Everything Now

Today’s going to be a wild one. Everything happening right now, all at once.

I’m headed over to CNBC’s Delivering Alpha later this morning to do my show live.  It’s at the Pierre Hotel on the upper west side as always. This morning, the Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin discussed the importance of getting tax reform done. He couched it in terms of helping American workers. (video here)

I won’t go into a whole political thing here other than to point out that it will probably be of more help to American corporations and business owners, which may or may not benefit workers. That depends on how the recipients (the top 20% of income earners) choose to behave with the additional money they take home. If they spend it and hire people and buy equipment and whatnot, great. But if they merely plow it back into savings, stock ETFs and Treasury bonds, then the effect for the bottom 80% will be de minimis . It’s not as though this is uncharted territory. The Bush tax cuts of the previous decade were meaningless for the majority of Americans other than possibly serving as the kerosene that ignited the second half of the housing bubble from 2004-2006.

Anyway, the market doesn’t seem to believe that it’s going to be a 2018 story at this point, so we’ll see. You can read his comments here.

On the Halftime Report show we’ll have my pal Jim Chanos on for the hour, talking about markets and some of his investment ideas. Jamie Dimon, Ray Dalio and lots of other finance bigshots are speaking today. Should be no shortage of interest soundbites.

After the show, I head over to the Crowne Plaza Hotel for the Disrupt Advice Conference being put on by Financial Planning Magazine. I’m the closing keynote speaker for day one. There are something like 200 attendees from all over the wealth management industry coming. I have a half hour to fill, without the aid of any slides, so I don’t really know what I want to do yet. It’ll be fine, I guess. I know some good jokes and I love talking about fintech and advisory practices, etc.

After that, it’s on to Madison Square Garden for Arcade Fire with my boys. I’ve never seen them live but have been a fan since 2004 when ‘Funeral’ came out. I remember laying on a pullout couch in my old apartment in New York City with headphones on, bugging out over Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels) and just being absolutely blown away. I was in my late twenties at the time, about the age when most people stop listening to new music and checking out new bands. I never stopped 🙂 Anyway, tonight should be sick.

Oh, and throughout the afternoon I’ll be checking up on all the news flow from the Apple launch event for iPhone 8 and iPhone X. It’s 1pm EST – the first time they’re holding it in the brand new Steve Jobs Theater. Apple is a huge chunk of the S&P 500 and even more important to the QQQ’s. This morning, Morgan Stanley’s tech analyst just “went ballistic” and slapped a $253 “bull case” price target on the stock, which would equate to a $1.3 trillion market cap, assuming a constant share count. Oh. My. God. A trillion dollar company! What a time to be alive!

Here’s Win Butler and the gang, see you later: