December 2018

Rate hikes on the QT. Is this good or bad? Hello, my name is Paul Carroll. I'm the CEO and founder of Efficient Wealth Management, a boutique wealth management firm in South Texas. Fed Chairman Powell announced a quarter percent rate hike yesterday with new band of 2.25 to 2.50%. As a result, domestic and global stock markets tumbled. Was this unavoidable? From a market point of view, valuations over time, are the net present value of future income streams discounted by long term interest rates. You raise interest rates, you see markets tumble. But was this appropriate? Is the market too hot? Only hindsight will tell us and when I say the market, I really mean the economy. The labor market. The labor market is very strong right now. It is slowing down but is it slowing enough? One of the important lessons that has faded into history is...

The Dow Jones is down more than 1,300 points this morning. This is no time to panic. Hello, my name's Paul Carroll. I'm the CEO and founder of Efficient Wealth Management, a boutique wealth management firm in South Texas. The first thing to keep in mind when we see the news is points and percent are not the same. The media is all about advertising. It's about fear, and fear I define as false evidence appears real. Yes, the Dow is down 2% today, 3% on Monday. That sounds so much less painful than 1,300 points. We do have an inverted yield curve. I'm sure everybody's heard about that, and all that means is that we're probably going to get a recession. We're probably going to get an earnings recession. This is not going to be a 2008 meltdown, and that fact is very much evidenced by the strong showing...