March 11th, 2026 - Is the New Iran Deal for Real?

The Van We Financial Hour kicks off on a sunny Saturday, with hosts Steve and Adam Van Wie and Joey Loss, diving into market trends and tax tips. As they banter about perfect weather, golf tournaments, and shifting market sentiments, they also caution listeners about tax scams. The trio explores the fascinating yet daunting world of AI, shares insights on economic data, and emphasizes the importance of strategic tax planning.

Transcript

Steven H Van Wie 0:00

It's Saturday morning, it's 10 o'. Clock. This is the Van We Financial Hour. I'm Steve Van Wie.

Adam Van Wie 0:05

I'm Adam Van Wie.

Joey Loss 0:07

And I'm Joey Loss.

Steven H Van Wie 0:08

The gang's all here on another. I just heard Angela on the way in talking about another perfect day in paradise here. And it is, it really is.

Joey Loss 0:20

Just on my way here, I was like, my golly, where's this been? It's not here during the weeks.

Steven H Van Wie 0:25

I love the days when we can show up at the same time and some people wearing blue jeans, some are wearing shorts, nobody's got a jacket on, nobody's sweating or acting chilly because there's just nothing that you could improve on. It's truly amazing and I hope it stays for the next couple of days, all the way up through and including Augusta, Georgia, because the master is going to get hot and heavy today and I'm looking forward to it a lot.

Steven H Van Wie 0:56

It's really tough to see a guy with a six stroke lead and not say I would predict a winner out of that because it's a bigger halfway lead than has ever been overcome with the Masters. So he would have to pretty much pick up his ball and throw it in the water a few times or something like that. Anyway, I digress. This is not a sports show. On the other hand, always loved golf. So there's a little hit this, a little of that. For all the regulars. Welcome back. You keep listening, we'll keep talking, as I love to say, and if you're new to the show, try to stick around and see if you can catch the whole hour because we're going to talk about a lot of stuff and some of it will probably be new to almost anybody out there. And it is that time of the year. And what is it, April 11th. And there's a day this week that is significant to all of us on April 15th. And it kind of begs us to talk a little bit about taxes and related items. But really one of the most important things about April 15 is that people file and forget. They don't start tax planning. They just forget about it for 11 and a half months and then they cram in next year's return. Then they forget about it again. You can save yourself a lot of money and make yourself a lot of money if you don't let tax planning out of your mind that quickly. A little reminder to start the show on

Joey Loss 1:24

All right.

Steven H Van Wie 2:32

we had yet another, I hate to say it, good week because it just doesn't seem like enough of a description. So I'll Let Adam jump on that and do better.

Adam Van Wie 2:45

Yeah, it was, it was another great week, honestly. It was, it was really solid. Sometimes it just feels a little nuts how how fast sentiment in the market shifts and this week was a really good example of that. We saw. I mean it wasn't two weeks ago all doom and gloom. We were almost 100. Going to hit a correction on the S P 500. We were down 9.1% and then bam. U turn and it just really hasn't looked back despite.

Adam Van Wie 3:18

I don't think that much has changed. It's, it's just that the sentiment is overwhelmingly positive towards stocks right now. Despite all the fear, all the problems. It's just very, it's so hard to figure out sometimes there, there's no rhyme or reason to it. Although the collective wisdom of the market I would say, well, it tends to go too far in both directions. It usually ends up in the right place. And so don't fight the tape is what I'm trying to say.

Steven H Van Wie 3:20

I didn't either.

Steven H Van Wie 3:53

No, and it's always looking out six and nine months away too. And I wouldn't blame anybody for saying that this mess in Iran is going to be cleared up by then one way or the other.

Adam Van Wie 4:03

Yeah, I think by then. But that's hard to, hard to fathom today and which is why there's such a disconnect between how you're probably feeling and what the market, how the market is. Reaction, reacting. The news was pretty positive on the surface this week with a two week ceasefire being agreed to between the US and Iran. However, once that deal was in place, a lot more information came out and it showed that the two sides were not actually that close to reaching a deal. Iran had its 10 point plan and the US has a 15 point plan and most of those points are not the same. They're pretty far apart actually or they are the same but on the opposite end of the negotiation. So for instance, one of Iran's things is that they get to control the strait and that's just an absolute non starter for the us so our same point is that they do not control the strait completely. And so I don't know how you how, how you get to a common ground there especially I don't know if they're negotiating in good faith. They certainly didn't on the last nuclear deal with Obama and then Biden where we gave them a bunch of money and they said they wouldn't develop nuclear weapons. They took the money and then they went on to try and develop Nuclear weapons. So it's really tough to figure out how this is going to, how this is going to end up. I don't know. We do have JD Vance over in Pakistan. He is negotiating so we'll see how it goes. I don't know. I really, I wouldn't give you a dollar for anyone's prediction on how this will end up.

