This week’s Market Alert focuses on what recent inflation data, corporate earnings, and shifting investor sentiment mean for your portfolio and long-term plan.
Ken Moraif and Chief Investment Officer Jordan Roach share insights to help keep you confident and informed:
• Inflation edges higher but no surprises: Prices rose slightly, but less than expected. That’s a sign the Fed’s efforts are working and the economy is stabilizing.
• Rate cuts likely ahead: Even with inflation up year-over-year, the Fed is signaling it may lower rates soon. This is welcome news for both borrowers and investors.
• Earnings remain strong: Corporate profits are solid across key sectors, a healthy foundation supporting your investments.
• AI’s growing influence: Major companies are reducing hiring or trimming staff not because of weakness, but because technology is boosting efficiency.
• Employment still steady: While hiring has slowed, widespread layoffs haven’t appeared. This is a reassuring sign for continued consumer spending.
• Cautious economy, confident markets: Investors remain optimistic even as economic sentiment lags. We hope this is a gap that could narrow in the coming months.
• Cash waiting on the sidelines: Many investors remain in cash, and that stored-up buying power could drive markets even higher once confidence builds.
• Tariff fears fading: Inflation tied to trade policies hasn’t materialized, easing one of the biggest concerns from earlier this year.
• Opportunities remain: With strong earnings and improving sentiment, we continue to participate in the market’s growth while staying mindful of risks.
• Your strategy in action: Our Invest & Protect approach remains ready to act if conditions change, so you can stay invested with confidence knowing protection is built in.
At RPOA, we continue monitoring every indicator so you don’t have to. As always, our goal is to help you enjoy your second childhood without parental supervision. We want you to have confidence knowing your financial plan is designed to weather whatever comes next.

Transcript:
Ken Moraif
Hello everyone, and welcome to our Market Alert Video for today, which is October 24, 2025 and as usual, I hope this video finds you healthy, wealthy and wise. And of course, as we always do, we’re going to have more fun than a human being should be allowed to have when talking about all of this boring financial stuff, and we have a lot of boring financial stuff to talk about this week. So first of all, we got the inflation data, and it was inflation went up, but the Fed is going to lower interest rates. Why is that going to happen? That seems like weird. Okay, so we’re going to explain that one to you. Also, earnings look healthy, so that’s a good sign. But then conversely, there’s a difference between the market sentiment and economic sentiment, and so we’re going to go through that and explain why we think that. You know, there could be some cracks in the armor in all of this. But as usual, we always like the fact that we have our invest and protect strategy to help us out should things go south. So we have a lot to talk about, and we’re going to have so much fun, it’s going to be like impossible. You’re just not going to be able to the rest of your day is going to be fantastic because of this. So let’s get started. Jordan, why don’t you join us? There he is. Did I miss a memo here? Ken, oh, it’s true, isn’t it? I’m actually at a wedding in Charleston, and I was also at a convention, not a convention, a business conference in New York with all these highfalutin CEOs of all these companies like ours. And so I don’t know why I get invited to those, but it’s all it’s these companies, like one of them has $1.2 trillion of assets under management, trillion with a T. And so you know little me, what am I doing at this conference? But I’m flattered that they invite me. It’s nice. Apparently they feel that, you know, they can learn from me, but I learned more from them. But nobody wears a tie at that thing, so I didn’t take my tie, and now I’m here at the wedding without a tie, so I’m glad you’re wearing yours.

Jordan Roach
CEOs and people who go to weddings, don’t wear ties, huh? Okay, all right,

Ken Moraif
yeah, and underlings do Yeah. Jordan is our chief investment officer, and so thanks for joining us. So let’s talk about inflation. It went up. So inflation went up versus last year, but it went up less than expected, and so therefore that is good news. So it went up, bad news, but less than expected, which is good news, and everybody’s hanging their hat on the less than expected, than the fact that it went

Jordan Roach
up. I mean, it’s a weird thing to try to swallow and understand, right? That prices are not going down, folks, you know, we’ve all seen that pretty heavily since the pandemic. But again, how the market views this, how the Fed, we think views this, is, it’s relative expectations, right? So we actually don’t really want deflation. Deflation usually means bad things economically, but we do want some meaningful growth, you know, that’s that’s subdued, and we got to have that. So the market goes all right. Still, this whole bugaboo that they’ve been worried about with prices going up and up and up, it’s it’s really not happening. So that probably is good,

