Chris. got the first rate cut of 2025 last week, right? Lowered by 25 basis points first since December and uh, it’s coming off the back of that 22, 23 incredible rate hiking cycle, which was obviously the biggest fastest since Volcker. Well, essentially zero to 525, right? To five and a quarter in a matter of what, 14 months or something like that. And now, so they lowered a little bit last year and now they lowered a quarter, which doesn’t seem like it’s all that much, but the market liked it, the market approved, if you will. And we’re sitting the overnight lending rate for the federal reserve is a four to four and a quarter. They give a range now. They used to be just a flat number, but they give a range. They changed that a number of years ago. How much does that help the overall markets? I mean, we did get new new highs right after that, up until yesterday till Tuesday. It’s certainly been risk on lately. I mean, you see that in the rally. I mean, it’s been essentially a continuous rally since those April lows. And we even have the Russell 2000. finally peaked out to, at this point, near four year high. Yeah. November, I think of 21 was the last high. last Thursday it peaked above there and would be nice if we could get small caps moving up. We’ve talked about several years now, how sort of the boot on their neck of really high interest rates because of their need to get loans to finance their businesses was really holding them back. And maybe just maybe they’ll get out of the penalty box. It does seem like, and excuse the expression, but it does seem like kind of a junk rally. you know, there was an article this morning about profitless tech was the one that was beating profitable tech by kind of leaps and bounds. you know, some of the smaller AI companies out there that don’t make any money, generating revenue, but they don’t make any money. They’re the ones that have been really rallying over the last month or so. And, you know, I should point out the, were talking about the Russell 2000, which doesn’t have a requirement to be in the index for profitability. Uh, the, the S and P 600, which does have a requirement for four quarters of profitability, which is the law, the smallest 600 securities in the S and P 1500. No, I’m going down a rabbit hole on that one. Uh, they’re only up about four and a half percent for the year. Whereas Russell 2000, no profitability requirements. up a little over 10 % for the year. I mean, small caps being up is great because they’ve been underperforming for a long period of time. To your point, if we continue to get some rate cuts, which it looks like are in the cards in the future. So last year, Tom Lee or this year, earlier in the year, Tom Lee had called for a massive 40 % rally in small caps and it didn’t happen. didn’t happen. And I think he put a timestamp on it. did. And like, three months or something. First and foremost, I am not dunking on Tom Lee. Interesting character, lot of insights, lot of great experience in the market. When you put yourself out there like that, and you put a marker on it, you give a specific percentage amount and in a timeframe, you know, you set yourself up to be wrong. And certainly that was one he’s been right on a lot of different things. That one was a no go. Yeah, that was a no go. I should bring up, um, you know, it depends on where you are in your life cycle as whether it’s an investor or a institutional investor or a financial advisor. What you think of interest rates now kind of depends on how long you’ve been around and in the business and your perception on how they impact companies has to do with that as well. So Here we are the 10 year you’re talking about smaller companies doing well because rates coming down, right? Federal reserve lowering rates. I’m to move to the 10 year instead of the overnight lending rate. 10 years right around 4%. I think today it’s around 4.2, 4.1 or something like that. which to me seems relatively low, but depending on who you talk to, they say, well, it should be significantly lower. I went back and I looked, I mean, everybody knows that rates were much higher in the nineties and eighties when I was born, which was 1975, I turned 50, uh, last week. Thank you very much. When I was born in September of 1975, uh, the 10 year yield was roughly 8.5%. Give or take it reached 15 and a half percent in August of 1981. Thanks Paul Volcker. Yeah. Thanks Volcker. A lot of that or burns maybe you think burns well having to get to that. You know, there’s a lot of factors on why that got up there. But certainly one of them was the oil embargo. I mean, I wasn’t around I was born but I don’t really remember it waiting in lines, you know, different license plates would go in on different days. So a lot of that had to do with the oil embargo. But then you topped out on the 10 year in 1981 and you think to yourself, well, would you want to be an equity owner starting in 1981? I mean, if anybody says no, let’s, let’s forget that for a moment. We’ve had a, just an amazing rally over the last 40 years and interest rates have been higher than they are now