This week’s topic, technically speaking, the S&P500 achieves a “Golden Cross” on 2/2/2023, and historically, that is a good thing. For the better part of the second half of 2022, viewers of financial news and readers of internet financial newsletters were bombarded with a constant negative message supposedly “backed up” by an ominous chart of the S&P 500. The negative messaging was the coming “collapse” of the US stock market in the 4th quarter of 2022 and the first quarter of 2023. This is even though the S&P500 had already dropped over -27.5% peak to trough in nominal terms and – 35% in real terms from its early 2022 peak. These declines were in line with the average bear market, the average recession decline for stocks, and normal mid-term 2nd-year Presidential decline. Time for the Bulls? For the better part of the second half of 2022, viewers of financial news and readers of internet financial newsletters were bombarded with a constant negative message supposedly “backed up” by an ominous chart of the S&P500. The negative messaging was the coming “collapse” of the US stock market in the 4th quarter of 2022 and first quarter 2023. This is even though the S&P500 had already dropped over -27.5% peak to trough in nominal terms and – 35% in real terms from its early 2022 peak. These declines were in line with the average bear market, the average recession decline for stocks, and normal mid-term 2nd year Presidential decline. None the less, the purveyors of doom wearing black turtlenecks were grabbing headlines virtually every day on CNBC, Fox News, Bloomberg TV and virtually every subscription newsletter I was forwarded. Here’s one of the many 2008 versus 2022 “overlays” that were making the rounds in the 3rd quarter of 2022. This one was circulated by Mott Capital. If one just looked at the chart one would think that Mott Capital was running money for their clients and investing in this strategy. Alas, a little bit of quick research shows that Mott Capital is another…

This week we’re talking about Earnings, Economic Data, what happened last week, and what we see going forward into February. The Stock Superbowl: Chris Perras: Hey, I’m Chris Perras, Chief Investment Officer at Oak Harvest Financial Group in Houston, Texas. This is Charles Scavone, Director of Investments. This is our weekly Stock Talk podcast, keeping you connected to your money. We’re going to do something a little different this week. Normally, I script these things, but Charles, myself, and James have been really busy the last week with earnings and economic data. We’re going to do a bit of ad lib here. We’re just going to walk through what happened last week, and what we see going forward here in February. Charles, I’m just going to ask you, what did you do last week? What did you see last week? Charles Scavone: Yes, well, it was interesting. I guess, if we break it into a couple of big buckets, we did have some big economic data, we also had a lot of earnings. Let’s go reverse the order there. Let’s just talk about earnings a little bit. We have now had over 50% of the S&P 500 report earnings. If I had to characterize it, I’d say they were okay. Expectations had been lowered headed into earnings season, but they probably were good enough. People are concerned about what the outlooks are going forward. Outlooks have generally been, again, okay and so people are right setting expectations. It’s a good process. It can create some volatility, but it helps us then get a gauge on how we need to assess the GoForward look, which is what’s most important, obviously. Coming back, we had Amazon, Apple, Tesla, Microsoft, big, big-name companies reporting. Again, in characterizing them, they were good enough and have hopefully right sized where expectations are. Anything from you from earnings standpoint maybe before we go to economics? Chris: Yes. What Charles said, I totally agree with. It’s pretty normal. If you’ve looked at earnings expectations throughout the year,…

On January 26, we live-streamed our 1st Half Market Outlook, titled, “How will Inflation and Recession Impact My Retirement Planning? 1st Half Market Outlook Summit 2023.” In this episode, we recap the highlights of the live stream and Chris comments a bit on what was discussed. Here’s the link to the live stream: Beginning the Outlook: Chris: Hey, I’m Chris Perras Chief Investment Officer, Oak Harvest Financial Group here in Houston Texas, and welcome to this week’s podcast, Keeping You Connected To Your Money. I’m going to do something a little different this week. Last week, our investment team here had our first half market outlook summit and we live-streamed it. It was Troy, myself, and the newest member of our team, Charles Scavone. What I want to do here is break that one-hour video down into six segments. When you watch it, if you want to you can fast forward to the segment you want to focus on. For the first 10 minutes or so, Troy and myself we did a recap of what happened in 2022. If you watch these videos, I hate the word unprecedented. Well, 2022 pretty much was. So it was the first time in almost 90 years that the 60-40 portfolio had just a horrific year. It was the worst year since 1937 and it was the first time really since 1931 when both stocks and bonds were down materially both. There was no ballast to the bond market. We spent about 10 minutes walking through that. Posted a really great table from Charlie Bilello and if you want to see that, go ahead and fast forward you can look at that or you can go back and watch the first half market outlook that we wrote in December and we published in early January. The second part of our video, Troy and I spent a long time talking about the components of inflation. There’s a goods component that peaked last June and has dropped dramatically auto prices, car prices, used car prices, commodity…

