• We hit our sell signal yesterday, which was the biggest down day since COVID.
• We sold 50% of all our stocks.
• Regardless of which portfolio you are in, if you are in a 70/30, 60/40, or 50/50, we sold half of your stocks.
• We also sold half of your high yield bonds, because high yield bonds tend to behave just like stocks do.
• So, if you are in a 60 stock 40 bond portfolio, for example, you’re going to be about a third in cash, a third in stocks, and a third in bonds.
• Over the last six months, we’ve done a lot of work on improving our strategy to develop what we are calling Invest and Protect 2.0.
• Our strategy is very good at dealing with the big bad bear markets like 2008 and y2k.
• In big bad bear markets like those, the market goes down so far, and it lasts so long that it could be devastating and destroy your retirement.
• But there is another type of bear market, where they last a shorter period of time and are shallower.
• To better address those kinds of bear markets, we’ve developed what we are calling “sanity checks” to decide, when we hit our sell signal, what percentage we sell.
• There are 1000s of indicators to look at, but the Investment Oversight Committee’s research went all the way back to the Great Depression, and we narrowed it down to four.
• The market is very good at sniffing out problems, but it is also very emotional and sometimes not very sane.
• We want to use the sanity checks so that in instances that could be one of those shallower bears, we are hedging our bets.
• The first sanity check we look at is the yield curve, which is the relationship between short term interest rates and long term.
• The yield curve has predicted every single recession we’ve had in the last 100 years, but it has also predicted recessions that didn’t happen.
• The yield curve is currently flashing red, or saying a recession is coming.
• The yield curve is inverted, which means short term rates are higher than long term rates, or that interest rates are going to be lower in the future.
• Why would rates usually be lower in the future?
• Because the Fed could react to a recession.
• The second sanity check is building permits.
• If people are moving, businesses are expanding, building permits are a leading indicator that people want to build, so it is a nice indicator that economic growth is still prevalent.
• Building permits are currently flashing green.
• The third one is investor sentiment.
• Are people overly optimistic, or moving money from aggressive growth-oriented stocks to more defensive stocks?
• Investor sentiment is also still flashing green.
• The fourth sanity check is credit conditions.
• For the economy to grow, consumers to spend, and businesses to build, people often rely on borrowing money.
• We look at consumer credit, business credit, loans, mortgage rates, car notes, and more.
• Credit conditions are also flashing green.
• Because 3 out of our 4 sanity checks are still in the green, we are choosing to sell 50%.
• We may continue to see the market go down more before it comes back.
• Please note, past performance does not guarantee future results.
• So, what happens next?
• One possibility is that right after we sell, the market shoots up and sets new all-time highs.
• That is why we kept some in, and we will wait to hit our buy trigger to buy the rest back in.
• Our Investment Principle is that growth is important, but protection of principal is even more important.
• We always are going to err on the side of protecting you from large losses.
• When our strategy says it’s time to sell, we’re not going to ever ignore it, because with your retirement, we cannot afford to be wrong once.
• We want your money to last as long as you do.
• We certainly want to grow, but if we miss out on some gains by sticking to our core values, we still believe we did the right thing.
• On the other side, if the market goes straight down from here, even if it is another 30%, for a 60/40 portfolio that would translate to about a 9% loss on paper, before bonds and cash come in.
• If this turns into a recession, our bond portfolio should do very well.
• Cash should also earn a significant interest rate in our money market fund.
• The two could provide an offsetting mechanism.
• This downside is painful and we don’t like it, but we are doing everything we can to mitigate the downside for you.
• We hope this gives you peace of mind.

