Joey 0:01

All right, welcome back to another episode of Wealth Unplugged. This is a market chatter dated April 6, 2026. My name is Joey Loss.

Adam Van Wie 0:10

And I'm Adam Van Wie.

Joey 0:13

And seems like we're still talking about Iran and all eyes are still on oil. What do you think?

Adam Van Wie 0:19

I think that's right. I think that we've mentioned several times on both our radio show and this podcast that the key to this market is, is getting things wrapped up in Iran and getting the Straits back open and the price of oil dropping. I think below 80 would be a good number to look for.

Joey 0:38

Yeah, it's kind of amazing. I mean, oil always matters, right? But I can't think of a time where the focus of what the market does day to day has been more about oil than now.

Adam Van Wie 0:51

Yeah, we were in such a good trend there with the price of oil for quite some time. You know, it really spiked about four years ago and then the price steadily come down and it had gotten to a point where we were seeing some really cheap gas prices across the US and that's important for consumers, but really where oil impacts everything is in the price of the goods that we buy, because oil is used in the production of just about everything. And so at a time when people are still worried about inflation, the last thing you need is to have one of the main inputs to every consumer good that we buy spiking. And so that's why it's just so important right now that we get that price back down.

Joey 1:36

Yeah. Well, Adam, I know you had some notes. Why don't you tell us kind of what's been going on, key events over the last few weeks?

Adam Van Wie 1:44

Yeah, it's certainly been interesting a couple of weeks. We saw, two weeks ago, we saw a pretty, pretty ugly week. We lost a bit of ground in the market. Still not a lot of damage done, honestly. I mean, yeah, it feels bad, but we ended the first quarter, quarter and most diversified portfolios ended up maybe down a couple to up 1% somewhere in that range. As long as you were positioned in, in a way that, that you didn't put all your eggs in the US Large cap basket, you probably turned out a little bit better than what you might have thought, but the week was pretty ugly. But then this past week we actually saw the opposite happen. And we saw one, actually the best day of 2026 so far on Tuesday. And that was on the hopes that something, some kind of deal would be struck in Iran. And that's kind of continued over into this week. As of this morning. We're seeing some green on the screen. So last week was a pretty good week. We saw the market up more than 3%. We saw. We saw the NASDAQ up more than 4%. So really a solid week last week. And this is why you can't time the market, because what material changed from two weeks ago to last week? And I would argue that it was almost nothing. And yet the market went in two opposite directions and did so pretty severely.

Joey 3:15

Yeah, well, I think we had. We've been deciding, when do we need to write something to clients? Because there's an art to that. You don't want to write something when an event hasn't really become something yet because you're creating alarm by writing in the first place. But then once it becomes an event, you want to write something that's thoughtful and helps people stay the course and keep their heads cool. And we just happened to have picked, like, the best day to send it. And the points that we made were about, you know, look at last year, April 9th. Nobody knew exactly when a recovery would come or how swift it would be, if it was going to happen in the first place. And, you know, that was an incredibly swift recovery and then not quite the same recovery last Tuesday, but the fact that we sent it out right before that ended up just feeling good, that was pretty ideal on our side.

Adam Van Wie 4:01

Yeah, definitely. Sometimes you get lucky.

Joey 4:04

Better to be lucky than good.

Adam Van Wie 4:05

There was no rhyme or reason to picking Tuesday. It just felt appropriate because we had seen the market go down for five, six weeks now. And actually, in the case of the nasdaq, the, the last high was actually on back in October of last year. So we just been drifting sideways to down for quite some time and it wasn't feeling very good and decided to send out that communication. And what do you know, it. It looks like, at least for now, it's the recent bottom.

Joey 4:36

Yeah, well, you've commented that really the, the issue with oil is not so much the price today, which of course it's not great, but if oil stays heightened for a period of time, that's when we get into real danger. What, what is the thought there?

Adam Van Wie 4:48

Definitely that's where you start seeing the inflationary pressure, because as I mentioned, it's just an input into everything there. There's almost nothing you, you can make in this world that doesn't involve an oil product at some point along that process. It's just. It's everywhere. And so if you are paying twice as much as you were five weeks ago for the same input. Yeah, you're going to see some upward pressure on prices and until, and then, not to mention any type of distribution is going to use oil as well. So if you're moving by train, if you're moving by ship, if you're moving by truck, you're, you're using some sort of oil products to get it there. And so it just affects every point along the supply chain. And that is problematic when you're looking at $110 gas and oil.