In this episode of Stock Talk Podcast, Keeping You Connected To Your Money, We’re changing it up a little bit this week. We’re going to introduce a new member of our investment team. His name is Charles Scovone. I have a lot of history with Charles over the last 28-plus years. We’ll highlight some of that History and some of the processes of how we manage investments. Welcoming Charles to the Team: Chris Perras: Hey, I’m Chris Perras, chief Investment Officer at Oak Harvest Financial Group here in Houston, Texas, and we’re going to change it up a little bit this week. Some of you are tuning in for the getting connected to your Money episode. This week, we’re going to introduce a new member of our investment team. His name’s Charles Scavone. I’ve got a lot of history with Charles over the last 28-plus years. What’s going on here is we’ve got some great changes to the investment team and the investment process. Taking you backwards in time, about six years ago, Oak Harvests on the investment side, we were small. We were about 35 million in assets under management. Troy and Jessica were looking out towards the future, brought on James McFarland to help manage the money, and they were looking forward and they brought me in. I’ve been here about five years. We’ve grown from 55 million in assets to almost 575 million in assets. With just Troy, James, myself, and a few others’ input into the investment management process. We’re looking towards the next five years. We’ve brought Charles Scavone in to the team. I’ve known Charles for 28 years. He is a great money manager and even a better team leader. Charles. Charles Scavone: Yes. Thanks, Chris. I can’t begin to tell you how excited I am to be here, to be working with you again, to be part of the Oak Harvest team. As I got to know the people involved all the way from senior leadership to everybody in the organization. Very impressed….

STOCK TALK HAS BEEN MOVED TO ITS OWN CHANNEL! CLICK HERE TO VISIT: https://www.youtube.com/@OakHarvestStockTalk This week’s video is going to be short and sweet. It’s titled, What “really” matters. Two things as far as I see it and they are intertwined of course. New Lows: On Friday, October 14th last year, and with the S&P500 hitting a new low below 3600, our Oak Harvest investment team released our weekly stock talk titling it, “What could go right”? We have a few reasons for our optimism during a time of uncertainty backing it up with historical statistics combined with real-time data series. Trust me, it felt iffy to release it and I’ve been doing this for almost 30 years. I’ve gone through a number of bear markets in the past, and whether you see them coming or not, they never feel good. As it turns out, so far, that week has been this market’s cycle low. And it’s been so far for many of the reasons we listed in the video including a peak and rollover in the Fed’s favorite inflation-watching tools, a China reopening trade after they finally scrapped their Zero-Covid policy, and mid-term election seasonality. This week’s video is going to be short and sweet. It’s titled, What “really” matters. I am Chris Perras with Oak Harvest Financial Group in Houston, Texas, and welcome to our weekly stock talk podcast, keeping you connected to your money. Before we get into this week’s topic, please take a moment to click on the subscribe button and click on the notification bell so you will be alerted when our team uploads our latest content. We do have a new location for our Oak Harvest Investment-oriented content. You can find it by typing “Stock Talk with Chris” in the Google search window or going to the Oak Harvest YouTube channel and clicking on the drop-down tab labeled “channels” and clicking on “Stock talk with Chris”. So, what really matters here? As far as I see it, they are intertwined, of course. First, a…

