Money Life with Chuck Jaffe

Victoria Fernandez, chief market strategist at Crossmark Global Investments, says she expects the post-midterm market to live up to history — meaning it will be up a year from now — but not without bumps and heightened volatility along the way. She expects continued rotation away from the Mag 7 stocks, and thinks that will lead to a Santa Claus rally near year's end, though she notes that Santa's bag may be light this year. One issue she flags is that there will be less stimulus in 2027, not just because of the election results but because 2026 had a lot of stimulus; that reduction may slow the economy enough that the Federal Reserve can avoid major rate cuts, allowing the market to take a gentle pullback, which she thinks would be a good thing before it regathers strength as the rotation plays out.
Nate Miles, head of retirement at Allspring Global Investments, discusses the firm's 2026 Retirement Study, which found that target-date funds and other default choices in retirement plans are more effective and popular with younger workers, but that savers want more control and the chance to generate more income as they approach retirement age. Upon retirement, savers' use of target-date funds drops dramatically, reflecting more nuanced needs that one-size solutions don't fit as comfortably.
Plus, after an election season in which consumers' phones were bombarded with mostly unwanted political messages, Brad Herrmann, chief executive officer at Text-Em-All — a mass-messaging and two-way SMS platform — discusses common texting myths and ways to make the most of technology while avoiding the worst, noting that while consumers want to avoid spam they don't want to miss the latest news from their child's school system. He explains why mass texting and spam aren't the same thing, how to recognize legitimate messages from unfamiliar numbers and when to send STOP messages versus ignoring unsolicited texts completely and more.

Howard Yaruss, a professor at New York University, says that the terrible consumer sentiment numbers will show up in the economy because the problems those numbers reflect will not be solved quickly. Moreover, he says that the artificial intelligence evolution will include a significant downturn because capital expenditure projections are too big to hold up. Yaruss, the author of "Understandable Economics: Because Understanding Our Economy Is Easier Than You Think and More Important Than You Know," says, however, that the best long-term strategy for investors will be to ride out a slowdown sticking to a long-term plan, rather than trying to dance around the market's increasing volatility. 
David Goodsell, executive director of the Natixis Investment Managers Center for Investor Insight discusses its 2026 Global Retirement Index, which measures retirement security around the world, and which found that the United States fell three places from last year, pushing it out of the top half of 44 countries studied. Goodsell says the modest drop in teh rankings was due to renewed financial pressures, including mounting public debt, inflation, and uneven access to employer-sponsored savings along with a heightened burden with 81% of investors saying that funding retirement is increasingly their own responsibility.
Plus, Chuck reveals the results of his long-running Halloween tradition of offering kids a choice of cash or candy. This year, the children who came to Chuck's house had choices ranging from straight cash to pure candy to "Halloween Lotto" and giving to charity, and the results surprised Gail, Chuck's wife, and they may surprise you too!

Omar Aguilar, chief executive and chief investment officer at Schwab Asset Management, says current levels of inflation  and interest rate could put an end to the bull market over the next few quarters, but he doesn't think the bull market will suffer a bubble-like ending. Aguilar does have valuation concerns and thinks some repricing of future profitability around artificial intelligence is necessary, but he suggests it will be more of a pause and an adjustment than a roadblock.
Aguilar was one of the headliners at the Schwab IMPACT Conference held in Boston last week, and today represents the last of the interviews Chuck conducted at the event. Those conversations include:
-- Tom Lydon, founder of ETF Trends and chief executive officer at Global Trends Investments -- who used to be a Money Life regular and who has made over 600 appearances on the show -- discussing evolutions in the ETF business.
-- Brian Smith, head of Morgan Stanley Investment Management's Wealth Education Center, talking about how high portfolio concentration risk is right now, because so few stocks make up such a large part of the big indexes, but then are also driving returns in many other parts of an ordinary investor's seemingly diversified portfolio.
-- Reed Fraasa, founder of Highland Financial Advisors, covers the importance of having a financial plan you can be comfortable with and whether high net worth clients – the people at the top of the K-shaped economy – are out of sorts like the rest of us when it comes to how they feel about living in times sticky inflation and rising interest rates.
-- Tom Haught, chairman and chief executive officer at Sequoia Financial Group, which has been aggressively buying independent firms since 2023. He speaks about the concept of adviser independence and what difference it makes for clients if they get an adviser who is a sole practitioner, the head of a small shop, affiliated with a larger firm or comes from one of the national wire house brands.

Schwab IMPACT — the world's largest conference of registered investment advisors — has ended, but Money Life's coverage of the three-day event in Boston last week resumes today with Simeon Hyman, global investment strategist at ProShares, discussing how this week's election will likely have minimal market impact, even if it is a Democratic sweep, talks about what he expects out of the Federal Reserve to do into next year and how he is reading the bond market and generating income at a time when yields are up but so are fears.
Before we get to Hyman and the other interviews from IMPACT, the talk starts with regular Monday guest Vijay Marolia, chief investment officer at Regal Point Capital. In "The Week That Is," he discusses Binance and whether the world's largest cryptocurrency theft is changing or strengthening his feelings about crypto, a government report showing consumers are spending more on food and shelter as a percentage of their budget than they have in at least 15 years, and he gives his take on some of the complex financial tools that had everyone talking at Schwab IMPACT.
Then it's back to interviews recorded during the conference, featuring:
— Andrew Torok, a vice president at Vest Financial, discussing the firm's Synthetic Borrow program, which allows investors to access cash without selling their portfolios, effectively borrowing against their money like a margin loan, but without some of the risks generally associated with margin plays. 
— James Kaufman, senior wealth management advisor for OpenArc Corporate Advisory talks about how the firm is preparing clients to deal with their current fears about the market turning, while still climbing the wall of worry higher.
— Mamadou-Abou Sarr, co-Founder and president of V-Square Quantitative Management, talks about portfolio construction and what most investors should be looking at to replace the classic 60-40 asset allocation.

It's Day Three of Money Life at Schwab IMPACT, the world's largest conference of registered investment advisers, and the talk ranges from buying the hottest emerging tech companies before they go public to how the artificial intelligence giants don't look so great when viewed through the lens of free cash flow, because all of the spending they are doing isn't going straight to the bottom line.
Here's today's lineup:
— Som Priestley, head of global investment solutions, Americas, for T. Rowe Price
— co-manager of the T. Rowe Price Goldman Sachs Private Markets Fund, an interval fund that launched this summer — discusses the pre-IPO market, how it's not just about the big names that are making headlines and the risk if the headliners fall short of expectations.
— Laurence Russian, founding partner at ABS Global Investments and portfolio manager of The Pre-IPO & Growth Fund — and interval fund that opened in January — addresses the same issues as Priestley, noting
— Bonnie Treichel, founder and chief solutions officer at Endeavor Retirement discusses the generation of retirement savers that have never faced a bear market and how that lack of experience demands that they prepare now for that event, no matter when it might actually happen. 
— With portfolio personalization being one of the biggest topics at Schwab Impact, Adam Gebler, head of wealth for the Americas for FTSE Russell, discusses the company's recent survey on direct indexing, which found that advisers believe it's going mainstream now, and that advances in technology will make it easier for average investors to participate.
— Michael Mack, client portfolio manager for VictoryShares, who says investors should be looking beyond the A.I. hype and use free cash-flow to determine the quality companies in technology now. Using that free cash-flow model, he notes, would eliminate a lot of the biggest A.I. names from a portfolio of quality stocks.