The Barbeque Benchmark

Daren:
[0:01] Chris, I don't know about you, but it's my favorite time of week. It's that time of week where we get to wrap up the week and nerd out on the markets.

Chris:
[0:10] Yeah, it is definitely my favorite time of the week.

Daren:
[0:14] Well, it's all we can easily do when it's the weekend. So why not? Right. That's right. And go into the weekend to talk all about what's going on out there. It's been now, I think, 10 days since the election. So thank goodness we're no longer talking about it. Um, I know everybody's moved on. Just kidding. Um, um, anyway, there's, uh, lots to talk about in the markets. I mean, we've had really strong runs since the election. We had some pullback. We're going to talk about that pullback and where it's coming from. Some interesting dynamics around interest rates and inflation and what the Fed's doing and not doing. And i mean if there's anything more newsworthy this week it is that dogecoin is now worth more than ford motorcorp it's

Chris:
[1:05] A sign of the times Daren it's a sign of the times it's what what they call

Chris:
[1:10] foreshadowing for the rest of our slides it's a sign of the times.

Daren:
[1:15] If you've ever seen a more clear signal or if you've never seen a more clear signal of a bubbles intact the bubble is still intact because doji is worth more than four um anyway we're gonna dive into a lot of that and more right back after this

Music:
[1:31] Music

Chris:
[2:08] All right yeah so uh this this was a real headline this is not uh ai generated which is which.

Daren:
[2:18] Is not we think it's real anyway i didn't see it as possible but

Chris:
[2:24] Yeah one of the many things that we've seen over the last few years of of the investment world we're just like is this really happening because can this really be but uh i forget which which podcast i was listening to and they're interviewing you know somebody that was talking about market history and stuff and they were talking about i think it was in south korea that this is also a really big thing where there's there's companies that are bet on based on politicians like like the the company represents a politician, even though the company itself might not do anything really. It's just that people buy the stock because they like the politician. There's meme stocks. So it happens in other countries, which I guess gives me some comfort that we're not the only crazy ones when it comes to this kind of stuff.

Chris:
[3:20] So this was a cool visual because we talk a lot about the government's financial situation or the U.S. government's financial situation. And here you can see that compared to other major economies. And the United States is there at 122% debt to GDP, Japan leading the world at 252%. And that's, I think, appropriate because this year, we saw kind of a mini flash crash that one Monday related to Japan. And so it's going to be interesting to see how this experiment, this central bank experiment plays out over time, because we're getting to the point now where there's a lot more debt on the balance sheet. There's less room to maneuver. People are definitely not tolerant of more inflation, which ties the hands of the central banks a bit. And so we're also at a place where we've got valuations, at least in the US, pretty escalated. So it's a different set of cards that we're dealing with moving forward.

Chris:
[4:45] And, uh, you know, I think one of the other things to keep in mind, this is a great chart from B of A, uh, showing the government, U S government expenditures as a percentage of GDP going back to 1791. And Daren, you know, I love, I'll post pretty much any chart that goes back to the 1700s. That's just pretty awesome.

Daren:
[5:06] You're a sucker for old data. That is true, Chris.

Chris:
[5:09] Yes. Yes. Uh, I am here for it. So, but you look at the Civil War, World War I, both of those, the U.S. Government was obviously not, you know, we were not the global superpower. We were not the global reserve currency. Even World War II, we were not until the end of that, right? But now we are. And you can see the jump in the government expenditures since we became that status. And like any good politicians, our governments decided to kind of abuse that status of being the global reserve currency over many administrations, over many decades, with COVID being the biggest expenditures that we've ever seen, basically. And I think we have to keep in mind when there's so many things going, gosh, why doesn't that indicator work anymore? Why, why do these numbers or these relationships not work that the way, the way they have historically? Well, it's because we were not that far out in financial time from, you know, the biggest explosion of money to hit the, to hit the world, uh, you know, in history, basically. Um you know so it's uh whoa what do we got what do we got here what am i looking at have.

Daren:
[6:31] You seen this yet

Chris:
[6:32] Uh yeah i think i have but um still strangely shocking and.

Daren:
[6:39] We crossed 36 trillion dollars today um today we've burned about just about was i guess $2 billion. So at this rate, we're clipping like every 100 days, I think we're adding a trillion to the U.S. debt. Now for a sense of how much printing has happened since COVID, in early winter of 2019, I was in New York City on Times Square, and they have a little box up by Times Square and you can see this debt moving. And that number right there says 36. Well, it said 19 in 2019. So... We basically are per near doubled our debt in all of five years as country.

