Good morning. My name is Chad Taylor, Managing Partner with MDT Financial Advisors here in Houston, Texas. I wanted to jump on and just record a quick video, just talking about what's going on. Today is October 31st, Halloween, so hopefully, you've got a Halloween event to go to or just enjoy watching the Astros here in Houston. We have the Houston Astros playing tonight and so I'll probably be running back and forth from the TV to hand out candy. But whatever you do, I hope you have a great night.

So last week, the markets were a little bit better, the last weekend, really the last couple of weeks, they've been better. When you looked at the Dow Jones last week, was up a little over 5%. The S&P was up about four. The NASDAQ was up a little over two, so it was a good week and that was the second straight week of gains amongst a flurry of earnings and economic data that came out.

So it was a good week. The Fed that meets this week and they're expected to raise interest rates by 0.75% or 75 basis points this week. But they are expected to maybe signal that their increases are going to be less going forward. So that started coming into the markets in the last couple of weeks. We'll see if that happens. Even as soon as the December meeting, which will be the last meeting of the year, there was talk that they would raise it again by 75 basis points now, maybe it's a little bit less, we'll see, no one knows for sure. This week, if they do raise it by 75%, that's expected, if it's more, that's probably going to be a little rough on the markets, if it's less, maybe a little bit better on the markets. But we'll see how it goes this week. But it is expected to come in at 75 basis points.

Mortgage rates went up again last week.  So a better week, are we out of the woods as far as the markets go?

Who knows? Probably not. And there's a lot going on still. We still want to remain cautious in this environment. I always say don't hesitate to, let's talk about it. Every day, you ask yourself and we ask ourselves, do we make changes? And the answer is maybe. If something's changed in your life, if you're a lot more nervous than you have been in the past, if your plan is not... If your investments are not paired with your plan, well, it may not hurt to make changes and let's talk about that.

But if nothing's changed as far as your financial position goes, you don't have a big cash need coming up. If your investments are aligned with your investment plan, making no changes might be the best thing to do. But let's talk about that. Let's at least have a conversation if we haven't done our review, our strategy meeting or even if we have, let's do it again.

We'll get through this. We talk about, investing is not always easy and it's challenging from time to time but we'll get through this. But let's have conversations about that. Oh, required minimum distributions. We're in that timeframe that everyone that has a required minimum distribution or RMD, we need to take that before years in. If you remember, it's pretty painful, if you don't, I think whatever you were supposed to have taken, the Fed charges an extra tax on that and so you pay a 50% tax on what you should have taken.

So make sure that if you haven't done your RMD, let's go ahead and take care of that definitely before the end of the year. With that, I hope you have a great week. I hope you have a good Halloween. I hope the Astros do well. If you're a Phillies fan, sorry but I hope you have a good week. Please let us know if we can be of any help. Have a great day.