Joey 5:41

Yeah, well, and a lot of these companies have contracts at certain prices and then if oil spikes immediately after that, I mean, there's things that they do on the cash management side. Maybe they own oil futures and things like that to hedge a potential change in oil prices. But no matter what, you can have an excellent product and excellent business and a gouge in oil prices can help you run out of cash if it's up too high, too long and, you know, perfectly good operations can shut down and that trickles up. So. Yeah, I'm with you. I think that is the fear.

Adam Van Wie 6:09

Yeah. And you're already seeing, I saw some news this weekend about a fuel surcharge being slapped on some product and that's what happens during these times. So the goal is for companies to pass that, that pain of the increased prices along the supply ch. Chain to their, to their buyers. But that ends up that. What happens then is that the, the middlemen then implement a fuel surcharge and then the, the trucking companies implement a fuel surcharge and it just gets passed on down to the consumer. And you and I are going to feel it in the, in the way of paying more for everything we buy.

Adam Van Wie 6:49

So that's what I'm worried about. I mean, I'm not, I'm not like really, really worried at this point because I do have some belief that, that this will get wrapped up in the next four weeks or so in one way or another. But I, I can't, there's no way to know what will actually happen. But I know there's a lot of pressure on the administration and people involved in this situation to get this wrapped up relatively quickly. And so I feel like that is the most likely outcome when that. There's just a, there's a tremendous amount of pressure right now to get this over with.

Joey 7:29

Yeah, well, Trump has an address at 1pm Eastern today, so just a few hours. I don't know what they're going to talk about.

Adam Van Wie 7:35

I didn't even see that. Okay, so that's, yeah, that could be

Joey 7:38

had one last Wednesday it was really no new information. No, he just kind of threaded together everything he'd been saying. But, you know, love him or hate him, Trump is definitely a stock market president and when the stock market goes down, it does affect the kinds of decisions that he makes. So if we see more downward momentum at some point because it's kind of just there's no news, which I imagine no news for the next week or two is going to be kind of bad news. I would think, just based on how it's gone,

Joey 8:09

I would think that you're going to start to see him kind of pivot more than he already has.

Adam Van Wie 8:14

No doubt about it. He, he is not the type that likes seeing the S P go down under his watch. So think whatever it takes to keep that up will be the most likely course of action.

Joey 8:27

Yeah, I think that's right.

Adam Van Wie 8:29

Yep. So yeah, the, it was actually. So that's one part of the stock market, the other part is economic data and sort of the macro picture not including geopolitical events. And man, we had a pretty good week for economic data. It was, it was really kind of something else. I, I going through this when I was putting get doing my radio prep for Saturday morning, it was a little shocking how, how good the, the numbers were in terms of jobs, in terms of

Adam Van Wie 9:06

the, the just economic data in general. It was, it was pretty impressive. So I, I just want to do a quick rundown of what we saw last week and feel free to agree or disagree with me, Joey, but, but give me your thoughts on what we saw. So first we saw the ISM manufacturing report come out and that came in at 52.7. The way that that report works, any number above 50 shows expansion. Any number below 50 shows contraction. So we've now seen pretty solid expansion numbers for three months in a row. I don't like just taking a one off and saying, okay, this is a trend, but at three months you have to be feeling kind of good about the direction of the manufacturing sector, which has been kind of in a, in a pretty bad spot for the last 18 months. So, so I was encouraged about that. We saw retail sales come in at positive 0.6%. They're now up 3.7% from a year ago. That beat expectations by 1/10 of a percent. A little bit of that attributed to a bounce back from slow January sales because of weather. Still a solid number. We got the ADP jobs report on Wednesday. The estimate was 40,000. The actual number came in at 62,000 jobs created. Jobless claims came in at a really low 210,000. And continuing claims fell a bit to. There's hovering around 1.8 million. That's a strong number. Then on Good Friday, even though the market was closed, we saw the government release their jobs report, and that one was a really big number. Employers added 100, 178,000 jobs in March, and that more than reversed the 133,000 jobs that were lost in February, according to the same report. And the expectations for that one were for 60,000. So it was almost a 3x the expectation. That's. That's pretty big. Also interesting, it lowered the unemployment rate from 4.4% to 4.3%, which I doubt anyone would have predicted.

