The second quarter was a tough quarter, particularly at the end. Continued emphasis on government fiscal and monetary policies, both here and abroad, played havoc with bond, stock, and precious metal investors. It’s enough to make my hair turn white!

Click on my video to get my thoughts on the past quarter (over-reaction) and the upcoming one. The year is not over!

Hello, Mike Brady here with Generosity Wealth Management, a comprehensive full service wealth management firm headquartered right here in Boulder, Colorado. I’m here for my second quarter review and my third quarter preview.

I wish I could sit here in July 2013 and say that my analysis and the reason for markets going up or going down is because of the profitability of this company or that company or this sector or that sector, but really the big news both this quarter and even as we go back to the beginning of the year with the fiscal cliff and other big topics at the time, has been the intervention and the discussion of the fiscal and monetary policy of the government. In this past quarter it has also been some news out of China that really rattled things, and then of course the continuation there in Europe.

In the middle to kind of late June, Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, gave an indication that the quantitative easing would start to drop because the Fed believed that the economy is doing much better, so therefore it’s not needed the easy money that we’ve seen in the last four to five years. What happened is, the bond market really reacted, in my opinion, overreacted, and so the prices went down on bonds, which means that the yields go up. I believe that’s going to settle… there was a lot of outflows from bond funds and bond ETF or the selling of it. I think that once people kind of step back and realize that wow – I’m not going to get any yield in a money market or a CD, etc., they’re going to reengage those particular funds and ETF. So I think that it’s really an overreaction.

At the same time, the kind of equivalent to the Fed over in China, their central bank, also there was a perception that they might have policies that would lead to a credit crunch. The Chinese market went way down as well and I think that was an overreaction. While it’s painful when that stuff happened, I’m not overly concerned as we’re going forward into the third quarter.

Europe continues to be a mess. Look at my videos going back for two years. I’m just going to sound like I’m saying the same thing over and over every quarter. Europe I think is going to continue to be a real problem. This past quarter, those areas that had problems were dividend paying stocks, bonds as I already talked about, and gold. Gold and silver has lost its luster. I think that it’s overreacted on a down side, but hopefully, if you’ve been watching my videos and listening to me, you really shouldn’t have more than, if at all, each client is different – you really shouldn’t have more than 4% or 5% anyway. If it goes down a significant amount, I think it was 23% down just in this last quarter after a huge run up for a number of years, that’s going to majorly impact what you’re doing. I think that the best thing to do is to keep the big picture in mind.

I’m going to throw up on the chart there inflection points for the last 15 years. You’re going to see that where we are, the little arrow that’s pointing there. I don’t believe that we’re at the top of a crevasse waiting to go all the way and straight down. If I were to show you a graph on back all the way to 1900, you would see that these things are normal, these variations like what you’ve seen and a tough quarter that we had, the second quarter, which really took away some of the gain from the first quarter. The reason why I’m not showing you that chart is most people’s time horizon is not another 112 years, so I’m really kind of showing the last 15 years, and hopefully your time horizon is long, even if you’ve just retired, I hope you’re going to live a very long time. I think that some of the overreaction is because the concern about the Fed, but I think the Fed, they have a rosier picture than what I’ve really seen. I think some of their inflation numbers are wrong as well.

I’m going to throw another chart up there. We’re going to see historical returns by holding period. What this shows is going back to 1950, 62 years, that the longer you hold historically, the range of your return in the various sector has a tendency to start to normalize out. Diversification, I think is really key in certain quarters and years, as I talked about gold already, that really help you. This past quarter it hurt you, so therefore, hopefully you didn’t have 100% of all of your assets in gold. That’s the purpose for diversification. It’s not a panacea in that in a generally trending down market, diversified portfolio may be down as well. However, I do think that that’s a wise approach as a tactic and a technique in order to reach your particular strategy. I keep stressing that you have to know where you’re going and have a plan, etc.

A little summary here. For the second quarter gold and dividend paying stocks, the Chinese market in general, and bonds were down, but I think that it was an overreaction. I am optimistic in that regard for the third quarter. I don’t believe, as I see things right now, that the third quarter will bring forth some huge decline and we all run for the door. I do think that we’re going to continue to be in a trading range, both this year and next year. That’s why having good managers that can take advantage of that is important. I’m a little disappointed that in June, some of those managers might not have foreseen that quick or abruptly as they could, but I think it’s an overreaction. It think it’s just a blip at this particular point.

Mike Brady, Generosity Wealth Management, (303) 747-6455.

By the way, I’m having a seminar on the 16th. Give Cassidy a call at my office if you would like to attend. It’s one hour. I’m a straight to the point, this is what I think and why I think it… My attention span is not greater than an hour so I certainly can’t expect anybody else listening to me to have an attention span greater than an hour. I’ll be very sensitive to the time. (303) 747-6455. You have a wonderful day. Thanks. Bye bye.