Why You're Stuck With $13 Burritos

DANO WEIR: It's a Friday in August 15th of 2025 and we are On The Markets. Who are we? We're Sonoma Wealth Advisors and the brands of Fermata Advisors, Fermata 401K, Fermata Tax. My name is Dan O'Weir. I'm the Marketing director. I'll be joined in moments by our managing principal Daren Blonski. In today's episode, we are looking at why you might be stuck with $13 burritos.

DANO WEIR: What that even means. Inflation data came in hot this week. And what's the Fed going to do? They're in a little bit of a pickle, especially with their ongoing dispute with the president. Also, speaking of the president, he met today with the president of Russia and how that may have affected oil prices. We'll get into it after this.

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: The stock market, the economy, your money. What's the latest and what could be next?

CHRIS SIPES CFP®: Find out now with Fermata On The Markets. Straightforward financial market updates for the brands of Fermata Advisors Sonoma Wealth Advisors Fermata.

DANO WEIR: 401K Fermata Tax and Fermata Insurance On The Markets starts now Daren you now officially have a high schooler congratulations you will be buying her 13 burritos for lunch or giving her money to do so.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Dan, I was actually just thinking when you mentioned that, I feel like at Casa Grande where we went to high school, they used to have these Taco Bell burritos you could buy, and I swear they were like a buck. But it was my memory, it was like $2.50 or something crazy like that.

DANO WEIR: We did have an official Taco Bell in the school.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: We did? Okay.

DANO WEIR: Which has been removed by the health police, but for... Somehow we survived with $1.99 bean and cheese burritos. Yes, that was real.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: I mean, those were so clutch when you're hungry, you could literally scrounge up two bucks. That and the, do you remember the cinnamon rolls at Costco?

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: I have wanted to recreate that moment of those cinnamon rolls for the, since I graduated, I have yet to find one as good as those. And I wonder if it was just because I was like starving as a high schooler that made them taste so good or they were just amazing.

DANO WEIR: Yeah, it's one of those things where the memory probably conflates with the quality. But yes, I agree. They had these sad cookies, too. They had like big chocolate chip cookies that were always undercooked. It was like slightly congealed dough. Perfect. Perfection.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: It was probably the fact that I was a wrestler and half of the year I was dieting or on some stupid trying to make weight thing. And so whenever I eat a donut, it was like, oh, I wish you know.

DANO WEIR: Well, that donut is now $9.99. And this week, we wanted to focus on inflation because we got new inflation numbers, some CPI, some PPI. And as we like to do with our show, we are professionals.

DANO WEIR: We are a wealth management firm, but we're also moms and dads and brothers and friends. And we live in the same world you do. And how some of this stuff hits the road, how the rubber hits the road, is that the burrito is $13 at the end of the day.

DANO WEIR: So I found this from Toast, which is a point of sale company, which you likely have interacted with when you made a purchase. They're the ones who are always asking you to tip 15 to 40 percent. But they they had a write up that says burrito prices roll up to a median price of 1337. A great write up from Toast. So thank you to them.

DANO WEIR: So, Daren, we could just see tracking here from 2023 median burrito price, according to their data across their systems. Median price was $12.25, which is already high. And now in July 2025, that has risen all the way up to $13.37.

DANO WEIR: If we look at their 25th and 7th percentile, meaning what's the range here from some of the cheapest to some of the lowest, you can actually see in the highest percentile, the 75th percentile, burritos are actually $15.77. So that's a whole heck of a lot for lunch.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Yeah, I was shocked the other day. I went and got a super burrito carne asada for myself and just a bean and rice burrito for my daughter and a drink. And it was like I was approaching 40 bucks. It's just like, what on earth has happened?

DANO WEIR: And that's what's been crazy is to hear some of the headlines, and we'll see the change this week. But the headlines prior to this is inflation is coming down. Inflation is coming down. And on the same article, they actually have. This is the burrito index.

DANO WEIR: They have burrito prices, net changes from February 2024 to July 2025. And the percentage that it's up has been decreasing from as high as 4.6% increase in March 2024 to only a 3% increase in July 2025, which seems like, you know, this is a chart that's going down, except that this is cumulative. So this is still going up.

DANO WEIR: So even if we're seeing the amount that's going up, going down, it's still gone up all this way. And the title of this week's episode is We Might Be Stuck With It. So what are some of the economic factors, Daren, that will have led to something as simple as a burrito now being double digits?