Ken Moraif
yeah, and you know, the reality is that even though, even if inflation went down to 2% which is what the Fed wants, it still means prices are going up. That’s right. I mean, it doesn’t mean inflation. So deflation is when prices start going down. And as you said, deflation is like a cancer to an economy, and we don’t want that, believe it or not. So All right, so the Fed then should lower interest rates despite the fact that inflation went up versus last year, but less than what was expected. I

Jordan Roach
mean, that’s that’s the thinking, right? So if you look across market and economists and surveys, they would think that this reading, you know, and there hasn’t been a lot of data come out, so the government shutdown, well, this is one of the important ones. Certainly the Fed would be monitoring, would take this sale again. I don’t know how many of these they need to say inflation is not a real, persistent problem right now, but surely this would be give them enough to say, yes, we’re going to lower interest rates next week when they meet. And now still, the majority think that maybe December, that would be the time the next month they’re meeting. We can see another cut, so we’ll see what happens here. But this would certainly think that the market would go okay, fed, don’t worry about inflation as much. Let’s stay focused on

Ken Moraif
jobs. And with the government shutdown, you know, basically this is the Fed, right? They’re operating with, like, no data. And maybe that’s

Jordan Roach
maybe it’s better, maybe it’s better, as we’ve talked about, maybe that lead to better decisions. We’ll see

Ken Moraif
and as we’ve talked. About a lot of the data is wrong anyway, they adjusted, you know, a year later and say, Oh, by the way, the jobs numbers were off by a million jobs, and so the decisions they were making with the data was like, wrong anyway, so maybe it’s no difference. But let’s talk about earnings. So earnings are looking really good, and as we always say, you know, what drives the stock market is earnings, right? In other words, profits that companies are making drives their stock price, regardless of what the economy is doing or what inflation is doing, or all of that. If a company has really good profits, their stock price most likely will go up, and vice versa. So right now, earning season, things are looking

Jordan Roach
so far so good. I mean, again, we’re not all the way through it, you know, we’ve seen a couple big names, especially on the banking side, come out, and they looked good. Some other healthcare names look pretty good. Now we have Apple, Microsoft, Google, those will come out next week. But again, I think largely based on the kind of the trend of earnings growth, I would expect that to be pretty good. So, you know, fundamentals look good, look healthy, and that’s a huge, important driver for market

Ken Moraif
returns. Yeah, and, you know, AI, we just heard, for example, that Facebook, I think they said they’re going to lay off 600 people, because AI is doing the work that those people were doing. You know, we heard that Salesforce laid off like 1000 people. I think it was a couple months ago, because AI is doing the work of all those people. So, you know, the Fed is supposed to be worried about, you know, jobs. But how do they, you know, incorporate the fact that the jobs are disappearing not because the economy is bad or because companies are not getting they’re not profitable and they’re laying people off. It’s because AI is, like, taking over all these jobs. So the Fed has a difficult, a difficult job, because they’ve changed their focus from we’re worried about inflation to we’re worried about jobs. But maybe the reason why we’re seeing jobs not looking so good is AI, and it’s not because, you know, there aren’t a lot of layoffs, right? Or people aren’t hiring right now. That’s, that’s the thing, right? That’s,

Jordan Roach
that’s it, right? We’re not seeing tons of layoffs, right? A little bit like you said, related to AI, it’d be more on the Yes on the hiring side, and a lot of these companies are not hiring either. So what it all means, I don’t know, but I think that’s where the Fed is going to have a tie on.

Ken Moraif
Yeah, they’re, they’re looking at, I don’t need to hire more people, because I can do AI. I can have ai do the work of that. And so, you know, I have loyalty to my existing employees, but I’m not gonna hire any more because AI can do that. So that’s a reverse way that AI is affecting the jobs market. All right, so let’s talk about this is really interesting, and you and I were talking about this before we started, and that’s the difference between market and economic sentiment. So right now, the Well, you tell us what is, what is the difference between market and economic sentiment?

