In this hurricane edition, I talked about the weekly news of what went on this week in the markets. Some ideas that you may want to add into your portfolio, and more…

If you're looking for a trusted source to help you stay on top of the ever-changing financial world of investing, retirement and estate planning, and asset protection, whether it's for you and your family or your small business, you're in the right place. This is the 1715 Treasure Coast Financial Wellness Podcast, where we'll keep you up to speed with the latest market news and conditions every week. Now here's your host, Thomas Davies. Hello, and welcome to the hurricane edition of the 1715 Treasure Coast Financial Wellness Podcast.

My name is Thomas Davies. I am a wealth advisor here in Stewart, Florida. Don't forget to like and subscribe. You can also find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Welcome to another show. This is episode 10, whoo-hoo, we've got 10 episodes in the book. I'd like to send a salute out there to all our veterans here on Veterans Day, and thank you for your service. So this weekend, we will be at the Stewart Air Show.

For those of you that are in the area, I highly recommend you bring the family. It is a great event. There's a lot of things to do for the kiddos, a lot of great planes to see, and it is also a big salute to our veterans. So with that, let's get started with this week's news.

We've certainly got a lot of it here. And first and foremost, Hurricane Nicole, what a mess. This is like a one-two gut punch for our coastlines. Seeing the devastation in the Daytona Beach area with homes falling into the ocean is just absolutely heartbreaking.

I can tell you as someone who partially grew up in the Daytona Beach area, it's just sad to see that that beach is gone. If you've never been to the Daytona Beach area, I highly recommend you look at pictures the way it used to be back in the 90s and 2000s before the hurricanes went in. You had probably almost 200 yards of beach before you hit the waterline, and now the water is right up into the hotels and homes along the area. So let's keep all those people in our thoughts and prayers.

It's unbelievable and just tragic what's going on, but the beach keeps eroding and it's just Mother Nature and you're not going to be able to stop that. So hopefully we're done with the hurricanes for the year. We had a late one here in November. I think they said it was the first one ever to hit in November.

But I can tell you that luckily here in Stewart, Florida, we didn't get too much even though we were in the eye of that hurricane. It was more of a wet weather event and a water event than it was a wind event. So thankfully everything is good here. We're going to have the air show this weekend.

I look forward to seeing everyone out there. For those of you that maybe can't make it this weekend, put it on your calendar for next year. We're going to try to make it an annual event to be an exhibitor out there. So that's some of the local stuff.

We'll talk about some of the market news that went on this week and more market volatility. Man, it just continues. We had a lot of news this week to get to, so we'll try to get through it here. The S&P 500 on Wednesday dropped 2.1%.

I guess maybe you'd call it post-election buy in the rumor, sell in the news. I think for the most part, most people thought that the GOP would take over the House. It looks to be that way with the Senate control undecided. As Arizona and Nevada continue to count votes, and Georgia is looking to face a December 6 runoff.

So we had that on Tuesday, and that was pretty exciting to watch that, even though here in Florida we were preparing for a hurricane. And then on Thursday, we had a huge rally in the market. Like I said, more market volatility came back with a roar, 5, 6, 7%. Big 1,000 plus point climb on the Dow.

Huge rally, and that was all caused by the CPI numbers. For those of you, that's the Consumer Price Index, and it looks that possibly inflation is maybe starting to come down a little bit. I can certainly tell you, I referenced chicken wings last week, food prices and prices for most everything still don't seem to have come down, but the numbers here, which generally are lagging, are starting to show that we're starting to come down. Home prices are certainly coming down a little bit, certainly across the country.

In Florida here, they still remain relatively stable, but we're starting to see a lot more on the market. I don't know if that's related to hurricanes. This year, people are going, I don't want to deal with this, I am out. But I can certainly tell you, from living down here, that the traffic is just unbelievable.