Daren:
[7:44] And before then it was the whole existence of time of the United States. We built up the $19 trillion. So I think, you know, that one singular fact alone should give any investor pause and should influence any investor's thesis on the markets.

Chris:
[8:06] Yeah. Yeah. You know, we talk a lot about the power of compounding when it comes to investments and that power of compounding can work in reverse, you know, when it's when it's the compounding of debt, which is why we in general encourage people to stay out of debt because it introduces a lot more chaos into the system and can work against you in ways that are really difficult to get out of. When you kind of get beyond the pale. But when governments have gotten into this much debt historically, there's really only three choices. They can pay it off, which doesn't seem likely. They can default on it, which also doesn't seem likely. Or they can do what they usually do, which is inflate it away slowly by keeping the inflation rate and nominal GDP slightly above the rate on the debt. Um, they try to, you know, make the debt more, um, palatable over a period of time by getting rid of it, you know, through that, through that mechanism. Um, and that's, that's what, uh, BlackRock's Chris, um, or, um.

Chris:
[9:23] Rick Reader said this week when he was in an interview with, uh, Yahoo Finance. And, and there's been many that have, that have stated that that's how the U S took care of it after World War II, and that's what I'm assuming they're going to do moving forward.

Chris:
[9:42] So we got a big, as expected, a big jump in bullishness on the AAII sentiment this week, almost hitting that magic 50 number. Now, strangely, that's not higher than the one-year bullish high, which was actually December 20th of 23. I'm trying to remember exactly why people were so excited back then. I guess Christmas right around the corner. Maybe, I don't know. But it's hard to believe we were at almost 53% at that time. But the CNN Fear and Greed Index dipped down to neutral from 62 at Greed last week. And that's the one where people are positioned. So they look at seven different factors of positioning in the market, and that's more neutral. And then we have Bitcoin at extreme greed at 88, which was up from 75 greed last week, which is expected with the big jump we've seen in Bitcoin prices in the last couple of weeks.

Chris:
[10:50] So this is one of the weirdest i guess miss uh interpretations of the the headlines maybe i'm coming across there and i don't know what you're seeing but i feel like i'm seeing a lot of hey markets going gangbusters since the election you know um but yet really they've they've given back all the gains that they had the day or two after the election. And it's not just stocks, it's also gold, commodities, foreign stocks are really taking it on the chin. And really the only thing that's kind of hung in there are the super long duration treasuries, which not an awesome sign. So I don't know if it was kind of a case of everybody was already positioned that way going into the election, and then it's just kind of unwound.

Chris:
[11:44] But all the headlines you're seeing are, you know, markets just skyrocketing. Doesn't seem to be the case based on what I'm looking at.

Daren:
[11:55] Well, I think, you know, that we titled today's slide deck, the, the barbecue benchmark. And one observation I think we both can conclude we've made over time that the most utilized benchmark when we're talking to investors is how's your buddy at the gym or your friend at the barbecue doing? And they compare and contrast their portfolio returns to that statement. And I think there's a lot of barbecued benchmarking going on out there and not a lot of insight really looking at the assets.

Chris:
[12:32] Yep. Yep. Well, one asset that's not on here that has done well is Bitcoin.

Daren:
[12:39] I wasn't going to bring it up, Chris, but you did.

Chris:
[12:43] Yes. Well, so, yeah, we want to talk a little bit about the barbecue benchmark. And this quote is from Howard Marks, who's considered, you know, Warren Buffett says that he, you know, one of the only things he reads are the memos from Howard Marks. So he's been an investor. He's been around for a long time. He's got some great books. Um, and he had this quote that I, I stuck with me that says, you know, never forget the six foot tall man who drowned crossing the river that was five feet deep on average.

Chris:
[13:20] Right. And so, um, you know, when you think about that, if you think about a river, like, yeah, it might be five feet on average, but there might be, you know, parts of that that are 20 feet deep and parts that are two feet deep. And so, um, you know, you got to know the whole story, and the way we look at our job as, as an advisor and our position as an advisor and a partner with our families over time is to understand, you know, the client to the point where what's their capacity to cross this river, right? How can we best position them to make sure that they get across the river and that they aren't susceptible to getting in over their head if they can't swim, right? And so I think that those are factors that any good advisor, and I know there's a lot of them out there will take into consideration when they're recommending, you know, a certain type of portfolio, um, or positioning for a client. And, uh, you know, a lot of that has to go into, um, you know, where the person is in the, in the cycle of like, are they actually going to be using the money very soon versus someone who's younger, they're in accumulation phase, they can go through a bear market, right?