Joey 11:19

Yeah, I was shocked by that when you were going through that. I was like, wow, those are. I mean, half of those pieces are the arguments that stalled the Fed from continuing its rate cuts. Of course, I don't think they made the wrong decision waiting and seeing with regards to Iran, but there were notes about jobs, concerns about inflation outside of that. And so to see jobs making a bit of a surge back is very positive and welcome. And it kind of agrees with what we've seen, like when there's moments of positive headlines in the market or in the news, we've seen the market, like, almost dying to go back up. And from my perspective,

Joey 12:03

the market knows all of this data that you're talking about. And if we can just get rid of the Iran problem and the oil issues that are arising out of it, it's like the market wants to continue what it's been doing for the last few years based on all this data that you're talking about. It just can't do it with confidence until that's resolved. Is that kind of your read?

Adam Van Wie 12:21

Yeah, definitely. The uncertainty is what's keeping the market down, because it's certainly not corporate profits. They've been rising and rising at a pretty good clip, actually. And so I honestly think companies are in about as good a shape as they've been in since COVID And usually when that happens, the market does go up because profits increasing. Therefore, your discounted cash flow analysis looks better and the values go up. So

Adam Van Wie 12:51

for something like this to happen, you usually have to throw a wrench in the works. And that's exactly what the Iran situation has done. Now, on the flip side of that, if you're making an argument for why to buy now, the valuations look a lot better than they did five weeks ago. So I'm not making a call if this is an Entry point or not, that's not what we do. But I just objectively would you rather pay under 20 for a PE ratio or would you rather pay in the, in the 24 range? Of course you'd rather pay less long term. That's the odds of that being a good investment are going to be higher than if you paid peak market valuation prices.

Joey 13:34

Yeah, I mean the momentum's gone which is a factor that matters when you're talking about short and intermediate term gains. True. But when you're looking at mag 7 stocks they've never been a better deal. I mean they haven't been a better deal for a long time than they are probably right now. Specifically like Meta or Microsoft. Those guys trade in the mid to high 30s and they're down to what I think Meta is below 20.

Adam Van Wie 13:58

And Microsoft, Microsoft just been absolutely decimated stock price wise. But fundamentally their business models haven't changed. AI has not made them obsolete by, in any measure yet. The worry is about what it will do in the future of course but today nothing has changed.

Joey 14:18

Yeah, agreed. So yeah, I mean I, I, I feel pretty optimistic about US markets and I feel like I'm a little less in touch with international markets at this point because we do see a lot of pain in, in certain markets like Korea they've already gone to like government employees. They're being encouraged to alternate work from home, work at the office to help cut down on gas usage and countries like that are just in such a different position than the US because of their total dependence on partners for oil and energy. They're totally energy dependent whereas we have achieved sort of a notable energy independence that insulates us to some degree. So US markets I feel good about as long as, you know, back to where we started. As long as oil doesn't stay too high for too long. Every other fundamental looks pretty good to me.

Adam Van Wie 15:09

Yeah. Ironically as I look at my board today, South Korea is the, the best performing international market up 2.2%. So I, I, I think there is some optimism around the Iran situation. That's what that tells me. I, I don't think they would be rallying. That market wouldn't be going up if, if they were really going to run out of oil.

Joey 15:32

Yeah, well, I don't know what the South Korea VIX is called but, but it's definitely high these days. or 7% a day.

Adam Van Wie 15:36

Yeah, no doubt they were down 5 Yeah. And they were the, I think the number one stock market in the world going into the problem year to date they had been really On a tear and then this hit and obviously went the other direction and it went pretty hard.

Joey 15:53

Yeah, well, it was cool to see, you know, still international developed and international emerging and I think small caps, particularly small cap value ended the first quarter up. Year to date, you know, they lost a lot of their steam. They were up I think over 10% all three of those before Iran conflict started. But yeah, they still finished positive.