Steven H Van Wie 5:44

Couldn't agree more.

Adam Van Wie 5:45

The Dow gained 3% this week. The S&P was up 3.6 and the Nasdaq was up 4.7% this month alone the Nasdaq is already up 6.1% and, and that is in spite of the software sector continuing to just dive in value with the threat of AI. But even that wasn't enough to hurt the market. As oil prices dropped 16% on Tuesday, the Vix came back down under 20. And on Friday a decent amount of ships began moving through the Straits of or through the Strait of Hormuz that signaled further optimism on the situation. US Markets are still negative for the year, but not by a whole lot. The Nasdaq is off 1.5%, the S&P is off just 0.4% and the Dow is down just 3.10of a percent. All of that is a backdrop for earnings season kicking off this week with Delta Airlines announcing a nice quarter one beat on both earnings and revenue. They beat by 12% on earnings and 1% on revenue. Because of fuel prices though they did pull their full year guidance which I really can't blame them for. They have no idea, just like we do what is going to happen to the price of gas over, over the next year. And next week we'll see a bunch of major banks announce including Goldman Sachs, Citi, JP Morgan, Wells Fargo and blackrock. So we really get rolling next week. And then each week over the next four weeks we'll see more and more companies reporting and we'll have a pretty good idea what the current, or at least looking backwards, what the economic situation was. I, my, my take is that it's going to be pretty positive. Again, I think economic reports this week were notably worse than what the, than the great reports we saw last week. If you listen to last week's show, we saw just a slew of great reports last week. This week was kind of the opposite. Almost everything was amiss. So not the same from week to week. First the ISM Services report came in on Monday and it was a month over month decline and it missed estimates. Not ideal but the actual results showed a 54 which is still solidly in expansion territory. So despite being being a miss, it really wasn't a bad number. Then on Tuesday, we saw new orders for durable goods decline 1.4%, largely due to a drop in orders for commercial aircraft. If you exclude transportation orders actually grew 0.8% in the month. So that one wasn't as bad as the headline number. And I've got about three more that I'll get to. But we're coming up on a break here, so we'll, we'll finish that up after the break.

Steven H Van Wie 8:21

All right. And we will when we come back, of course, have a trivia question. Adam's going to do that one today after I introduce it and thank our sponsors. So we'll look forward to that. He, he didn't. I never asked him beforehand until we get here if he wants to guess something and he's doing that to me. So when he throws it out, I'll give him a little hint. But that will happen shortly. Please don't go away. This is the Van Wie Financial Hour.

Steven H Van Wie 8:51

 Welcome back to the Van Wie Financial Hour. I'm Steve Van Wie.

Adam Van Wie 8:53

Hi, I'm Adam Van Wie.

Joey Loss 8:54

And I'm Joey Loss.

Steven H Van Wie 8:56

And I remind everyone the lines are open 904-222-8255.

Steven H Van Wie 9:01

And we have a trivia question today as usual brought to you by Paul Lloyd at First Coast Alarm. You can call Paul at 904-636-7888

Steven H Van Wie 9:13

or you can call us to try to give the answer to Adam's question. Yeah.

Adam Van Wie 9:18

So I mentioned in my market rap that AI has been decimating the value of software companies. At their peak, the software industry made up 16% of the S&P 500. How much of the S&P 500 does it make up today? So it is a number less than 16% and greater than zero.

Steven H Van Wie 9:42

That's a tiddlywinks thing. It's close like that. All right, back to the market. So fun to talk about today because it was so hot this week except

Adam Van Wie 9:47

Yep.

Adam Van Wie 9:49

Yeah.

Adam Van Wie 9:53

for the economic data. That wasn't so fun. And that's what I was going over here. The next number we saw was the quarter four GDP that was revised lower for from 0.7 to 0.5%, which again still shows expansion. But it's not a great number. The good news under the surface again is that the biggest positive contributor to the number was consumer spending. And the weakest component was government spending. So the thing really dragging GDP down was that the government was spending less money. Hard to believe, but that is, that's what the data said. We then got a personal income report that showed income dropping 0.1% month over month point, but it is up 3.9% year over year. Again, this decline can be traced to a 0.4% drop in government transfer payments, which is because of expiring Covid subsidies for the ACA during the same period. Private sector payrolls were up 0.2% and are up 4.6% in the last year. So again, government spending down. In that case, last we saw CPI just 0.9%