Chris:
[14:39] Because those sequence of returns don't matter as much for them. But somebody that's like, hey, I just retired. I've got X amount of dollars and this has to last me for another 30 years. And I need to take a certain amount out to keep my lifestyle going. So the advisor's job is to say, okay, how do we make sure that we don't put this portfolio at risk to the point where there could be a catastrophic loss that you can't recover from.

Chris:
[15:13] Part of that is gauging the trade-offs in the market. If you're looking at your different investments, you're trying to gauge, of course, nobody knows this with full clarity, but what's the potential upside versus the downside when you use things like historical valuations, when you use things like technicals?

Chris:
[15:38] Are you in a place where it's going to be easy to get 10x your money or is it more stretched? And this chart from Real Investment Advice is showing the S&P versus the valuations based on the Shiller PE. And the reason why there's the two red dots here. So I guess taking a step back, whenever it's above that kind of dotted line, it's considered extended. And you can see those various areas where we had crises. So when that black line gets really high, the valuations get extremely high, that tends to precede market turbulence because it's harder for trees to grow to the sky. They reach kind of a maximum valuation point. So we've got the 29 crash. Obviously, that was the depression. Everybody knows that. But keep in mind where you see these red dots here. The first one is supposed to be close to 1968, guesstimating there.

Chris:
[16:44] And then the second one is 1982, the year that I was born. So a very good year. But keep those two in mind as we kind of go through these next couple of charts from Resolve Asset Management. So Resolve's got this great paper on path dependency. Now, the premise here is that someone retires, they need to spend about 8% of their portfolio per year. That's the spending need. And they mapped it over from 1966 to 1977, sorry, 1997. So, you know, a little over 30 years. And they used the Dow Jones Industrial Average because over that period of time from 1966 to 1997, it averaged about 8% per year. Okay, so that's the average depth of the river again, right? But that's broken up into two very distinct markets. You've got the Dow from 66 to 81 that basically went nowhere with several big drops. And then if you go to the next slide, you've got the Dow from 82 to 97 that basically took off straight up.

Chris:
[18:11] Now, so two totally different markets over that 30-year period. Well, this hypothetical person that retired in 1966, well, it makes a huge difference for whether or not they were able to make their portfolio last over their retirement, even though their investment made 8% on average. If you go to the next slide, Daren, you'll see what happens when those returns come late. So basically, when you get this 1966 to 1982 market first, they ran out of money by the time they were 79. So that choppy market, those big losses, while they're taking 8% out of the portfolio a year, the account ran out of money versus if they got those returns early, if they got the good returns early and then the bad returns late, then the portfolio was fine. All was good, right? So that sequence of returns, I know that sounds, it's kind of the most boring term for something that is extremely important. That sequence of returns matters majorly for someone that is going into retirement and needs that portfolio to last a 30-year period.

Daren:
[19:37] That's got to be the most boringest thing you've ever said on a Friday afternoon, Chris.

Chris:
[19:42] Good job. Well, it's important though, when you're getting the barbecue benchmark, right? Because, hey, I've made so much money this year and all my money's in XYZ stock that's done great. Okay. Is there anybody that's kind of looking over your shoulder saying, you know, are you going to be able to sustain that over 30 years? Is that company even going to be around in 30 years? Right. And, you know, is it really wise to be gambling your retirement, you know, lifestyle on the fact that this stock is going to continue to trounce everything else that's out there? Probably not, you know. um so uh and so we've got we've got this situation where we look at it and we say okay, valuations are high in uh in the stock market um we go back to the yield curve oh i guess we're back to the debt well let me just interject for a second on.

Daren:
[20:48] Your point yeah i think the point's really important because you said hey if you're that person saying hey man i made all this money in Nvidia, Bitcoin, buying tech stocks, and you're thinking that's going to continue on forever and making the mistake that it's your sheer brilliance that you made a lot of money, there's perhaps some opportunity to interject some self-critique to there.

Daren:
[21:19] Given that we basically doubled our US debt in the period of time in the last five years, whenever you put money into the system it has to go somewhere and a big part of where it's gone is into the stock market and so i believe there's this really false sense of confidence existing out there whereas people who are operating more diversified in their portfolios have not really benefited because it's only been very small segment of the markets that has actually received a lot of this cash and continued to go. And at some point that changes, right? And then you have to ask yourself, what's your plan? So when the neighbor at the barbecues tooting their own horn about how much money they've made in NVIDIA or Microsoft or Netflix, or Tesla,

Daren:
[22:20] The question that one would ask in any type of intelligent conversation would be, wow, that's really great. What's your plan for diversifying them?

