Moore Financial Solutions 3rd Quarter 2024

October 1, 2024

With an election looming and the market going through what has historically been a bearish period for stocks, all eyes are on the Federal Reserve regarding their interest rate policy. The third quarter of 2024 offered positive returns for the S&P 500 of 5.53% (not including dividends) to close the quarter at 5,762.48 (1). The real narrative of Q3 is the emergence of bonds finally complementing stocks and producing a positive return, as illustrated by the iShares 20+ Year Treasury Bond ETF (ticker TLT) being up 6.89% (without dividends) (2). We’ll discuss our active management as well as more thoroughly discuss our fixed income strategy. Additionally, we plan to highlight allocation strategies regarding various asset classes as the Federal Reserve goes through their interest rate decrease cycle, and of course we’ll discuss potential impacts from the election.

In our last quarterly review we offered, “We currently expect that rate cut to occur during the fourth quarter of this year, or slightly sooner.” This was far from a bold prediction as most of Wall Street agreed on this timing. Nonetheless, September 18th, 2024, was a huge day for the markets and Moore F.S. as the Federal Reserve reduced rates by .5% (3). However, the rate cut of .5% was slightly higher than the typical .25% cut, leaving some wondering if this was a sign the Federal Reserve should have reduced rates sooner and more gradually. As a reminder, the Federal Reserve had to aggressively increase rates to stomp down inflation that had arisen very quickly, and this rate decrease was a means to normalize rates in response to normalizing inflation data. In the opinion of Moore F.S., the bond market was not only pricing in this normal rate reduction, but additionally pricing in a recession, an event that would even more significantly decrease interest rates. In other words, as time went on without a rate decrease, some feared this meant a “hard landing” was in store for the economy because not only did Jerome Powell drive down inflation, but he potentially drove down growth by leaving rates too high for too long.

Moore F.S. stayed true to our belief, and continued to voice a high likelihood of a “soft landing” in which the Federal Reserve’s timing of rate reduction is just right, or at least close enough. In this Goldilocks situation that we forecasted; Americans were earning interest income at a much greater rate given the sudden increase in rates which increases their discretionary spending. In addition, the labor market remained strong, thus keeping the economy very strong and resilient in the face of higher rates. On September 18th, 2024, Jerome Powell stated, “Our economy is strong overall and has made significant progress toward our goals over the past two years. The labor market has cooled from its formerly overheated state. Inflation has eased substantially from a peak of 7 percent to an estimated 2.2 percent as of August. We’re committed to maintaining our economy’s strength by supporting maximum employment and returning inflation to our 2 percent goal. Today, the Federal Open Market Committee decided to reduce the degree of policy restraint by lowering our policy interest rate by ½ percentage point. This decision reflects our growing confidence that with an appropriate recalibration of our policy stance, strength in the labor market can be maintained in a context of moderate growth and inflation moving sustainably down to 2 percent.” (4) We interpret this information to be straightforward and we give the Federal Reserve credit for the transparency it has given regarding policy change.

In our opinion the bond market was pricing in a mild recession while the Chairman of the Federal Reserve was giving the message of confidence within the United States economy, it became the opinion of Moore F.S. that appropriate allocation changes needed to be made within our fixed income assets. On September 19th, 2024, we began the process of decreasing duration within our fixed income assets by selling our nearly million dollar position of iShares 20+ Year Treasury Bond ETF (ticker TLT) and received an approximate price of $98.95 per share. TLT closed the quarter at $98.10 (5). This longer duration debt ETF was generally replaced with the Blackrock Short Duration Bond ETF (ticker NEAR). This decision was reached for two primary reasons. First, we believe that TLT has moved rapidly higher on fears of a recession, not simply the Federal Reserve’s policy change.

As rates ease back up as we envision, we believe that shorter duration debt will outperform. In other words, the bond market has gotten a bit ahead of the Federal Reserve. Secondly, TLT offered a yield of about 3.4% compared to the more attractive yield of about 5.14% in NEAR. We aimed to be heavily in long duration debt while interest rates decreased, and now aim to shift into shorter duration holdings. Not all clients hold fixed income funds.

Though Moore F.S. tries to stay away from interest rate prognostications, we believe the yield curve will move entirely out of the inverted stage in 2025 as the Federal Reserve moves the Fed Funds rate back to a more normal level. Currently, the curve is still inverted in some areas. We believe banks will be a significant beneficiary of the normalization in interest rates as their lending operations become more profitable. When the yield curve is inverted, profit margins tend to fall for companies that borrow cash at short-term rates and lend at long-term rates, such as community banks (6). In other words, your bank was probably not as excited as you were to see moderate term certificates of deposit paying 4.00% and mortgages written at 6.5% than they would be to see rates on their deposits earning .5% and mortgages written at 5.00%. Simply put, banks care about the spread in interest rates not one given rate. In response to a normalizing yield curve, and potential steepening of the curve, Moore F.S. clients sold broad market ETF’s and purchased Goldman Sachs (ticker GS) within the third quarter. This, like the conversation regarding TLT previously, only applied to some accounts where we viewed this action as appropriate.