Jordan Roach
Yeah, it’s really interesting. So, you know, economic sentiment, if we were talking to a lot of our clients, prospective clients, advisors, we’re in news. You know, there are a lot of fears out there about the state of the jobs market, the economy, geopolitical risk, straight, political risk. And so there’s a lot of people that are worried that at some point this is going to fall apart, right there any cracks in the system? We’re at kind of the end of the cycle. And that is kind of economic sentiment, right? Which is like lingering fears that permeate out there. And what that typically does, it leads people that have start hoarding, stashing cash for the unknown. We don’t want to reinvest, because we don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, so they start piling up their cash savings. Now, market sentiment is different. Market sentiment, we look at that and say, okay, you know, you could look at just the state of where the market is, which is towards all time highs. So that’s probably a pretty good indicator where things are, how people feeling. You can look at, you know, are people putting more and more money into the market? And you can look behind the scenes of the market and say, Are people starting to hedge their bets, expecting maybe the markets to decline? But we see the opposite there. Actually, right now, there’s almost some complacency inside of how people are positioning inside of the market. So you got people that are very bullish optimistic on the state of the market, while another side is very worried about the state of the economy and so, so

Ken Moraif
you’re probably ones, right? You’re probably too young to remember, welcome back, Cotter. You remember that show? No, you don’t. Okay, well, this was John Travolta’s first role that made him famous before Saturday Night Fever turned him into an international star. And he was kind of like the the the unintelligent but very good looking guy in this high school class, right? Okay? And he always would say, I’m so confused. And so it sounds like that’s what’s going on here. It’s like, I’m so confused. But the good news, though, is that there’s lots and lots and lots of cash. And as soon as those people that are confused, if they think that the economy is going to be okay, and we get past these lingering doubts, there is a mountain of cash. Could go into the market and drive it to significant new all time highs. So we remain bullish, given all of those dynamics. But again, you know it’s like you plan for the worst and you hope for the best, and that’s why you know we’re we’re all in right now, right? So we’re anticipating that it’s going to go up to new highs throughout the next, the rest of this year and into next, but at the same time, we have our investment protect strategy to protect us should the market collapse, because all of this is a house of cards, all this AI and all this other stuff is another y, 2k That’s brewing. Yeah.

Jordan Roach
I mean, that’s right. I mean, you know, right now what we don’t have to do with our strategy is hoard cash because we’re worried about the unknown, we have a strategy that would deal with that so that would allow us to kind of stay invested, be confident, and deal with the now versus what is to come, and then if the what is to come does happen, and this stuff falls apart, right? We have a way to deal with that. And I think that’s the hope, you know, if we just talk about through the end of the year, of how this economic sentiment flows into market action. The hope would be, like you said, is people say, okay, the Fed is starting to bring down rates. Money supply opens up, credit facilities open up, and people that have been hoarding cash say, Okay, I feel better. Let’s go ahead and invest now and then. That maybe leads to the next led hire, and that’s what we hope happens,

Ken Moraif
yeah. And one of the things I think that is keeping people back is they’re not convinced yet that, you know, the effect of tariffs has been fully felt. You know, it’s like, every every time we get a new inflation reading, we’re like, okay, inflation isn’t that bad, but tariffs are going to cause inflation. And so wait till the next time, and then you’ll see it happen. And it just hasn’t. And so, you know, so there’s, there’s that lingering doubt at some point, I think that rubber band is going to snap where people are just going to say, You know what, tariffs are not inflationary, as we worried about, people are absorbing those costs. And therefore, you know, I’m going to go ahead and release that fear and go into the market. So ladies and gentlemen, are we are confident that the future looks bright. In fact, you know, I have this thing from this old song about the future is so bright I got to wear shades. So I put on some fake shades here, and so, but only because we have our invest and protect strategy, and should the market turn the other way. I hope you have the confidence of knowing that we will take action to protect against a big, bad bear, should that occur. So as usual, I hope you had more fun than a human being should be allowed to have when talking about all this boring or listening to all this boring financial stuff. I hope this video finds you healthy, wealthy and wise, make sure you like and subscribe and you share it with all of your friends and business associates. And I look forward to seeing you next time, and we’ll talk soon.

Please note: transcript has been modified after the time of recording. 

Economic indicators and stock market performance cannot be predicted. Opinions expressed regarding the economy and the stock market belong solely to Ken Moraif on behalf of Retirement Planners of America and may not accurately portray actual future performance of the economy or stock market outcomes. Opinions expressed in this video is intended to be for informational purposes only and is not intended to be used as investment advice for individuals who are not clients of Retirement Planners of America. All content provided is the opinion of Ken Moraif, CEO and Founder of RPOA Advisors, Inc. (d/b/a Retirement Planners of America ) (“Retirement Planners of America”, “RPOA”). ©Copyright 2023