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Well, I mean, the thing you first have to understand about inflation is everyone experiences inflation differently, right? So burritos might be. Something I tend to consume a lot of burritos and my family does and Mexican food here in California is pretty prominent in something that we buy a lot of. But that's not necessarily true in, say, the South or the Northeast.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: When I lived in the Northeast, there was far fewer places to go grab a quick burrito, whereas here there's like 10 on every corner. So we all experience differently when it comes to inflation. And you really have to dig into the numbers to understand why the inflation numbers are driving higher and what's causing them.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Interestingly enough, a lot of the preliminary data I've looked at this week, it's not necessarily the tariffs that are driving inflation. The way that, well, it's not inflation, it's tariffs driving the inflation we're seeing. If you want to let me share my screen there, Dan. And so let me show you what we're talking about, right? So what came in this week is something called core PPI and PPI.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: So core PPI is what the Federal Reserve looks at, they say, to decide whether or not they believe there's inflation. And so the actual forecasted expected inflation for the month was 0.2, and it came in at 0.9, which was significantly higher than expected. You can see these blue bars representing what inflation was that month.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And versus what was expected which is these little golden bands so it came above way above expected inflation but you can also see how often the you know those who are trying to quote unquote predict these type of numbers are wrong it looks to me like well just about 100 of the time they're wrong so i don't think it's particularly surprising that it's not where they expected it to be what was a surprise is that inflation this month was higher than expected well that's problematic for a lot of reasons one of the the great political dramas being played out on the stage right now is Trump and Putin and battling back and forth not Putin Trump and excuse me i have the Trump and Putin meeting that just happened on my brain i was trying to catch up and see if anything good had come out of that other than the fact that Trump literally blew a B2 bomber over.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Putin's head as soon as he stepped out of the car.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: I'm not sure what that was signaling, but I think I know.

DANO WEIR: Your kids call that a flex.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: That's called a flex. I think we can say that is a flex.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Literally, if you look at the pictures of this meeting that just happened in Alaska, I guess we'll divert to this topic for a minute. If you look at Putin showing up, Trump literally had all our military might just lined up on the tarmac. I mean, he had all these, you know, $200 million planes and stealth fighters and all kinds of things. And then he flies a B-2 bomber over the guy's head.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: But interestingly enough, right before we came on, they canceled the luncheon that they were going to do. And Trump is heading straight back to Washington, D. C. I don't know what that means, if the talks went well or if they went bad, but that's kind of interesting.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Nonetheless, so going back to inflation.

DANO WEIR: Trump and Powell.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Trump and Chair Powell. So Chair Powell was appointed and is a known Democrat. So he's favored by the Democrats. And now the Federal Reserve is supposed to be non-political, which is pretty much BS. But nonetheless, they're supposed to be nonpolitical, and Trump has been putting pressure on Chair Powell, one, to quit, and two, to lower the rates, which he's refused to do.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Now, that's semi-problematic, because if Chair Powell lowers the rates… that will stimulate the economy. If that stimulates the economy, then that will further push inflation. And Trump is saying, well, you need to lower rates because otherwise things will get worse.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And Trump isn't necessarily wrong either. If we look at a lot of the housing data, for example, I looked at some data last night that there's more housing inventory right now than there has been since 2007. It's far cheaper now to rent a house than buy a house. Well, that's going to hurt the economy, right? Because if you think about our number one consumption engine we have as Americans is our house.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Just look around in the room you're in right now. Think of all the garbage in your room. Without that room, you would have nowhere to put it, so you probably wouldn't buy it. And whenever you buy a new house, you think of all the different things that you purchase from furniture to stuff you put in your kitchen, stuff you put in your bedrooms. Pictures on the wall, all that stuff, that all has an impact on the economy.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And if people aren't buying houses, they're not moving around, that's going to actually take some heat out of the economy. So Trump has been after power to lower rates. And Trump's saying, no, inflation's gone, inflation's gone, inflation's gone. And we get this really ugly print that comes out that you saw right here. It says, no, actually month over month inflation is almost as high as it was way back in 2021 and 2022.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: When we were all complaining about inflation. So that's not a good print at all. And that puts Trump in kind of a predicament and it puts Powell in a predicament because Trump now can't say, oh, inflation's dead. And Powell can't say, well, I can just lower rates. So now we're kind of wondering, well, what's the likelihood that rates are going to get lowered? So this here is the FOMC kind of...

