Learn more about the latest cybersecurity threat (and how to protect yourself).

A recent survey of more than 1,000 financial planners asked whether they had experienced any attempted or real scams with their clients. Many had, and reported varying levels of success dealing with what appears to be a dramatic upsurge in sophisticated ways to separate people from their assets.

Please click the link inside to view the 2024 Annual Market Review from Optimus Capital Advisors.

A recent comic strip shows two different office workers in two different cubicles, talking about the great benefits of artificial intelligence on their working lives—and on the company’s productivity as a whole.

The catastrophic wildfires in Los Angeles represent a terrible human tragedy, and for many homeowners, it will become an awful financial tragedy as well, as thousands will discover that there’s a big gap between what their homes are worth and what they’ll actually get from insurance companies to rebuild on top of the ash.

The early market reaction to the election has been staggering and investors are basically returning to the same Trump playbook from 2016: the reflation trade is back. Yields are blowing out with the curve steepening and real rates driving nearly 2/3 of the widening. The Dollar is strengthening, the VIX is crashing lower, cyclical stocks are roaring, led by financials, and the US is outperforming the rest of world. Lower priced small cap stocks are having their time, leading to a broad-based surge in the equity markets.

If you think people are job-hopping more frequently today than any previous era in the American economy, you’re right. In the good old days of 1983, a little over half of male American workers age 40-44 had worked for the same employer for ten years or more. Job stability was common. Today, only 32.5% of this cohort have worked with any one employer for a full decade.

Two years ago, it seemed that the Federal Reserve’s target of 2% inflation for the U.S. economy was a mission impossible, and people were laughing at the Fed chairman’s comment that we were experiencing ‘transitory inflation.’ But it turns out that the 2020-2023 spike in inflation actually WAS transitory, even if it lasted longer than the Fed economists seem to have expected.

Without any particular fanfare, the investment landscape has shifted dramatically, from public companies to firms controlled by private equity. Increasingly, the opportunities to buy corporate growth are being diminished for the average investor, while a small number of wealthy investors are cherry-picking off the top.

As we wrap up another eventful quarter in the financial markets, our team at Optimus Capital Advisors has compiled a comprehensive analysis of the key trends and developments that shaped Q3 2024.

All eyes are pretty much always on what the U.S. Fed is doing, but most of the attention goes to only one aspect of its manipulation of our economy. You read about whether the Fed is thinking about raising or lowering interest rates, pundits offer up their opinions, economists read the tea leaves of the Fed meeting minutes and press conferences—and, well, from all that, it would be natural to believe that this is the only lever that the Fed is pulling when it wants to raise or lower the temperature of economic activity. But the other handle is the Fed balance sheet.

The U.S. dollar is declining in value compared with a basket of international currencies. The greenback has fallen 5% in the last two months, and now sits at a 13-month low. Should we be alarmed? Probably not. In fact, other nations go to economic war over trying to devalue their currencies compared with the others around the world. A strong currency means that the products of companies based in that country will be priced higher in countries they are exporting to—making them generally less competitive versus local brands.

A week is a long time if you’re a quick-twitch trader or market pundit. Early last week, the Smart Money (which is never as smart as it thinks it is) was assuring all of us that we were in a ‘goldilocks’ economy that had executed a ‘soft landing’—which means avoiding a recession after a period of strong growth. The Fed, we were told, was going to lower interest rates, and, well, everything was (this is not a technical economic term) ‘hunky dory.’

The headline news this week is that the U.S. economy grew at a 2.8% annualized pace in the second quarter, which is basically a continuation of two years of solid, if up-and-down, growth. Consumer spending was (surprisingly) strong (up 2.3% year over year), and business investments rose at an 11.6% rate. But behind the robust numbers is a more sobering picture: the size of the gains in some of the economic areas are slowing down (see graph), and economists are calling this an economic cooling-off period.

Adding international stock exposure is one of the first steps toward a diversified portfolio. Even minimalist investors usually carve out a portion of their portfolios for non-US stocks as a supplement to domestic stocks and bonds. At this point, however, even committed globalists have to acknowledge that adding non-US equities has detracted from the returns of a US-only portfolio, even as it has modestly reduced risk. In the 2024 Diversification Landscape report that I recently completed with Amy Arnott and Karen Zaya, we found that foreign stocks’ correlation with the US market has also increased over the past three years.

Passing on the family wealth to children without also bestowing a sense of entitlement is a challenge for many affluent families. It can be a significant part of a financial advisor’s job to provide strategies and solutions to families in the hopes of avoiding the ill-effects of what’s known as affluenza.

The U.S. and (to a lesser extent) global equity markets continue to generate positive returns for investors, the bond market is settling down and the long-predicted recession keeps being moved back by the market pundits. It's almost easy to forget that bear markets ever happen, given the returns of last year and this year's first two quarter.

Not everybody makes contributions to donor-advised funds (DAFs), but the concept has become more popular with the expanded standard deduction. Many people who had been making donations to their favorite charity, whose overall deductions didn’t rise to the level of the standard deduction, suddenly found that their charitable contributions were no longer providing a tax benefit.

If you’re ever curious about what professional economists with access to huge troves of economic data think about the U.S. economy, you can turn to the Beige Book.  The Beige Book is published by the Federal Reserve every couple of months, and summarizes the state of the economy, overall and in each region.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has upended one of the most common aspects of executive employment, banning non-compete agreements as, in the words of the announcement, ‘an unfair method of competition.’ The ban covers everyone except senior executives who are in a ‘policy-making position,” for whom existing noncompetes will be grandfathered.