Ken Moraif: Hello everyone. And this is a very special Market Alert video, because we’re going to be talking about what we did and why. And as you know, we told you yesterday that we had hit our sell signal, but we could not go into the details. And the reason why is because we want to avoid what’s called front running. So if we tell the world you know what we’re doing, then people could affect transactions before us and affect our pricing, and we would potentially not get optimum pricing. And we don’t want that to happen. We always want to get you the best price we can. So that’s why we waited until the end of today to tell you what we did and why. So what we did is we are we sold 50% of all of our stocks. And so regardless of which portfolio you’re in, if you’re in a 70, a 50 or a 60, we sold half of your stocks, and we also sold half of your high yield bonds. And the reason why we did that is because high yield bonds tend to behave just like stocks do. They tend to go up and down in the same way. And so therefore we wanted to get half of those off the table as well. So as we sit right now, if you are in a 60 stock, 40 bond portfolio, for example, you should be you’re going to be about a third in cash, a third in stocks and a third in bonds. And so we’re going to talk about why we decided to do that, and what the rationale was behind it. And to do that, I want to bring into the conversation with me, Jordan Roach, our Chief Investment Officer, Jordan, welcome to our I’ll call it. You know what this feels like a podcast. I’ll call it. Welcome to the podcast. So we’ve been doing a lot of work over the last six months on improving our strategy on two different fronts. One is on the front. Well, tell us what those two fronts are. Jordan, welcome. How are you?
Jordan Roach: We’re good after a wild couple days
KM: Yes, craziness, craziness, yeah.
JR: Biggest day yesterday, biggest down day since COVID. Believe that. So wouldn’t a good one. But yeah, last six months really hone in on a couple things. The first and foremost would be painting a broader picture, to give us a, you know, maybe a better insight to what’s going on, not only what the market’s telling us, but the general economic, monetary backdrop to help us navigate those, you know, big bad bears, obviously, but all of us, the mild recessions, the mini bears, all these things that the market can throw at, throw us in different cycles.
KM: We’ve been looking at, how do we get out sooner, which we call Invest and Protect 2.0 right? But also, do we sell 100% or not? And on getting out sooner, we are not quite there in terms of developing that, but we’re very close, and we’ll be announcing that to you, ladies and gentlemen, when we get there. But we have come to some very solid ideas with regard to whether we should sell 100% of our portfolio, our stocks, etc, or 50% and so we went back and for what we call Big Bad bear markets. Big Bad bear markets are where, like the Great Depression, in the 60s, the 70s, 2008, y2k so these are bear markets, where the market goes down so far and it lasts so long that it literally could be devastating. It could destroy your retirement, if it’s bad enough. And our strategy is actually very good at dealing with those. Y2k, 2008 the Great Depression. If you look at how our strategy would have performed during those times, we’re obviously, we’re always looking to improve, but we think that that’s actually quite good. Where our strategy we’d like to we wanted to improve on, it is in what we call the non Big Bad bear markets. And the non Big Bad bear markets are the ones that are not the big, bad ones, like the ones I described, but they’re the ones that maybe last a shorter period of time, and they’re, they’re more shallow, right?
JR: Yeah, they’re, I mean, we’ve seen and sometimes they are, you know, coinciding with a recession, sometimes they’re not. You know, we’ve seen a couple of these in the last decade. We’ve seen these in various other periods. That’s right. So there’s ones where maybe the market only needs a 10 to 20% 25% sell off, to recalibrate, find its footing, sometimes it’s it’s discounting recession. Recession is mild. It works through that. But it’s those types of scenarios.
KM: Okay, so in the Big Bad bears, we wanted to make sure that it we wanted to develop what we what we’re calling sanity checks, right? These are where we hit our sell signal. And now, do we sell 100% or do we not sell 100% do we sell 50 or whatever. And in the process of doing that, we wanted to start right with these sanity checks. Need to always say, Yes, sell in the past, when we’ve been in a big bad, when it’s the resulting was a big bad bear, right? So you started with that, right?
JR: That’s right. So, I mean, this is, you know, the hard part of the research project is there, you know, there’s 1000s upon 1000s of indicators, things to look at across economic, monetary, with the bond market saying, what credit I mean, there’s all sorts of things to look at. So to try to narrow that field is really studying each of these big bad bears and figuring out what was flashing, what was breaking at the time the market was also signaling something’s wrong. We want to start there.
