The Fed is signaling that more rate hikes could be coming, and it’s eliminating the forward guidance that helps investors anticipate its next moves. Meanwhile, the AI companies driving much of the stock market are facing a major test as their earnings come in. 

In this week’s Market Alert, we explain why these developments could create significant volatility and why today’s concentration in technology stocks reminds us of the risks we saw before the dot-com crash. 

Transcript:

Hello, everyone, and welcome to our weekly market alert video for today, which is October 30, 2026. As usual, I hope this video finds you healthy, wealthy, and wise. And you know, Alex, uh, my producer extraordinaire, said that I should have worn a costume since this is Halloween, and I said, “What are you talking about?

I am wearing my costume, Alex. This is it.” So we have a lot to talk about, so let me go over, uh, what we’re gonna talk about on this, our weekly excursion. Um, first of all, the Fed held interest rates steady, and in theory, that should be good news, but we’re gonna talk about why maybe it’s not. Also, uh, this week was the test for all the AI stocks, and, uh, so we’re gonna kinda give you a rundown of that, and it’s super important because it’s 30, 40% of the entire stock market.

If those guys fall, they’re gonna take everything with them. It’s gonna be a giant sucking sound. And then, of course, something interesting happened in the announcement that, uh, Kevin Warsh, the Fed chair, gave, uh, this week, which is a change in how the Fed does business, which potentially in the future could bring to us a lot of volatility.

So we have that. Now, also, um, this week, I wanna talk with you about where we stand regarding our returns and, uh, why I’m at peace with the fact that this year, uh, could be a year where we underperform, and I wanna go over with you some of the reasons why, and why, again, I’m o- I’m okay with those, okay? So, uh, a lot to talk about.

First of all, I wanna wish all of you, uh, SCWIPers out there a, uh… I hope you are enjoying your second childhood without parental supervision. And again, if you don’t know what a SCWIPer is, it’s, uh, the acronym for second childhood without parental supervision. So when a client of ours retires, you become a SCWIPer.

And, uh, so I hope you guys are having a great time. Uh, before we get going, I just wanna, uh, uh, give you an update on something that’s going on in my household that I’m actually, uh, not very happy about. Um, my wife has decided that she’s going to train our cats to do their business on the, on the toilet, to poop on the toilet so we don’t need a, a litter box.

Now, you may think that that’s not something that can be done, but actually, we had a cat a long time ago. His name was Jogger, and Jogger could do it. And so I know what you’re thinking. “Wow, that’s awesome.” You know, you ne- no litter box, nothing. The cat takes care of business, and you don’t have to do anything.

Well, let me tell you why it’s not great, okay? It’s not. And here’s what happens. You need to go to the restroom And the cat needs to go to the restroom at the same time. So you make eye contact with each other, and then it’s on, okay? It’s like, who’s gonna get to the toilet first? And cats are fast. You know, I hate to admit it, but cats are faster than humans.

And so he, he zooms over there, jogger, and then he’s sitting on the toilet seat with that look, you know, when they’re peeing, how they have that look on their face. And he’s looking at me like, “Ha, I beat you.” And meanwhile, I’m over here doing the Snoopy dance, waiting for the freaking cat to be done. It’s not a good thing, okay?

I’m just telling you, it’s not a good thing. And I’m gonna have two cats doing it now, so I’m going out of my mind. I, I, I don’t want this. I don’t want this. I’m, I’m done, Alex. All right. Let’s, let’s talk about the Fed, okay? So the Federal Reserve decided that they’re not gonna do anything with interest rates.

Surprised no one, but it was actually interesting because two of the Fed governors actually voted, there’s 12 of them, two of them actually voted that they wanted to raise interest rates, okay? So they’d not cut them, raise them. So the bias right now is towards raising, and the market is building in a very high probability, about 85%, that they’re gonna raise interest rates in December.

So that’s not a good thing, right? Because if money is more expensive, profits are more, are harder to come by. And again, as we’ve always said, the stock market is a re- uh, a, a reflection of profits. Profits going up, stock market goes up. Profits going down, the opposite happens. So, uh, it may sound like good news, but it really isn’t.

