• This week our Market Alert Video we will cover some important portfolio changes, all of the most relevant aspects, and how the market could respond to all of those variables.
• So, we’re always evaluating. We’re always looking to improve and find a
way to do this better.
• We just did a sanity check, a very positive enhancement, so let’s talk
about that. Over a year of work went into defining our sell trigger and
figuring out what we can do with it.
• Macroeconomic indicators tell us what the stock market is selling, but what
is going on with the general economy. Other indicators share how bad
things are going to get and that tells us we should sell everything.
• There’s majority position, minority position. In the last one, it told us not to
sell everything and that first test turned out to be the right decision.
• There are some further enhancements to the sanity checks that we’re
looking to finalize.
• Which ones matter more than others? Which combination tells us how
much to sell.
• How do we move from one sell state to another sell state? How do we look
at anything in between? There’s a lot to consider.
• This time we were basically binary. We said 50% or 100%. We’re looking
now and it may be going to a third, and then another third. That’s what
we’re working on right now. We’re also looking at speeding up the sell.
• Last year, I went to the West Coast and talked to some clients. A common
question was, “How do we sell faster?” I told them, “That is the hardest
part.” But not so much that you’re always selling. Because if you’re always
selling, over time that can lead to more transaction costs. So there’s a
balance.”
• We’re also looking at improving our buy signal. That means buying back
sooner. Currently we have two buy signals, and we’re looking at
introducing another one or replacing one. Essentially, we’re looking at
everything so we put ourselves in a position to get back in as quickly as
possible… where we think it’s safe to get back into the trend, into an
upward market.
• If you think about the times when we’ve sold, in almost every case, the
market has gone down significantly after that. So the sell signal isn’t
necessarily broken.
• Where we missed was, we sold, the market went way down, but then on
the rebound, it would have been nice to have a mechanism to get back in
sooner. So, that’s what we’re working on.
• We’re also looking at, and this leads into the changes that are coming, the
allocation changes.
• We always talk about when we sell and when we buy. A big portion of that
is when we buy, what do we buy, what are we holding? So, we’re starting
to look at the total portfolio more than before. What are the new asset
classes? Do we need to introduce more of something? Do we need to
tweak the percentages?
• We’re looking at a lot of things but there are a couple things that we
noticed immediately base on where we want our investment protection
strategy to look like.
• So what are the changes? Before we get into that, keep in mind, before
when we were in the mutual fund world, we could announce our moves in
advance. That didn’t create any issues that allowed others to front run us – meaning take our idea and buy or sell by following the plan we announced.
• Now that we are in ETFs, we have to tell you after the fact because buying
or selling ahead of us is allowed. This is an after the fact change that we
made.
• Effectively after this latest rebalance – establishing the proper mix of
stocks to bonds, types of stocks, types of bonds – we went ahead and
removed small caps and emerging markets from portfolios.
• The biggest driver of this is that we want to make sure that whatever we’re
owning allows us to execute our investment protect, risk management,
overlay. So we don’t want to own stuff that we can’t sell, or cause
ourselves to struggle to sell in the way we want to based on insanity
checks.
• If we are going to sell a minority position, less than 50% for some of our
holdings that are small percentages, it’s difficult to do that based on
account sizes. We look at small cap, emerging markets for our stock
portfolios. They are our smallest holdings so we said those would
potentially limit us on the sell side, so we’re just going to go ahead and
remove them. They’re also the most expensive things in our portfolio.
• Historically they’re more expensive. They’re more volatile. Those portions
are a correlation… just how do different assets move together.
• If US small caps go up, big US companies are also up. Same with mid
caps. So, they tend to move up and down together. We didn’t feel like we
were going to necessarily lose a lot from the upward momentum by just
selling those.
• They don’t add a lot to our returns and they’re more costly when it comes
time to sell them. They’re more problematic when it comes time to execute
our strategy. Overall, they’re not very good for our portfolio.
• So that money went into reinvestment into our large cap position. US has
been pretty dominant for the last 15 years. This year still doing pretty well.
So we put money into that. I think that’s the big AI theme. We put a little
more money into mid caps. That is our riskier position historically. Then we
added to our developed international position – that’s Europe and Japan.
• As AI gets built out, the large companies are the ones that have the
money, the resources to build out the data centers, to build out the things
that we need to create all the programming and everything else.
Eventually it trickles down to the small companies to make everything
else.
• For the forseeable future, it looks like large cap and established
companies in foreign markets is where it’s at. They can weather the
downturn in tariffs better. They have more access to liquidity.
• So a lot of exciting things happening in the investment oversight
committee meetings. There are some very lively debates happening and,
brace yourselves, cryptocurrency may be something we add to our
portfolio as well.
• So what’s been happening lately? It looks like the economy is ok. Jobs are
fine. What we’re hearing is that it’s too soon to really know what the true
effect of the tariffs are. And that we will probably feel that in the second
half of this year. In terms of inflation, a way to look at it is, what’s
inflationary for us is disinflationary for the people we do business with. It’s
like a teeter-totter.
• We could see the dollar start to feel some pressure because of this. The
dollar was very strong throughout 2022-2023. We’ve seen it come down
for the last 6-9 months. There’s been a bit of a sell off. The fear is that if
tariffs are inflationary for us, it could continue to move the dollar down.
• If the dollar is less valuable and you can buy less goods with it, I don’t
want to put my money in the thing that is losing value.
• This brings us to The Fed and Jerome Powell. There’s talk of Trump
removing Powell then he’s not going to fire or move Powell. The President
has been inconsistent. That pressure puts the Fed in a bad position
regarding lowering interest rates because they don’t want to look like
they’re kowtowing to the president.
• The good news is, the data suggests that we’re probably headed toward a
decrease in interest rates sometime before the end of the year.
• As far as the Treasure Auction, we’ve got $9 Trillion coming up. A fourth of
our entire national debt is getting refinanced in the next few months.
Hopefully the big, beautiful, bill will bring down the deficit like it has been
said to do.
• The best in on it is Trump. He’s talking about the Fed, which controls short
term rates. The treasure secretary is saying, we need to try to go after the
10-year, but the 10-year is harder because the bond market is in control of
that.
• The good news is that half of that $9 Trillion has been auctioned off.
Buyers are still there so demand is there. In the land of the blind, the oneeyed man is king.
• So, the primary message this week was that we’re always looking to
improve upon our processes and strategies so that they work harder for
you and your portfolio. I think we’re up about 4% since we got back into the swing of things so, so far so good. Our strategy is working for us.
• Thanks again for watching this week’s Market Alert video. Make sure you
like and subscribe and share it with your friends and family.
• We hope this video finds you healthy, wealthy, and wise, and we’ll talk
again soon.
Transcript
Ken Moraif
Hello everyone, and welcome to our market alert video for today, which is July 25 2025 I am Ken Moray from the CEO and founder of retirement planners of America, and in this week, we’ve entitled this one the new all time highs. Should we worry? So we’re going to be talking about tariffs, the dollar weakening, which it’s been on a decline lately. The Treasury auction, potentially the big gorilla in the room. We got the spat between President Trump and Jerome Powell, although I think it’s a one way spat. And then, of course, what are interest rates going to do? And we’re going to wrap it all up in talking about your retirement planning, what you do about all this stuff. And so we’re going to dive into that, and I’m going to bring my our Chief Investment Officer, Jordan Roach, here to join me in the conversation. Jordan, good to see you. Good to be back. Yeah, it’s good to see it. I want to give you, I want to give everybody an update, because everybody cares a lot about this. And so I just want to make sure that people know I had my knees replaced, as you know, and I’m an avid tennis player. I’ve been playing tennis for 58 years, and because of my knee replacement, I’ve gone the longest period in my entire life without playing, which is nine months. I’ve noticed you get grumpier. I’m very grumpy. I need tennis. It’s an addiction. And yeah, so I went, and a couple days to three days ago, I went and I hit for the first time. Didn’t move very much, maybe six feet, one way to the other, okay. And I had the pro just tossing me balls by hand. And it was actually okay, little stiff, but okay. And of course, the big tell is the next day or two after, always worse, yeah, the next so I was thinking, Man, when I get out of bed tomorrow, I’m gonna really know. So then the next morning, when I got up, I was like, Ooh, is this gonna hurt? And it didn’t. It was actually better. It felt better than it had. And I think it’s because, you know, a lot of the physical therapy that you do is linear. You know, you’re doing squats and you’re doing stuff that’s straight. Tennis is very you know, you’re moving sideways, you’re backing up, you’re doing all this stuff. And so I think it strengthened, or at least woke up the stabilizer muscles that have been asleep for nine months, yes. And so overall it my knees feel a lot better. So I went played again yesterday, and it worked again. Yeah, it was even better then. So what’s the soreness? Ramp Up schedule. I got to be careful that I don’t overdo it. Because, you know, that’s I’ve heard a lot of people that overdo it, and next thing you know, to do that easy. Yeah, so I’m, I’m gonna be a good boy. I want this to work. That’s great. So anyway, yeah, so very good news. So let’s, let me stop talking about myself. What do you think about me? No, I’m just kidding. All right, so let’s talk about what we’re supposed to be talking about, which is, you know, what’s going on. So first of all, we got some good, encouraging economic data this week, right? Look, things are looking okay.
Jordan Roach
Unemployment again, still saying very low, better than expected. Unemployment came. You still have some manufacturing, some service. Data also looked really, really good PMI. PMI data looks really tell us what PMI stands for. So it’s purchase managers, inventory or index, I believe, and so it’s just a centralized Gage for what are people that buy goods? What are they doing, manufacturing activity, what are they buying? And that was, that was good, and it looked pretty good.
Ken Moraif
And that’s surprising, because you would think that with all the parts coming in with tariffs, that they would be that that wouldn’t
Jordan Roach
be good. That’s exactly right. And then you the equivalent on the service side. So because we have the manufacturing economy, service economy, or more service and manufacturing, and the service numbers look really good. And so again, from a pure economic data point, things are looking better than so it doesn’t
Ken Moraif
look like the tariffs are biting yet, but I saw an interview with the chief investment officer of Morgan Stanley, Mike Wilson. Not as important as
Jordan Roach
you appreciate that. Yeah,
Ken Moraif
you got, you got, you got it all over here, he was saying that, you know, the tariffs take time to filter through, and we may not see it till the second half of this year, and that’s when we’ll really so right now, the numbers we’re seeing are not reflective. I think
Jordan Roach
that’s definitely a fear, right? That’s definitely a point where we could see that. I mean, we have a lot of, a lot of slowdown early on in the year. A lot of people bracing for things. We got ahead of the orders, right? We talked about that in April, like almost GDP looked bad, but it was good, because people were front running all this, yes, and now we might see regular activity and see, you know, what are the flex I mean, again, inflation does usually come. It does not come all at once. So that makes sense. If they say that maybe we wait and see.
Ken Moraif
So that could be some headwinds that we see in the second half of the year. If we suddenly see inflation starting to pick up, and we start seeing unemployment start to pick up, all those things, then the next thing would happen is the Fed would say, you know, forget it. We’re not lowering interest rates if we’re starting to see, you know, the economy turn south.
Jordan Roach
At some point. I wonder when it’s they’ve seen enough to start lowering. But yes, I think the back half of the year we got a lot of things, we have the expected Fed decision to lower maybe once or twice,
Ken Moraif
and that’s kind of baked in right now. If they don’t do it, that might be bad for the market.
Jordan Roach
I think the market would have to reset. Yes, I think you’d have to recalibrate. Because I think the expectations now probability show one or two, at least one, right? At least one. So I think the market would have to recalibrate if we didn’t come to that. But yeah, you have that coming. You got Treasury
Ken Moraif
auction. Treasury auction, let’s talk about that. $9 trillion it’s a staggering. Fourth of our entire national debt is coming up for refinance here in the next few months. We
Jordan Roach
need people coming to the table to still say we like to take on US debt, we feel good
Ken Moraif
about that, yeah. And if they don’t, then what? Then
Jordan Roach
again, we’re in a world of hurt. Then that’s where it gets. I think right now, honestly, the bigger risk is not to it’s there is an inflationary risk, but almost the bigger black swan is if our bond market starts season up, yeah, I think that would have more cascading.