KM: Okay, so the first screen was making sure that whatever we are going to use, it worked every time in the Big Bad bears, going back 100 years, going back to the Great Depression, right? Okay, so that narrowed the universe of all the different things that you can look at that tell you, are we going to have a recession? You know, is the stock market going to go down? You know, all those kind of things. It narrowed that universe dramatically. Out of the 1000s of things you could look at, I would imagine.
JR: Oh, absolutely. It absolutely narrows it down to where you can start getting very focused on what breaks. Because, you know, the also, the hard part is, you know, every bear market, every big, bad market, the things that are leading into them, the causes can be all different. The magnitude, the duration of the clients, are all different. But you can find some commonalities of things that are breaking. And the reason we, I think we call them sanity checks is because, you know, traditionally, you’ve looked at the market to tell us what’s going to happen, and the market is very good at sniffing out problems.
KM: But it’s also very emotional and sometimes not very sane.
JR: That’s exactly right. So we want some sanity checks on Mr. Market. That’s very volatile.
KM: Okay, so then step two was to say, Okay, we’ve narrowed the universe. Now what we want to do is we want to look at the non Big Bad bears, of which, since 2008 we’ve had six times where our strategy has said to sell, and they have not been big bad bears, right? Exactly, right. And so we want to say, We want these sanity checks to then tell us not to sell 100% in those instances, right? So that we we don’t commit fully, because they could be short and they could rebound pretty quickly, and so we want to hedge our bets.
JR: Exactly right? We want to look at those periods and say, You know what? They’re the market’s telling us some things are off, maybe some other indicators saying something’s off. But it doesn’t appear that the weight of the evidence suggests everything’s going red, we should therefore go to 100% cash.
KM: Okay, all right, good. So let’s talk then about what we’ve narrowed it down, and this was, like I said, after six months of negotiations, deciding which are the best ones. Sometimes pretty contentious on our Investment Oversight Committee, but that’s good. I like, I like it when everybody has strong opinions and we’ve narrowed it down to four. That’s right. Okay, so the four are the yield curve. Well, you tell us what are the four? Yep.
JR: So the four designed to kind of look at different areas of things, right? Because you don’t want to have, basically, for instance, you don’t want four different ways to judge the stock market using only stock market based indicators, because that’s all kind of the same thing. So we want to look at different areas. So the first thing is, like we look at the stock market, we’re going to look at what the bond market is telling us, and the way we do that is looking at the yield curve. Okay, so it’s the relationship between short term interest rates and long term and depending on that relationship, it can signal that the bond market now is getting scared about economic growth prospects and earnings, or the bond market is saying things look pretty good.
KM: Okay and so that’s the yield curve, that’s the yield curve, that’s the yield curve, and the yield curve is pretty is an interesting sanity check, because it has predicted every single recession that we’ve had in the last 100 years, absolutely right. Now, the problem with it, of course, is that it’s also predicted recessions that didn’t happen, or very mild or whatever else. But that’s right, right? So, but it does. It is very accurate, very good.
JR: That’s right. I mean, if as a basis, if we just looked at the yield curve as its own indicator, it is very good about signaling you in advance, sometimes well in advance that a recession is coming. It hits it with 100% accuracy.
KM: Okay, so right now. So we’re going to use the terminology that you came up with that I like. Flashing red means it’s telling us to sell. Flashing green means don’t sell. Right, right? And so all four of these flashed red in the Big Bad bears, going back to the Great Depression, but in the ones where they were not big bad bears, all four of these did not flash red, right? They flashed green, or something like that. That’s exactly okay. So what is the yield curve doing? Right? Now, we’ll start with that one. Is it flashing red or green? Yield Curve is flashing red, flashing red. Okay, so the yield curve is saying recession is coming.
JR: That’s right. And there’s, you know, certain way we look at all these things, the yield curve. But effectively the the yield curve inverted, meaning short term rates are higher than long term rates back in 2022 those were really early to this, because 23 and 24 were very good periods for the market. But as of you know, we stand today in, you know, 2025, and April, yield curve is still flashing red.
