On The Markets

Say it with me, the market is not the economy. And what?  And the economy is not the market.  Good job class, now write that in cursive a hundred more times.    This week On The Markets, Sonoma Wealth Managing Principals Daren Blonski CFP®, Chris Sipes CFP® and Sonoma Wealth Marketing Director Dano Weir look at:  • The market’s up 16% this year?  Don’t tell that to job cuts.  Which states have bee...

Fed President Jerome Powell might be going through his last Christmas in office, but he's put on his Santa hat one more time to make it rain again, well it's winter so Let It Snow...liquidity.       This week On The Markets, Sonoma Wealth Managing Principals Daren Blonski CFP®, Chris Sipes CFP® and Sonoma Wealth Marketing Director Dano Weir look at:  • How liquidity, i.e. money printing, is back i...

Hope you and your family had an awesome holiday!  Daren, Chris and Dano are back on the grind with a new episode of On The Markets.  As the year draws to a close, we can start to look at all those convenient narratives the market Nostradamus’ had this time of year, and how wrong they were.    5 Busted Market Narratives In 2025  Trump's Administration Will Send Crypto To The Moon Bonds Are Yesterda...

You won’t fully know when “the bubble” pops, but there will be signs.  Did we see some this week?  A smoking gun from TechCrunch?  Or do we just not truly understanding the 4D Chess of tech behemoth accounting?  Plus a few laugh-out-louds with the Sonoma team to lighten the mood in a red week in the market.  Let’s go...    The Bubble Is Leaking    This week On The Markets, Sonoma Wealth Managing P...

The chess pieces were definitely moving on the board this week, whether it was the market, the economy or the Federal Government.  When millions become billions become trillions, it can be hard to fathom exactly how much money is really being discussed.  This week, let’s put it in another context...    The AI Buildout Costs More Than Going To Mars    This week On The Markets, Sonoma Wealth Managin...

The signs have been there for months, but is this week that the Ai bubble meets it’s “dot-com” finish? Did a so-called “expert” call it? Let’s find out. This week On The Markets, Sonoma Wealth Managing Principals Daren Blonski CFP®, Chris Sipes CFP® and Sonoma Wealth Marketing Director Dano Weir look at: • The dude from The Big Short is back and he’s betting against Palantir and Nvidia, who procee...

Tell me if you've heard this one from a friend: "Ya it's great it went up, but I'll get *crushed* on taxes if I sell it. I've got to wait for it to GO BACK DOWN so I can get out." Yikes. Surely the point of investing isn't to wait for an investment to go DOWN 😂for fear of the tax man. Could there be a better way? Enter: The 351 Exchange. A tax deferment option to gain diversity, and unwind concen...

There was always that one house...that rumor that everybody on D Street in Petaluma didn’t just have “fun size”, they had FULL SIZE candy bars.  As we sit here on Halloween night, is the Fed President is also about to dole out the goods?    This week On The Markets, Sonoma Wealth Managing Principals Daren Blonski CFP®, Chris Sipes CFP® and Sonoma Wealth Marketing Director Dano Weir look at:  • Why...

Consumer Price index (inflation) burning at 3% still, stocks in and around the all-time high neighborhood, valuations of companies with no profits through the roof and just for kicks, even more Fed cuts seem imminent.  This week On The Markets, we’ll look at the "engine” of American finance, and why the power players are choosing to RUN IT HOT 🔥.    This week On The Markets, Sonoma Wealth Managin...

Entering Day 16 of the 2025 Federal Government shut down.  Last week the market seemed to shrug it off.  But for how long?  Gold? Bonds?  This is a time when, as the kids these days now like to say, we need to do a “vibe check”.      This week On The Markets, Sonoma Wealth Managing Principals Daren Blonski CFP®, Chris Sipes CFP® and Sonoma Wealth Marketing Director Dano Weir look at:  • How is the...

Air traffic control, National Parks, half the IRS, NASA, health agencies all shut down...the market took a minute, but now in tandem with new Chinese tensions, the market is reacting.  Negatively. Like the little meme about a dog surrounded by chaos having coffee, you just gotta say...    Government Shut Down. Chinese Trade Tensions.  This Is Fine.    This week On The Markets, Sonoma Wealth Managi...

You just sort of wake up and are in a cycle that you don't know how it started and it's unclear when it'll end.  The money has money, the money goes to the performance, the performance is Ai, the Ai keeps spending, the employment doesn’t matter, wash rinse repeat.  Because...    The Virtuous Cycle Continues    This week On The Markets, Sonoma Wealth Managing Principals Daren Blonski CFP®, Chris Si...