Ken Moraif
There’s no money that’s right, because people don’t, are not willing to lend it to us in this coming briefing. If they say, No, we’re not refinancing you, that’s right. And suddenly we’re stuck with all of our bills but no money to pay for yes, and Katie bar the door if that were to happen. Now we give that a small probability, because so far, it looks like there’s interest. It should over there, yeah, but it’s, you know, it’s, there’s a more than zero probability of it happening, yeah? And yeah,
Jordan Roach
and it’s not the, you know, they’re not going to be there. It’s just, at what point do rates have to go higher for buyers say that’s attractive enough, given all the risks to take
Ken Moraif
on the risk that America is overextending itself. That’s exactly right. And then we also had the big sell off in the dollar here over the last few months, right? I mean, we’re starting to see some weakness in the dollar, which is digital.
Jordan Roach
Big fear for I think a lot of people is, is this the start of the end kind of deal? Right? Where, you know, again, our currency is not the best game in town. And you see nations colluding to try to figure something. You have the rise of digital assets. You have people talking about gold, like all these things happen, the Euro strengthening. But yes, the dollar, as I think people are worried that inflationary effects are going to come here means that’s what inflation does, is it kills your the effect of your dollar, the strength of your dollar,
Ken Moraif
yeah. So if the people that think the tariffs are going to create inflation are correct in the second half of this year, then it’s kind of a teeter totter between us and our trading partners. If we have inflation, they have disinflation. Their inflation goes down, right? So what happens there is that if inflation is heating up here, then it means the dollar is becoming less and less valuable. And so investors are saying, Why would I invest in something that’s going to become less valuable? I’m not going to do that. I’m going to put it in cryptocurrency, or I’m going to put it in the Euro, I’m going to put it somewhere else and not in the dollar. And that could be problematic as well. It
Jordan Roach
absolutely I mean, again, the basis that we’ve operated for all of our careers, your is, the dollar is the best game in town, and it still is. But that is now we’re starting to hear more and more murmurs, more and more undertones, of, is it finally losing its status as the global
Ken Moraif
number one? Is it the tipping point? I mean, we had the Treasury auction a little bit ago for 20 year, and it didn’t go as well as people thought. It sold out. It sold That’s right, the way, not as quickly as people thought. And that was like, Wait a second, yep, that’s never happened before where people have not gobbled up our debt and lent us money to be able to finance all of our stuff.
Jordan Roach
So we’ll see. We got about, you know, at least about half of that 9 trillion coming due this year, so we’ll see who’s stepping in. And,
Ken Moraif
you know, I was thinking about $9 trillion you know, and we were talking about this a minute, because
Jordan Roach
we, neither one of us really, and I don’t think anybody has a true concept of how big that silly
Ken Moraif
number is. It’s like, it’s like, it’s a mind boggling number. So, so we were fooling around with with Chad GBT. So if you stacked $1 bills, okay, $1 million of $1 bills is 35 stories, just a million of them, okay, okay, all right. So then if you go to a billion, then a stack of $1 bills a billion, if you stack them all up, that is 6786
Jordan Roach
miles, which, so we’re already getting silly, because that’s already a wild time. About
Ken Moraif
1 billion. We’re talking about 9 trillion, right? We’re talking about 9000 times that, which is 610,000 miles. If you stacked all these dollar bills,
Jordan Roach
we’re well into outer space. We’re all so. So
Ken Moraif
then we say, well, how far is it to the moon? So to get to the moon, it’s 238,000 miles. Yeah. So if you had this stack go all the way to the moon, then the circumference of the moon is 7000 miles. So you could go around the moon, you so you could build the stack of dollar bills all the way the moon, circle the moon three times, and then come all the way back, and you’d have, that’s how many dollar bills it would take.
Jordan Roach
And we got to find buyers for every one of them. And we got to
Ken Moraif
find people who have lent us that kind of, oh my goodness, man who, anyway, a lot of money. Yeah. So interest rates, we talked about, we talked. Oh, the Fed. So now we have this, this spat. One’s at one way spat, right? It’s one way. Jerome Powell isn’t saying anything. The only thing he says, We’re not going to be influenced by what the President says. But boy, Trump is not being very quiet about what he thinks of Jerome Powell. He’s pretty,
Jordan Roach
very vocal on social media about this. And the funny thing is, he might, actually, he might be the cause the Fed not doing, ultimately, what they maybe want to do, like maybe the Fed does want to lower rates, but they’re going to look like they’re not independent if they go ahead and bow right when Trump’s yelling at him, right?