Now you people on the West Coast are laughing at me, saying, yeah, well you haven't seen LA traffic. Well, I can tell you that the traffic has certainly increased here in just the last two years. Palm Beach, Miami, Broward, it's unbelievable now that, you know, 2, 3 o'clock in the afternoon, you're in bumper to bumper traffic. Once again, you people in LA are laughing at me, and probably in D.C.

and Atlanta area. But it certainly wasn't that way here a few years ago, and the population increase here in Florida has certainly been massive, and we're seeing it here on the roads. So Governor Ron DeSantis won in Florida. Will he make that 2024 presidential run?

We will see. Former President Trump is supposed to make a big announcement here on Tuesday. It looks like a lot of the candidates that he backed didn't seem to do so well. So we'll see if that changes anything on Tuesday with his possible presidential re-election announcement, and we'll see how that goes.

The war in Ukraine certainly still presses on. The security chiefs of Russia and Iran pledged a deeper military cooperation. President Biden said that he plans to discuss the conflict avoidance when he meets with the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping. Certainly I think most people, you know, with a lot of news this week, forget that they're still fighting that war in Ukraine, and it's just tragic what's going on over there, and hopefully this conflict will end soon.

So some news from Meta and Facebook. With a 70% decline in their stock values, they have cut 11,000 jobs. This is the first time that Facebook has done this, and we will see what Mark Zuckerberg has in store going into the future. He made a heartfelt video, you know, saying it was the toughest decision and call that he had to make.

I don't think anybody likes firing anybody and cutting their employment, but it is a part of business, and we'll see what Facebook has going forward. One of the things arising this year is the work from home. Companies are starting to see some tax complications, legal liabilities, and payroll issues are starting to weigh in on what they call the digital nomads, otherwise known as the work from home people. It's been, you know, many managers took a tax approach to remote work during the early part of the COVID pandemic, opening the door for the ranks of self-described American digital nomads.

It's a term that I'm just learning today, American digital nomads to grow. Bosses have since awakened to potential legal and cybersecurity liabilities and starting to restrict just where their remote employees can be. We're certainly starting to hear a lot of these companies clawing back their remote work employees because they, one, don't have that cybersecurity with their home networks and computers, and certainly with the personal information being accessed, it just, it makes it easy for the cyber attackers to go in and do that. Shopping season is getting underway.

Black Friday is just around the corner. We will see if consumers remain to be the bright spot. We'll see how those sales go as stores, you know, we're starting to see less of that zero percent down financing. The auto manufacturers were always known for that, and I'm sure a lot of you that get those credit card mailers, those are starting to slow as interest rates have risen, they're now in that 7% range.

So we'll see if the shopper and the consumer, like I said, it remains in that bright spot and how people go about their spending this holiday season. Another big part of the news this week was also cryptocurrency exchange FTX has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. I will tell you on a personal note that my social media, I must have gotten a hundred hits in a week from people trying to get me involved in the FTX and Binance, and I just, I didn't have any interest. But it certainly reminded me of back in the 90s with the pump and dump penny stocks.

It was really interesting how broad the range was of trolls, I guess you want to call them, that were out there trying to get involved in this FTX. This news is just happening today that they're filing for bankruptcy. I can tell you that there was a lot of celebrities involved in this, a lot of pro athletes that were involved in this FTX, Binance. The storyline is going to be something to watch over the next few days.

As it's reported, there was over 130 additional affiliated companies are part of these proceedings. The CEO FTX has stepped down and has been replaced and will assist in the transition into bankruptcy. So this is something to watch with crypto, and I will talk a little bit about cryptocurrencies. Here at Davies Wealth Management, we're certainly open to these ideas.

I will share a little bit of a story with you. I was at the ETF exchange earlier this year, right around the end of January, beginning of February, and things were very positive. The market was still holding fairly high. Nobody was certainly looking to go down 25-26% on the S&P 500, and crypto was all the rage.

The week that I was there, prior to that, was the Bitcoin conference in Miami Beach, and that's where this particular conference was, was also the week after. So there were a lot of people there from the cryptocurrency world, with Michael Saylor, among other people talking there, and the consensus was that Bitcoin, by 2030, was going to go to a million dollars a coin. That may still happen. We don't know.