KM: Right. And I should qualify that all of these four sanity checks, we look at them on the day that our strategy says to sell, yes, yes, and therefore we’ve narrowed. It’s not so the yield curve, as you said, has been inverted, saying recession for two years now. That’s right, right? But we’re looking at it right now on the day of our sell and the sell day, the yield curve is still flashing red. That’s right, right? And and the reason why, ladies and gentlemen, it would that the yield curve does that, is because it’s why is it progress forecasting a recession is because it thinks interest rates are gonna be lower in the future. And usually, why would interest rates be lower in the future?
JR: Because the prospects of economic growth or waning, or getting discounted, or lower and lower and lower. Yeah.
KM: And the Fed’s going to react to that. Okay? So that’s the first one, so that one’s flashing red. So now let’s go to the second one, which is what?
JR: It’s more of a pure economic data point, its looking at building permits.
KM: Okay? Building Permits. Building Permits.
JR: So if you think that, you know people are gainfully employed and want to move, you think businesses are expanding. The first thing to expand a footprint, right, to build a building, to build a house, is before you start building, you got to go to the city and ask for a permit. So it’s a it’s kind of a leading indicator, if you will, that people want to build. People want to move. The builders have access to credit, because that’s usually how they build, that they feel like people are gainfully employed, will go buy the build houses, so on and so forth. It’s a nice indicator that economic growth is still somewhat, you know, prevalent.
KM: Okay, so building permits? Are people getting permits to build stuff, and what is that flashing right now? Red or Green? Green. Green, green. Okay, green. So we’re we have one red, one green, yep. Two to go, Yeah, all right. So this, the third one is sentiment, right? It’s the the sentiment of stock market investors tell us what that means, right?
JR: So it’s a kind of a derivative of just looking at, you know, the market itself, but it’s telling us, effectively on a are people overly optimistic, which means sometimes overly complacent about growth. So that can happen where everyone says, I think the stock market’s going to the moon. I expect to increase my equity allocations. I already have 60% I plan to go to 80% that actually is a contraindicator, meaning once we get so optimistic, it’s only going up large a lot of time you’re closer to the top than not.
KM: And so also isn’t part of the stock market investor sentiment. If they’re moving their money from aggressive stocks, you know, aggressive growth oriented stocks, to more defensive, you know, stocks that tend not to go down as much. If you start seeing that kind of movement within the stock market, that also is a sentiment indicator.
JR: It absolutely is. And so part of it is you’re looking at going from basically, you know, very optimistic conditions to start moving to net neutral. That move from overly complacent to net neutral is where you start saying something’s wrong. People are repositioning.
KM: All right, so same question, sentiment, flashing red, flashing green, actually flashing green, green. Okay, so we have one red the yield curve, but we have green on sentiment and we have green on permits, yes, all right, so let’s go to the fourth one. And the fourth one is what?
JR: Fourth one is credit conditions. Again, this is, you know, for the economy to grow, for consumers to spend, for companies to build and expand, largely, we still rely on credit to do so, borrowing money, borrowing money. And so there’s, there’s a couple actually components we look at, we look at consumer credit, and we look at business side. But effectively it’s looking at, are people taking out loans. Are they are mortgage rates between risky mortgages and safe? Is that spread widening? You look at people are defaulting on, maybe car notes. You look banking lending standards, you survey lenders number of things, and it kind of gives you a look on what are credit conditions favorable? Or are they starting to tighten?
KM: Okay so credit conditions flashing red, flashing green, still green, flashing green, still green. Okay, so three of the four indicators, sanity checks are saying, don’t sell. That’s correct. Yeah, and so, and going back since 2008 when these indicators, these sanity checks were flashing, where not all four of them were flashing red. It has turned out not to be a big bad bear. Is that correct?
JR: In fact, going back way further right, we have not seen and you know, this does not mean we can see it going forward. It just means from all the historical precedent and all the markets that we’ve studied,
KM: and you’ve gone back, in many cases, to the Great Depression, right?
