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We like to cover current events in the financial markets and share our opinions on how to approach investments given the financial circumstances. 


Thursday, April 23, 2026

All Time Highs – All Time Lows The conflict between the US, Israel and Iran has been front and center for investors now for close to two months. And, initially, the S&P 500 sold off in response to spiking oil prices. The 500-stock...

Thursday, February 5, 2026

On Thursday of last week, gold hit an all-time high of $5,575 an ounce during early trading. But the milestone didn’t hold up and Friday the yellow relic went through a gut-wrenching downdraft trading as low as $4,460, a 20% one-day...

Tuesday, December 23, 2025

At this time last year, the theme of our 2025 outlook was overarching uncertainty. A new administration was about to take over in Washington, inflation was coming down but still not on target, an unruly congress was preparing to be...

Wednesday, September 17, 2025

Anyone who has ever piloted a ship, taken the wheel of a powerboat, or sat on the tiller of a small sailing vessel can tell you about the problem of over steering and lagged reaction. Keeping the ship on course requires small...

Thursday, July 24, 2025

Anyone who has done an ascent, a long uphill hike or has just spent any time heading up into the mountains is familiar with the phenomenon of questioning… where is the summit? As you advance, you can see the near peak and as it gets...

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Monday, June 16, 2025

As I drove home last night from a dinner with friends, the headlines crossed with the news that Israel had launched airstrikes against Iranian military sites in an effort to prevent the further development of Iranian nuclear weapon...

Wednesday, May 21, 2025

I always kind of crack up when clients ask about my crystal ball. I have a little one. It’s actually a mini-globe with all the continents frosted on, so it is truly hazy. The fact is nobody knows for sure what will happen in the future...

Monday, April 14, 2025

We are huge sports fans at home. We really love football and basketball. But many people are surprised by our third favorite sporting spectacle, soccer, also known as the beautiful game. The pinnacle of soccer (futbol) is the World Cup...

Tuesday, April 8, 2025

The administration recently announced a new policy initiative involving reciprocal tariffs, intended to address ongoing trade imbalances. The announcement, delivered during a press event at the White House Rose Garden, introduced a...

Monday, March 3, 2025

Market participants today seem to be solely focused on the earnings of the leader of the so-called “Magnificent 7” – the small group of tech stocks that have led the markets for the last 2 years. There is good reason for the hyper...

Wednesday, January 22, 2025

Welcome to 2025 and to the new administration in the White House. We are about 24 hours into Trump 2.0 and it has been a struggle to keep up with the flurry of executive orders. Then this morning I got a survey from the Bureau of Labor...

Thursday, December 19, 2024

As we pull together our thoughts to synthesize the 2025 outlook for investors, it’s a bit like commuting in the Phoenix area. Public transportation here is virtually nil, so most people drive the grid made up of city streets and...

Tuesday, November 26, 2024

There was a lot of talk about tariffs during the recent presidential election. Last night, the president-elect announced via social media post that his administration would be enacting across the board tariffs of 10% on all goods...

Monday, November 11, 2024

The outcome of the 2024 U.S. presidential election will have significant implications for both the stock and bond markets, as the change in political leadership will shift economic policies and investor sentiment. Stock Market: With...

Monday, October 21, 2024

Canoes, Airplanes and the Consumer Our obsession with watching the Fed to figure out if they will be able to engineer a “soft landing” may soon be ending. The airplane analogy was always kind of a head scratcher anyway. Technically, a...

Thursday, September 19, 2024

Fed chair Jay Powell has just announced a 50-basis point (1/2 percent) cut in the federal funds rate. What should we expect going forward? As I listen to the post-announcement press conference, there are a few things that come to mind....

Monday, August 26, 2024

Investors tend to overreact to all kinds of stimulus and every four years, the presidential election brings about some of the worst instincts we see in investor behavior. A deep dive into the data might be of interest. This chart from...

Monday, October 9, 2023

Today’s Fed announcement on the fed funds rate was completely expected. Pause on rate hikes, maybe one more hike later, data dependent, etc. Meh. But if you look out at the longer-term prognostications from committee members, the...

Tuesday, April 25, 2023

Debt Ceiling Decline? Although markets are up for the year, with the S&P 500 posting a gain of 7.5% for the first quarter of the year and up almost 15% since the recent lows in October of 2022, this week looks like it could show a...

Friday, March 17, 2023

So, you may have heard this week that there is a bit of distress in the financial markets, particularly with the banks. And the talk of banks collapsing and / or being bailed out has become rideshare-driver talk. There are definitely...

Tuesday, February 21, 2023

 Fed head Jay Powell announced the FOMC decision today to raise the fed funds rate another quarter point and the market responded almost as if he was talking about a rate cut. What gives? Aren’t rate hikes supposed to be...

Wednesday, December 14, 2022

What is an inverted yield curve? Let’s say you wanted to loan out $100,000 for two years. How much interest would you want to collect? If you could get 5%, that’d be $5,000 per year. Not bad, but would it be worth the...

Friday, October 21, 2022

Bulls and bears are iconic figures on Wall Street. Most of us have pictures of them on our walls or little figurines on our desks. Funny thing is, they’re almost always the same size. But bull and bear markets have fairly...

Monday, September 26, 2022

How much time you got? My clients know I can sometimes get kind of excited when I start talking about markets, the economy, geopolitics and all that goes along with the investment process. It seems I always end up apologizing...

Tuesday, September 6, 2022

Inflation is the Nightmare MonsterThe fed has spoken and the beastly monster they have in their line of sight is inflation. That’s the message coming out of the Jackson Hole summit last week.Every August, the Kansas City Federal...