DANO WEIR: Let me go back to one second here, just to clarify that point you just made. Because the presumption is that inflation and the interest rates are correlated such that if they leave the rate high, it'll cause inflation to be low.

DANO WEIR: And if they lower the rate, it will make inflation be high. But it's actually the opposite of what you would expect, which is that the rates are currently high. And also, for some reason, inflation now is high.

DANO WEIR: Well, which eliminate, which eliminates their lever to lower rates.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Correct. But the issue is that there's, the issue at hand though, is that it's not, if you push this button and pull this lever, then X, Y, and Z. And the problem is it's far more complex than that.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: So the, the. While yes, in theory, if rates are high, then that would slow the economy, which we certainly are seeing in the housing market.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: It's not necessarily a if they just all of a sudden lower rates that the economy is just going to tear off either. Because part of the there's this thing called stagflation, right, where you don't have growth, but you have high inflation. And the Federal Reserve is really in a precarious spot because we risk.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Falling into stagflation at this point. I presume that we would have fallen into stagflation many, many months ago when we started inverting that yield curve. So if the Fed lowers the rates and inflation goes up, and that might stimulate growth, but if it doesn't stimulate growth, then you really have an issue.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: But if rates are high and growth is slow, then that could be an issue too. So there's not really a good solution at the moment. The best solution could be that we continue to get inflation out of the system. The argument is that the tariffs, though, are creating the inflation economy, and that's somewhat still debatable. Does that make sense?

DANO WEIR: Yeah, totally makes sense. Sorry.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: So with that in mind, let's take a look at the S&P 500. So what's happening in the stock market? When we look at the stock market and we look at the heat map, so I show this each week and this shows you the relative size of each of the various stocks in the S&P 500, which is the largest US-based stocks. You can see Microsoft, NVIDIA, Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta, and Tesla are much larger than anything else.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Although I'm kind of eyeing Walmart, Walmart seems to be growing as of late, which is interesting. It says a lot, I think, about. The consumer. We'll dig into that in a minute. So what's driven this market higher, Microsoft and the Apple, Amazon, and Google Meta, that push higher has really come from these big stocks.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: So if these big stocks start selling off, that becomes much more problematic for the index, where you saw them sell off. Because generally, this is a pretty positive market today, except You can see down in your financials, insurance and stuff that are impacted by rates. I think these stocks are now getting, well, wait a SEC, maybe we aren't going to be lowering rates and that's impacting financials.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Some noteworthy, UnitedHealth, which is the largest health group, has just been getting clobbered in the stock market and really started moving up pretty quick. Because one, the politicians started buying the stock and that got out to the news.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Everybody and then to berkshire halfway just disclosed a very large position in united health you know how it helped if you don't remember Dan is that the CEO was actually executed by that guy in New York city for that yeah so it's a pretty been it's had a rough go ever since then but interesting that that stock has really taken off as of recent So let's go ahead and look at our S&P 500 on what we call the candlesticks.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: So what this represents is the price of the S&P 500. The S&P 500 is typically looked at as, quote unquote, the market. It's much bigger than that, broader than that, but it's a general way of thinking about it. And you can see the S&P 500 actually finished out positive. And you don't hear the media talk about this, but...

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: It closed out at an all-time high today which is pretty bullish and remember we started talking about this last week or maybe two weeks ago damn where i started talking about the float higher and you're seeing that float high right it's just floating and i wouldn't be shocked to see coming into September this really get traded down we look at it on a daily chart that was the weekly chart, you can see today wasn't great in the market.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: We kind of hit resistance here. But I'd say for the week, the fact that we closed above 6,400, that's pretty bullish.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Now, the stock market's incredibly overbought at this point from all valuation metrics. So then that's when things start to get kind of long in the tooth, as they said. But generally, it's positive. The stock market did really well this week. When we look at our 10-year, We talked about inverse relationship between bonds and interest rates. Interest rates going up, well, that's going to impact your bond prices.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And so bonds came back down the last couple of days when the interest rates started going back up the last couple of days. And so with inflation being higher, this is the market saying, well, we think that rates might be going higher. We're not necessarily convinced it's going down. However, I would say this line here is really important. You can see this was support all along the way, and now it's resistance.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: I really want to see what happens next week with some more data coming in to make any determination. Now, keep in mind, economic indicators are extremely noisy, right? So when we look at this core CPI, this is very noisy data, right? It's all over the place. You can be like low inflation, down inflation. And We're looking for smoothing trends, right?

