Will You Build Wealth or Lose It in 2025? (Webinar)

Foreign.

Welcome to today's virtual event. I'll be your host, Jake Preer today. As you can see, we have Brady Marlo and Sonu Varghese from Carson wealth on the call with us as well. We'll introduce them here in just a minute, but we're going to give a couple minutes for people to trickle in here. I know it's over the lunch hour period, so we've got a limited amount of time. So we're going to try to knock out as much as possible over this lunch period. And if for whatever reason you have to leave, you have to go back to work, whatever the case may be, just know we're recording this. We will send it out after the fact so that you guys can rewatch it, pick it back up where you left off. Also, questions and answers. We're going to take these throughout the event. We may even sprinkle them in in the middle of the presentation. So as things come up, drop your questions into the chat. We'll make sure to address them either in between or at the very end. And stay tuned to the end because we are going to have a special call to ebook from Carson wealth that's going to go even deeper into this content that we're going to review today. It's going to be about tariffs, the market, some of the things you heard from Trump at the, at the address to Congress a couple days ago, which if you didn't watch that, it was worth popping some popcorn, grabbing a drink and watching it because it was, it was fun to watch. I'll just put it that way. Anyways, let's jump in. Brady, Sonu, thank you so much for joining us today. I'm so excited to get into some of these topics that we have. It's so timely with again the Trump's address to the Congress, the tariffs that are rolling out. There's so much going on post election that this is such a good time for us to go through this information for, for our investors and for people who are even thinking about getting into not only real estate investing but just other investments in general in 2025. So before we jump in, I'd love if you guys could take a minute and just give us a brief bio of who you guys are, what you guys do and then we can jump into the content.

Yeah, I'll jump in. Thanks Jake and I could do, I'll do a mini bio on me and then I can introduce Sonu if that's all right. Jake and I appreciate you having these events for your ecosystem. It's really more than a value added. You're helping people think more strategically about their balance sheet, about their businesses, about their life and how the intersection of all those things can make them more wealthy and not just from a financial standpoint, but really from a joy and being able to accomplish what they view as success. So thanks for having these, these sessions.

Of course. Appreciate it. Thank you.

And so my name is Brady Marlow. I'm a wealth strategist with Carson Private Client. So I spend most of my days working with business owners that are nearing exit. Right in the middle of the throes of an exit or right afterwards. It's just a huge transitional period when there is a currency event where we're, we used to have a business all in on that and now we're having to zoom out and be more discerning about giving and family wealth and taxes and running a a bigger net worth that's going to be reinvested into things like real estate. We have real estate as a vertical for all of our clients and often reach out to Jake and, and Steve on, on those types of opportunities as well. So that's me. I help people more in entrepreneurs with the personal wealth. Sonu Varghese. He's our VP of a global macro strategist. So Sonu has over 19 years of experience in the asset management industry. He leads Carson's group asset allocation team, which formulates our firm's house views and outlook. So when I say house views, that's where we're seeing sector tilt, where we're seeing opportunities in the market for all of our strategies. And his focus is on the intersection of markets, the macro, economic and policy. He provides research guidance for more than 130 Carson partner offices and we collectively manage over 41 billion in assets. He's also the portfolio manager for several of the strategies that we use on our platform. He does have a podcast too. Check that out. It's called Facts and Feelings. He does that with Ryan Dietrich. You can get that on itunes or Spotify.

Facts versus Feelings. Yeah.

And Facts versus Feelings. Thank you, Sonu. So without any further ado, Sonu, what do you have for us today? I'm excited to hear.