You leave the money in your checking account, you get 0%.  You move the money to the account below it in your online login you get...3%? 4%? 5%?!?!  That’s been life for the last couple years with money market accounts.  A no brainer spot to park funds you might need soon or even...for awhile?  Chris Sipes thinks that may change soon.    This week On The Markets, Sonoma Wealth Managing Principal C...

Halloween in September?  Not exactly.  The S&P wasn’t that spooky or great this week, but there was some “witchcraft” that happened today we need to look at.  Plus, an exciting guest joins the show from Canada's finance hub, Toronto to give his perspective on potential vulnerabilities in the US market right now, On The Markets.  This week On The Markets, Sonoma Wealth Managing Principal Daren...

Our show is focused on the markets, but sometimes the markets are impacted by political and global events.  And yet, despite a tumultuous week that could have easily been a narrative for a dip, the market kept plugging away. It’s time to ask the question...  Why Isn’t The Market Reacting?  This week On The Markets, Sonoma Wealth Managing Principal Daren Blonski CFP®, Chris Sipes CFP® and Marketing...

Cut the rates, money will be cheaper, millions can refinance, market tends to love rate cuts, ...what could go wrong?  This week On The Markets, Sonoma Wealth Managing Principal Daren Blonski , Chris Sipes CFP® and Marketing Director Dano Weir explain:  Why the scenario where rates need to be cut means we are likely looking at a major economic downturn  Why single family home sales are looking lik...

The overarching theme of this decade’s market thus far has been ‘concentration’, meaning a few large, US tech stocks (many fueled by Ai) have just been getting bigger and bigger and smaller stocks have been getting smaller and smaller.  But this week we’re seeing signs of cracks.  And it’s time to ask...  Is Concentration Still A Thing?  This week On The Markets, Sonoma Wealth Managing Principals...

He lurks in the shadows, waiting for the right moment to come out in Jackson Hole with his secrets that send the market into a frenzy.  HE IS-  FED PRESIDENT JEROME POWELL, but guess what we (think) we know now?  We’re having some fun with the episode name, but the market was far from a horror movie on friday!  This week On The Markets, Sonoma Wealth Managing Principal Daren Blonski CFP®, Chris Si...

We are indeed a wealth management firm that deep dives on market trends, expense ratios, long term tax implications, competing currency trends, etc, etc, etc...  But we also keep our feet on the ground and ask- how does that actually show up in your life?  On today’s episode, we look at the macro economics that have left us with....  This week On The Markets, Sonoma Wealth Managing Principal Daren...

Did you know IBM laid off 8000 people in May, essentially handing the bulk of its HR operations to an A.I. chatbot? It’s true, underreported and happening more and more.  As we see how A.I. hits the marketplace, it's seeming less a hostile takeover, and more a creeping ground swell.  Could it be doing the same to your portfolio?    This week On The Markets, Sonoma Wealth Managing Principal Daren B...

Mark Twain popularized an old saying from a former British Prime Minister :  “There are 3 types of lies:  lies, damned lies and statistics.”  Find out why we believe that may be in play in the US economy right now as we speak, this week On The Markets ...   You can look at the numbers.  The numbers can be accurate. And yet they make no sense.  How is the economy allegedly "growing" and inflation i...

We sincerely hope you’ve found some “me”or family time or both so far this summer, perhaps just lazily floating in a body of water.  According to Daren, that’s actually what happens with the market this time of year too...  This week On The Markets, Sonoma Wealth Managing Principals Daren Blonski CFP® and Chris Sipes CFP® and Marketing Director Dano Weir look at what Daren calls his “Summer Float”...

It's a classic “meme” (the internet’s version of a newspaper cartoon)- an old clip from the Spider-Man cartoon show with two Spider-men (mans?) pointing at each other claiming to be the “real” Spider-Man.    It’s been used a million times in meme-land, and make it a million and done because we’re wondering...is the market a Spidey meme?    Trump says it’s Powell holding the market back! But then r...

If you ever made your own greeting cards or birthday invitations in the 90’s, then you probably used a program called Print Shop Deluxe.  Long before Canva or Photoshop, this was what you’d use to make infinite graphics, literally out of thin air.  The phrase ‘Print Shop’ popped in our head this week as we thought about...The Fed.      Can they ever stop printing?  Is the recent market resistance...

There are some times in life when you just want a “do over”.  Wake up from a nap, and it’s as if the last 10 years didn’t even happen.  Well, this week for the market, it’s sort of like January-May just got blinked out of existence and...2025 starts in June!  What tariffs? What war?  The market is once again tapping on an all-time high.  This week On The Markets, Sonoma Wealth Managing Principals...