And also inflation. You know, with what’s going on in Hormuz and all the rest of it, and oil prices are back over $100, inflation’s picking up again, so the Fed is not getting any help from inflation. So that’s all there. All right. Now, the other thing that was interesting was that last week, many of the big technology companies, the AI, uh, companies reported, and, uh- And they, they started, not all of them.

And Microsoft beat expectations, but across the gr- the, the whole group, the results were mixed, okay? And so the, the big bet that people are making is that they’re gonna be able to make so much money that they can finance all the debt that they’re taking on and, uh, you know, and grow their way through it.

If they’re not able to do that, if they can’t keep showing profits or, or rather revenue growing the way people are expecting, we could see 40% of the stock market take a nosedive, and that concentration is very dangerous. We’ve seen… I’ve seen it before. You guys are old enough, I think, maybe to remember back in, uh, the year 2000 when the stock market crashed because of all of that.

So we’re keeping our eye on it. I’m thankful we have our Invest and Protect, that’s for sure. Now, the other thing that’s really interesting is that Kevin Warsh, who is the Federal Reserve chairman, announced that the Fed is no longer going to be giving us what they call forward warning or, or, you know, looking into the future and telling us what they’re going to do, okay?

Uh, he said that, uh, this, this h- forward guidance thing, he doesn’t believe in that. He thinks it, it, it doesn’t serve the Fed well. But what it did do was it used to calm the market down because they kind of had a feeling for the direction that the Fed was gonna go. But now We’re gonna get nothing. In fact, he wants to have fewer meetings where they vote.

So if that– if we have fewer of all of that, then when they do come out and say they’re gonna do something, that could be more shocking to the, uh, to the stock market and to investors, and so that could bring with it a lot of volatility. So he’s gonna make us have to wear our seatbelt . It’s gonna be a rougher ride.

But overall, um, it doesn’t look like there’s anything that’s gonna upset the apple cart this year with the remainder we have in the last few, uh, weeks we have left in this year. So things should be okay. Even if the Fed raises interest rates in December, that should be something that, uh, the, the market plays through.

And then, of course, the whole thing with Iran, that’s kinda like becoming background noise at this point. So for the time being, it looks like all is well. So really, what I wanna talk with you about is, uh, this year and the returns that it looks like we may end up with this year. Now, for those of you who attended our investment oversight– our investment committee’s, uh, webinar, you know that over the last three years, uh, our, our average…

uh, our client who is in a seventy stock, thirty bond portfolio, uh, has averaged ten point seven percent after fees, uh, and this is, uh, as of September thirtieth. So we’ve done very, very well for the last three years, and no complaint there, right? However, this year, if we just, uh, s- you know, slice out the calendar year of, of two thousand and twenty-six, uh, as I record this, the stock market is up thirteen to fourteen percent, and we’re not, okay?

So we’re significantly lower than that. And so I wanna go over with you the, the fact that, uh, we’re gonna struggle to make five percent this year, and the market may be significantly higher than that. So there are two reasons for it. Number one, we protected you when the Iraq– the Iran war was declared, right?

It was going to be, and, uh, you know, the fear was that they’re gonna shut down the Strait of Hormuz. All that oil would stop, and that would cause a massive recession, maybe even a depression around the world, when suddenly you choke off all the energy that people have. That could be terrible, could cause a massive recession.

And so the risk was great, and we took evasive action. We went into protect mode. And, uh, so when we did that, of course, almost always when we go into protection mode, there is what’s called an opportunity cost. And what that means is, is that we’re gonna miss out on returns that we could have made when we do that, okay?

It comes with the territory. And why am I totally at peace with that? Because we did what we told you we were gonna do, right? We protected you. The market went way down after that. You, you’ve forgotten about it, I’m sure, at this point, but it went way down when that happened. Now, it recovered, but still, it could have gotten really worse, and that’s what we wanna do, is protect you against the really worse.

