Does A "Lost Decade" For Stocks Lie Ahead? | New Harbor Financial

**John Lodera** (0:00)
There are lost decades, we know this from history. And it's not just a nice thing on a chart, it is a painful experience for someone that has done a good job and built a foundation to witness that and suffer that. Maybe it adds another 10 or 15 years of working life to their picture. This is real serious stuff, a lot is at stake, and it's not crazy to think about reducing risk, even if you're younger.

**Adam Taggart** (0:33)
Welcome to Thoughtful Money, Thoughtful Money founder and your host, Adam Taggart. Welcome you here for one of our special monthly summaries with the team from New Harbor Financial. They're on this channel with me every week, usually following one of our big interviews. But every month now for, guys, I think past six months or so, we've had a dedicated episode, just you guys catching everybody up on your general outlook, what you're seeing in the overall markets, what you see lying ahead. That's what we're gonna do here. Folks, I'm joined as usual by lead partners at New Harbor, Michael Preston and John Lodera. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining me this week. It's not like there's anything to talk about, guys.

**John Lodera** (1:15)
Oh boy, Adam, what a headline driven world we live in today, whether it's obviously the war and that's nothing to laugh about, of course. Lots of developments going on in the Middle East and Iran and broader area. Headlines about AI, private credit. There's certainly no shortage of things for headline driven investors to be watching and worried about. We generally will tell folks don't ever trade headlines, instead look at data and let market signals guide things. We've certainly got plenty to talk about there as well. But yeah, it's been a very active headline driven environment. The markets so far, even though they've been pretty volatile of late, are still just low single digits from their all-time highs. So these things probably aren't fully priced in if they're destined to become bigger issues.

**Adam Taggart** (2:07)
All right. Well, as I said, John, Mike, you want to give any introductory words before we just roll up our sleeves and dig in?

**Michael Preston** (2:13)
I just want to say it's good to be back. It's been a little while since we talked and there's a lot going on, and really not that much damage in the indices if you look at the raw data. But let's dig in and see if we could see what some of the nuances mean and explain some of them.

**Adam Taggart** (2:29)
Well, why don't we start with the big news, which is I think since the last time you guys were on the channel, which was just last week, the US and Israel have gone to war with Iran.
Implications. Obviously, this has created some market volatility. It has sent the price of oil spiking, and on the day that we're talking here, Friday, the price of oil has continued to jump higher. One, because Iran has been threatening and in practice, I think, kind of closing the strait of Hormuz. There's very little getting through there right now. But also, the day we're talking, the president announced that he's not really open to negotiations with Iran. He doesn't want to hear from them until they're ready to talk about total capitulation, total surrender. And that obviously made the price of oil jump pretty substantially after that was declared. So, yeah, gentlemen, while we're seeing some immediate volatility in the market in the first few days of the war, how big of a deal do you expect us to be market-wise? And I'll let whoever wants to take that can start here.

**John Lodera** (3:43)
Yeah, I'll just chime in. So, this week is easy to summarize in terms of what's happened so far. You noted oil prices have jumped quite dramatically, Adam.
The US dollar has rallied pretty considerably as well. More or less everything else has sold off to some degree. US stocks, non-U.S. stocks, precious metals, Bitcoin, bonds. It really is almost two things have been the only things relatively immune from the action this week anyways, and that's again the US dollar and oil. Now, those are short-term factors. We obviously think about much, much bigger things. But we have seen some, not utterly concerning, but some minor and moderate degradation in the battery of indicators that we look at. So we haven't really materially changed our allocations at all, in fact. But we have added some tail risk hedges in the form of puts, and we can talk about that as we get further in. But not a whole lot of action in the market thus far that has us too concerned about. Mike, I think, mentioned we're just a short bit from all time highs, and we can certainly dive deeper into that. Mike, please add on to what I just talked about there.