STOCK TALK HAS BEEN MOVED TO ITS OWN CHANNEL! CLICK HERE TO VISIT: https://www.youtube.com/@OakHarvestStockTalk Continuing On: I am Chris Perras, Chief Investment Officer at Oak Harvest Financial Group, we are a retirement planning and investment management advisor located in Houston Texas. Welcome to the part two of our 1st half 2023 market outlook. Recall, we titled it the “Old Normal”. Why? Because after close to 12 years of generous Federal Reserve monetary policies brought on by the Great Financial Crisis in 2008 and 2009, Central Banks around the world are reverting to their old ways of allowing business cycles, both good and bad, to play themselves out. As for the public financial markets for the first half of 2023, let’s start with fixed income and bonds. After 10 years of suppressing yields through QE, Quantitative Easing, the Fed has once again reversed course and is selling bonds and letting their balance sheet shrink. Here’s a chart from Bianco Research of how historically bad 2022 was versus other years for global bond returns. Down -16.4% on the Bloomberg global bond index. It was a horrific year for most bond markets. That’s over three times worse than the -5.2% return in 1999, which was the second worse return the last 30 years. The good news is that expected returns increase from lower price levels and the chart for 2022, the lower bold line, looks like it’s starting to form a reverse head and shoulder bottoming pattern in this amateur chartist’s opinion. Many public fixed income investments are looking attractive to the OHFG team for the first time in years. With yields haven risen dramatically in 2022, bond yields are now offering fixed income investors and retirees decent yields for income generation. Shorter term government bonds, Investment grade credit, and municipal bonds look very attractive now as all should hold up better in either a first half 2023 economic slowdown, or a Fed induced recession. Inflation should continue dropping throughout the first half of 2023, but it is likely to remain above the…

STOCK TALK HAS BEEN MOVED TO ITS OWN CHANNEL! CLICK HERE TO VISIT: https://www.youtube.com/@OakHarvestStockTalk The Old Normal I am Chris Perras, Chief Investment Officer at Oak Harvest Financial Group, we are a retirement planning and investment management advisor located in Houston Texas. Welcome to our 1st half 2023 Market Outlook, YouTube, Stock Talk “Keeping you connected to your money”. Today and next week, we will be covering our first half 2023 outlook. I’m titling it, the “Old Normal”. Why? Because after close to 12 years of generous Federal Reserve monetary policies brought on by the Great Financial Crisis in 2008 and 2009, Central Banks around the world are reverting to their old ways of allowing business cycles, both good and bad, to play themselves out. In fact, more than any time in my 30-year career, global central banks spent 2022 trying to force a substantial economic slowdown in order to lower their own Covid induced, lax monetary policies, that induced the highest inflation in 40 years. Before we get into the meat of our outlook, I have to say that 2022 turned out to be the most difficult year in the markets in my entire career. For me as a portfolio manager and investment officer, it was tougher than the Dot.com bubble. Tougher than the Great financial crisis and even tougher than anticipating the post Covid shutdown rally. How tough was 2022? According to Nick Colas at Data Trek, only 5 days accounted for more than 95% of the S&P500 index losses on the year. Those days and declines were April 29th, -3.6% (Amazon earnings reduction), May 5th, -3.6% (Jerome Powell’s speech), May 18th, -4.0% (retailer Target’s earnings warning on inventory), June 13th, -3.9% (a hot CPI inflation number), and September 13th, -4.3% drubbing on another higher than expected CPI release. That concentration of downside moves, and volatility is a trader’s delight, and an investors nightmare. Good luck market timing those moves. While we had expected the first half of 2022 to give us our first market correction since Xmas…

