Hello and welcome to our Market Alert video for today, which is October 4, 2024. I hope this video is finding you healthy, wealthy and wise. I am, of course, Ken Moraif. I’m the founder and CEO of Retirement Planners of America, the firm that is taking care of your finances hopefully. And I want to first of all say hi to everybody out there in SCWPerS nation. I hope you guys are SCWPering Your little tails off. That’s your job. Our job is to get the gray hair and to manage all this stuff for you so that you don’t have to. And for those of you who are clients, our job is to get you to be a SCWPer as soon as possible, and hopefully we’re going to get you there, and we’re going to accomplish that with you. That’s our that’s our singular goal, is to get you to be a SCWPer or to help SCWPerS stay SCWPerS. That’s what we want too. So thank you for watching! Before we get into it, we got the jobs numbers, and they were surprisingly good. And so I want to go over with you the ramifications of that, because sometimes good news is bad news. But before I do, I have a quick public service announcement, and that is that, you know, my birthday is coming up on October 22 so that’s a little under two weeks from now. And I just want to remind you to make sure that you get your shopping in early. Okay? Because you don’t want to go online and find out that it’s all sold out, or go to the malls and have to deal with all the crowds and the parking and all of that stuff. It’s like, it’s a hassle. So get your shopping done early, you know. And if you need a hint or a suggestion as to what to get me, you know, something little red fits in my garage. That would be great a Ferrari, you know that would work if you’re wondering what to get me, think Ferrari, yeah. Anyway, so let’s go over what we got with the jobs numbers. The numbers came in twice as good in terms of numbers of jobs created, than what even the most optimistic economist on Bloomberg list of economists was forecasting. Now, these economists make a lot of money, and it always, you know, they’re wrong almost always. So is that a bizarre to me? But be that as it may, what does this all mean? Well, we’ve been talking with you about how the Federal Reserve has two mandates. One is that their job is to get inflation down and keep it at 2% and the second is to have jobs be at what’s called full employment. Well, they have basically said inflation is under control. It’s headed towards 2% our work there is done. Now we’re going to focus on the jobs, because the numbers were coming in saying that jobs numbers are getting worse, and the momentum was accelerating. And so we need to address that. And so in our view, they panicked, and they lowered interest rates 50 basis points. And if you remember 1% is 100 basis points, so 50 is half a percent, but they lowered interest rates by 50 basis points, which is more than very, very few people thought they would do go that big. And so, in our view, they panicked. And so given these jobs numbers, and given that they have lowered interest rates as much as they did, we think inflation is going to pick back up again, and we’re going to find out next week what the inflation numbers are. But our view is that next, through the end of this year, we’re going to get three more inflation readings, and we think they’re going to show that inflation is going back up again. And so the Fed overreacted, in our view, and they’re going to come under a lot of criticism. Now investors, if they start seeing inflation going back up again, probably won’t take that well. And of course, we are in an election cycle, so those two things probably will cause, in our view, a correction in the market, which is a drop of 10, but not 20 in that range. But as we’ve shown you in previous videos, those are common. Eight out of the last 10 election cycles, the market’s gone down in October, and it’s recovered very quickly. So if it happens, it’s likely, we think, possible. If it does, we see that as a buying opportunity not a reason to freak out and sell, nor is it a reason to sell. Now, okay, we’re going to play through it and and let it play itself out. Now, the other thing that happened, there’s two items that are interesting to talk about. One is the strike. The dock workers strike, and right now it’s off the table because they decided to postpone the strike until January 15, which is very interesting to me, because why would they do that? Is there something that’s going to happen between now and January 15? Yeah, I can’t really think of what that could be. But maybe there’s something that might cause them to delay. So anyway, that’s off the table for now. So through the end of the year, shouldn’t be an issue. And then secondly, we have something that potentially could be an issue, and that is Israel bombing Iran’s oil production. Now, as I record this, they haven’t done it, and certainly, if they do, there would be a huge spike in oil prices, and that certainly would be inflationary, and that would again cause inflation to go up, cause the market to go down. But we have precedent for oil shocks in the past, and other than the one in 1973 74 where that was actually an oil embargo, where they basically choked off the world’s oil because they were mad at us. The Saudis did. But other than that, when we’ve had oil shocks, the stock the stock market’s gone down, but it’s recovered very quickly after that. And we anticipate that if that happens this time, the same will be the case. It’ll recover quickly. So again, we don’t see anything right now that would cause us to want to sell now because of something that’s about to happen. Quite the opposite, if it goes down. We see that as a buying opportunity. So there you are. Now, in terms of our investments, I’ve talked primarily up until now about our stocks, so I’ll talk about our bonds now. We believe our bond portfolio is going to do very well into the rest of this year. The Fed is in the cycle of lowering interest rates now, you know, they may halt in November, but certainly the trend is favorable for bonds, and we think they’re going to perform well. And we projected this at the beginning of this year, and sure enough, it’s happening. So that’s that’s been a very positive outcome. So our stocks and bonds should do well. Rocky in between now and the end of the year, but should do well overall. So no reason to panic and do anything for the time being. So as I said, I hope this video finds you healthy, wealthy and wise. Make sure you share this with your friends and family. And in fact, if you know anybody that is looking for somebody to help them with their retirement planning, please send them our way. We’ll treat them right. We’ll take care of them, and we’ll part friends with them if they don’t want to do business with us, that’s fine. Don’t worry about that. Okay, so send them our way. And so again, all you in SCWPerS Nation, good on you. Those of you not there, our job is to get you there. We’ll work on it, and we’ll talk soon. Bye.

Please note: transcript has been modified after the time of recording. 

Economic indicators and stock market performance cannot be predicted. Opinions expressed regarding the economy and the stock market belong solely to Ken Moraif on behalf of Retirement Planners of America and may not accurately portray actual future performance of the economy or stock market outcomes. Opinions expressed in this video is intended to be for informational purposes only and is not intended to be used as investment advice for individuals who are not clients of Retirement Planners of America. All content provided is the opinion of Ken Moraif, CEO and Founder of RPOA Advisors, Inc. (d/b/a Retirement Planners of America ) (“Retirement Planners of America”, “RPOA”). ©Copyright 2023