• This week we’re focusing on one key question: where are we relative to our sell signal?
• We originally planned to unveil our new strategy in April, but because we are getting close to a potential sell signal, we released it early.
• This is one of the most significant updates we’ve made to our strategy in 25 years, and we want every client to fully understand it.
• We still strongly encourage you to attend the April webinar, where we will go deeper and answer your questions.
• As of now, we are approximately 3–3.5% away from our sell signal.
• That may sound like a lot, but in market terms, it can happen quickly.
• At the same time, it can also take time to get there, so we are close, but not there yet.
• If we do reach that point, we will rely on our sanity checks to determine how much to sell.
• Right now, two out of our four sanity checks are flashing red.
• The first is the yield curve, which has been signaling potential economic trouble for some time.
• The yield curve has historically predicted every recession, although it can give early or false signals.
• Even so, it is not something we can ignore.
• The second is building permits, which are now showing weakness in the housing market.
• Housing is a major driver of the economy, and a slowdown there can ripple through many other sectors.
• These indicators were flashing warning signs even before recent geopolitical events.
• That means current risks are not just about the war — they were already building.
• Inflation data this week came in worse than expected, particularly in producer prices.
• Higher inflation, combined with rising oil prices, could force the Federal Reserve to keep rates higher or even raise them.
• Higher rates would put additional pressure on housing and economic growth.
• The situation in the Middle East adds another layer of uncertainty, particularly around oil supply.
• If tensions escalate and oil supply is disrupted, that could further increase inflation.
• On the other hand, if the situation resolves quickly, markets could stabilize in the short term.
• Even in that case, we still have to contend with underlying economic signals that were already weakening.
• Our approach remains disciplined.
• If we reach our sell signal, we will act based on our strategy, not emotions.
• We are closely monitoring all developments so you don’t have to.
• Think of us as being on call at all times — the market does not take breaks, and neither do we.
• Our goal is to manage the risk so you can focus on your life.
• For our retired clients, that means enjoying your Second Childhood Without Parental Supervision.
• For those still working toward retirement, our job is to help get you there with confidence.
• We will continue to keep you informed every step of the way.

Transcript:

Ken Moraif
Hello everyone, and welcome to our market alert video for today, which is March 20, 2026 and we have so much to talk about this week that we actually had to pare it down because we didn’t want to spend an hour with you doing this thing, because we know that you guys have busy lives, and we can’t spend a whole hour talking about everything that we wanted to so we split it up. We’re going to talk about half of it next week and half of it this week. We distilled it down to what we think is the most important. And so we’re going to talk about where we are versus our sell signal. And hopefully all of you watched our rollout video that we sent to you yesterday. And just to explain all of that, let me, let me, kind of set the stage for you on what, on what happened yesterday, because it was chaotic. So first of all, it occurred to us that we were very close to our sell signal, and therefore, as our core value number four says, we want to answer your questions before you call us. Right core value number four says, If a client calls us first, then we lost, and we don’t like losing, and so therefore we wanted to get it out to you now the video we sent out yesterday, we intended to make it the actual webinar that we were going to release in April, when we were going to have a big splash announcement of our new sell signal, the sanity checks. We’re going to do all of that in April. Well, as it turns out, we thought we needed to get that all to you now, because we’re and we’ll talk about it here in this video today, we’re getting close to where we might even sell so that created the situation where we needed to do that. However, we have still sent out to you the invitation for the April one, because we still want you to attend the April one, because that’s going to be where we’re going to have questions and answers, and we’re going to get into more detail with you then in the specific rollout video. So if that makes any sense to you, the only thing you need to know is, please click on the link that says, sign me up for the one in April. Okay, we want everybody to be there for the one in April. Very, very important. We’re very proud of a lot of the work we’ve done, and we want to share with you and answer your questions, and we it’s one of the biggest changes we’ve made to our strategy in 25 years. So very important that you attend. Okay, so that’s what that’s all about. So therefore, let me bring Jordan Roach, our Chief Investment Officer, into the conversation, and let’s talk about what’s more germane to what’s going on right now. So Jordan, good to see you. You’re on spring break, so you’re you’re doing some extracurricular. Here we are

Jordan Roach
so but no one buy outfit. Can, you know, fake out? Anybody? We are working spring break here. Markets are not letting us arrest.