JR: And we’ve pulled old building permit on raw paper to kind of extrapolate the data, right? So, I mean, we’ve done some due diligence here, but certainly to 2000 and well prior, we have not seen a big, bad bear happen when only one of the four is flashing.
KM: Okay, we just haven’t seen it, right? So. Because of that, we we’re not as sanguine, we’re not as enthusiastic about selling 100% that’s right, and that’s the reason why we chose to sell 50%
JR: that’s right now. Now, caveat, that’s exactly right now. What I caveat is that does not mean, on average, selling has not happened after we got to our sell signal, even if one’s flashing. Yes, a lot of times the market does have to play out for a while to find its bottom.
KM: COVID is a good example. It was a great example. And, you know, one of the things that I was thinking to myself, if I was watching, this is okay, but you know, this is caused by the tariffs, and the tariffs could be the thing that, you know, we don’t know. It could cause all these things to flash red, yes, well, COVID could have done that too, right? Yes. Certainly, with the economy being shut down, you would think that all these things would be are going to turn flashing red, no question. But yet, even in COVID, only one of the three was of the four was flashing green.
JR: COVID was actually ended up being two. We clipped one sentiment came in right at the right before our signal date. But yes, even COVID was only two.
KM: Only two. Okay, so 50% then, is the decision that we made. That’s right, because not all four of them are flashing. In fact, only one is
JR: That’s right, knowing that it’s not unlikely at all that we continue to see the market have to trade down to find its footing.
KM: And it probably will go down before it comes back.
JR: I mean, if I look at when at least one is flashed on average, and it all varies. I mean, we usually have, you know, another couple percent of selling to potentially could end up, you know, another 10 or 15. I mean, that’s kind of the averages. So it does not mean just because one’s flashing, that we’re done. It just means that we think we’re probably, on average, into it a bit.
KM: Okay? And you made me think of something here. We need to make our compliance team happy. So, ladies and gentlemen, just so you know, everything we’re talking about is hypothetical. None of it will actually happen, and because it happened in the past, it does not guarantee the future. Okay, so I want to get that out in the open. All right, so let’s look at what happens next. Okay, okay. So the first thing that could happen is, you know, that next week, the market shoots up and goes right back up and sets new all time highs, absolutely could happen. And then, oh no, we sold right at the bottom.
JR: Could happen, yeah, which is why we’re hedged. Effectively, that’s why we kept some in. So that happens. You know, the good news is, I mean, if the market goes in a straight line up, and we’re not that far from we hit a buy, and so we wait to that buy. We would not buy early, just because some tariff was lifted, and for the day it looks good. We wait for that, that buy discipline, and then we put the rest of it in there.
KM: So if the market turns around from here and goes back up again. Then we will just use our traditional buy signal, yes, and the one that we developed in the during the pandemic for the big the bears that go way down fast and then rebound really fast, yes. And maybe that second strategy would trigger a buy as well. So we have the buy signals are the same ones that we’ve had for four years and going back decades before that, yes.
JR: And you know, in theory, we got one that would happen higher from here and one that would happen lower, or both could be lower, just depending on.
