Hello, my name is Chad Taylor, managing partner with MDT Financial Advisors here in Houston, Texas. I hope that your year is starting off great.

I wanted to get on here and talk real quick about the bond market. The markets in general have done better so far this year after a very challenging year in 2022 for the stock market and the bond market, which, if you follow history, that's not really normal. Usually, you don't have both the stock and the bond market falling in the same year or for the entire year. It hasn't happened in a long, long time, but it did. Things have gotten better since the beginning of the year and even really in both markets, since October they've been going up.

I saw a chart this week that I wanted to share that just talks about the bond market specifically, so let me share my screen here. Okay, if you can see this chart, I think it just says the title of it, Softening Inflation May Extend Long-Term Bond Rally. What this chart shows is if inflation continues to trend down, like it has been, and the Fed doesn't feel the need to raise rates as much as they have been, what we're saying here is since October, I guess it's showing October 26th, you've had a pretty good rally in the bond market. Now, it was pretty rough to that point and so we're still not back to zero, but at least it's trending in the right direction. What this is showing is longer term bonds, of course, have done better than shorter term bonds, which was opposite from the beginning of the year until that October timeframe.

But if all this continues, where inflation does continue to fall a little bit, the Fed is going to meet next week, probably will raise rates again next meeting. Hopefully, it's not quite as much as what they have been raising because inflation is showing signs that it is pulling back a bit, but we'll see what happens here the first half of the year. But at least at this point, bonds are finally starting to act like normal, or whatever normal is, but are starting to trend back up a little bit.

If you have any questions about this or anything else, please don't hesitate to give us a call. I hope you have a good year. If there's anything we can do, let us know. Thank you. Bye-bye.