Ken Moraif
Yeah, you know, anybody that works at ARPOA understands that we’re basically like doctors who are on call, right? The market doesn’t care whether you’re on spring break or not. You know, it doesn’t look at your calendar and say, Okay, I’m gonna take a break till you come back. It’s always doing stuff, and we always have to be ready to act so, you know, I have, I have a question for you. This is a question that my that my grandson asked, and, you know, He’s four years old, going on five, and he asked a question Jordan, that I wonder if you have the answer to, and that is, Do birds have penises?

Jordan Roach
Okay, we’re gonna leave that to granddad to pop up there.

Ken Moraif
Yeah, I’m like, I’m glad he didn’t ask me that question. I love it. You know, kids come up with the funniest things, and folks, please do not get offended by that. Okay, it’s a four year old. It’s okay, okay? Because sometimes people get offended if we use words that. But it’s a scientific word. It’s a four year old So, but, yeah, I thought that was pretty funny, because, you know, I could see why he would ask that. It’s a legitimate question, right? And it’s what is

Jordan Roach
also amazing Ken is how much, how little you realize you know of things when little kids make you explain things simply.

Ken Moraif
It’s true. I’m waiting for why is the sky blue and those kind of questions? Oh yeah,

Jordan Roach
yeah, you realize I need to go back to grade.

Ken Moraif
So all right, let’s, let’s, let’s talk business. So the inflation numbers came out this week, and they were absolutely terrible. The PPI came out, and it was bad, and put put a layer of bad on top of that, spread some bad on top of the bad. And again, this was data from before the war. So what’s your take? What’s your take on that? Yeah, so we’re looking specifically.

Jordan Roach
At ppi, which is slightly different than CPI, but PPI is a lot of times that people think of it as like a leading indicator to what CPI could show later, because it’s raw materials. It’s the first input, kind of into supply chains and production. And so the take is maybe, maybe finally, all these whispers that we’ve been hearing, all this bracing the market’s been doing for a year, maybe it’s showing something here. Yeah. Now, the thing is, PPI fluctuates almost more than even CPI does month to month.

Ken Moraif
Well, before we continue, let’s define our terms. Can you tell us what PPI is and what CPI is? Yeah, so

Jordan Roach
CPI Consumer Price Index,

Ken Moraif
and that’s the big headline number that everybody looks at. It’s a CPI, right? And that’s

Jordan Roach
when we think of like when we go to the grocery store, you know, those prices are in CPI numbers. You know, PPI is producer’s price index. So those are kind of the raw industrial manufacturing, kind of the first input before it gets made into final goods. So that’s what PPI is, and that, and the reason that’s important is because, again, those prices are what goods are being sold at prior to be going further through to retail.

Ken Moraif
And it’s actually also the number that feeds into what the Federal Reserve looks at when they’re deciding on what to do with interest rates. Right? Absolutely. I mean,

Jordan Roach
they can look at CPI and it can look fairly muted, but if they start seeing ppi, that can give them pause.

Ken Moraif
Yeah, so right now it looks like, you know, we may be heading in a really bad direction. And you know, our sell signal, which, if everybody watched the video from yesterday, will it explains it. But interestingly, the sell signal was a week or two ahead of Liberation Day, right last year, and so our new sell signal actually triggered before President Trump even said we’re going to put tariffs on everybody. So somehow the market knew something was coming. And of course, the market went way down after that and right now, tell us where we are we have, we have four, what we call sanity checks that go along with our cell signal. So if we hit our sell signal, we want to look at those four sanity checks before we decide how much to sell, right? So tell us, first, how close we are to our cell signal, and then secondly, how many of our insanity checks are flashing red right now? And which ones are they?

Jordan Roach
Yeah, so, I mean, as of as of close yesterday, right? Because markets are moving right now. As of close yesterday, we were, you know, three and a half percent or so from from where we would look to trigger right that would hit our sell signal. So that moves every day, because the signal point moves every day in the market moves every day, but fairly close, right? I mean, again, traditionally, for most of our clients, all right, you look at the 200 day moving average, and we’re getting, we’re getting right around that number, yeah, that’s when we start getting closer.

