different things, you know, travel related, and what have you that you would expect to see in something called the Leisure and Entertainment ETF. And really, if you think about it, leisure and entertainment in those particular particular areas really is what got hammered here.
So it’s been doing very, very well. So we added that to the portfolio. And obviously, you know, the hope is that we continue to see that. The other thing we’ve done is we’ve added some more inverse bond piece. And that’s mainly because when again, inflation comes in economy really grows, the Fed is said so far, we’re not going to try to stop that we’re going to let this inflation run for a little bit. And that means trouble for bonds. And so if you have something that’s going the other way, I think it does well. So two of our five bond pieces right now are in the inverse side, and the rest are on the short term government or short term, high yield or short term TIPS, for example. So I’m really happy with this portfolio right now we’ll see what happens going forward here. I think we have a great opportunity here to make some money as this comes through. Quickly, I’d like to talk about what’s happened today, that was somewhat important, there was a lot of conversation about increasing taxation. And the reason this is coming about is because they’re now that they’ve got this big stimulus bill all the way through, they’re now working on the next bill, which is this really big infrastructure build out bill be between three and $4 trillion, which is a lot.
And so they’re going to try to offset some of that with increased taxes. And so talking about a few areas, number one, corporate taxes would go from 21%, up to 28. They were at 35. And the top tax bracket for people over $400,000 of earnings would go from 37% to 39.7, which is where it was before. And then they’re talking about increasing capital gains taxes, but only if you have more than a million dollars worth of income. And it would basically instead of being at a 20%, you know, max, it would be part of your ordinary income, which if you’re making over a million, which would be 39.7%. So that’s a big difference. But again, you have to have an awful lot of income in that year for that to be, you know, effective as far as that goes. And so I don’t think that’s going to be a big impact to you know, my clients as a whole in terms of their own personal taxation situation. But let’s talk about the impact that could have on the market.
Historically, what I have seen is that when these come through, there’s some volatility around these, you know, increases in capital gains, we really haven’t had an increase since 1993, you know, in ordinary income tax rates and what have you, either. So, you know, we’ll have to wait and see what happens there. But I wouldn’t be surprised to see some volatility around those, you know, announcements, and then next would be just long term. And we have almost no correlation to taxation rates, capital gains rates, or what have you to what happens to the stock market, which is kind of interesting. I know that flies in the face of what most people think but it hasn’t had an impact if you look at the studies. Now, the other part, I think, very fascinating is can they even get this passed, in order to do the entire bill, they would have to get 60 votes right now, if they kill the filibuster that could get that back down to 50. Or they could push some pieces of a bill like this through the Budget Reconciliation Act where they need 50 I don’t think they have 50 votes right now to increase taxes as we stand.
So this is going to be a real big battle. And there’s maybe some concern about increased taxes, but it’s going to be fairly difficult to actually do it. So, you know, we’ll have to see you know how this plays out. But that’s what I’m seeing today. Really fascinating. Love the way the portfolio’s established right now, again, you know, most of the changes today were done to the IRAs, a few changes to the non-IRA accounts. But, you know, the non-IRA accounts did better today, you know, because it got a lot more growth still left in there. And so, you know, we’ll see how this plays out as we go, but look forward to talking to you tomorrow. Thank you.