for probably, 40 of those years. Right? So in 1981, rates, the 10 year rate was around 15 and a half percent. And over that 40 year period, 39 period, they essentially got down to less than 1 % on the 10 year after, after COVID. But for the entire time up until 2019, they were above 4%. And I would have been an equity owner in any of those times. So You know, you think about it now where they are 10 years, four and a quarter ish percent 4.2. I don’t know that it’s all that bad. I do know that lowering rates makes it easier for companies to borrow and less expensive, which is probably good. But there needs to be some like floor because you can’t continue to go down. If there is some type of event crisis, the Federal Reserve needs to be able to lower rates if that happens. think about Japan, how they were on zero forever and how their economy essentially stalled. I mean, we talked about several podcasts ago, but like, basically since what, like 1987, like the market didn’t go anywhere over that whole time period where we’ve been to the moon, we’ll say over that period. mean, we had a lost decade. Definitely did. But still far better than Japan over the time frame. yeah. Yeah, no question about it. No question about it. So anything else interesting happened on the Federal Reserve over the last few weeks? This is a loaded question, right? I mean, I’m not going to go into, uh, I’ll let you broach. we we had a new fed governor. We did. Yeah. Yeah. So he was appointed a fed governor. I thought you were going to the Lisa cook and I was just like, no, no, no, no. That’s, that’s, that’s a conversation for another day. Uh, but no, uh, the We have a a new fed governor on the federal reserve board. And I guess my next question is, was this a unanimous decision to raise or to lower by a quarter? wasn’t unanimous, but you know, if you look back over history, 50 basis point cuts are normally other than last year only used when you’re in. a dire economic situation and 50 basis point cuts are not good for the market. If you look at those past instances with exception of September of 24. So it’s probably a good thing because those alarm bells go off in institutional portfolio managers minds when it was like, well, why’d we have to go 50 instead of 25 other than say the administration putting weight on them? I think when you go 50 or, you know, if there’s there has been emergency cuts over COVID. But when you go 50, you think, wow, there’s something wrong. Yeah, right. It’s, it’s not a moderate raise or, or cut. There’s a jumbo. Yeah, it’s a jumbo and there’s something wrong. And that freaks out the market a little bit. So I think more a smoother downturn in rates 25 at a time. And the market seems to be pricing in three this year. Right? So going from two more this year, two more this year. And it seems likely that we’ll get that. So, Jay Powell, the chair of the federal reserve was out and today he was talking about, a softening in the labor markets, what they’re seeing. And that seems to be reverse of what he was saying, you know, just as, as recently as two months ago. they must be seeing something in that data. Of course, over that time period, we’ve had the revision in the jobs report. which I would imagine they had two months ago when he said that, I don’t know for sure. and then we saw a, 26,000 new jobs come through for last month, which is one of the lowest it’s been. And we had an actual revision for, one month this year that actually was negative. Yeah. Right. So we are seeing a softening in the labor market. And the question is, you know, how soft does it get? Does it go from soft to runny? Is that a thing in the labor market? Does it just, you know, does it, does it Peter out? And I think we’ve said here before that the replacement rate is roughly 70,000 jobs a month just to keep the number of people employed that are currently employed, which is about 172 million. So, I mean, what do you think in terms of the factors that, um, that the federal reserve controls? mean, Are they in a situation where they’re going to come out and they’re going to do a jumbo next time? don’t think they’re doing any jumbos. I think they’ll go methodical 25 in November and December. And then right now we’re straddling two and three 25 basis point cuts in 2026 as well, which would get us to around a 3 % maybe neutral rate or terminal rate. We’ll call it for this little psycho cycle. Um, but I think they just, They have their eye on weakness. And I think from his tone and what he said in the meeting here in September, they’re shifting slightly, which was a dovish pivot to looking at the labor market primarily. And I think he reiterated that they’re looking at still as a one-time price increase on tariffs. So a slight shift of their eye towards the job market. And there’s different pieces of information out there. Everyone talks about all the time about what AI will do to jobs. saw someone at Allianz might’ve been one of their chief strategists was on today on Bloomberg and he mentioned they expect over the next 10 years, a 20 % reduction in the current jobs because of AI being