Financial Floyd Blogspot

Good Morning, Summer is here, but should we follow the old phrase of "sell in May and go away?" If you have been following my post, that is not something I preach, but it looks like we might finally receive some relief from the recent political developments. Yesterday MarketWatch posted an article from the Associated Press providing a recent update on the US/China trade war. In case you might not know, there is a summit going on with numerous countries participating (called the G20 Summit), and one of the most anticipated meetings was between the United States and China. The article from MarketWatch highlighted a couple of outcomes from the meeting: 1. US companies will be allowed to sell to Huawei 2. No new tariffs at this time 3. The administration sees Saudia Arabia as a key ally in the Middle East From my viewpoint, the first two points have the ability to impact the markets while the third point reaffirms our usual stance in the Middle East. To be fair, US compa...

Good Morning This week Facebook announced a plan to launch a digital coin next year. This comes on the heels of Bitcoin rising out of the ashes after it had a disastrous crash last year. There has been a lot of chatter about the new venture and earlier this week CNBC published an article about their new digital coin called Libra. A couple of takeaways from the article were: 1. Facebook has teamed up with 28 different firms for this venture and created a subsidiary called Calibra to be a digital wallet for the currency 2. Libra is intended to help those who are unbanked (they have no banking account) have a place to store capital 3. Privacy concerns are a headwind for Facebook after data breaches, questionable usage of data, and them selling individuals data This move is very interesting because Facebook is nearly double the population of China and this announcement adds to the legitimacy of cryptocurrencies (thank you Planet Money -Facebucks episode). What I like about this ...

Over the past two weeks, our news has been inundated with trade wars, whether it is related to China or Mexico. As a layman, it is tough to understand why this matters but the impact of these trade wars have a negative impact on your wallet and investment outlook. Various articles have been written about the trade wars and its impact on individuals and the economy, but I'll reference information primarily from two articles written in Bloomberg and Financial Advisor Magazine . These two articles were really great at putting things in perspective in relation to the trade war and economy, but the points worth mentioning are: 1. The initial rounds of tariffs on Chinese goods had minimal impact on consumers, but new tariffs initiated have negatively impacted consumers and businesses by increasing input cost, hence negating the tax cut most received. Most prices either will or have started gradually increasing for everyday products. 2. While the Mexican tariff th...