Daren:
[22:32] And if there's a big, long pause, and I don't know, which is very likely, you should talk with them next time the market explodes because that individual asset's likely to have a difficult time. Um so it's i think just an opportunity for us all to self-reflect and and look at our own bias around why things do the way why are things as good as they are what's the attributable factor and then what is my plan to diversify further if you're not um

Chris:
[23:03] Yes yeah probably not probably not the greatest question to ask if you want to be invited back to a barbecue again right full disclosure if you if you uh if you want to be invited back don't talk about diversification, but uh but i think the point is that hey there's a lot of signs that like you know the water's not always going to be shallow right you're not always going to be seeing headlines that dogecoin is worth more than ford um and that you know it's, mean stocks are tripling and all these things. And given the fact that we have so much debt, given the fact that we've had this battle with inflation, you know, maybe the central bank isn't going to be there to bail everybody out again, like they have been in the past, or if they do, they're going to have more limited tools to do so. So, you know, we've got the yield curve here. It's disinverting. And again, you can see on those gray lines that usually when that's happening, that signaling recession is pretty close. And who knows, maybe this time is different. Maybe this time the yield curve doesn't work anymore, of course, but we're getting very, very close to that zero to where we're no longer inverted on the yield curve. So the fixed income market is telling us something.

Chris:
[24:31] And then if you go to the next slide, it's also showing us that things are priced pretty tightly. This is the spread between corporate bonds, so lending money to a corporation versus lending money to the government, extremely low. That's also almost always the case prior to a recession, and then that goes up a lot when you see a recession. So at what point do these interest rates keep going up to where okay people are going to start to say you know i need more return from these corporate bonds uh in order for me to risk uh risk putting funds in it so so it's a bit of a it's a bit of a tenuous uh situation when you think about the fact that we've really had a very good market for for quite a while um and there and there's, if there's anything about markets that has been true historically for a very long time, it's that they cycle and they go through, they go through, uh, you know, these cycles on a fairly regular basis. Um, and that as soon as everybody starts saying it'll never happen again, um, or that's been solved, that's usually when you want to start to worry.

Daren:
[25:47] The um you know Chris did you see that link i sent you earlier apparently feds gold speed came out and said the fed has to figure out why the tenure is rising and keep an eye on long rates

Daren:
[26:03] Yeah you know that makes you wonder right because we've been wondering for a few weeks like dude they're lowering rates and the tenure is just ripping up and my assumption is well it's going up because inflation is actually higher than the Federal Reserve wants to admit, which would be true if you look at the true inflation numbers and that it's actually going to rear its ugly head again. And then you've got all these populist politics, whether it's the left or the right, doesn't really matter. They're all telling everybody they're going to bring them helicopter money basically. And so you've got this very stimulative environment when you've got inflation not quite fully under control yet, but the Fed's also lowering rates. And like you and I have said, whoever won that election, they're going to have to thread a fine needle because it's going to be difficult to keep growth going and not be too stimulative, but also keep inflation under wraps. Because what we know is that people really don't like inflation. And if there's any other factor, I think you could argue that led to the election going the way it went, it's inflation uh so interesting though that the fed like gold speed kind of made a concession we're like oh yeah we're trying to figure it out i'm like wow That's really faith ensuing. But yeah, I hope they know more than what Goldspeed was leading on or suggested.

Chris:
[27:30] Yeah. Yeah. Now, this is from the JP Morgan Guide to the Markets, just showing, again, what's the environment like across the board? Are things cheap and therefore the risk is lower because they're cheap? You know, is this 1982 or is this 1966? And uh these green dots these are called uh z scores um you know if you if you thought you didn't want to talk about diversification on a friday or sequence of returns i bet you really didn't want to talk about z scores but this is a way of i thought you would never.

Daren:
[28:06] Bring it up Chris

Chris:
[28:09] This is a way of normalizing kind of like evaluation over a long period of time between different asset classes because, you know, bonds, you value those differently than you do stocks. You know, EM stocks are valued differently than stocks. So it's kind of a way of normalizing it. But the point is, if the green dot is way above the gray box, that means that that asset class is expensive relative to where it's been historically. And if the green dot is below or towards the bottom, like if you look all the way to the left of the chart, which is treasuries, everybody's least favorite asset class of the moment, then those are a lot cheaper than they have been historically. Same thing with bonds. Nobody likes bonds. But on the other side of that, pretty much everything US stock related is elevated relative to where it's been historically on those valuation metrics. So, um.