implemented. So if you look at it like that, mean total jobs? Yeah. Total like total employment, current jobs. Now there’s going to be jobs that replace that obviously, but they’re going to be different jobs. And again, we’ve talked about before people are gonna have to retool, they’re gonna have to learn different things. What was that? Not a meme, but the thing said in jest, like, learn to code when people are going back and forth that learn to code, it’s gonna be a situation like that people are gonna have to learn to code. think it’s more like learn to plum. Or yeah, right. Do home health care. Yeah, I don’t know that I think coding is going to be one of the jobs that’s kind of cooked from AI. And maybe not like your super high end like engineer level. Yeah. But I mean the, the entry level coding jobs, they’re probably the first ones that disappear. I never got involved with coding. in my early years, I mean, when we were in school, I think the first thing that I touched as, a, as a kid in school was an apple two C, you know, with a five and a quarter inch disc drive and It was just word games on there. I wasn’t coding anything. But do you ever do any coding, any Python? I one time randomly got one of those like coding training apps, you know, and played around with it for like, probably 20 minutes. I’m like, this is stupid. I’m never gonna win. I’m gonna stick to God bless the people that do I I’m just I’m not that I’m not that guy. Yeah, doesn’t fill my cup. I was just like, am I doing? No, doesn’t doesn’t make me happy. My mom’s a computer programmer and like I don’t know, just never, never bought into it. She knows all the old stuff. She’s learned the new stuff and never got me into it. Yeah. think the closest thing that I’m going to do to coding in my lifetime is maybe a little movie editing. I’m going to take like a movie, air talk. Nah, I don’t know about that. I’m going to take a movie, like a airplane. And instead of it being an hour and a half movie, I’m going to break it down to like 20 minutes. So you just see the good stuff. I don’t think there’s any coding involved with that one. Yeah. No, not not likely. So news on the tick tock front though. yeah. With Oracle apparently going to be taking over. And apparently, what I’ve heard is they’re going to require a new app to be downloaded to fully separate it from the previous. Okay, so we get algorithm out when you get an upgrade, it’s going to be the new algo. I don’t know. I think they might have to go to the app store. And yeah, I don’t know who’s going to control the algo. I assume it’s Oracle then. But I don’t know. So If I’m mistaken, Oracle is going to run TikTok, they’re going to run Paramount. And there’s another one that they’re going after Warner Brothers right now too. That seems, mean, I don’t know that it’s antitrust. have Netflix, is Netflix, which is, I suspect the largest. So it’s not the same industry though. mean, related but not the same social media is not the same as broadcasting like Paramount. It’s definitely not the same but it’s it’s all entertainment. Yeah. You know, I mean how many wasn’t there an antitrust issue with Bezos and the Washington Post when they first wanted to do that and obviously that happened but wasn’t there some antitrust talk and I think there was just concerns about you know the ultra billionaire class. doing too much, we know, you know, most publications are controlled by some ultra wealthy person. mean, I think in the end, you know, last time we were on here, we were talking about jobs of the future. And instead of jobs, I mean, you think about capitalism of the future and what, you know, what our economy is going to look like in let’s say 50 years. you brought up, the Rockefellers and the breakup. of standard oil and we went through some of that. But it seems to me as one man’s opinion, it seems to me that the bigger companies continue to get bigger because they have the capacity to do so. And they can take on whole industries where when it comes to like Amazon and healthcare, they can put in, you know, $2 billion to start up a healthcare competitor to the, the, PBMs, you know, the, the shippers of pharmaceuticals, $2 billion stems nothing, but to get a new pharmaceutical company, not a biotech, like to get a new pharmaceutical, shipping business, PBM business up and running, you just can’t do that from scratch. it seems to me over the next 30, 40, 50 years, the big continue to get bigger and they use their scale. to put the weight on for themselves, not that they are being anti-competitive, it’s just naturally that they can move into new markets. Yeah. I mean, you had mentioned the Rockefeller reading I’m doing and my takeaway from that is obviously he was convicted or they were convicted and the trust was busted. from reading it- makes it sound criminal. Yeah. But my takeaway was- I mean, the only thing about it that was anti-competitive was that he was doing it better than everybody else. He was being more efficient. He was like, I think I said last time he was down to the scent on everything and he just operationally made it