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: So generally, you can say in this period of time, there was an inflationary period of time, 21 to 23. And the question is, now are we entering back into another inflationary period of time? When we look back through all the other economic data for the week, though, you're not necessarily seeing this super strong print. Interestingly enough, core CPI, so core CPI is Consumer Price Index. So this is.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Quote unquote, what we do when we buy things. Producer price index is what people who create things are and sell things, right? What their inflation is. And so that the theory is that the producers are already seeing some of the inflation from tariffs and that's somewhat debatable, but unemployment claims don't remain particularly high. So that's not concerning. Retail sales came in slightly lower than expected.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: But nothing really kind of really really concerning consumer sentiment's been low for a while and that can usually tell you how the consumer feels and you can see we've been trending down since 20 with consumer sentiment but it's not necessarily in the basement kind of picked up a little last couple months when we go back to the charts i wanted to look at oil because sometimes when we look at oil oil really impacts is impacted by what's going on between Russia and ukraine and the us and all that geopolitical nightmare and oil didn't really signal much of anything right not really a ton of movement today considering that So basically, I would read this as the chart saying Putin and Trump, it was just a bunch of little boys trying to show their power in front of each other for their meeting today, and nothing was really going to come of it.

DANO WEIR: His name is Darren Blonsky, Vladimir Darren Blonsky. He lives in California. If you need his address.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Oh, that's all I'm going to show up. Oh, careful there. Just take a look at gold real quick. Gold continues just consolidating across. Looks like there's distribution happening, meaning that there's just a lot of buyer-sellers hanging out around that area.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: The longer this goes, the more likely I think it goes down. I could see a real strong test of somewhere around this area in the near future. That would be if some changes with interest rates, some changes with geopolitical risk. Let's look at our mags next. So these are our magnificent seven stocks.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: These are the stocks that have really driven the stock market higher. When we look at the mags, you can see they're kind of just bouncing around up here on the 60 and not a lot of movement there. And that's why you didn't see the market going higher. What we saw was the rest of the market actually doing okay this week.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And you can see that from these two big candles, these two green candles. So this is the RSP. It doesn't overweight those bigger companies, the mags. It just says every stock's equal. And if more stocks go up than down, then the index goes up.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And the equal weighted index had a really nice week, two really nice days back to back. And then interest rates came in and kind of threw a pot in their face. When we look at NVIDIA, which is pretty much the driver of a lot of this AI revolution we're going through. And we talked.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: About this last week how it's taking over portfolios nothing really remarkable there either in fact i would say that's probably looking like it from a from a chart of standpoint that's looking like a rounded top or looking like we're we're getting ready to distribute i think support writers around 170 though i could see that stock very easily selling into the 170 range based upon that chart and where support is let's see let me take a look over here and take a look at the move index, which is a measure of volatility on the bond market.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And you can see it's been falling, which tells you there's kind of a risk-off element going on in the bond markets, which could be signaling that the bond markets think things are actually going to get better geopolitically, which would be great.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Silver, let's take a look, was having quite the one, quite the breakout. It's come back in. Still say that's pretty bullish chart though, just because the breakup, if we look at all the weekly, still looks like a bit of a bull flag there.

DANO WEIR: So this is feeling like this is like the sixth chart in a row you've shown where we're looking either trading sideways or looking bullish. This is to me looking exactly like what you've told me, which is an August float high. And you mentioned that earlier. So can you explain that again, what your theory is there?

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Yeah, the theory is just this, that there's less participants in the market. So think of it this way, right? Half of the people who trade in the markets and the institutional buyers, which are far more important than any of the others, the institutional buyers, they're not necessarily in the market, right?