Daren:
[29:14] I had to bring it back up, Chris.

Chris:
[29:16] Yes. I'm watching this just to see if it is. You're going to give me a seizure.

Daren:
[29:21] If it hits $2 billion while we're filming. But I want to point this out because when you talk about stock valuations and you talk about relative history of stock valuations, I don't think you can dismiss the impact that increasing the national debt by almost twofold has on valuations. And you have to fly in the face of valuation research, you have to at least consider the possibility that printing so much money would permanently almost inflate the valuation numbers across the board. I'm sure there's someone way smarter than me could argue otherwise, but I think we have to consider that.

Chris:
[30:04] Yes, it's definitely possible.

Daren:
[30:09] Well, since we're done with the slides, you might as well look at the debt calculator one more time before we wrap it in. But so let's take a look at the S&P 500 to start today. That's kind of our home base when we're thinking about, you know, the markets, right? And I think what's always important when you're listening to your neighbor talk, to your friends talk, to people who are interested in the markets talk, And they say the market, like what actually does the market mean, right? Because I think people throw that word around quite often and don't really have it well-defined in their brain or in the people's brain they're talking to. So when we generally say the market, I think that it's slang for generally either the Dow Jones 30 or the S&P 500, right? And the S&P 500 is made up of the largest 500 US-based stocks, this is a really great way to look at it from a visual standpoint. So you can see one-day performance on the S&P 500. What happened today is these big dogs that Chris and I have been talking about for a while sold off. All except for Tesla because it appears like Elon Musk is now involved with everything government. So I guess people are betting that Tesla is just going to keep going.

Daren:
[31:30] But the market actually did pretty well underneath the hood. It's just these companies are so big from a capitalization comparative relative basis that when they don't do well, it just squashes the market. And that's the challenging environment we're in. When it comes to the stock market, we got to see this rotation happen. Now, from a trend TA analysis standpoint, you can see this trend line that the S&P has been working up. And you can argue that it's fallen now below. And then it's testing these important moving averages right now. I think right now it's just a short term correction makes perfect sense. This was the election bump right here. And then it moved up and it's moved back down. And now we're testing this area right here, which was the previous all time high. So now if we're looking at this, and this is why I don't feel necessarily like, hey, yeah, I gave it all back, but it makes sense it gave it back, right? Like this is the moment where when you see a large breakout like this, you get a test of this support area. And then if it holds, which it did today, it actually held. So I'd say on its face, today's market was actually a bullish test.

Daren:
[32:43] Now, we'll see what happens next week. But if we go below next week and we lose this support area, then that's obviously bearish. What I'll be watching next week, though, is for some news to pop out over the weekend and we go up. If we see that move up, then...

Daren:
[33:03] That's a sign we're probably going to run higher to another all-time high and ultimately retake on that 600 mark on the SPY. That 600 mark here, 6,000, is a pretty important psychological point that the market's going to contest with. A lot of people will short it there, sell there, et cetera, et cetera.

Daren:
[33:24] So interesting, but I'd say on its face, while it might feel like the last few days was bearish, I would say right now I'm going to take a bullish test. That's just testing a support line and i'm actually okay with it i think that's a healthier market when we look at this on the weekly chart so each one of these candlesticks represent a week in the market and you can see we went up tested all-time high and came back down but what's bullish on my opinion is that we stayed within this candlestick from the previous week in the sense that we didn't sell way below it or anything like that we didn't test anything down here and we just stopped at this previous all-time high. So I think that's good. This is the election bump. Now the election test. And my suspicion is we'll see a bounce next week and that will head up further and we'll head on to more all-time highs in the markets. When we look at the RSP, a very similar look, albeit is sold down a little bit lower. RSP now looks at these boxes and says, all these boxes, they're equal. There's no differentiation between the sizes. And so it kind of gives you a better sense of quote unquote, the market, right? Because these bigger companies really shape and change the market. Um, Versus all the other smaller companies.