perfect. And obviously strategically, he was always buying up refineries on rivers and extra railroads so he could get better distribution rates. He would have them negotiate against each other basically. And. I think with how talented some of these hyperscalers and these mag seven and the big that keep getting bigger. One thing that is overlooked is for the most part, they are phenomenal at what they do. So it comes across as anti-competitive that they keep growing and expanding into different sub industries. But they’re also doing it really strategically and really efficiently to the point where just entering the industry isn’t anti-competitive, but you know what it’ll do? It’ll sort of like, you know, when Robinhood came in and started doing zero dollar equity purchases, things like that, it’s began a race to zero. We’re like Vanguard. So I think it will at least temporarily make things more competitive or should because people are going to be like, what was the old term? Amazon’s the death star is entering our industry. So I think it forces people to be competitive where they otherwise didn’t have reason maybe they had their maybe we’ll call it would be maybe a doopoly or like just a few different companies competing and it was like, you know, shaking hands under the table, like let’s not cut prices too far, let’s keep our revenue up. And when you have someone from the total outside come in, it sort of upends that, know, it’s one of those things where any big company that’s growing is going to look at opportunities that they have for return on assets. And it just so happens that you have big companies that have a lot of money coming in that they have to find something to do with and doing what they’re doing, what they’re currently doing, maybe isn’t going to provide the return on assets that they need in terms of growth. I mean, if you look at Berkshire Hathaway, how much cash do they have on the sidelines? It was like 330 billion, 330 billion. And the reason that they have so much cash is because they can’t find anything that I’m They’re willing to deploy the cash on hand. Yeah. And so you have other companies. Apple is another one with a tremendous amount of cash on hand and they’re always looking for new opportunities. And I think if you’re a big company and you’re not doing that, you know, you’re to be behind the curve. mean, my first professor, economics professor, he had this analogy about buggy whips, right? There’s no more buggy whip manufacturers anymore. right? That was a big thing at the turn of the century, the first, you know, 1900, right? Um, if you’re not moving forward, you’re standing still and you’re actually going backwards because everybody else is moving ahead. Yeah. What was Bill Gates’s mantra was every year you look at a process or you look at a business line and you evaluate it, you critique it, try and prove it. If nothing changes after two years, you know, you have to change something. And if you don’t change anything by three years, generally it becomes obsolete or starts losing market share. I thought it was continuous improvement, continuous improvement. Yeah. I thought his mantra was get me out of this locker. Okay. My bad. Don’t come for me. Bill Gates. just think of him getting hit in the face with the pie. you mentioned Berkshire with a, with a ton of cash. you know, hundreds of billions of dollars of cash. There was a, an article out this week, last week from crane data that said that there was about $7.7 trillion in us money market funds. now we see that rates obviously are going down, right? They started last year, short-term rates, which money market funds invest in. And so you, you can kind of see the future, right? You know, the president is applying pressure. on the federal reserve. And there’s a rational reason why the federal reserve would continue to lower rates, regardless of what the administration thinks or wants them to do. And so you have the seven plus trillion dollars in money market, and the return is going to continue to get lower and lower and lower. And, you know, conventional wisdom kind of goes well, at some point, the markets, the money that’s in those money markets is going to get to a point where they’d rather be invested in equities. And so that’ll be, you know, maybe normally you would see that type of asset. If it’s looking to increase risk, it would go into fixed income. But with how disenchanted people have become with fixed income over the last few years, you haven’t heard much. hear at least from our advisors and their discussions with their clients, you know, they want nothing to do with bonds and that’s probably the time you want to buy some bonds. absolutely. There’s no question about it. I mean, you know, with with spreads where they’re at, they are tight. Yeah, very tight. So it may not be the best time for maybe they’re on to something you mentioned spread just for for people listening, right? This, generally speaking, the spreads are the difference between what you’re going to get in in X versus treasuries, right? So corporate spreads or high yield spreads right now high yield