November 2018

The sell-off pre-Thanksgiving has certainly created an opportunity for portfolio checkup. Hello, my name is Paul Carroll. I'm the CEO and founder of Efficient Wealth Management. Until recently, as we've talked about before, the FAANGSs have defied gravity and they've done this as other assets have stumbled leading to some frustrating tracking error. The S&P 500 has been pulled up by the FAANGs. The rest of markets, global and domestic, have fallen behind. That tracking error appears to be ending. Fortunately, for the last year or so, we've been persistently trying to de-risk clients, especially those with concentrated holdings. Now, with the market correction definitely in play and the price of oil tumbling, we're beginning to see a certain amount of normalization of asset valuations, especially international. This is a wonderful opportunity, finally, to get some good rebalancing in, to take some tax losses. We call this tax harvesting. To...

It's that time again, it's almost Thanksgiving, and Thanksgiving means Christmas shopping, and our experience has been once the Christmas shopping has started, any chance of getting the spending under control is over. Want to briefly go over seven tips to help you prepare financially for the holidays. First, try to take a look at what you spent last year. Were you happy with what you spent? If you were, then do what you did last year, that's simple. If not, number two, start making a budget and gift list now. Shopping is an arms race. Once you've bought something for Uncle Fred, you have to spend at least as much for Aunt Mildred or whoever the relatives are, so we need to get this under control right now. Figure out gifts, decorations, foods, activities, donations. Three, set aside the money. Set the expectations early, work from the end game...

The FAANGs, part two. Is the party over? Hi, my name's Paul Carroll, I'm the CEO and founder of Efficient Wealth Management. Back in June we sent out a couple of videos discussing how the FAANGs are lifting the market and growth-oriented indexes. And of course, the FAANGs are Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google. Rarely has so much money been made by so few stocks and for such a long period of time. It's really unprecedented. In fact, since 2013 a full 37% of the rise in the S&P 500 were just those five stocks. Less we think it's a US-only phenomena, in China, 28% of the rise of debt equities in the same period of time, just two stocks, Alibaba and Tencent. And Alibaba of course, is their Amazon but bigger. Since September, the medium value of these five companies just dropped over 21%. We have seen almost...

The S&P 500 fell 7.3% in October, and other indices fell even more. Is the market forecasting a downturn in the economy? Hello, my name is Paul Carroll. I'm the CEO and founder of Efficient Wealth Management. The first two quarters of the year showed above average growth. Can it last? We would expect with the tax cuts that you would get a boost in growth, and most economists feel that that's going to wash out by 2019. Normal GDP growth is the function of two things: productivity and the working age population. Typically, in a country as developed as ours, 2% is a pretty good standard for long term growth. That doubles the size of the economy every 30 years. The legacy of the tax cuts probably more than anything will result in weaker finances with which to deal with a future downturn. There are three forward looking growth...