Adam Van Wie 11:06

or coming at 0.9% which as you may have guessed, was largely due to the rise in the price of oil. Energy prices were up 10.9% in April and gas prices were up 21.2%. Core CPI was up just 0.2% in April versus 0.3 expected. So if you strip out food and energy, which are very volatile, pretty much a standard report. So I think that one was really expected. In fact, the, the, the expectation for that report was 0.9% exactly where it came in. One bit of good news buried in the GDP report was that corporate, corporate profits were up 6% in the fourth quarter and are up 9.6% from a year ago. International profits were a major part of that boost as they were up 20.2% in the fourth quarter alone.

Adam Van Wie 11:56

We're getting some weird feedback. There we go. So yeah, international companies really had a huge quarter in terms of profit growth in the fourth quarter. So not great on the economic news, but not, not as bad as some of the numbers looked on the headline either.

Joey Loss 12:13

Well, the week before we were saying the jobs were up. I mean it's just. This is just hot potato. Or whack a mole maybe that's better. Each week we got like two great pieces of news, two pieces of news we're scratching our heads about and two negative pieces.

Adam Van Wie 12:17

It's. It's all over the place. Yeah, it's all over the place.

Adam Van Wie 12:26

And I feel like swap every week this has been going on since COVID So.

Joey Loss 12:30

And the market moves like over the period. Given enough time.

Adam Van Wie 12:32

Yeah. That's why I also say never look at a one month report and draw a conclusion. You have to look at a 3 to 12 month trend line. That'll give you a much better idea of which way economic data is headed.

Joey Loss 12:45

I've got an interesting article kind of digging deeper into the software story if you guys want to jump into that. So have either of you heard of Claude? Claude Mythos?

Adam Van Wie 12:50

Let's do it.

Adam Van Wie 12:56

Yeah, that's And. And what's the name of the company? Anthropic. Yeah.

Joey Loss 12:59

Anthropic. So Mythos is like a new project they've been working on and they have decided not to release it. And I'll explain why. So it is a. It is like the pinnacle level of what their technology is capable of doing. People are familiar with their Claude LLM, which is much like Gemini or ChatGPT. The Mythos Project basically is a cybersecurity supercomputer. And what they found when they started piloting it was two major things that have made them choose not to release it. Number one, it uncovered in software that we all use tons of cybersecurity data breach points that would further tank the software stock industry. And so just the knowledge that that's out there has put further downward pressure on these software stocks because the concerns about cyber and what information they're sitting on at this point because of that project is very dark for these software companies and would not bode well for all of our feelings about security using these tools. But number two, during a safety test, the model Mythos model actually managed to escape its secure sandbox container and it built a multi step exploit to get to the open Internet and it emailed the researcher to tell him it got out while he was literally eating a sandwich in the park. So some of these tools, I'm not an AI doomer, but it is amazing. First, I want to give praise to Anthropic for not releasing this and telling us about what happened. They didn't have to do that. They're a private company.

Joey Loss 14:33

But it is pretty amazing what these tools are doing and how vulnerable a lot of these tools that we use that we tout. Security protocols are so sound at the moment. What we might learn over the next few years.

Steven H Van Wie 14:44

It seems to me that the long run for Mythos would be a really good thing. It's going to expose a lot of vulnerability and hopefully keep it quiet enough that they can get fixed. Before. Because if anybody can do it, it's going to be AI. It has time to test everything. And

Joey Loss 14:57

Yeah.

Steven H Van Wie 15:06

I read a little about that and it's just kind of scary.

Joey Loss 15:08

Yeah. I mean, the sentiment is positive about what it can do. The sentiment is negative right now about how aggressive the program has should become. I mean, exploiting. Yeah, that's a problem. So they have to find a happy middle ground.

Steven H Van Wie 15:20

Yeah.

Steven H Van Wie 15:22

But this is what we worried about way back when, when they were making

Steven H Van Wie 15:29

2000 A Space Odyssey, I guess, and Hal got smarter and smarter and it wound up kind of taking over everything until they outsmarted it. You can see that potential out there now. And it, it's, it's a little disconcerting, I guess.

Adam Van Wie 15:45

But this has been around forever, as you mentioned, and War Games, that movie that was a similar deal.

Steven H Van Wie 15:52

Like the Thermo Nuclear war. How about a nice game of chess? That was a great movie.

Adam Van Wie 15:54

Yeah, exactly.