spreads are a little over 2.7%. So the average difference between buying treasuries and buying high yield debt 2.7 % The risk for your reward, the reward for taking risk above the treasury. Very low. Very low. Historically speaking. That is much lower than the historical average spread is. Both high yield and investment grade are half of their normal spread historically right now. So can we ascertain anything from that, with the decline in the spread and where it is versus its historical numbers? think there’s just been a risk on environment and a lot of companies for the most part are flush with cash right now. And there’s not many companies that are viewed as being at risk of going out of business. Yeah. I mean, when I do bond buying for, for advisors or for, for clients, you know, I go through a lot of the metrics on their debt capital structure and all that stuff. But when you look at a company and you say, is this company going to be around in five years? Is this company going to be around in 10 years? Cause that’s really what you want to know about a company when you’re buying their debt. Are they going to be able to pay it back? I don’t care. You’re not, you’re not bond trading on like a week or one month thing. So that’s exactly the question to ask is when you’re buying it. It really tough for me with the exception of a few companies, know, Toyota motors is I think AAA rated here. With the exception of a few companies like Toyota, like Microsoft or at Oracle, they had some debt that they put out today. I think it was 14 billion in debt that they just issued today. With the exception of a few companies, when I look at bonds to buy in portfolios, I don’t know who’s going to be around in 10 years. Is Royal Caribbean going to be around in 10 years? The autos, I haven’t bought autos really since the global financial crisis. unless they’re short term, you know, six months to a year is Ford going to be here in five years? I’m not knocking for it, but you just don’t know. Yeah. for a long time, AT &T was issuing a lot of debt and you really thought to yourself now 18 decided kind of a big rally over the last year or so, and their financials have improved. But a year or two ago, you might’ve thought, and even right now I don’t, wouldn’t buy any of that debt. mean, any telco debt, it’s tough to really know unless they’re a massive company like an Apple or a Microsoft or an Oracle, whether they’re going to be around in 2040. Yeah, it’s just it’s it’s I don’t want to say you know, it’s a toss up but it’s after COVID especially when we’re entering a period of change where a lot of things are going to be flipped on their head. Yeah, no question about it. going back to the individual investor and these money market mutual funds. So right now there’s, you know, there’s still clients out there that have CDs that are coming due and they are asking me, well, should I go for a shorter term bond that’s going to pay a little bit higher? You know, we’re still kind of inverted, although that is changing right now, meaning the short term yield is higher than the longer term yield. So do you go for a short term yield for a little bit of excess return in the short run? Or do you lock it up for, you know, three, four or five years to kind of guarantee that you have a, maybe not the highest return, but it’s in for the longest time. there’s something said for that. mean, we’re at a point now where we obviously the expectation is rates are going to be going down. So for individual investors, I’m recommending longer term, especially on CDs or things where you don’t have to worry about, at least we hope you don’t have to worry about FDIC insurance. hasn’t been an issue. don’t think it’ll ever will be. but you know, I’m recommending people go a little bit longer out on their duration to guarantee that that return over three, four or five year period. just to clarify, you’re talking when they’re buying individual pieces, absolutely things and not necessarily buying a bond fund. no, no. I did say CDs, bond funds are a little bit different because, you know, there’s a general expectation that at some point the longer end of the curve is going to start to rise. If you think there’s going to be reasonable inflation and reasonable growth, then I would suspect that the 10 year is going to be higher in, you know, five years than it is today. And if that happens with longer term bond funds, you’re going to see that eat into some of the appreciation that would be there potentially. would think my base case right now is a bit of a twist of the yield curve. where the short end is going to come down the next two years, but we’re going to see that long end sort of drift upwards. And so if you are in a longer duration bond fund, say something with like an eight or nine year duration, where you’re going to get hit a little bit in the short term, because those yields are going to bleed upwards now. That’s just my hypothesis, we’ll call it. So I would say when we’re looking at bond funds, I don’t want to go all the way up to 10 years. I want to avoid that a little bit. it’s, it’s tough