Daren:
[34:51] So that's the RRSP. And overall, I'd say, though, it's testing just the support area. You can see previous. There was the previous all-time high before that election bump that happened. Let's take a look at ag, right? So the 10-year has been going up, and this has been really painful for people investing in bonds because when the 10-year goes up, then you get bonds going down. And that's what you've seen here. We've got this 200-day moving average coming in to test it. But so I would argue that bonds are probably starting to look a little oversold. So I think we need to kind of-

Chris:
[35:45] In addition to that, you have the benefit of when bond prices go down is that the yield goes up, which most of the return that you should expect from bonds is the yield. So that's the coupon or the interest that you're getting from that bond on a regular basis. And so that's a function of the price that you pay for the bond. And so yields are going up as the prices of these bonds are going down. So it's a good news, bad news situation from that standpoint.

Daren:
[36:25] When we look at the dollar, the dollar is really... which actually isn't great, super great for the small caps, but the dollars really showed a lot of relative strength to the other currencies in the past little while. And you could see it was winding up, and then now we're breaking out. And that break out of that downtrend line means we'll probably go up further. It looks like at 110, I would kind of call as a range of, if I was saying, hey, maybe we'll see some rolling back over around 110. But that doesn't bode well for a lot of those value stocks, smaller cap stocks. When the dollar is stronger, it's actually more difficult for U.S. Companies to sell abroad. Just take a look at gold because gold was certainly the darling leading into the election and now it's almost i don't Chris that's like a free fall jagged knife

Chris:
[37:25] Yeah yeah you know um uh eric from macro voices i thought he had a good theory on that was that people uh sold out of gold to go into Bitcoin given that Trump's going to be pro-crypto and that it's more of like a replacement theory. So who knows? There's no way of knowing, right? But that's one of the things he thought was driving it that I thought was interesting.

Daren:
[37:58] Yeah, makes sense. Well, And to that point, Bitcoin's just been ripping higher. And it does this where it rips up and then it kind of stalls out.

Daren:
[38:10] My particular thesis on it is that there's so much Bitcoin being bought every day by BlackRock through Ibit that it moves up really quick, kind of pauses, and then just massive accumulation continues until it just squeezes it higher. And I think that's the dynamic of what's going on right now. Plus, there's a whole seasonality theory behind Bitcoin that's certainly in play right now. But it feels to me like we push right up into 90 without any problem. We're hanging out there. It'll be interesting to see. We could easily move into 100,000 per Bitcoin pretty easily, which is pretty wild when you think about it. The darling of the most recent stock run-up is NVIDIA, and NVIDIA has rolled over, but I would say it's just a correction at this point, nothing to get too wound up about. But that's another, you know, one of the biggest stocks we're watching, right? Because if that goes down, then we have problems. There were some interesting rumors flying around about NVIDIA using something called mark-to-market accounting. I don't know if you saw that for us.

Chris:
[39:25] I did not.

Daren:
[39:27] And so there's mark-to-market accounting is what Enron used. So there was a lot of people kind of conspiratorially suggesting that NVIDIA might blow up. But certainly it's big enough and gone fast enough that you're just kind of waiting for like that shoe to fall. Like what's that bad piece of news that the market didn't take into your account that then it's going to blow up? Because that's a perfect example when you just see these markets just rip, right? Be kind of waiting for the next shoe to drop. We've been talking a lot about oil for a while and how we were winding up in this consolidation. We're just hanging on to this kind of 66 68 area um which could mean a couple things one it's just getting ready to fall down through it but you could also argue something similar to like right here that it's a basing effect it did fall out of that

Daren:
[40:29] Kind of that the triangle pattern there it's kind of an ascending one but more even um the uh and you can see we just keep touching the support level at 66 68 um it certainly seems like the next administration wants calm in the middle east um albeit that they've given um net non-new the green light to do everybody pleases. Um, so that's interesting. If oil goes down, I would expect things were calming down. If oil goes up, then things are getting worse in the Middle East.

Daren:
[41:06] Um, so all in all, I mean, wrapping up the market, like, I just think it's so interesting in some ways for everything that's going on in the news, for everything that's going on politically,

Daren:
[41:20] It's kind of boring. We're just moving. We're retesting. It looks like we might go higher. That's kind of the look on things. Tenure, we're not sure yet. That needs to turn around for bonds to do well. And if you think portfolios are made up of generally bonds and stocks and then some other items around those, like gold and Bitcoin, et cetera, you've got a market now, I think that in some ways is still confused about what's next. Like, I don't think it's all settled yet is kind of how I read this market. And, uh, but as always, we'll keep watching it week to week and update you as things change with that. Have a great weekend to everyone. And we'll be back next week to wrap up the markets.

Music:
[42:09] Music