KM: Yeah. And you know, if the market does do that, if it goes straight up or comes way back after we’ve sold. And you know, it turns out that we did sell at the bottom. And you know, you might say, well, we shouldn’t have done that. You know, I want to tell you a quick story, ladies and gentlemen, to illustrate why we think that selling is always when our strategy tells us to why we think it is always a good idea to do that. And this goes back to a story I’ve told many times, because it’s just, in my view, a perfect way to explain. This was in 2009 and I was on an airplane coming back from a convention in New Orleans. And on the plane I was sitting next to a young man from from Oklahoma, as it turned out, and as happens when you’re flying, you know, you get into, you know, what do you do? And you know, that kind of thing. And so this was 2009 and when I told him what I did, what I do, he said, Man, you must be living holy hell right now. I mean, the markets crashing, you must be in it’s horrible. And I said, Well, actually, that’s not the case. We’ve been out of the market now, you know, with our clients for about a year and a half, and he said, a year and a half, how on earth? I said, Well, we have a strategy that when the market and other dynamics reach a certain place, we sell. And he goes, Oh, so it’s like a tornado warning, like a financial tornado warning. And I was like, wow, okay, I’m always looking for ways to explain our strategy that I that are clever. I thought, Okay, this is good. So I said, Okay, tell me more. Do tell and he said, Well, it sounds like you have a tornado siren that goes off, and when it does, you take all your clients money and you put it in the tornado shelter. And I said, Yeah, you know you could put it that way. I like that. And I said, But let me ask you a question. Suppose the. The siren goes off, and you take, you know, what do you do then? And he goes, Oh, we take my family, and we put him in a tornado shelter. And I said, Okay, and what happens if the tornado doesn’t hit you, you know, it turns around, it goes the other direction, or it peters out. Then what? And he goes, Well, I guess we played cards, didn’t we? I said, Okay, what happens if the next day the siren goes off again. What do you do now? He goes, Well, family’s into the storm shelter. And I said, and what happens if the tornado doesn’t hit you that time either? Played more cards well, what happens if it happens on the third day all over again? He said, You know what? I will take my family into the storm shelter every single time, because I cannot afford to be wrong once, and that’s the same thing with our strategy. When our strategy says it’s time to sell, we’re not going to ever ignore it, because with your retirement, with your you know we want your money to last as long as you do, and therefore we cannot afford to be wrong once. We can’t not sell when our strategy says it’s time to sell. That’s why we always will so therefore, you know, we have two investment principles that address that. The first one is, growth is important, but protection of principal is even more important. Certainly, we want to grow, and if we miss out on the gains, because the market turns up and goes from here, you know. So be it, our core value is, growth is important, but protection of principle is even more important. And then secondly, our investment principle says that our strategy comes with what’s called opportunity cost. And so I’m going to stop, get off my my soapbox here in Jordan. What is opportunity cost in terms of our strategy?
JR: Effectively, it’s, it’s, it’s gain that you could have had, if you would not, had basically taken the insurance out on on that decision, right? So it’s basically saying that, okay, if the market goes in a straight line up, and we don’t have full equity position, we did not capture as much upside as we could have had we not sold from beginning with and that’s the opportunity. That’s just it right there. But if we look at it now, especially with, you know, kind of our sell to discipline and our strategy now that opportunity cost, on average, at most market cycles, is going to shrink quite a bit.
KM: And that’s why we sold the 50% so as to mitigate against that opportunity. But we can’t eliminate it, because we always will sell if we want to protect our clients. Okay, so that’s that’s if the market goes up from here. We talked about, okay, so let’s look at the opposite. We sold half, right? And now the market goes straight down from here. Yeah, okay, so that’s not a good outcome. So now what happens here? So for most of our clients, right? We’re a third in cash, we’re a third in bonds, and we’re a third still in the stock market. That’s right. So let’s assume for a moment, kind of a really bad scenario, which is that the market goes down 30% from here. So it’s already come down a lot, right? But it’s going to go down another 30% so it’s all said and done. This is a 40, 50%
JR: Yeah, that’s a bad one. And historically, that’s a real big bad one. We have not seen that when only one’s flashing red. But let’s just say we did okay, because I mean, market cycles change. Things change. Yeah, fine, no guarantees, right? So if we go down another 30% on what is in the market, so on our stocks and our high yield, that’s still in there. Okay, so let’s say we have 30% currently in the market. So you take a 30% loss on roughly 30% of your assets, that’s going to cause about a 9% loss on paper, yes, before bonds and cash come in there, and you got more bonds and more cash.
KM: And so bonds, you know, as we saw yesterday, performed very well in this news. They went up half a percent or more. They went up. And so they went up, probably because people are thinking, Okay, this is going to cause a recession. That’s right, the Fed is going to lower interest rates, and therefore bonds do well in that environment. And so our bond portfolio in theory should do well, you know, if it does go down, if the market does go down that much there.
