Good morning. My name is Chad Taylor, managing partner with MDT Financial Advisors here in Houston, Texas. Today is Tuesday, April the eighth, and I wanted to get on and just kind of talk a little bit more about what's been going on with the markets. I know you may be tired of seeing me, but that 15 minute video that I recorded at the end of last week was quite a bit, so hopefully this one won't be 15 minutes. But I did want to get on and talk a little bit more about what we're seeing in the markets. So today is Tuesday, and as I'm recording this, the markets are up pretty big today, after Monday being a pretty wild day. So it's all still revolving around the tariff issues and the reciprocal tariffs specifically that are causing all the angst right now. And so all that, and I covered this in the last video, but it all got put into place last week, Thursday and Friday.

Were pretty rough in the markets, specifically Friday going into the weekend. And so when markets are bad like that, it's hard to relax over the weekend knowing that Monday, you just don't know what's going to happen. And so Sunday afternoon, as I always do, especially when the markets are rough, I check the futures at five o'clock in the evening on Sunday. And I know at that point for the most part what the market's going to do. And when I checked this Sunday, they were down quite a bit. So come into the office and the market opens. I don't know, it opened eight or 900 points down on the Dow, which is after Thursday and Friday, another significant move on the downside. And that's where it was open. But that did come off the lows from what the futures were for telling the day before. And so that's what was going on for most of the morning.

And right now, as I mentioned in that video, the market seemed very emotional about all this. What are we worried about? Well, you're worried that the tariffs are somehow going to push us into a recession. And if there's a recession, the markets are going to be pretty rough for a little while. If there's no recession, usually what you'll see is we'll find a bottom somewhere here and then kind of work our way back up and go on. If you remember Wells Fargo's base case or the Wells Fargo Investment Institute have come out and said that yes, the tariffs are probably going to slow the economy down. Probably not a bad thing considering that the fourth quarter was a little frothy as far as the economy goes, which could have led to more inflation anyway. So it probably needed to slow down just a bit, which is what we're getting. We got in the first quarter of this year. But we think that all that's going on could slow the economy down, but at this point, we don't think it will push us into a recession. We'll see, trying to fine tune a $30 trillion economy is tough. And so will it stay out of a recession, will it not? We don't know yet, but that's what our base scenario is right now.

And so yesterday it was down big in the morning and then all of a sudden Dante Meese, who sits right next to me, comes around the corner and said, well, we've got a rally going on. And we watched the market go from on the Dow Jones Industrial average down 900 to up 800 or something along those lines in a matter of no time. It ran up and then almost as fast as it ran up, it fell back again and went right back to where it was and then ultimately closed down. But well off the lows of the day yesterday. And so what that tells you is that there's, what made it go up was there was a rumor that they were going to put the tariffs on hold for 90 days, and then the White House came out and said, no, that wasn't the case.

And so that's what it ran up on, the optimism and sold off on the confirmation that it wasn't going to happen. And so that's emotion, that's markets are watching the news, they're reacting to the news, and usually that's what you get in one of these kind of scary times. This was the sixth fastest drawdown since the 1930s. So you wouldn't be human if you weren't a little nervous about what's going on with this. Whether or not you agree with what the reasoning behind it, it still a little, it is concerning. And so we wake up today in the futures we're up last night, which always makes for a little bit nicer evening, and the markets are up today. And there again, it's just more on rumors that are discussion that some of the talks are going well, and maybe that helps stop some of the tariffs that are being put in place or that will come online here shortly.

And so I've been through this a number of times through the years. What you see on these volatile markets like this, these emotional markets, is just happened yesterday. That was in a microcosm of how it works. When there's some bad news that comes out, the markets sell off. If there's good news or rumors of good news, they can run up sometimes. But if you remember, and I know we've done a video on this a number of times, and this is one of the why it's usually better not to try to time the market because usually the best days in the market happen around the worst days in the market. Yesterday was a bad day, Friday was pretty rough. Today it's a good day. You've got the market going up. So these good days happen with these bad days. Hence the reason of trying not to move in and out too terribly much because you can miss these good days, and we need these good days to offset those bad days until it calms down.

Now, I love days so far, like today when they're up big. I mean, that's great, especially after what we've gone through Thursday, Friday and Monday, but it just leads to more volatility. So I would caution you to be getting too excited about what's been going on today, not be too pessimistic about what's gone on in the last week. Let's see how it kind of plays out. What I am noticing is obviously if you have a hundred percent of your money in the stock market, you're going to follow along with what the stock market's doing. If you have more of a balanced portfolio, where you have 50% in stocks, 50% in bonds, 65% in stocks, 35% in bonds, 40% in stocks, 60% in bonds, some kind of balanced portfolio, those portfolios are holding up. They're down, of course, because everything is down, but they are holding up.

They a little bit better right now because the bond market has been going up as interest rates and yields have been coming down. So versus 2022 when you had stocks falling and bonds falling this time, you have stocks falling. But bonds have been helping to offset some of those losses which make the portfolios, it's what asset allocation is supposed to do. So that's a real quick update. As always, if you want to talk about it, please call us, talk to any of us. This is the best time. If you have thoughts on your mind and your situation is always different than everybody else's. So staying the course may be the right thing. Not staying the course and make changes may be the right thing. It's completely different for everyone. So if you do want to talk about it, please let us know. I hope you have a great day. Thank you.