Friday, June 17, 2022

The FOMC finally seems to be serious about fighting inflation and today announced a three-quarter point rate hike to the fed funds rate. The market, so far, seems buoyed by the move. The idea behind raising rates to fight...

Friday, May 20, 2022

Wednesday, April 20, 2022

Friday, March 11, 2022

Friday, February 11, 2022

Wednesday, January 19, 2022

Wednesday, December 22, 2021

Wednesday, October 6, 2021

As the debt ceiling debate rages on today, mostly in the media and in halls of Congress, it is probably worthwhile to take a big picture look at what the public debt is and put it in some context. First, public debt is very different...

Thursday, July 29, 2021

I just got back from two weeks in Kenya. Never saw a McDonalds, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have them. And I was curious about the price of Big Macs there. Having travelled a lot over the years, it always fascinates me...

Thursday, June 17, 2021

The Federal Reserve Open Market Committee (FOMC), the voting members of the Federal Reserve, met over the last two days and made their normal statement and Chairman Powell held the usual press conference. Nothing changed. Nothing moved...

Monday, April 19, 2021

A lot of attention recently has been focused on crypto-currencies and related financial instruments. Some dismiss cryptos as a fad, while others speak in an almost religious tone about their favorite blockchain coins. But to really...

Tuesday, March 23, 2021

In case you haven’t noticed, the US housing market is hot and getting hotter. For many, this would seem to mean there is a bubble that’s sure to pop anytime now. Let’s take a closer look. According to the National...

Monday, February 22, 2021

One question we get a lot from clients is about the future of inflation. It’s a big question and a complex topic and like most in that category, it’s not easy to answer with any certainty. But there are a few tools we can...

Thursday, January 28, 2021

I have never sold a stock short. I know you can make money doing it, but the math says you probably won’t, at least not in any consistent fashion. Still, there are any number of hedge funds and institutional investors that spend...

Tuesday, January 26, 2021

Lumpy Data We are telling clients we expect Q4 and Q1 economic data to be “lumpy.” Huh? What’s that supposed to mean? Basically, we’re talking about inconsistent results. As we head into Q4 earnings season here,...

Sunday, December 20, 2020

This time of year my inbox is full of investment outlook pieces from all the major investment management firms, including LPL. Below is a link to the LPL 2021 outlook. Today we want to summarize some of the more prevalent themes in the...

Friday, November 20, 2020

We are now past the historic US presidential election cycle of 2020. Most of us are just glad the endless grind of campaign advertising is gone. While the results of the elections are not actually official until the states certify...

Friday, October 16, 2020

Inflation Protection What can you do to protect yourself from the price of things going up? As a follow up to our last blog post, we want to give some thought to the topic of inflation protection. Let’s first say we are not...

Thursday, September 3, 2020

There is a grand debate brewing between economists about the future economic environment centered around the belief that the economy will be mostly deflationary versus, on the opposite side, those who are counting on and preparing for...

Friday, August 21, 2020

EverVest blog 08/15/20 Not All Government Spending is Equal As the US Congress hashes out what to do about further Coronavirus stimulus, it might be a good thing for us to think about what government spending really looks like. Most of...

Friday, August 7, 2020

Last week’s historically awful GDP number was shocking, down 32.9%. But when we get into the details of the component parts of that negative print, what we really see is how much the economy has changed over the last 40 years or...

Thursday, July 23, 2020

The World Bank lays out a rather stark prediction in its June 2020 Global Growth Prospects report. But before we dive in to that, let’s first consider how unusual it is to have a synchronized global economy like we do right now....

Wednesday, July 8, 2020

I have never taken one of those stress tests where they connect you to some kind of a device and make you run on a treadmill… sounds stressful! Thankfully, my doctor hasn’t said I needed to do one. But, our banking system...

Thursday, June 25, 2020

The bond market may not be the most interesting thing to study in economics, but it has an outsize effect on just about everything that has to do with money. Since the pandemic hit earlier this year, interest rates across the board...

Friday, June 5, 2020

Over my entire life we have always had a family dog. Every kind of breed formed part of our pack from little fuzzy yappers to big furry quiet types; hairless, hyper and all kinds of temperaments. So what do dogs have to do with what we...

Thursday, May 21, 2020

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome “Jay” Powell made some interesting remarks in a 60 Minutes interview last Sunday, including promises of further support for the economy from the Fed. But he was also blunt about his reading of...

Wednesday, May 13, 2020

As a small business owner and economics nerd, I always like to check in with the NFIB Small Business Optimism Index reported each month by the National Federation of Independent Business. It’s a monthly survey that asks almost...

Wednesday, May 6, 2020

Pop quiz!! What went up 424% since last year? How about a rise of 647%? What showed that kind of an increase since a year ago? The answer is not housing prices. So, do you think the average house price went up or down in the last...

Thursday, April 30, 2020

The news this morning sounds alarming; GM has suspended its dividend. And according to today’s Wall Street Journal, GM is not alone. So far this year, more companies have suspended or canceled their dividends than in the previous...

Wednesday, April 22, 2020

Oil closed at negative $37.63 per barrel; that’s minus -$37.63. It was a historic, never-seen-before moment. In the world of futures and commodities trading, it is hard to get your head around the mechanics, but it’s the...

Tuesday, April 14, 2020

It is almost certain we are in a recession at this point. Many analysts believed the possibility of going into recession in 2020 was fairly high at the beginning of the year, but nobody expected an almost total shutdown of the world...

Tuesday, April 7, 2020

Warren Buffett has so many great quotes about investing. I am reminded of this one today: “Every decade or so, dark clouds will fill the economic skies, and they will briefly rain gold. When downpours of that sort occur, reach...