JR: In theory, there should be some sort of, you know, offsetting mechanism with bonds and then cash. I mean, this is, you know, this is also why we feel good about being in cash, because as of today, you know, and the Fed is keeping rates where they are right now because, I think, a fear of inflation or whatever
KM: So we should earn an interest rate on the cash while we’re sitting there. That is not insignificant. It’s not insignificant. So the potential is that the bond market could go up to offset the 9% that you talked about, and then cash could will earn interest, and that’ll help to offset as well. So it should be something less than the 9% that you said, in a situation where the market goes down another 30 and by the way, again, none of this is guaranteed the future. We can’t see it, but we’re talking in hypotheticals to help to understand it. Because one of the things that I’ve found with human nature is that we jump directly to the worst case scenario. Yes, you know, human emotion is, oh my gosh, I’ve still got 50% in it’s going to go to zero.
JR: Yeah, that’s. Exactly right. That’s the natural reaction.
KM: And we just want to dispel that because, you know, I think another 30 on top of what’s happened could be pretty, pretty bad, historic. In fact, it’d be one of the worst bear markets. I mean,
JR: I mean, we have not had a so just to put in context, you know, a 40 plus percent of which that would be, you know, you know, obviously, ’08 was a 50% or Y2k was the last 40% prior to that was a 73/74
KM: Right? So they’re infrequent.
JR: I mean, so that would be a bad one. And so this, the idea is that a third, a third, a third, really dispositions us to navigate all sorts of scenarios, the good, the bad, the sideways. More effectively than a we just ignore a sell signal, or we go all the cash Yeah.
KM: And so even in that scenario, with a 30% down from here after we’ve sold, we’re still better off if we have only 30% of our money in stocks and 30% in cash bonds. I don’t know what they’ll do, but let’s just say that they stay even they don’t make any money or lose it, we’re still better off doing that than not having done anything, because now we’re not subject to the entire 30% drop if we were in stocks. Oh, absolutely right. So even if this doesn’t give us the best outcome, it does go down, et cetera. The downside is, you know, we have another investment principle, which is that we want our strategy to be have unlimited upside and a tolerable downside. And so this downside, obviously, is painful. It’s not nice. We don’t like it. We wish we didn’t experience it, but it should be tolerable, from the standpoint that you know, someone who’s retired wouldn’t have to unretire in most cases, right? And if somebody that we’re working to get them to retire. They should be able to retire still, even after this has happened, I think absolutely. Yeah, so ladies and gentlemen, we wanted to go over with you. Thank you, Jordan. We wanted to go over with you. Why the 50% and the sanity checks that we’ve now developed to help us to determine, not with certainty, but with a great deal of confidence, whether we should sell 100 or 50% and you know, with these tariffs, one of the things that is interesting to us is that the formula that President Trump And the administration use to come up with how to have these tariffs. And Paul, can you put that up on the screen for us? Let’s look at this. So this is the formula. And basically, what the formula says is, we’re going to take the trade deficit we have with a country, and we’re going to and the amount of exports that we have, we’re going to divide that and then divide by two, and that’s going to give us what the tariff that that country should have. And then he put up the chart that showed, you know, China has 67% tariffs against us, and we’re going to be nice to them by doing about half. So to me, what that says is, or to us, that these are probably negotiations because the formula is so broad that it doesn’t take into account that there are countries that will always have a trade deficit against us. It’s impossible. They’re a small country. There’s no way that their imports could equal you know, it’s just not possible.
KM: So, so it’s not possible, so therefore, you know, there’s going to be negotiations. And in our view, you know this, this is the beginning of that, but it’s also I’m not bluffing, because I’ve done it, and that has a lot more power. So where this will take us, time will tell. But thank you for watching this video. I hope that this gives you some confidence, some peace of mind. Let us get the gray hair. I mean, even Jordan, you should see him. He’s getting gray hair all over his face. He’s a young man. He’s getting gray and let us get the gray hairs for you. You go out and SCWPer, enjoy yourself. And for those of you who are headed for retirement, we’re going to do everything to get you there so again, thank you for watching this video. Talk soon.

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