What’s Chris Perras’s Stock Talk and News or Noise all about? Whether you’re retired, about to retire, or on the path of accumulating wealth, Stock Talk and News or Noise will help give you perspective on what’s happening in the Market: https://www.youtube.com/@OakHarvestStockTalk The Interview: Troy: Troy Sharpe, CEO of Oak Harvest Financial Group, along with Chris Perras, our Chief Investment Officer, and we want to talk to you a little bit today about the origin of the Stock Talk podcast, who it’s designed for, how you can benefit, and why you should listen. Chris, you’ve been doing the podcast now, first in audio format for going on 4 years, about 3 and a half years now, and we recently switched it over to YouTube. Who’s the podcast meant for and has the audience at all changed over the years? Chris Perras: Yes, thanks, Troy. The podcast was originally in audio form only, and it was meant to go out to our clients only, and our thoughts were trying to cover material that we thought our clients might be concerned about in the markets, what they were seeing on tv, what they were hearing in the news, and thinking forward about events and times that they might be concerned going forward, so it was meant for clients only. It was distributed to clients only, but it’s morphed over the last 3 and a half, 4 years. Troy: Our job, first and foremost, is to protect people’s money, but obviously when you invest in the stock market, there’s some volatility and that’s where the financial planning comes in, the income planning, the tax planning, all those aspects, and from a firm standpoint, one of the complaints we hear consistently from new clients that come aboard is my other advisor never reached out to me. My other advisor never talked to me. Our goal with the podcast, originally, was to stay in contact with our clients to help people understand because it’s not realistic to pick up the phone and call 1000 people…

I am Chris Perras, Chief Investment Officer at Oak Harvest Financial Group, and with the Christmas weekend here, I want to keep this episode short and focus on 4 charts, tables, and data sets. Before I do, make sure you click on the subscribe button as well as the notification bell, so our team can notify you when we upload new content. On December 16th, we released a podcast warning that our call for a 4th quarter rally should be running into resistance in both price and time due to 4 things. One, more Federal Reserve hawkish talk would be forthcoming, 2-chart technicals, 3-stock buybacks slowing into year-end, and 4- year-end tax loss selling by individuals. Well, someone out there might have seen the same things we did. We’ve sold off hard since mid that week. Here’s an updated chart of the SP500 through Dec 15th. No, it’s still not a pretty picture. The S&P500 remains in a downtrend that was established early in 2022 when the Federal Reserve went full inflation flight. What’s amazing to me is to see the magnitude and timing of the rallies and sell-offs since the late 2nd quarter summer low. Talk about looking rigged? Someone is playing station to station. A 41-day rally from June low to mid-Aug high? A 41-trading day pullback into the October 13th low? Then a 41-trading day rally into the short-term December 13th top? That doesn’t look like a coincidence. That is a big or multiple big players trading. And to make it even crazier. The rally in the cash S&P500 from June 17th through August 16th was 688.4097 cash S&P500 points. The rally from October 13th through December 13th including the crazy futures trading pre-open on Dec 13th around the CPI number took futures to 4180. 688.4204 points? A difference of barely .01 points? Folks. That’s computers and only computers. So, the Fed is still on the inflation-fighting warpath even though the real-time data has the leading inflation data series dropping like a stone. How do we know…

As of this writing, December 9th, the typical 60% Stocks and 40% Bonds portfolio was down almost -15% year to date in 2022. This makes 2022, one of the worst 5 years for a “balanced” portfolio like this. Here’s a chart from Lombard Odier, showing how bad and rare 2022 has been for this well-known retirement planning strategy. How bad was the loss sustained by 60/40 through Q3 2022? Looking at calendar year returns dating back to the mid-1920s, the loss ranks second all-time. For the first 3 quarters of 2022, the losses experienced in the traditional balanced portfolio were greater than any year since 1931. Jim Valvano I am Chris Perras, Chief Investment Officer at Oak Harvest Financial Group, and those who know me know I am a huge college basketball fan. ACC all the way. With the holidays quickly approaching, I want to leave my viewers with a holiday gift. I’m going to combine a little stock market history with one of the most moving and inspirational speeches I have ever heard in my life. The speech was given by legendary N.C. State men’s head basketball coach, Jim Valvano. It was his speech at the 1993 ESPY awards. He was accepting the Arthur Ashe award for courage, as Jimmy V was in the late stage of his life, fighting cancer. This speech is better known as the “Don’t give up.. Don’t ever Give up” speech and is used at this time of the year to promote Cancer fundraising for research. I’ll put a link to the speech in the description below. A warning, have Kleenex handy. It will put life in perspective. “Don’t give up, don’t ever give up.” Those are Jim Valvano’s words of determination, and those are fighting words. Clearly, my job here as CIO of Oak Harvest isn’t as important as someone’s fight against cancer. Not a chance. It isn’t. However, after a volatile and negative year in the financial markets, and for sure, 2022 has been a trying year across both stocks and bonds,…