This week’s The Distillery is a gentle reminder for all of us that stocks don’t go up or down forever. In March, it felt as if they would never go up. Now, it feels like they’ll never come back down, which makes it a great time to review the fundamentals and curb expectations. Schwab’s Chief Global Investment Strategist explains what he’s watching for to ensure this rebound has the strength to continue.

As we get closer to a full economic reopening, we’re suddenly moved to return to our previous selves. While it’s only been about two months since the quarantine began, I can’t help but feel a bit of change anxiety setting in as we prepare for the transition back to “normal.” In this week’s The Distillery, Vitaliy Katsenelson offers us a nicely written recap of his quarantine experience followed by advice on how to rebuild good habits after the lockdown.

This week’s The Distillery highlights four of the Tech Industry’s great “unlocks” over the past two decades. Always enjoyable to read, Scott Galloway shares with us a synopsis of each, while highlighting Amazon’s newest initiative as the most recent innovation “that’s obvious only after being crazy/genius.”

This week’s The Distillery shifts attention away from the headline obsessed stock market, and onto the less tantalizing bond market. With bonds delivering fairly decent returns recently, especially versus stocks, and yields at historically low levels, what’s an investor left with as far as future returns are concerned? That’s a very good question.

This week’s The Distillery offers an answer to the classic economic question, who’s going to eventually pay off all our national debt? The question is not only a good one, but timely due to COVID and the ongoing phases of stimuli being pumped into the economy currently. The author’s answer is probably not what you would have expected to hear, but it’s by far one of the best ways I’ve heard it explained and well worth a read. Especially if you’re usually the one asking the question!

This week’s The Distillery highlights two positive changes to the charitable giving rules within the newly passed CARES Act. Meant to encourage more giving, the changes allow you to also receive a larger tax deduction in 2020. 

Please enjoy!

This week’s The Distillery is brought to you by one of our clients, Roxanne. She is officially our first client to test positive for the virus and has graciously shared her COVID-19 experience with us. She even offered to share it with all of you in hopes it can help anyone in the coming weeks/months. We appreciate her candid account of her experience and hope that you do as well. If you would like to get in touch with her to discuss further, she has offered to share her email. Lastly, I know I speak for everyone here at The Advocates when I say that we're thankful for all of you and wish you a happy and healthy holiday weekend!

Today’s Distillery hits home for me, so I wanted to share my research in case you or someone you know is in a similar situation. We have an aunt in her early 60’s staying with us from another country. When all this COVID-19 stuff started to happen, she did not want to risk flying back to her country of residence to quarantine there. So, she is quarantining with us for the foreseeable future.

Today's Distillery is something we're all familiar with, but likely hasn't been on our radar for a while to the general calm in the world only a few months ago: Identity theft. Identify Thieves seem to thrive in times of uncertainty when us humans are at our most emotional. With COVID-19, stimulus packages, changes to retirement account rules, credit and loan issues, etc. all taking place recently, we want you to know your options and have a plan in place ahead of time.  Speaking of identity thieves, I hope you enjoy the featured image for today's blog. You can never be too careful around these guys...

Now that we've settled into the beginnings of whatever this initial move up in stocks will be called in the future when hindsight is 20/20, we thought it timely to distill an article about the infamous "Dead Cat Bounce." Like most quality investment pieces (in my opinion), the article offers up more of a what not to believe, opposed to what's going to happen. All we know is that no one knows for sure how this will play out, but a proper portfolio strategy is integral to making it to the other side, when it so presents itself.