Ken Moraif
And, you know, 3% doesn’t sound like a lot, but it is. I mean, it depends how you you know, it can be like a mile, 100 miles away, or it can be like, you know, a foot away. It just depends on how fast the market moves. But generally speaking, 3% is a pretty big move in the market.

Jordan Roach
That’s right. So 3% I mean, we’ve been, you know, in this range more, you know, more than probably our clients even realize, you know, over the last 15 years, and a lot of time, we don’t get there, but it just takes one or two bad data points, bad events, and the market quickly can adjust to that. So, you know, it’s, in some ways, 3% is a long way to go. In some ways, in this micro environment, it’s very short way to go.

Ken Moraif
Okay, so we’re close, but we’re not there. So just want to put every, pardon me, want to put everybody on notice that we are very close, but we’re also very far. So, you know, and that’s why we are on it. And we get the gray hair for you. We want to worry about this so that you don’t have to. And so should we get there? We’re going to look to our sanity checks to tell us, you know, how much should we sell? So tell us how many of our sanity checks are currently flashing red, and which ones are they? Yep. So we

Jordan Roach
have four sanity checks, and they’re all looking at different things right now, right? And this can change over the next days, certainly over the next weeks, but right now, we have two out of four things, sanity checks flashing red. Okay, so the first one that’s flashing red, which has been flashing for some time, quite frankly, is the bond market, the yield curve, right? So that that has been signaling problem. The bond market has been signaling problems for, you know, a couple years now, and that’s still the case right now. So this, this could change, because this signal can move fast, and trades can move fast, but the bond market still pricing in slowing growth, inflationary problems, all

Ken Moraif
those things. Okay, so before we go to the second sell sanity check, let’s stay on this one. So the yield curve, so that everybody understands it is it has predicted 100% of all of the. The recessions that we have had in this country over the last, even, probably 100 years, right? I mean, it is an incredibly accurate recession predictor. The problem with it, though, is that it also predicts recessions that don’t happen, right?

Jordan Roach
That’s right, yes. And so, I mean, for, take it for this time. I mean, the yield curve, started turning red for us the way we look at it a couple years ago, and the market broadly, over the last couple of years, has gone up, but it’s still flashing that. So the bond market is still pricing in some problems there. And we do not, we do look at that and say, okay, yes, it can have some false signals, but it’s going to probably predict the thing that we’re most scared about, which is bad recessions.

Ken Moraif
Yeah. And so it’s kind of like, if we do eventually go into a recession, and the bond market will say, see, we told you so, but they’ve been saying it for a long time. But nevertheless, it isn’t a very, very accurate predictor of of recessions. And it’s, it’s saying there’s one coming. So that’s one we cannot ignore. So secondly, what’s the

Jordan Roach
second one? So building permits, right? So think housing construction, you know, I’m sure a lot of our clients have been reading about housing markets slowing down, being kind of locked up over the last couple years as we had this run up in prices, you know, post covid, and we’d interest rates run up too. And those two things together, high prices and high interest rates tend to lock up that market. And so what we judge is building permits. That’s kind of front end leading indicator, and that flipped recently right signaling problem in the housing market, which we feel like is still a huge part of the economic engine,

Ken Moraif
real estate and all the associated whether it’s building permits and everything else that goes with that, because if people build something, the next thing they want is curtains and sofas and you know that, and desks and paint, and you know all the other stuff that goes with it. So it’s not just a building permit, and you add it all together. And real estate is about 25% of our economy, so that’s an important thing. And if it’s flashing red, then that’s actually, again, not a good sign. And with inflation, you know, really heating up here. I mean, the numbers that came out this week were bad. And so if you, if you couple that with, you know, the expectation was the Fed’s going to be lowering interest rates now, all of a sudden, there’s actually built into the market, right now, a 15% chance that the Fed might actually raise interest rates, because they’re worried. Not only did the inflation come in bad before the war data came out, but now we got the war with high oil prices, that’s going to be inflationary, so they might actually raise interest rates now is starting to become the top and that could hurt the real estate market even more.

