Prepare For "The Mother Of All Blow-Off Tops" | New Harbor Financial

**Mike Preston** (0:00)
I don't think we're at the euphoria stage yet. It's been kind of like a slow, you know, really FOMO, fear of missing out stage. FOMO is not quite euphoria. And the longer that we sit in this market, that just won't correct, and every little micro drop has been rescued by money printing. You know, the longer that we sit in this, I'm more and more convinced, as I see these corrections that, you know, come right back to new highs faster, that we're going to have to really see the mother of all you four pinnacles here.

**Adam Taggart** (0:39)
Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm Thoughtful Money Founder and your host, Adam Taggart. I'm welcoming you here. Joining me and my good friends, John Lodra and Mike Preston, the lead partners from New Harbor Financial, one of the endorsed financial advisory firms. By Thoughtful Money, you've seen them here on this channel with me week after week after week in the past. We are gonna try something a little bit different today, and if it sticks, we'll keep with it going forward. John and Mike and their team there at New Harbor, they're great people, salt of the earth. Obviously, those you've been watching already know them quite well. But they're really based in sort of the practical, so what, of all the issues that we talk about here on Thoughtful Money. Okay, if you think the future is gonna look like the way Lacey Hunt sees it, or Daniel DiMartino Booth sees it, or Darius Dale sees it, or any one of the people that come on this channel, and also if this is happening in the macroeconomic environment, if these are what Trump's policies are gonna be. Okay, so what is all that gonna mean for me as the individual investor? How do I put together an actionable plan from here? So at John and Mike's behest, we're gonna try this new format here that's gonna try to dig into a little bit more of the practical how-tos than what we normally get into on this channel. We'll talk a little bit about macro first, we'll set the stage, but then we'll get into some actual hands-on sort of steps you can use to improve your situation type content. John and Mike, gentlemen, thanks so much for joining me.

**John Lodra** (2:09)
Hey, great to be with you, Adam, and thanks so much for giving us this platform. It's really what we love to do, and it's inspired by the work we do every day with our clients that applies what we see and view in markets to their lives and their specific situations.

**Mike Preston** (2:25)
Look forward to the talk, Adam. Thanks for having us here today.

**Adam Taggart** (2:29)
All right, gentlemen, we'll look. Maybe just to sort of set the stage a little bit, a lot's been going on in the world. We have a new president-elect with a very ambitious and very seemingly disruptive set of economic policies that he's already chomping at the bit, it seems, to implement. Why don't we just sort of get a sense for how you guys see the macroeconomic environment right now and then talk about some of the things that maybe most of the individual investors watching now, key steps they should consider taking either given the macroeconomic situation or the calendar, because I know we're coming up on year-end as well, and there's a lot of year-end planning steps that we've been talking a lot about in this channel. John, why don't we kick it off with you first, because I know you guys, you put out your own videos at New Harbor, and you just put one out on basically repercussions of the election.
So how much of a change agent do you see this new presidential administration being in the mix?

**John Lodra** (3:36)
Yeah, Adam, I think I probably speak for most people, regardless of their political stripes, that it's good to have the election behind us, because the circus that we all sat through, I was getting texts on my phone almost every day from both sides, with all kinds of propaganda, and just happy to have that behind me. Maybe I'm alone, but I don't think so. There's a lot of slogans or cliches in investing. One is, for example, buy the rumor, sell the news, right? And it's funny, because election cycles, if nothing, are all about headlines and promises and sound bites and whatnot. And we certainly have seen a bunch of that. But if you zoom out over the course of economic and investment history, it's not those headlines or the promises, it's bigger picture stuff that ultimately come to guide and drive what happens in markets. And we did some looking at this, and certainly in the short term, there's going to be all kinds of gyrations that are headline driven. But when you zoom out, and we might say, okay, Trump is in office, and we have a sweep in Congress, so we have a Republican sweep, what might that mean for the years ahead? We know all about the headline policies, tax cuts, deregulations, government spending, all these things that sound great in the surface, and certainly in a vacuum, our markets anyways would more or less cheer, but it's not that simple. In fact, we can go back to the last time that we had a Republican sweep, and that goes back to the turn of the century, basically George W. Bush's administration. So here's a headline, what a Republican sweep means for Congress. And again, last time we saw this was during George W. Bush's reign. And many folks may not remember this, but his two terms, both terms, saw the stock market, for example, if you want to talk about the stock market, lose value. There were negative returns if you looked at the S&P 500, for example. And that's despite the sweep of Congress and the executive suite.