No one can predict that future, but I can tell you that with what's going on, there's certainly been a consolidation, and that usually happens when you see the markets go down. You'll see a lot of companies consolidate, either go out, get bought, and this is generally the time where things start to bottom out. This is certainly probably the biggest announcement in the crypto world that has gone on with this institutional bankruptcy. It certainly doesn't bode well, but for Bitcoin and Ethereum, which has a much, much larger following, much more diverse, integrated into the world of finance, I heard a money manager today saying how that in his institution, without naming them, that he had about a 4% exposure to FTX, and how it pissed him off that he was lost.

It's certainly not going to bring down the house, but he was referencing some other institutions that had a 30 and 40% exposure to this particular cryptocurrency. You know, it's interesting that even at 4%, and listening to Michael Saylor, who talked about the different stages of crypto and how it was never going to work, and how it was going to be illegal, and how those have kind of gone away, and how now you have institutions and advisors like myself who maybe allocate 2-3%, and then you have the people like himself who are 100% all in. I would definitely put myself in that category of the 2-3%, and not 100% all in, even though I do believe that Web 3 is here to stay. Technology is not going to go backwards.

So a thought this week maybe on investments, maybe look at some of those tech stocks that have been beaten up so badly, that are down 50, 60, 70%, do some research on them. They may be some of the ones to look to the future, as technology generally doesn't go backwards. It only presses on forward. Now that doesn't mean that there isn't failures along the way, but there are certainly companies that can endure those failures and press forward.

One of the companies that we certainly use here and look at is the ARK family of funds with Kathy Wood. She is probably the furthest removed from the center as far as what they do. It's all disruptive technology, and we like it. We like technology.

It's what we're using here. I mean, it's part of here to stay. Once again, something to think about in your portfolio. One of the equity classes that have just been absolutely hammered is that technology sector, so maybe something to add into your portfolio if it seemed fitting.

Once again, always contact your financial advisor or give myself a call here, and we can certainly discuss it. I can tell you that speaking to a couple people this week, that they're lost in their portfolios. They don't know what to do, and we're in a transitionary moment where you can really do some damage to your portfolio if you just don't know what you're doing. The one thing I've always said that if you're unsure, get help.

Get help in your portfolio. It's like a plumber. If you got a leak, you may know what you're doing, but you could certainly do a lot more damage if you don't know what you're doing and flood your house. Once again, reach out to myself or a financial advisor and get a second opinion.

Most advisors out there, like myself, will give you an opinion on your portfolio. Maybe you're doing everything right. Maybe you're doing everything wrong. Maybe you just need to make a few changes.

You want to try to get a true, honest opinion on your portfolio. Generally, most advisors are not going to charge you to do that. They're looking to gain the business. Some are better than others, but that's for you to do the research on who it is that you're speaking with and sitting down with to discuss your finance and portfolios.

With that, this is going to be a little shorter edition this week. I mentioned last week that we were going to have Richard Karpolos, our CPA on, unfortunately due to the hurricane. We have postponed that until next week, so we look forward to having Rich on next week. We're going to talk about all things taxes, tax-related, maybe get some ideas what you can do inside your portfolio, certainly as we go into the end of the year and you look at some of those tax-loss harvesting ideas.

That will be for next week, and we will talk more about that. Thanks again for tuning in. Don't forget to like and subscribe. Once again, you can find us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and follow us there.

Please send those likes, comments, and ideas for the show. We love to get idea for content. With that, I wish everybody a great week, and thank you again to our veterans for your service. Freedom is not free, so thank you for that, and with that, I am out.

Thank you for listening to the 1715 Treasure Coast Financial Wellness Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, share it with a friend who might like it, and please rate, comment, and subscribe. If you'd like to contact us, find more information, or if you'd like to keep up with us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or LinkedIn, check out our website at www.tdwealth.net. Have a great day, and we'll talk to you next week.

Bye. Bye. Bye.