No, thank you for this. This is such a pleasure. Thank you especially Brady and Jake for the connection as well. Let me share my screen. You know, that was a very generous bio and you can call me Sonu, by the way. So, you know, I always say like, you know, Sonu Varghese. I've been so used to telling the full name and I say, you know, Sonu is more than, you know. That's it. Somebody once asked me, like, is that like, Madonna? Just a single day, like, no, I was thinking more along the lines of a Brazilian soccer player as opposed to Madonna. Right. So. So no, I. Brady said, I lead an asset allocation team. I'm trying to think about, you know, I'm looking at markets, I'm looking at the economy, what happens in the US like from State of the Union speech, what's the administration doing in terms of policy. But not just the White House. Right. Even Congress. Congress matters just as much. And then on the other side of D.C. you have the Federal Reserve, probably even more important in some ways with respect to what's happening in the economy, too. How does this all come together? One thing, what I think we're unique at is we, you know, you always hear, okay, the economy is not the stock market. The stock market is not the economy. Yes, but the stock market is driven by profits. Profits are driven from the economy, but companies derive profits from there, as you all probably know. Right. If economic growth is good, you know, sales are reasonably good, productivity growth is good, that means, you know, in most cases, margins are expanding, too. That's good for the stock market. Historically, the stock market has gained when on the back of profit growth. Yes. There's sentiment and things like that. And that gets to what we titled Our 2025 Outlook is Animal Spirits. Right. We haven't had a lot of that over the last several years. People have been fairly pessimistic, despite the fact that the s and P500 has gained about 90, 95% since the end of 2019. Right. It's hard to think about it that way because there has been this error of, you know, lower confidence, if you want to call that maybe not pessimism is, you know, too much. But still a lack of optimism, a lack of animal spirits. And you think that could potentially change. I'll talk about the tariffs and things like that and the, you know, how that impacts things. But at the end of the day, look, this is what Brady and the team does. I mean, you know, I always tell people, yes, markets can go up and down, but ultimately it's about, how do you find joy? What do you need for you. For you to find your freedom. Right. And that's the plan. That's the financial plan. Right. Of course, when it hits reality, suddenly you have tariffs, you have other things going on. China, Germany, all of these things. Right. To creating these potholes along the way. But at the end of it, what matters is what your final destination is and what's the plan. And hopefully try and stick to the plan in a way that you've accounted for. Right? You've accounted for all these little things. Market volatility is not unusual. What's unusual is actually what we've seen over the last two years. The S&P 500 gained 26% in 2023, 25% in 2024, and it did that without really a big 10% plus correction. We haven't had that. We barely had 5% mild corrections. And historically we've seen at least three of those every year. We've seen historically seven 3% dips every year. Right. We just haven't seen that over the last two years. So volatility is the name of the game. And as a global macro strategist, I'm supposed to be pessimistic, but everyone asked me, like, sonu, what do you think about, you know, what's happening in this corner of the world? The Middle East? The Middle east always comes up, right? There's always something happening in the Middle East. But market's seen this before, you know, and I don't mean to, you know, that imply that, you know, we're just whistling past the graveyard here or anything like that, right? So, but, you know, we've seen over the last century, World War I, World War II, I mean, more recently, we had 9, 11, and then Covid the great financial crisis. I think in my life, I mean, I started my career in Finance in 2005. That was soon after the dot com bubble crash. And then as soon as I started my career, two or three years later, I get hit. We get hit with, you know, my generation, we get hit with the great financial crisis crisis. If you think things were like, oh my God, what's happening now? I see emails daily coming to me from advisors saying, you know, like, is the world, you know, this is massive, right? How massive is it? Are things going to crash? It's like, you remember the financial crisis? That was really bad. That was really bad. And then we, we got through it, right? I'm not saying everyone came out of it, you know, smelling like roses or anything like that. It was a tough time, but the market got past it. Ultimately, that blue line kept going up. It gets to, you know, like I said when we were thinking about writing the outlook this year, like, okay, what's our theme? Right. Two years ago, our team didn't think there was a recession. Two years ago this time, and maybe, you know, end of 2022. Really? I don't know if you remember seeing the headlines at that time. Everyone was calling for a recession. There was a Bloomberg headline saying 100% chance of a recession. There's a reason why most people are probably pessimistic. Right. You see these things in headlines, things like that. It's in the Zeitgeist or recession is coming. Recession is coming. And that continued into 2023 as well, a year ago. People are saying, oh, it's more than likely you'll see a recession. We never saw a recession. Right. We didn't expect a recession. Which is not to say we were 100% certain of it. And I'll never tell you 100% certain of something. Right. If I tell you we don't expect a recession, there still may be.