Ken Moraif
So they might say, Oh yeah, well, we’re just not going to lower interest rates, because you can’t make me, that’s right. So it’s a fun tug of war there. Oh my goodness, yeah, that’s an interesting one to see. And as we recorded, you know, we don’t know what the Fed is going to do with interest rates, but we still feel that it’s likelihood of at least one this year, right?
Jordan Roach
I mean, if things keep doing this, we don’t get that inflationary, you know, creep, you know, I think that’s right. We the market expects one, maybe into two, but certainly mark right now, if the market didn’t see one, I think they’d be surprised.
Ken Moraif
Yeah, and that could certainly be a scare, you know, to the market, if the Fed said, and we’re not doing anything this year, and I think there’s some talk a little bit that that may be happening, we’ll see so a lot of dark clouds on the horizon, but not necessarily any of them will cause rain. But it’s good to have an umbrella, don’t you think? Always good, always got one in the car. And our philosophy, because we work with people who are over 50, who are retired or retiring soon, we believe in having an umbrella, certainly, because it can start raining when you least expect it, and a storm could hit when you least expect it. We know in Texas, they come in fast, sometimes fast, yeah, and sometimes tragically, too. And so making sure that you have a strategy to protect your retirement super important. Tell us a little bit about the one that we have.
Jordan Roach
So we have a strategy. It’s continuing to evolve all of the years, but effectively, it’s one we’re we’re using the market as a barometer of what’s going to happen, right? Because the market is a collective think tank for how good or bad things are. And so we look at the market, and depending on kind of the overall trend, we decide we want to play or we don’t want to play, right? And there is a point where the market is saying we don’t want to play anymore. And then we look at the broader economy to say, what is that telling us different, to confirm or deny? And then we make a decision,
Ken Moraif
yeah. And generally, the way we look at it is, we look at the trend that’s right, and if the trend is our friend, we want to play because we like playing with our friends. That’s exactly right. If the trend is not our friend, then we don’t play with people that are not our friends. We charge us not to That’s right, our strategy said to sell, and this is a while ago, so I’m aging myself here, but it told us to sell in November of 2007 before the stock market crash of 2008 we actually counseled our clients to stay out for a year and a half during that so those who followed our advice avoided most of that 57%
Jordan Roach
that would have been early. I mean, that was early before, really, many people were sounding any
Ken Moraif
longer, yeah. Lehman crashed a year later, almost in October, and more recently, you know, I would ask anybody watching this, you know, when Liberation Day came and the market went down, 22% did your advisor take any preventative action in that regard. You know, as it turned out, it bounced right back. But at the same time, you know, we believe is better safe than sorry, protecting your retirement, especially if you’re within five years of your retirement, or in the first five years of your retirement, if you’re in that decade, you know, you in most cases, you can’t afford to be a gunslinger. You know, at that point you need to be, you need to be thinking defensively, well.
Jordan Roach
And that’s goes back to that, you know, interview you talked about with Ken Griffin from Citadel, right? Who’s a very aggressive natural, you know, that’s his natural disposition. That firm is running securities for everybody. And even he’s saying, Yeah, we went through that, but we were playing the fire, and
Ken Moraif
probably shouldn’t have, yeah, yeah, that’s right. He said that, if I even though we stayed in because that’s what we do. He said the smart thing would have been to avoid that, because you don’t know what could have happened. Good result, bad decision. So ladies and gentlemen, that’s where we are. A lot of stuff happening, and we’ll keep you abreast of it. And you know, as we always say, if you miss these videos, you do it at your own peril, because we have been uncannily accurate in our forecasts and our predictions of what’s going to happen and what to do about it. So thank you for watching as always. I hope this video found you healthy, wealthy and wise. Make sure you like and subscribe. I want to thank you guys. We had we crossed over the 1,000,000th view of our podcast just a month or two ago blows my mind. I’m so grateful you guys are awesome. Thank you for doing that. Share this video with your friends and family. More importantly, come in and visit with us. See if we can help you with your retirement planning. So again, I hope this found you healthy, wealthy and wise, 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