because when you look back historically, not less, not the last, let’s say three or four years, but I talked about that time period from 2015 really till 2020 where bonds just rallied, not every single year, but almost every single year they rallied because interest rates were coming down. Now you have a situation where they’ve gone up. they’re kind of in not necessarily in the middle, but you know, 4%, it’s not super low. It’s not super high. I think in five years, the 10 year is going to be higher, but there are certainly other people out there that think it’s going to be lower. And you know, there’s just more risk investing in longer term bonds to your point about people, you know, not wanting to, to invest in bonds. I completely get that. after 2022 we’re bonds went down and they should have, you know, based the air quotes, they should have gone up, not because interest rates, but because the stock market went down, you don’t normally have stocks and bonds going down at the same time. And people think, well, now I shouldn’t have bonds, right? Or I should have a much smaller portion. I think just to your point, just when people are ready to throw in the towel and bonds, That’s when you’re going to need them. So I said this, you know, I’ve said it a bunch of times this year, the 60 40 is working again. Uh, 60 % stock, 40 % bonds is working again. And I, I kind of feel like now that we have a little bit of yield out there, even though it’s smaller than it was, you know, 2000 and well pre global financial crisis, but I’m, I’m happy to collect a three, four, five, 6 % yield on a combination of of different bonds, whether it’s corporates and high yields and treasuries, and then maybe hope for a little bit of appreciation on the fixed income side. Yeah. I mean, we can always hope for appreciation, right? But you, gotta, you gotta invest properly. There’s, there’s no question about that. I want to switch gears a little bit now and talk tech and cyber security. There was a UN meeting, this week, right? We, probably all saw some of the headlines from that. I’m not so much worried about what they were saying inside the building, but outside the building, the secret service found a massive cyber attack waiting to be deployed. Yeah. What do we know about that? That there was apparently a hundred thousand SIM cards that were in a coordinated effort to potentially do to do like a denial of service type attack. I’m not the cybersecurity expert to know what other types of attacks there are. There was a couple floated of maybe methods that were being targeted and that would bring down cell towers and things like that. You, if you bring down the, the comms for New York city and the surrounding area, that seems like a giant problem. Yeah. I just watched, I was just on an eight day vacation. I just finally watched leave the world behind where they’re literally in New York city. And then that sort of happens when they’re on Long Island vacationing. vacationing from New York to Long Island. everybody goes out to the Hamptons, right? Come on. Well, not anymore. Apparently, apparently, they’re cutting down on airbnbs out there. geez. But yeah, that’s basically what happens is, they just happen to be outside the city, everything breaks down, satellites stop working. And I think the goal was to do exactly that cut off communications, create pandemonium while all of these, the General Assembly was together there. It seems like a test run. Right? It seems like, um, well, I’ll just say bad actors are just kind of like prepping for something. And I’m, I am not, I said prepping. I’m not necessarily a prepper. I do have, uh, let’s say more resources in my basement than the average person, if you will, anybody that knows me knows I have a little extra food stored here and there. Um, some few other goodies and I just, I just feel like there’s always this little testing of, the security, right? And they’re seeing what they can do. This seems to me like a bad actor country. they said it was a well-funded group tied with individuals known to our you know, intelligence services. So does that mean North Korea or China? Right? Right. has to think it’d be or Russia or Iran in that sort of scope in that access of evil will say access. don’t think it’s Iran though. It could be, you never know. I just, my thing is, I guess I feel like at some point in the future and, I don’t mean in 50 years, but at some point there’s going to be an internet outage in the United States. from a cyber attack or like even possibly an EMP. I mean, I’ve heard over the years, I don’t know how much of it’s true, but that several of the components in our electrical grid and production facilities are potentially compromised by foreign source China and China, you know, so I mean, I definitely, especially after watching that movie, I’m like now way more scared. Everybody, mean, always aware of the cyber attack and what it could do. Remember crowd strike when things came down just off of an accidental code mess up as they pushed out a patch to Microsoft stuff. But, Ooh boy, watching that movie, then hearing about