Weekly Notes
July 3 — Two Years Too Early: Small caps underperformed large caps by 8.8% in 2023, 13.5% in 2024, and 8% in 2025 — then flipped to outperform by 12.3% in the first half of this year. The reversal is used as a reminder that a trend being directionally correct and being timeable are two very different things.
July 10 — Jim Rogers & The Only Way to Make Money Off Pessimism: Revisiting an annual tradition, the note tracks fifteen straight years of media coverage in which Jim Rogers predicts an imminent, “worst in his lifetime” market crash. The pattern is offered as a case study in why prognosticators who traffic in doom rarely face consequences for being wrong.
July 17 — Trump Accounts: Take the Free Money, But . . . Using an 8-year-old as an example, the piece runs the numbers on a $5,000/year Trump account that grows to nearly $4 million by age 70 — and compares the tax outcome under a Roth conversion versus simply using a taxable custodial account or a 529 instead. The takeaway: opening an account is a no-brainer since the free money requires nothing else, but funding it is a separate decision that depends on the specific goal.
July 24 — When Society Gets Margin Called: In South Korea, 1.2 million retail trading accounts were margin-called last month, and roughly 360,000 were wiped out entirely after two major tech stocks plunged. The note draws a line from that episode to record leveraged-ETF issuance and retail trading volume in the US, arguing the same dynamics aren’t unique to one country.
July 31 — Different Incentives, Different Advice: A Morgan Stanley analyst’s $300–$600 price target on SpaceX is used to illustrate a broader point: the firm earned over $100 million in advisory fees on the IPO and brought in more than $70 billion in new wealth-division assets last quarter. The piece argues that advice isn’t necessarily wrong just because the source has different incentives — but the distinction matters.
Idea Worth Revisiting
From When Society Gets Margin Called:
“Debt narrows the range of survivable outcomes.”
Media Feature: Crystal McKeon Quoted Across National Outlets
Crystal McKeon, Chief Compliance Officer at TSA Wealth Management, was featured this month in four separate publications covering retirement planning and investing: MarketWatch (on what not to do if you’re behind on retirement savings), ThinkAdvisor (on the DOL’s proposal for alternatives in 401(k)s), PLANADVISER (on the risks of retirees investing in adult children’s business ventures), and MarketWatch again (on why a $100,000 portfolio doesn’t stretch as far for young investors as it used to).
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