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: They're vacationing in the Hamptons. They're doing whatever they're doing. And the market, when there's less volume in it, tends to float higher, right? It's just easier for that to happen. There's more buyers in the market.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: The market and if you think of it my theory is such that and it is a theory that the float hires got more and more important the last few years because the all the 401K purchasing that's happening right so if you think about it the millions of people across america who buy part of the sp500 every single week in their 401ks and if those people are just buying continually and they don't really care.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Prices that'll float it higher right but then when you get the traders that come back in in September they're not so happy because the market's up higher and magically there's some kind of reason why they'll have a temper tantrum it's September and market comes back in you can see this in chart if we go look at you take a look let's go weekly look at the weekly chart so i guess September let's go back and look at right here you can see September you can see how the market floated higher and then sold off pretty much gave it all back that was in 2024.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Let's look at 2023 i think it's like 70 of the time the market sells down is the statistics in September you can see here 2023 market floats higher in August right there and then boom September comes in and it floats down until you know October and then takes off into the end of the year And that's a very typical kind of what you see.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: You know, you kind of get the doldrums of summer. You get a little bit of a float higher here in August. Boom, it gets hammered down in September and then takes off October going into the end of the year. Well, magically, guess when all the bonuses get paid out on Wall Street? Yeah, exactly. So let's take a look at 23.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: If we look at 23, you can see, okay, here's September. September. So here's your, your August float right here in this area that we, you're actually went down for three times and floated up end of August a little bit and then got smashed in the end in September, four weeks in a row, three weeks in a row and found a bottom.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Let's look at 21.

DANO WEIR: And when you say institutional buyer, Darren, I just want to rephrase, I think what you just said, which is that So if you have a job, you're a W2 employee, you have a 401K, you made your selection, you chose growth and whatever else, or a target date or whatever it was, somebody else at unnamed company is managing all of that money.

DANO WEIR: You're just putting it in there and then ultimately at the end of the day there is a human or humans at a large institution who's managing the 401K. Who's really making the trades within that portfolio. And you're saying that those few people have much more power than Joe Blow on Robinhood making a couple of trades.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Correct. I mean, just you think about the amount of money that institutions move versus the consumer, right? It's just vastly larger. These are the people that are trading for the big institutions. They're in there. Literally trading with the institution's money to make money.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And they're not going to want to come back in September and like, oh, thanks for floating it higher, guys. Now, it's a little conspiratorial to say that, right? But, I mean, I think the evidence is pretty clear.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: You can see again, here's in September. Look what happened in August. It floated higher and sold off in September. Early October takes off into the end of the year. And we call that seasonality, right? There's just a seasonality to the markets.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And it's not 100% of the time because there's always things happening. But here again, in 2020, we float higher in August, sells in September, takes off, got a little bit of a dip here in 2020, and then goes up into the end of the year. That's kind of the typical pattern to expect in the S&P. So, you know, another...

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Couple weeks of maybe some positive float hires you can see the floating higher right here and then shove it back down i can easily see this this trend line this blue trend line moving up you know you could easily see this movement higher and then this it comes back into this line somewhere around here corrects in to this line and then goes high just because it cracked doesn't mean like the trend is over, it doesn't mean you shouldn't do anything as an investor.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: It just means like, hey, there's a seasonality to it. And if I was going to invest millions of dollars in September, maybe I wait till October because probabilities are on my side that the market's going to do better from October to December than it does from September to December.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: You just don't know, right? You don't know 100% of the time. So that's the seasonality of markets and where that thought comes from. Again it's never for sure there's nothing in this game that's 100% that's what makes it so interesting is that it's always a changing changing thing it's just like a Dr. Copper so hold on a SEC Of course, it's going to do that right now. All right. Well, I'll do that later.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: We're not going to adopt right now because I've got to fill out a bunch of stuff. It's going to make me do on the training site.

DANO WEIR: Darren, you want to do that and I can talk about the show just for a second?

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Yeah, let's do that real quick.

DANO WEIR: Yeah. So while Darren gets that ready, just wanted to update everybody. Just checking into the show for the first time in the first last couple of weeks, or it's been a while, or maybe you're brand new. We are Sonoma Wealth Advisors. My name is Dan. We're again, hi, I'm the Marketing director, and, first, well, podcast host. And, our firm has several different brands.

DANO WEIR: We, and we always have had several different brands, to service, the various needs, in a holistic fashion of you, our client or prospective client. And so in addition to our private wealth services, we have Sonoma Wealth, which is Sonoma Wealth Advisors. We have 401K services, which we brand as Formata 401K. And now tax planning and tax services with Formata Tax.