Adam Van Wie 16:17

They did. Also interesting, only 5 of the 12s and P500 sectors were negative. And I include semiconductors as a separate, separate category within the S P500. Not everyone does that. But I really think they deserve their own category at this point because it's such a huge and important business.

Adam Van Wie 16:37

But yeah, only 5 of 12 were negative. Every other sector was positive. So it wasn't the brutal quarter that you might have thought just looking at the, at the headline numbers.

Joey 16:51

Yeah, well, one thing to note is that's true of any really diversified investor. But if you've been a Mag7 investor for the last five or six years and you've just totally kicked the butt of every financial advisor, you know, owning a variety of index funds, this is, it doesn't feel like what you're saying is true for them because they might be, you know, if they own a bunch of software, Salesforce, Meta, Microsoft, they could be down 15, 20% or more at this point easily. And so we'd be remiss not to point out that this is why diversification matters. There's going to be periods where owning a few individual popular momentum stocks kicks the pants off of a more steady, diversified approach. But over the long term, the difference in performance in these moments really does start to matter, especially when you're close to spending the money. When you're young, it's not as pivotal, but when you're closing in on retirement, you know, it is not cool to lose 15, 20% in a market where a diversified portfolio might be losing two.

Adam Van Wie 18:02

No, it hurts. It really hurts. It always hurts to lose anything. Even small losses, you feel the pain more than a small gain. But when it, when you're talking about your whole portfolio and down 10%, that's gonna, that's gonna sting for sure. So yeah, trying to lose less in the bad times is one of the, the core tenants of diversification.

Joey 18:26

Definitely.

Adam Van Wie 18:28

But it doesn't. It, you know, conversely, in a year like last year or the year before, you're not going to make the 35 returns that some of those Mag 7 stocks had either. So it's, there is a, on both sides but the way that people value losses versus gains and the, and the, the pain of the loss is worse than the, the euphoria from the gain. So if you fall into that category, which most people do, you may want to look at diversifying away from just holding those seven stocks or, or just one industry or even just the tech sector.

Joey 19:12

Yeah, I was trading emails this morning with a client who,

Joey 19:17

she was asking about whether she should go ahead and make her backdoor IRA contribution for 2026. But. And then she commented, well, the portfolio hasn't done that well lately. Should I just buy a CD for six months and then make a contribution? And I was thinking about her situation and how her 401k has just done exceedingly well over the last five years, as most people's have. And I was like, we know because we do it every day that short term headlines don't dominate long term performance. They're just a moment in time. And the market does a really good job of shrugging those off if you give it time to do that.

Joey 19:56

I just reminded her that the market rewards those that find the strength to invest in periods like this. Now that's not to say next week the market couldn't be down further, but if you go 10 years out, I would be willing to bet more often than not by a large degree the market's going to be higher than it was today if you put the money in today. And so I just reminded her that her 401k has weathered the coronavirus, it weathered the bear market of 22, it weathered the tariff tantrum of last year, and right now, obviously it's going through the Iran war. And over that period, since the pandemic lows, the S and p is up 100%. And that's just a five year span. So if you've had the ability as an investor to just continue contributing or maybe even dial up contributions during market dips like the present, over that five year span, you've been rewarded with either market returns or better, which have, in that case of the S and p, been over 100%. I mean, that's just, it's such a good crash course on a consolidated basis of how the market works for investors.

Adam Van Wie 21:02

It is. And, and the, the even bigger asterisk on that 100% is that we went through a bare market in that period too. So it wasn't always comfortable getting to 100%. In fact, it was really uncomfortable in 2022. I mean, things were, things were pretty ugly. But we did come out on the other side and look where we are today.

Joey 21:25

Yeah, absolutely.

Joey 21:30

So any other key metrics that you think are noteworthy over the last two weeks?

Adam Van Wie 21:36

I, I want to mention that. So the, the technical definition of a correction involves the S P500. And we didn't actually get down 10% on the S P500, but we did on the Nasdaq and I believe on the Dow as well. And so did we hit a correction? I, I would, I would lean towards yes, we did see a correction. But I don't know if they will, if history will mark this as a correction. But I, I feel like it was. Besides, even though the S P wasn't there, it was right that it was so close. And so I'm going to count it as a correction because it's been a year since we've had one. It was really, really close even if we didn't. And honestly it's just an arbitrary number, 10%, there's no rhyme or reason behind that. But I would not count this a pullback. I would say it was a correction.