In addition to the interest margins improving for Goldman Sachs, we see this adjustment as an advantage to investors for two reasons. First, Goldman Sachs offers a better P/E ratio than the broad market at approximately 16. For more information on P/E ratios please see our First Quarter ’24 review in paragraph two where we discuss how P/E ratios influence our management approach. Secondly, Moore F.S. is always attempting to keep expense ratios lower by using single stocks in small weightings when appropriate. We hope this exemplifies the firm working hard to keep your expenses under control, while many other firms might simply use pre-built models, passing that higher cost on to you. We feel it is important to mention that Moore F.S. will never attempt to time markets, but rather react to public information and manage each account individually to the best of our ability.

Below charts the spread between two and ten year U.S. treasury obligations, which is generally the spread analyzed The yield curve on September 30th, 2024, showing short term debt obligations paying a higher yield than long term obligations by most technicians. Historically investors have been rewarded with a higher yield for risking their money for a longer duration, but not always. Keep in mind, ultra short rates, such as the three-month treasury obligation offer 4.73% (7), and moderate term rates, such as the ten-year treasury obligation offer 3.81%, as of the last day of the quarter (8). We feel this temporary inversion is holding banks like Goldman Sachs back from their full potential.

From the perspective of the stock market and global economy operating smoothly, we view the best election outcome as one with a clear winner, with conventional wisdom offering that a result that drags on for days is bad for markets. With two candidates offering quite contrasting plans and visions, we see corporations as most likely in a holding pattern, waiting for more clarity in variables such as corporate tax rates or manufacturing location incentives. We imagine these are the same corporations that have been in a holding pattern waiting for more clarity on the path of interest rates for the last couple of years. We feel that corporations benefit from stability and clarity, and when those are low, our best chance to manage portfolios appropriately is to not take a side, but rather, feel that our portfolios can benefit from either candidate winning. Once the election is passed, we will plan to craft portfolios in the fourth quarter in preparation for 2025 based on our view of the path of leadership.

With another quarter passing by, I want to take a moment to thank you for your continued trust in me as your advisor and remind you that your financial goals are my professional goals. As I continually say, investing on any scale tends to be an emotional experience and I very much try to cushion that emotion for a client, if possible, without becoming too conservative. In other words, I must walk a fine line between selecting assets that blend well to potentially bring correlation or risk down in a portfolio, without including such conservative assets that reduce our chances of hitting your long-term goals. This will be my fourth U.S. presidential election while entrusted to manage assets, and my focus tends to be twofold; not try to predict a winner in my style of investing and to get clients through it. One key take away I have from listening over the years is how people have managed their own money through elections. Though I don’t have solid research or data to back it up, it is my experience that do-it yourself investors often make far too drastic of allocation changes that are far too dependent on the outcome they have predicted. I highly encourage you to take just a moment to think of someone that could benefit from the no pressure advice and strategies that Moore F.S. offers. In today’s transient labor market, everyone knows someone that has transitioned jobs and has left behind 401(k) assets. Think to yourself how those assets might perform sitting there, compared to how they might succeed over long periods of time at Moore F.S. My hope is for you and your family to have another great holiday season and a great end to 2024 between now and my next review. As always, I’m personally just a phone call away if you need anything or have any questions.

Tyler A. Moore

Did you know? Moore Financial Solutions offers unique/custom-built insurance solutions. Does anything keep you up at night that we could help fix? If so give us a call and we’ll help find you the best policy rates and options as we shop the open market of providers, all while offering our zero-pressure sales process. This includes Life Insurance, Disability Income Insurance, and Long-Term Care Insurance. Let’s review your policy and search for Moore Solutions today!

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Moore Financial Solutions 2nd Quarter 2026

