Bad News Is Good News

Market Alert July 17, 2017: Bad News Is Good News

• The S&P 500 and the Dow rose to an all-time high last week.
• Inflation is so low that the Fed may not raise interest rates again this year.
• Investors are still confident that tax reform is still likely by the end of this year.
• We continue to stand by our fearless forecast of Dow 22,250.
• Both stocks and bonds were up last week.

Three Steps For a Sound Financial Plan

Kiplinger: The 10 Most Important Years of Your Financial Life (& How to Prepare For Them)

"The five years before and the five years after retirement can be a real minefield. A big loss during this time could spoil all your hopes and dreams, so here’s what you need to do to protect yourself." - Ken Moraif

Read Ken's full article: http://www.kiplinger.com/article/retirement/T047-C032-S014-the-10-most-important-years-of-your-financial-life.html

July 15th, 2017

Where Could We Go From Here?

We had a tremendous start to 2017. The U.S. stock market was up. The European stock market was up. The emerging markets were up. The first half of this year was the best first-half-year performance by the stock market since 2009. Why is the market doing so well? I believe its behavior in 2009 can be explained by the fact that we had just come through the credit crisis. The market crashed and then rebounded. It wasn’t unusual to see such a great rise after a severe bear market.  2017 is different because there was no market crash beforehand. The economy isn’t great. Jobs numbers aren't bad, but wages haven’t risen. I think the market is rising based on continued optimism in the Trump agenda: the prospect of tax cuts, the prospect of deregulation, and the prospect of repatriation of trillions of dollars overseas (it’s anticipated that much of that money could come back into the U.S. and go straight into stock buybacks, which would tend to drive stock prices up).