Transcript
I hope this short video finds you and your family doing well as of today, Thursday, October the 3rd. Equity and bond markets have been performing rather well despite the very significant domestic and geopolitical tensions, and client portfolios as a result have been growing quite nicely. This is yet another example of markets climbing the wall of worry. So far so good.
Now during our regular webinars, we focus on providing insights on what’s been happening in markets and our big picture outlook based on the most important factors affecting our clients’ economic well being. Normally, we’d be preparing right now for our Fall webinar next week, but this year, we’ve decided to adapt to current events and move our webinar to Tuesday, November 12th at 7pm MST 6pm PST.
We’ve chosen that date because it’s after both the US elections and Martin Armstrong’s annual World Economic Conference. That’ll be the 10th one in a row that I’ve attended.
I made a quick list of over a dozen things that are different this this time around with the elections. And for a variety of reasons I think that this election will likely be the most consequential in their history. Perhaps the last. Who knows? Perhaps the most important of these reasons is the fact that the Harris/Waltz ticket and the Trump/Vance ticket are offering vastly, vastly different policy prescriptions with very different consequences for their economy. But that being the case, we think it’s wisest to wait for the results and reaction to their election and to hear Marty’s insights and forecast.
To put it another way, we’re seeking a multitude of council before determining our outlook. Now this may gave rise to you asking if any changes need to be made to your investment portfolio in advance of the elections. If you’re not already one of our clients, I can’t answer that simply because we don’t know how your accounts are being managed. But if you are an IWM client, you don’t need to make any changes. And here’s why.
Your asset mix of stocks, bonds and alternatives, as laid out in your Investment Policy Statement, is designed primarily around never taking you beyond your financial pain threshold in the worst of market conditions. To put it another way, your portfolio is carefully designed to weather a perfect storm in markets so that you don’t bail out at a time when you turn temporary declines into permanent losses. Additionally, each discrete asset class within your portfolio is actively managed in real time. This is especially true within the equity pools, where our managers use varying cash levels, increased cash levels, in this case, currency hedging and even option strategies to minimize downside during periods of market turmoil, as well as being ready to step on the gas when it makes sense.
They’re very skilled, they’re disciplined and stoic, and they actually follow what’s going on in the markets and not getting caught up in the frenzied rhetoric that we hear in the public discourse. Some recent examples of how well this works are the Covid crash of 2020, the immediate aftermath of the vaccine announcements right after the November 2020 US elections and the bear market of early 2022.
This gives us a lot of confidence going forward and lets our clients rest easy whatever happens. So we’ll wait to see how these events unfold and we’ll tap into the wisdom of some really smart analysts like Martin Armstrong and other commentators that we follow in advance of that webinar, which again will be on Tuesday, November 12th at 7pm MST or 6pm PST.
So we look forward to having you join us then, either live or via the recording we’ll send out a recording link shortly after the event, as we usually do. And in the meantime, we wish you all a very happy Thanksgiving.
And after that, enjoy listening to the turkeys down south. Cheers.