Joey 22:37

I agree. I mean, I think if two of the big three indexes hit it, then it's a correction. I do think it's odd that the NASDAQ and the Dow did it in unison and the S P somehow did not. That seems unusual because the S P is really the one that straddles the other two. So for the other two to do it and that one not is just weird.

Adam Van Wie 22:54

Yeah.

Adam Van Wie 22:57

But you would, you would guess if you heard that the NASDAQ and the Dow did, you would say, oh, of course the S P was there. I mean, why, why wouldn't it be? It, it has, it shares so many stocks in common with both of those indexes.

Joey 23:11

Yeah, but I think it was, and just a reminder, we talked many times that on average a correction happens every 12 months. And that average correction is about 14% from the all time high that preceded it. And so

Joey 23:27

this is par for the course. This is why investors are rewarded for participating in markets. It's easy to own when everything's going up. It's not as easy to hold on when things are going down. And if you are, if you have your money in the right places, right, like you're not taking next year's mortgage payment and throwing it in tech stocks right now you're probably going to get the rewards of long term investing by staying the course. And you know, if you have your money in the wrong places, it's going to be a bumpy ride. And that's really where financial Planning and investment management intersect is you just use financial planning to figure out what money can I invest confidently, how do I invest it properly? And investment management processes the process of maintaining those positions and making sure your exposures are correct for the situation driven by the plan.

Adam Van Wie 24:19

Yep, I completely agree. I think that if you, the other, the third part of that conversation is also the hardest thing to do is actually to get back in the market once you've gotten out. So if you made the call when the Iran conflict started, oh, man, I'm selling out. You're feeling pretty good about yourself today. But when do you get back in? Did you buy back in on two on Monday night? Probably not. You're probably not back in at all right now, and you just missed a 3% week, so you still can come out ahead. It's not impossible, but that is the hardest thing to do. It's easy to make the call to get out. It's really hard to make the call to get back in.

Joey 25:03

Yeah. And I'm never shy about sharing that. My grandparents had that, you know, that was their story, was they'd spent a lifetime saving. 2008 comes along, they get advised to get out of the market as it's falling, which I'm sure at first felt great because I don't think they sold it at rock bottom.

Joey 25:22

But then, you know, the next several years happened, and as things started to recover towards the late part of 2009 and beyond, they couldn't decide when to get back in because you fall into this mental trap of like, well, is this a real recovery? Or, you know, is it kind of a fake, a juke of some kind? And I'll, I'll buy it the next dip. And, you know, how many years was it until we saw a dip? And that dip was well above any levels we saw 2007 to 2009. So they fell into the trap and it cost them tons of money.

Adam Van Wie 25:52

Yeah. And it's, it's, I've heard that story and seen it happen way too many times. It's, it's such a, you can do some real mental gymnastics about, okay, is this really the bottom or is it a dead cat bounce? Is it. What is this? What's happening? I, I, and it, you can, you can just drive yourself crazy trying to figure out what the actual bottom is, and there's no way to tell that. You can, you can get 10 different answers if you ask 10 different people, and the, the market will decide. So ultimately, it just doesn't make sense to try and do that. Just don't try and time the market out. If you're a long term investor, these short term swings will not matter. You won't even remember this in five years.

Joey 26:36

Yeah, I mean, proof of how many people ask about 22. Nobody?

Adam Van Wie 26:40

No one. I'm the only one who's still talking about it.

Joey 26:42

Yeah. Yeah, I could see the scars are deep for you, but nobody for sure. Yeah. All right, well, anything else?

Adam Van Wie 26:46

That was painful.

Adam Van Wie 26:51

I think that's it. I think that we talked about what the key to this market is. We all know what needs to happen. Got to wrap up Iran, get out of there, not put troops on the ground and get the oil price back down. And I think you're going to see this market continue to climb if those things happen.

Joey 27:09

Yeah, I think so too. And I hope that we managed to make that happen.

Joey 27:15

All right, well, we will touch base. You know, we might have some news later today, but we'll. We'll touch base in two weeks and see where we're at.

Adam Van Wie 27:23

Sounds good. Thank you.

Joey 27:24

Thanks, Adam.