DANO WEIR: So all falling under the umbrella of Formata Advisors, which we have always been. But that's our SEC registered entity name. But recently we've added those brands to our show because we want to let people know about everything that we're doing. So I only just take a moment to say that if you're seeing these brands on the show for the first time in a while or ever, we're still exactly who we have always been.

DANO WEIR: Darren has always been in charge of the whole thing, along with Chris. We're just maybe Marketing ourselves a little bit better because of a Marketing director. So if you're new checking out On The Markets 2, we would love a subscribe if you could anywhere you're listening, whether it's on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: A subscribe or a like is any kind of interaction really helps the show so we thank you for that and Darren are you able to show dr copper now yeah awesome sorry about that it's why the chart charting software asked me to deal with that right when it did was kind of funny but so we're looking at dr copper so dr copper is can be a sign that things economically are not great and What's interesting, when we look at this, you can see back in 31st of July, copper got just smacked.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And a lot of that was the tariff stuff that was going on with Trump. So it's been acting a little bit weird, a little bit harder to read as of late. But generally, you can see that copper thinks things look okay. And the trend is upward still. But it is hanging on by a string right now. And the idea is that copper...

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: Historically has moved first the whole green new deal kind of threw a wrench in that indicator to some degree because it just put such a demand on copper and the Trump administration's obviously not been pro green new deal and that has kind of i think changed the dynamic of this indicator but the theory is that copper will tend to signal an event before anything else because it's when you think about it economically it's if you're going to buy a bunch of copper put a bunch of wires in a house in a building in anything well you know that's something that's going to get planned out for it so the copper indicator and dr copper isn't saying anything particularly pernicious is amongst us or coming at this time but interesting we look at wm another leading indicator on the stock market is russell 2000 these are companies are really sensitive to interest rates interestingly enough They didn't really sell off much with inflation credits.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: So I think that's noteworthy. They actually did well. If inflation is going high, it's harder for these companies to do well. Look at the SOX indicator, which is the semiconductor index, which is the front end of that risk curve.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: That still looks pretty healthy. Maybe we can argue a double top forming there, but not quite. Igvs, you're like really risky software companies.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: That's in trouble so that's interesting that could be signaling something you can see because we closed below this all-time high right here this week you can see that all-time high i would have liked to seen this go up trade into that all-time high and then higher but the fact that it traded above it and went below it that's not a very good sign so that could be a crack in the dam and we could look at hot needle junk bonds doing great And they look really strong, which is usually a sign that things look good economically.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: The idea is that high yield corporate bonds, meaning these are corporations that have a lot of debt, aren't very healthy. People start dumping these first. And you can see they're not dumping those right now.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: So that's positive. So I think overall, I think you have to take a positive stance on the market. I think things look fairly healthy right now. Even developed markets, you can see one of the number one performing.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: And just a shout out to my buddy, Chris. He loves having a well-diversified portfolio through developed, US, and emerging. And emerging and developed have been poor, poor, poor until recently. And this year, they're just crushing it.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: So it does pay to be diversified. And what tends to happen is then you get these lumps. So the developed market is going to be Europe. So with all that's going on in Europe, it's doing pretty handsomely right now. And as is emerging markets doing very well as well.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: They lagged the stock market after the 2022 decline, but now they're really making up some steam. So it does pay to be diversified, but you just have to be patient. Talking about Bitcoin, Bitcoin hit an all-time high and then closed and went down.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: That's not necessarily bullish. Could be putting in a double top there. You can see that top here and that top here. I'm going to be watching $111,000 really closely. If we break below that, we'll probably go lower.

DAREN BLONSKI CFP®: So all interesting. And I think overall, I think we've got to be positive and see. Things is looking pretty good right now. We'll see how things pan out next week. And as always, keep you updated if things change in the meanwhile.

DANO WEIR: Darren, thank you so much. Thank you for checking out the show. As I said, if you're new, we would love a subscribe. We would love interaction from you if you want to follow the show so that way you don't miss future episodes. Also here on the YouTube Channel and on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, we have other podcasts to check out, including our podcast, It's All Money, which Darren and I also host.

DANO WEIR: So if you're loving today and you want more of us hanging out talking about money, check that show out to SonomaWealth.com to learn more about our firm. And we will see you next week. Thank you so much for checking out today's show. And thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate it. Have a great day and a great weekend.

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