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And a great day to have you on, Jeff. You know, and maybe we'll start in the politics, Jeff, because, listen, you heard Julie and I chatting there. There's just a lot going on, Republican National Convention that starts tonight, Jeff. Of course, those terrible events over the weekend, the attempted assassination of former President Trump reports that Trump is going to pick his running mate today, Jeff. Try to help us walk through, as a strategist, Jeff, how you're trying to make sense of all that, what it means for the markets. What are you telling clients?

Yeah, well, first thanks for having me on. Um, you know, I I think the key message for clients right now is is be patient, right? We've had just such a huge run. Uh, and uh, to us, the LP research looks like stocks may be a little bit ahead of themselves. So that's kind of high level, you know, wait for a pull back, potentially buy a dip. Maybe we get a dip around election uncertainty, maybe it's a geopolitical threat. Uh, we'll have to see, but that that's our our first message. In terms of the, uh, you know, the Trump trade, which is certainly getting a lot of, uh, attention today, uh, certainly it makes sense for the, uh, for the energy sector to do well. It makes sense for defense to do well. That's another one. Makes sense for the dollar to rally, right? It makes sense for yields to go up and the yield curve to steepen. We're talking about tariffs, and we're talking about deregulation. The banks are certainly getting a little bit of a lift from that Trump trade. So, you guys are talking about, think about all the right things. Uh, those are certainly areas investors can look at, um, if they want to try to position around a potential Trump victory.

When you're talking about patience though, Jeff, I think it's important to point out, and this is something you pointed out in a recent note, that people should stay invested. In other words, just because you don't necessarily like one candidate or the other, is not a reason to pull out of the market because you think there's going to be a pullback. And you had a chart that showed if you hadn't, if you had stayed uninvested during, say, democratic administrations or Republican administrations, you would have missed out on an awful lot of market upside.

Yeah, that's right. That's, uh, from our mid-year outlook that we recently published. Uh, certainly staying invested over the long term makes sense. You know, even though we have thought for a while that stocks are a little bit expensive, uh, we have remained fully invested. That's been our recommendation. Uh, we're neutral on equities. And, uh, it really takes a lot to move us much off of that. Uh, the, uh, the numbers here are very compelling in terms of staying invested. So, certainly, there were some Democrats that missed out on gains during the Trump presidency before there's certainly, uh, the opposite as well. So, um, yeah, staying invested, the stock market goes up something like 78% of the time. Staying invested over the long haul makes a lot of sense. You're very, uh, it's very unlikely that you're going to get declines over any meaningful period of time.

Jeff, did I hear you just say you were you were neutral on equities?

That's right. Yeah. We're recommending

Why is that, Jeff?

Sure. Well, first, um, you know, the earnings environment is pretty good. Um, we're probably going to get a double digit earnings growth number in the second, or in the first quarter, when, um, I'm sorry, the second quarter when the numbers are all flowing in, uh, over the next five or six weeks. Uh, so that's one. Second, um, we use technical analysis as an important part of our process, and the momentum is certainly very, very strong. And that suggests, uh, staying with this market. And then, you know, we are about ready to get to a Fed rate cut. And, um, you know, if the economy holds up, it's slowing, but if it holds up, uh, there's a good chance that, you know, we see some more gains here over the next several months. Despite the fact that markets tend to pull back in the second half, whether it's an election year or not, whether it's a good year or not, you do tend to see somewhere around, let's call it 7 to 10% drawdowns in most years.