Well, that was a heck of a Derby! I have to say, never before can I recall a 10-day period where I got to watch pro soccer, pro baseball, the NBA playoffs, the start of college football, the Kentucky Derby and tonight, the start of NFL football!
This week, I want to talk about stock splits, as I’ve been getting a few questions about what this means. Apple recently split their stock four-for-one, and Tesla split five-for-one. That means that if you used to own one share of Tesla worth, say, $2,000, you now have five shares worth $400 each. Stock splits certainly aren’t anything new, and were common during the late 1990s tech boom (more on that later). The split does not change the value of Tesla.
The Smyth boys are back in school, and in the Smyth household it looked like this: One freaked out because he couldn’t find the Zoom login information for his very first class. After the freakout was over, he did manage to find the credentials with two minutes to spare. Crisis averted.
This week, we’re going to address the second most popular question I’ve been receiving lately, right behind “what about the election??” That question is: “Should I consider cashing out and staying in cash for a while with what’s on the horizon with…?” Fill in the blank as to what’s causing you anxiety: the election, Covid, the second wave of Covid, Trump, Biden, China, unemployment, no football (for you Big 10 and Pac 12 fans), masks. That should about cover it! Hopefully your blood pressure isn’t up too many points.
During the last few weeks, I continue to hear concerns from folks about the upcoming election. Click here to read my thoughts on that.
We’re more than half-way through the crazy year that is 2020, and despite the unpredictable nature of everything we’ve experienced, it’s still important to check in with your goals and progress as we had into the latter part of 2020. Life may look a little different, but life is going on, one way or another.
Usually when we write market updates every so often, we talk about what’s going on in the financial markets, and what we’re seeing and our thoughts on the market activity. If you’ve talked to me even briefly in the last few weeks, you know I’ve made it clear that my crystal ball is broken. Now, if a financial advisor who follows this stuff for a living has no idea what to think or expect, well, that’s pretty disconcerting for some folks.
It seems to me like the whole world has just hit the reset button, sort of like when your computer is acting weird, so you just hit restart, hoping to smooth things out a little. We’ve looked for answers in Netflix. We’ve set up creative home offices. We’ve bought masks bearing the logos of our favorite sports teams while wondering when we’ll get to see them play again. We’ve accepted (some of) the things we can’t change, and we’re adjusting accordingly as best we can.
Our office has been open for eight weeks now, and I am super happy to say we’ve had some new clients come in for initial meetings for the first time in months. People are coming out of their shelters and are comfortable sitting on opposite ends of our conference table at a proper social distance. It’s been great to have people in, and a big thank you to those who have taken us up on our invitation to refer your friends, family and colleagues to our team. And if you haven’t yet, please do. There’s a lot we can do to help out during these confusing times, and our team has the capacity for more investment and planning clients.
As we’re slowly coming out of the lockdown and things are settling into a new normal, I’ve been noticing changes around me in how the world works and how we humans are interacting with that world, and with each other. Today I wanted to share some of my observations, and also hear from you about the changes you’re observing.
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