Adam Phillips:
Well, if you can believe it, we are almost through the end of the first half of the year. And perhaps more surprisingly than that, the market's actually hit an all time high. Last Fridays. This was the first high since February and un, unless you were fortunate enough to be living under a rock, uh, through the first half of, of the year and, and missed a lot of the drama that played out, um, we, we remember that the markets actually fell about 20% from their February peak.
In April, but since then they've recovered about 25%. So now we're looking at, at least as of this recording, we're looking at a stock market, the s and p 500, which is up just, uh, a little bit more than 5% for the year. So pretty amazing rebound here. And again, just more evidence that you don't want to. You, you don't want to give into to the temptation to sell or your emotions when it seems that we have so many risks facing us, it is so hard to predict the short term [00:01:00] moves in the market.
I. This is just additional evidence to stay the course when you're faced with these types of challenges as an investor. So as we start, as we look towards the, the second half of the year, I'm about to go into, uh, my own, uh, cave that, uh, I enter in the, uh, at the end of every quarter to start working on the updated, uh, market outlook, slides, the newsletter.
Here's some of the things that I'm focused on now. The markets, as I mentioned, they're back to an all time high. Valuations are elevated for now. The good thing is that the cease fire between Israel and Iran seems to be holding. And so investors are now going to turn their attention back to tariffs, which we are fast approaching that July 9th deadline, waiting for some additional agreements to be announced, uh, to hopefully get a little bit more clarity for ourselves.
For the Federal Reserve, uh, and for, uh, businesses around the world that are really trying to, to navigate in a, a fairly dark environment right now. The other one we're [00:02:00] watching is the big beautiful Bill and where this fiscal package ends up, uh, the, there was originally a July 4th really self-imposed deadline or a goal to get something done, but the Senate.
Continues to talk about this. There are still some hurdles, a lot of disagreement even within the Republican party. So we'll wait and see where this all shakes out. But for now, the economy is holding up. We're going to keep an eye on the
labor markets going forward. We're going to keep an eye on earning season as it gets underway here in a couple of weeks.
Uh, but, uh, but we would not suggest that, uh, the 25% gain that we've seen over the last. Couple of months. This rebound is going to continue in a linear fashion. We know that there's, we need some additional catalyst here to move higher, and we know that we're also facing some near term headwinds. And so for us, we are not stepping on the gas pedal within, uh, in portfolios.
We have a neutral allocation to equities still, but we're going to watch this and see how things play out at the end of the day. We are always going to take a long-term approach and we'll [00:03:00] respond, uh, to data and, and not to headlines and so I'll look forward to checking in with you again next time.
Until then, please feel free to reach out to your advisor if you have any questions.
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