Now- The really good news for me is that the four sanity checks that we introduced as a means of deciding do we protect 100% of your portfolio, do we protect 25%, 50%, et cetera, worked as designed, okay? We, we did not go into 100% protect mode, and that worked very, very well for us, so that part worked as designed.

So overall, from that perspective, if I had to do it again, I would, because at the time, I didn’t know whether or not this was gonna be another, you know, like what happened in the ’70s. When the oil embargo happened in the ’70s, the stock market went into the, the, at the time, the second-worst bear market i-i-in our history, okay?

So bad things can come when you choke the world’s oil supply off. We had to protect you from that. Now There’s another thing that happened this year which didn’t help us, and that is that our bond portfolio, bonds in general, I should say, went from thinking… The, the, the bond investors went from thinking that we’re going to lower interest rates this year, which is very good for bonds, right?

As interest rates go down, bond prices go up. So the expectation this year for bonds was they’re gonna do very well. The Fed’s gonna lower interest rates. Bond prices are gonna go way up. Well, in fact, that’s not what happened, is it? All of a sudden, with the war in Iran, inflation heated up, and the Fed now is raising interest rates to fight inflation.

Well, that’s bad for bonds. And so our bond portfolio, as almost everybody else’s bond portfolios, suffered because of that. Now, again, we’ve taken moves. We’ve made moves, and for those of you who have not seen our investment committee webinar, we went into great detail as to what we did to change up our port- our bond, pardon me, our bond portfolio to adapt to this new regime, right?

We’re now in a rising interest rate environment. And so we, we took action to, to address that, and we’re in a good place. But we did experience some losses in our bond portfolio because of that, and there was no to- no way to predict the war in Iran, okay? I wish I- I wish we could have. That would’ve been really good.

So because of those two things, right, we, we had the, the, our, our protect mode, which cost us some, some returns. But in addition, our, the bond side went down, and so the combination is what is causing our returns this year to not be where we want them to be. But again, if I had to do all this again, I would.

Because at the time, you know, it’s, it’s easy to look at and be a, you know, Monday morning quarterback, but at the time, under the circumstances we were in, our bias is always gonna be to protect you first. And then we’re gonna figure out what happens after that and, and let the chips fall where they may, okay?

So overall, the last three years, we’ve done very well. And if you look back three years ago and where you are today, I’m pretty sure you are gonna be very happy. But this year, maybe relative to the market, you might not be. But there are reasons for it, and I hope you’re good with them because I know I am.

And I would do it again. I’m just saying. All right One last thing I want to tell you is for those of you who have not signed up for our third Thursday webinar, it’s coming up on November 19, and it is our year-end tax planning webinar. Oh, my gosh, who doesn’t want to know how to save taxes? And if you know what to do, then you can do it.

And, uh, I think it’d be very beneficial for you to find out what it is, so make sure you sign up for that, okay? Uh, we should have a… We should have, like, a barcode or something, Alex, that people can just hold their phone up and, and sign up for that. What do you think? Yeah. Can you do it? Sure. Yeah. Okay, so I’m gonna just say he’s gonna do it.

It’ll be up for you. You’ll be able to see it, and, uh, just hold your phone up and register. You will be glad you will find out something that’ll save you millions of dollars in taxes. Think about it. What could you do with millions of dollars that you didn’t give to the IRS? Anyway, I’m glad you guys, uh, watched this video.

Thank you so much. You know, uh, from the bottom of my heart, I cannot thank you enough for, for being a client, being a Squipper with us. Without you, we would be nowhere. Now, remember also, bring all your friends, in- invite them to the webinar also. Maybe they can save some taxes as well. All right, that’s it for us today, and we’ll talk soon.

Economic indicators and stock market performance cannot be predicted. Opinions expressed regarding the economy and the stock market belong solely to employees of RPOA 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 employees of RPOA Advisors, Inc. (d/b/a Retirement Planners of America ) (“Retirement Planners of America”, “RPOA”). ©Copyright 2026