Jordan Roach
Absolutely. Yeah, so again, both, neither one of those things, you know. If you looked at the likelihood that Mark was at the price and a potential cut coming into the year that wasn’t even on the horizon, it was almost a certainty. Or have two, you know, or a rise, two cuts, we’re almost certainty. And so things change fast, right?

Ken Moraif
They change fast. And so we have two flashing red. And so just want to make sure our clients understand everybody, that you guys understand that our strategy is a discipline, and if we hit our sell signal. You know, I know that there’s going to be some thought about maybe I don’t want to sell. You know, this is a temporary thing and all that, but keep in mind, these things were flashing red before the war started or and so the war potentially, is only going to make all these things worse if it lasts too long or much longer. So we don’t want to ignore it if we hit our sell signal. So we’ll keep you posted on that. So let’s talk about the other side of the coin. What’s going you know, which is kind of the driver of all the anxiety that we’re feeling right now. And that’s the war, you know, in Iran and all that. And right now, the USS Tripoli, I think it’s called, is headed for the Gulf at high speed, and it has, I guess we’re sending 2500 of our elite troops to the area, and we’ve also got the Warthog helicopter or planes and the Black Hawks there. That feels to me like pretty good indication, if you look at the history of how Trump has done this, right, he loads up the military before he’s going to do it, and then he goes. And then, for some reason, everybody’s surprised by it. It’s like, you know, they put like, 1700 military things into the Gulf, and then all of a sudden they go after Iran. Everybody’s like, oh my gosh, he did it. Nobody thought he was going to do it. And so now, all of a sudden, we got 2500 troops going. And you know, yesterday, Scott Besant even said that Karg Island could become a US asset to me. That is not good. I think that’s a will. Because. Com, and those 2500 troops that are going over there, to me, that’s the only reason I would send them. What on earth are they going to do otherwise? So I think they’re going to take over that island, and it’s going to become a US asset. And so that will basically stop any oil that’s coming out of Iran from going anywhere, and in particular China. And therefore, that, you know, because they get 90% of their oil that comes out of that island, it gets it gets done there, before it goes to China. So all of a sudden, Trump is going to control 90% of the oil that goes to China. I think that gives you a bargaining chip where you could actually tell President Xi. President Xi, could you call the guys in Iran and tell them to open up the Strait of Hormuz because we could cut off all your oil and basically kill your economy? You think you could make that phone call for us? So there’s also a possibility this whole thing could come to an end pretty quickly. And if it does, you know if the flow of oil starts going through the Strait of Hormuz, and it all clears up. Then what? What does that bode for you?

Jordan Roach
Jordan, yeah, I mean, this is where we don’t know. So then, I mean, that would be a good news, right? So that would be good news where we can then refocus on what’s coming on, you know, US centric growth and inflation. Without that kind of, you know, heavy distraction, they could cascade and Domino against us. So now I think that would probably good at least short term. But then again, the other, the other thing we’d have to think through a little bit is, is the US economy right now stalling? You know, is it slowing in growth? Is inflation going to be persistent? Because even prior to Iran, remember some of these numbers that we’re looking at, yeah, like building permits, yield curve, those are showing red prior to Iran happening. Yeah. It doesn’t mean we’re completely in the clear. Yeah.

Ken Moraif
So that’s why, again, we’re on high alert. If we hit our sell signal, we’re going to take care of business for you, ladies and gentlemen, so that you don’t have to worry. And so we’ll, we’ll be on it. So anyway, lot of stuff going on, swirling around, significant uncertainty. But there one certainty you can have is, as I said, that will mine the store for you so that you don’t have to. So all you SCWPerS, I want you to go out. Enjoy your second childhood without parental supervision. Enjoy the summer. Have fun, visit your grandchildren, play golf, do all that. Don’t worry about all this stuff, you know. Let us do it for you, and for those of you who are not SCWPerS yet, who are not yet retired, then for those of you who are in that, we’re going to do everything we can to get you there so that you too can be a SCWPer and we can celebrate that event with you. So thanks for watching. Make sure you share this video with your friends and family, if they’re not getting it already, like and subscribe, of course, as well, and we’ll talk soon.

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

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