By Tyler Moore • July 14, 2026

The investment tree you planted previously may have provided more fruit in the second quarter of 2026 with the S&P 500 rising by about 15% (1). Additionally, some small cap funds such as ticker IJR (iShares Core S&P Small-Cap ETF) rose by about 19.3%, as investors felt relieved that interest rates were decreasing (2). This small cap surge was welcomed by portfolio managers such as Moore Financial Solutions, who have closely monitored the historical outperformance of small cap companies, which lagged last year. In Q2 all eyes focused on the U.S./Iran War, as investors pushed WTI crude oil prices to $112.95 on April 6th, 2026, an increase of 104% in 112 days from the December 15th, 2025, low. Investors viewed rising oil prices as a signal of higher inflation and worried that newly appointed Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh might delay the interest rate cuts that many investors expected. Take five minutes every quarter, twenty minutes total for all of 2026, to better understand from my point of view why I believe the stock market is in an uptrend, the movement of other asset classes, and our thoughts of if this can continue. If a traveler arrived near Kansas City for a World Cup match, knew nothing about Moore F.S. and was curiously asking about firm values, or A.I. was tasked with doing analysis of Moore F.S. quarterly reviews, you would hear a common theme. Repetitively, we attempt to instill three thoughts regarding today's modern investor. First, stocks will move both up and down, so do not get used to 25% years, but be ready to use them to your advantage. Secondly, whether you are an individual client or Moore Financial Solutions managing $27.8 million, we are still a small fish in an enormous ocean of investors. That reality is one reason we avoid trying to time the market or become overly concerned with short-term movements. The intention is not to make either party feel small, rather create a metaphor that you are subject to the tide going up or down and remind you that it will do both. Lastly, this is not Mayberry where Wally's Filling Station, Floyd's Barbershop, and Mayberry Diner represent most of your commerce. In fact, you are likely tied deeply into a global economy with dozens of moving parts from tariff rules to the Strait of Hormuz. We will dive deeper into that strait and use West Texas Intermediate prices for our conversation. Last quarter we honed in on the logistics of the Strait of Hormuz stating, “That roughly 21-mile-wide body of water, the Strait of Hormuz, realistically can create a recession.” In other words, the economy is increasingly global, and a small shipping route over 7,500 miles from Kansas City impacts your prices for gas and thousands of other items. Moore F.S. took the opinion that the oil price spike would be short lived and spoke freely to clients about this view. We did not take this viewpoint on a hunch, rather we studied the backwardation of WTI crude oil prices. This unique backwardation of oil prices looked similar to the inverted yield curve our firm witnessed for a couple of years from 2022-2024 (you can learn more about yield curve inversion in the previous Moore F.S. reviews written Q3 2024 and Q3 2025). In our backwardation forecasting we did not feel obligated to predict the price of oil, rather we used crude oil futures markets to determine where traders were imagining oil prices. This reassuring feeling of a decrease in oil prices combined extremely well with our buy and hold philosophy. In other words, we did not panic sell stocks in fear that oil might hit $200/barrel, as multiple firms said was possible. Since 1985, the crude oil market has been in contango (a positively sloping price curve) around 42% of the time. It has been in backwardation 58% of the time as measured by the price difference between the front-month contract and contracts for six months in the future (4). Higher fuel prices fueled inflation concerns. As a result of an increasing oil price economy, traders drove interest rates higher as well. An economy that imagined a couple rate decreases for the year now was eyeing a spike in inflation and had to reposition interest rates. As a result, Wall Street pushed the 10-Year U.S. Treasury rate from 4.318% to 4.469% in Q2. Though we aim to avoid interest rate prognostications, we firmly believe the United States will rejoin a decreasing interest rate environment for the remainder of the year, at least from the 4.469% levels, barring geopolitical shocks to the system.

Moore Financial Solutions 1st Quarter 2026

By Tyler Moore • April 9, 2026

The past 35 days have humbled investors as we witnessed the S&P 500 lose approximately 6% from February 25th into the quarter's close. The S&P 500 finished the entire quarter 4.6% lower, which represents the first losing quarter since Q1 of last year, in which the S&P 500 lost about 4.59%. Much like an emotional play or movie, the market offered three scenes of varying benefit to investor portfolios. Scene one was brief but fruitful. In these first 12 days of the year the S&P 500 rose about 1.92%. Scene two left investors leaning on the emotional lessons learned from 2025's market downturn, with the S&P 500 moving about 9% lower from day 13 of the year until March 30th. Scene three flashed quickly and only represented one day. On this last day of the quarter, the S&P 500 meaningfully rose about 2.9% in an effort to heal a portion of the quarter's losses. I believe, based upon my nearly 14 years of money management, that stock market history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Though I'm not predicting a positive year for the S&P 500 (and admittedly not in the business of making such predictions) this year's chart for the broad stock market looks somewhat like last year's. Those first quarter '25 stumbles were later looked at as a massive buying opportunity, symbolizing the power of "buy and hold" as it relates to stocks. Only time will tell if these stock market worries are warranted and if there will be continued damage to stock portfolios because of the conflict in Iran. Additionally, the market is eyeing oil price increases, interest rate increases, various geopolitical risks, and the additional unforeseen risks on the horizon. Or are stock market investors currently pricing in many areas of worry, all of which will subside in the coming weeks? Dive into the quarter's review in which I attempt to illustrate investing through my eyes, discuss quarterly geopolitical events, and speak to market moving factors of Q1 and investor emotions as a result. Use this tool to educate yourself and reduce worry or fear as it relates to investing.