March 2020

At the beginning of the week, United Airlines offered the pilots voluntary extended leave. What does this mean to you? Especially if you're retiring soon. If you're not retiring, all this is saying is "Don't come to work and we'll pay you 50 hours in May, or if you want to leave for a longer period of time, 40 hours a month." Frankly, if you've got a commute, you don't like being around sick people - you just don't want to come to work -that's not a bad deal. Well, what if you're retiring? Really, the retirement decision is one about the pension; the lump sum. Let me be clear. It is our opinion at Avion Wealth that the annuity is completely safe. Not only is the pension plan relatively well-funded, but the PBGC coverage for the annuities that were frozen about a decade ago, or more now, is more...

Today, I want to talk about the virus update, the economic stimulus package, how it's affecting markets and what to expect next. Let's talk about what we know first on the virus - you can all read, so I'll be brief. So what do we know? The COVID-19 is apparently showing all signs of being seasonal as it warms up, transmission rates slow. It doesn't mean it's going to go away. Just means we're going to hopefully get more time for the hospitals to build up their beds, their inventory of equipment, their respirators. New York City of course is getting hammered, and it's right in that critical weather temperature band of locations that are most susceptible to this. We're seeing that the fatality average rate is still less than 1% where there's good health care, and it's also age and health dependent. For growth rate the United States is...

Play Video Good morning. What a Monday! The market is down 7%. Oil prices have collapsed to $34, and Goldman's actually afraid it'll hit $20. We have Coronavirus. We're going to talk today about all these. Most important - what's our strategy to protect our clients from these fires? We have two kinds of clients who are reacting to what is essentially a real capitulation within the market. We've got the scared clients, and to them I would say we plan for this. This is why we've been so conservative. No one knew when a market correction would come, but we knew for over 18 months that the markets were rich. So we've planned for this. We're going to get through it. The hungry clients are actually the more interesting group, and for those the issue is when do we get in. When do we buy cheap. And there's no...