August 2018

With the S&P 500 hitting new intraday highs, these are great times to be invested in domestic equities. But what, if anything, could go wrong? Hello, my name’s Paul Carroll. I’m the CEO and founder of Efficient Wealth Management, a boutique wealth management firm here in south Texas. Today is Friday, August 24, and the S&P 500 hit an intraday high of 2,873. It’s too early to tell how it’ll end the day or the week, but clearly the market is bouncing along new highs as we progress. What is going on? Well, the world is healing. It is post-2008, and there’s a strong domestic and international economic tide. It is definitely raising all boats. Yesterday, Fed Chairman Powell indicated that inflation is not really a concern. Now that may or may not be a slightly political statement to protect the independence of the central bank, but he was quite...

How are emerging markets holding up in this new world of potential increased tariffs? How is this going to affect your portfolio? Hello. My name's Paul Carroll, the CEO and founder of Efficient Wealth Management. In the past 45 days, we have seen a modest sell-off in emerging markets. Is this the beginning of something worse, or is it just a blip? In some emerging markets such as Vietnam and Malaysia, exports make up the bulk of their gross domestic product. These countries are in the early life cycle of a developing economy, one where they're using exports to create a domestic economy and a domestic middle class that can sustain itself in the future and, even better, import from other nations in the coming decades. This is a story we've seen in the past — even in the United States 150 years ago, when we were an emerging economy...