this. It’s like, that could be the shoe to drop, but unfortunately, how are people, clients, investors supposed to anticipate that? why other than investing in cybersecurity, don’t know that you can anticipate any of that. think most people should. I am except prepare. Yeah, I’m expecting it to happen. And when I say expecting it, I feel like at any given day, we could come into the office. And the global internet structure could just be like someone flipped a switch off. I think of the golden eye 007 thing when the Boris hacker from Russia like pops up and he’s like, ha ha. That just pops up on our screen. It’s like a little Putin. right. geez. Yeah. Well, I don’t know who did this next one. But in in the United Kingdom, Jaguar Land Rover, which is owned by Tata, an Indian company happens to be a reasonably large manufacturer of vehicles. Everybody knows Jags. And most people know Land Rovers. They make about 1000 cars a day. The output in in the United Kingdom. And they have been in a shutdown on a cyber because of a cyber attack and they’re not expected to come back online. At least at the moment, it’s going to be a month. They’re looking at October 1st as a possibility. So you have this, you know, multi-billion dollar automobile manufacturer that employs, I think 110,000 people throughout the world and roughly 30,000 people in the United Kingdom. And most of those 30,000 people with the exception of cybersecurity and the programmers, they’re at home. There was nothing to happen. the estimated loss is at around 200 million right now? It’s 50 million dollars a week. Pounds. Pounds. So like 67 million dollars, US dollars a week in losses. And it’s due to a cybersecurity attack that they’re just locked out. They’re locked out. I mean, and so what it says is, well, it says a few things. One, you can’t work without a computer anymore. I mean, if we came in here to the office and there was no computer or no internet, we’d be so well. I mean, in the old days, the old days, uh, Prudential securities in the nineties, if the, um, if the internet went out, which it did occasionally at that time period, the phones work. So you could pick up the phone and dial your clients and have a conversation and make notes. But nowadays all the phone systems, most of corporate phone systems are voiceover, internet protocol, VoIP phones, right? And so internet goes out, phones are dead. then you think about, well, I can call people on a cell phone. Well, I don’t really know about that. Remember when I think it was last year, maybe two years ago when the auto lenders got locked out and like they had the people scribbling karma amortization schedules down on paper and doing the calculations because they were literally locked out but still trying to get their sales quotas. Yeah. Yeah. It’s, it’s a little bit scary. I mean, you know, we can just forget about it, whistle past the graveyard and I’m not suggesting that’s what we’re doing, although I guess we are a little bit. I just think people should have a plan for if that happens. I’m just going back to how do you play that? Okay. So you invest in cybersecurity, but think about what happened to cry crowd strike when they, they didn’t get hacked, when they present issues, the stock cratered fast. it’s like, if you, if their cybersecurity firm is their company is hacked and using this firm, that stock’s going to get crushed. So maybe playing that is there more, is there more risk in investing in cybersecurity than not? Could be. Yeah. I think if you, if you think about it from an individual stock perspective, they’re probably not necessarily more risk, but there’s an alternate risk that you don’t see because you think about it while they’re making all this money could because of all of this cyber crime. But at the same time, to your point when it happens and they’re the guys that let it happen, stock gets killed. Yeah. So you’re spot on like an ETF or a fund of them is probably the way to go because you can’t guard against that one. you know, happenstance scenario where maybe they didn’t do anything wrong, but you know what? It was someone picked them out. Well, sticking with the corporate world, I’ll move on to CEOs for a minute. are you a big candy guy? I’m a sugar guy, but not so much candy. it seems like, no, it doesn’t seem like the CEO of Nestle was terminated last week. You know what he was terminated for? improper relationship. Yep. That’s always an easy one. was not at a Coldplay concert. He was not at a Coldplay concert, but apparently he was had an inappropriate inappropriate relationship with a subordinate. Everyone’s a subordinate. can’t date anybody in your company, dude. You’re the CEO. Well, maybe that should be the general rule for CEOs. Don’t date people in your company. Yeah, find somebody else. Right. I just thought I would bring that up because Nestle is one of the largest European corporations out there, right? They’re as big as they come in Europe. And he didn’t get termed for, you know, missing earnings or having a bad strategy. He got termed for hooking up with somebody in his company. Yeah. It seems a