If you have been waiting for our write up on the most recent quarter, feast your eyes on this! doubleeaglewealth.com/newsle…

The wirehouses are closing the door behind you. Merrill, UBS, Wells Fargo, and even Morgan Stanley are losing advisors and are going to have to do something to stop the bleeding. Be ready for them to be even more litigious if you want to leave.

🐂 Bull Case: Small caps still trade at about a 1/3 discount to large caps. That gap has narrowed this year, but it was starting at a 25 year extreme. Plnety of room to run if the mean reversion continues.

🐻 Bear Case: Credit card and auto loans delinquencies keep rising for the low and middle incomes. This one is rage bait for me. I've had this pointed out to me my entire career and it's never mattered. This time is different?

Financial literacy in our country is lacking. Well, probably. I do believe that a large percentage of people know better and just lack the disclipline to do the right thing. That's another discussion. In my observation, families who involve their kids in real conversations early: how spending decisions get made, what a budget actually is, why saving and investing matter, and eventually, what the family's wealth is actually for are the ones that raise kids with the best financial outcomes. It doesn't require a huge trust fund to teach the lessons.

🐂 Bull Case: The stock Buyback machine just won't quit. If a company is confident enough to buy back it's own stock that says something.

🐻 Bear Case: Foreign central banks keep buying gold and not dollars.

RMDs force withdrawals whether you need the money or not. It can put you into a higher tax bracket and come with higher Medicare premiums. Once that happens, you're pretty much toast. The right time to start planning your RMD strategy is a decade before they start.

🐂 Bull Case: Healthcare stocks still sit around their all-time highs after a doulbe digit run since the Spring. On the same bus is Materials and Industrials. A market with rotating leadership can be an enduring one.

🐻 Bear Case: The wall of corporate debt issued at near-zero rates is increasingly coming due. It's getting refinanced at today's much higher rates. It's a slow-moving earnings hit that shows up over time, not all at once.

If the raising rates by 25bps was a major deal for you, seek help

🐂 Bull Case: The U.S. Composite PMI hit 56 in August. The fastest pace of business growth in over four years.

🐻 Bear Case: Bank of Japan just hiked rates to a 30-year high, narrowing the gap that's made the yen carry trade so profitable. Massive positions are still out there and unwinds to this trade have historically hit U.S. tech and crypto hard and fast.

1031 exchanges and tax-loss harvesting. These aren't strategies that magically make taxes disappear. They just defer them. Without understanding how they ultimately unwind, you're building yourself a tax bomb.

Two people can retire with the exact same average return over 20 years and end up in completely different places. It's called Sequence of Returns Risk. The order those returns happen in matters just as much as the average itself. A bad market in the first few years of retirement, while you're also withdrawing income, does far more damage than the same bad market showing up in year 15. It's simply because you have to sell more shares to generate the same amount of cash needs. Accumulation and distribution are different games. Going down the mountain is often harder and more risky than going up it.

🐂 Bull Case: The people who can actually do something about the bond market just did. The Treasury signaled it could tap its $1T general account to fund bond buybacks after 30-year yields hit 20-year highs. Stocks immediately responded positively.

🐻 Bear Case: Markets hate uncertainty. Sometimes more than bad news. Uncertainty is what they're getting. Fed Chair Kevin Warsh has been reluctant to offer much in the way of forward guidance markets used to get from Powell. Unclear messaging from the Fed hasn't been an issue so far, but it's something to watch if some questionable data starts flowing in.

You can be a partner at a firm, but that doesn't mean you own or even control your practice...

Fed Chair Warsh's Jackson Hole Address: A Gentle Hawk I saw a hawk yesterday evening on the 7th hole. I thought he wanted to take me out. I called him Chair Warsh and he seemed to take it as a compliment. Anyways, the real Fed Chair didn’t scare me as much this morning. He seemed to prefer a return to traditional monetary policy, while waiting for the data to tell the Fed what to do. Oh, and he seemed really focused on prices, which could be interesting if we see the jobs market soften. Forward Guidance Retired: Formally ended pre-announced rate paths in normal economic times, arguing explicit forward commitments create a "Hall of Mirrors" trap. Firm 2% PCE Inflation Target: It’s a non-negotiable threshold, noting price stability is not self-executing or automatically revert to the mean. The Fed will be active here. Their primary focus remains on prices, keeping rate hikes on the table if progress stalls. Bottom Line: The Fed is abandoning pre-programmed rate roadmaps. They will be highly data-dependent, but the explicit forward guidance is going away. Think for yourselves!

So advisors moving between these two firms can't even initiate contact with clients after their departure? Notwithstanding taking client data and outright solicitation, how is that any good for the client? They have to track down where their advisor they've trusted all these years went? Maybe these firms should realize that clients work with advisors, not firms. investmentnews.com/regulatio…