little bit strange. Was he giving out promotions like candy to them? I didn’t hear that. I didn’t hear that. I think it was just an undisclosed relationship with a subordinate. Undisclosed. So potentially if it wasn’t a direct report potentially if he had disclosed at DHR he could have gotten by potentially potentially yeah so you just said you were think about I feel bad for CEOs a little bit they work like 24 7 yeah like a CEO’s job never ends no they’re never off I hate when I see stats where it’s like the CEO earns 635 times you know their normal worker so you have that normal worker does you know, hours a week, and they turn their brain on where they do 32 hours a week. the average workweeks 32.4 right now. Okay, so not in this industry, right, right. But they work all the time. Like if someone calls them up with emergency at 1am, they’re going into the office, you know. And if you’re at the office and your brains on all the time on work 24 seven, assuming they’re single, you’re always at work, where else would you find a relationship? I’m trying to defend the guy a little bit. I hear what you’re saying. Yeah, no, I hear what you’re saying, but, well, I’m not passing any judgment on that part of it. I actually think it’s a little bit strange that you can’t date somebody at work if you’re the CEO, but I guess you have to disclose it. Yeah. You probably date someone at your job. Probably. I probably do. Yeah, I probably do. Maybe even more than dating. Shout out, English. I always give her a shout out. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Uh, anything else interesting? I mean, the market’s up pretty substantially. Uh, I think we’re up another percent since we were here last week. The S and P is going on 14 % up. We said small caps are up, uh, you know, whether you’re in the S and P 600 or the Russell 2000 either, you know, 5 % or 10 % big caps up about five growth. leading the way this year, but value is, you know, it’s up. What else is happening? What’s the playbook for the end of the year? mean, I’m still going to keep looking at the small caps. Hope there’s a resurgence hope, for example, the Russell 2000 breaks out and the S and P 600 can make a full comeback and get back to all time highs. You know, there’s rates obviously in their favor here. They can maybe do some investment. There’s the new tax law in the OB BBA. Yeah. And they can depreciate things right away if they can get a loan and depreciate assets right away to, you know, encourage investment and maybe building some more jobs. I think that’s a solid thing to keep an eye on. And then you also go into the spread between valuations of large caps and small caps is historically wide right now. Yeah. If we could get a little bit of convergence there, that would also lend to small caps outperforming a little bit. And while they are the things that would get hit worse if we go into recession, nothing imminent, no recession. That’s right here now. But like I said, we’re seeing slight softening right now in the labor market. I’m interested just to see how all those things sort of counteract each other. Yeah. You mentioned the tax bill and this is where I’ll end it for today. But there was information I did not realize this for people that are contributing to and maybe I only thought of it because I turned 50. But for people that are contributing to 401ks, there’s a catch up feature, right? So I think in 2025, you’re allowed 23,500 as a normal contribution. And then there’s an additional $7500 catch up if you’re 50. Well, apparently this tax bill in there somewhere says that you can no longer contribute. And I think this is going into effect for 2026. I mean, you can’t, you can’t go backwards for 2025 because of the way, uh, I mean, people have already been making these contributions, but so for 2026, they’re saying that the catch up contribution cannot go in pre tax, which means that your catch up, you’re older than 50 or 50, it’s the year that you turn 50 that you can make that catch up contribution. That catch up contribution has to go into the Roth portion of your 401k. It cannot be contributed pre-tax. So you don’t get the deduction on that for putting it in there. And then I think to myself, well, what if you are in a catch up plan, but your plan doesn’t have a Roth side of it? Ooh, have to pay the taxes to get it into your next deferral. You, your CEO better get a, you’re your HR guy and better get a new plan. Right. That is not going to work out well. If you don’t have both sides of that, you still keep the thousand dollar increase on regular IRAs and Roth IRAs. Correct. That hasn’t changed for catch up contributions. I believe. Yeah, I believe so this, I only read the part about the 401k, but I just, you know, the purpose of that which seems fairly obvious is that they want people to pay the tax now. I get it. I get it. All right. Well, listen, everybody, thank you so much for being with us today. we’re right at all time highs. I’m going to say it again, don’t bet against America and we will see you next time on the market enthusiasts. Thanks so much for joining us.