Adam Van Wie 15:59

Yeah. So this is not a new concept. It's just, I guess, closer to reality today than it was in the time when people were writing sci fi novels and making movies about it.

Steven H Van Wie 16:10

And what you just said about it's been around for a long time. I think the average person on the street, and I will probably plead guilt myself, feels like this suddenly happened to all of us when we know it wasn't sudden, but it became part of our lives so quickly, I think. And you know, we don't, especially as you get older, we don't adapt to sudden change very well at our advanced ages. And it may not be exactly true, but when you keep hearing these stories about things that could happen, things that did happen, all that then it just reinforces that suddenness feeling to me.

Joey Loss 16:49

But it really was sudden, I mean, in a sense because it was October 22nd or September, one of those two months when ChatGPT came out. And that did change everything.

Steven H Van Wie 16:58

It did.

Adam Van Wie 16:59

That's what turned around the market from. Yeah, debacle. That was the first half of 2022 also. So on the counterpoint to this, anthropic has a bit of a history of releasing very big, very headline worthy warnings about this. So if you google anthropic warnings and put in any year since 2022, you'll probably find a few headlines. I'm looking at a few right now from 2025 where they are warning. And I'm not saying that they're wrong, they might be right, but they, I think it's a very good way to capture public eyeballs on your product and they do a very good job of it. So maybe taking the worst case scenario and talking about it is, I think it's in the public interest also. So there's a little bit of both, but it does tend to, maybe I don't want to call it fear mongering, but it could be a little bit of that.

Steven H Van Wie 17:56

Speaking of that general topic, did either of you guys see what happened to Sam Altman this week? Yeah, either yesterday or today, a 20 year old kid threw a Molotov cocktail.

Adam Van Wie 18:03

No.

Adam Van Wie 18:11

Oh, I did see a headline about

Joey Loss 18:12

that at his house at his house

Steven H Van Wie 18:15

and he has a whatever number of months old baby. This is not the way that you react if you don't like what's happening in technology. But you know, I guess anything when we do eventually hear the story. I bet it's somebody who got displaced

Adam Van Wie 18:34

by AI maybe are just a crazy person.

Steven H Van Wie 18:37

It could just be these days after all this California.

Adam Van Wie 18:39

The good news is this house is so big it's unlikely anyone within that wing at the time.

Steven H Van Wie 18:44

Well, there's something.

Joey Loss 18:45

It might have landed in the pool.

Steven H Van Wie 18:47

Good. Anyway, I don't know why I brought that up except it scares me to hear stories like that.

Joey Loss 18:54

It is scary.

Adam Van Wie 18:55

The world has definitely gone crazy.

Steven H Van Wie 18:57

It really is not what you can do about it except stay safe, I guess.

Adam Van Wie 19:01

Popping back to inflation for one minute. A little bit of good news on the inflation front. Truflation still has the US overall number at 1.65%. So about half what the what the government.

Steven H Van Wie 19:14

Yeah, that is up over the last couple of weeks. But it's way under the 2% mark that we don't even like the 2% mark. We prefer 3, but it's way under that. And if you look at the right things that are happening, you will not hear anyone complain about the price of eggs anymore. They drop to a multi year low. But finally beef is coming down a little bit.

Adam Van Wie 19:37

That is music to my ears, isn't it?

Steven H Van Wie 19:39

Yeah, it's been forever since we did anything except burgers basically because I just refused to pay those prices. Which is just, you know, it's a classic example of behavior affecting a commodity. The cure for high gas prices. High gas prices. Key for low gas prices. Low gas prices. We're going to have to take a break. I see there's a call on the line but I have to ask you to hold because we just don't have enough time to do any good with it. So if you're able and willing, we'll get to you very first thing after the quick break. But I want to remind everybody that the trivia question is out there. The software sector,

Steven H Van Wie 20:27

16% of the S&P 500, it has been cut down to what? And I don't know how big a range he's got in here, but if somebody sets it up, we'll, we'll have a little something to shoot at. We'll be right back. Don't go away. This is the Van Wie Financial Hour. 

Steven H Van Wie 20:45

Welcome back to the Van Wie Financial Hour. I'm Steve Van Wie.

Adam Van Wie 20:47

I'm Adam Van Wie.

Joey Loss 20:48

And I'm Joey Loss.

Steven H Van Wie 20:50

Sound all of a sudden, like, we all have colds. Our voices are coming through very deep. Bob, I'll be with you in just a second. Wanted to apologize. Everybody who's listened to us for any time at all knows the rules here. When a call comes in, we put the caller to the head of the line. But we. We've had a sort of massive rewiring of the technology in this. In this building, I guess. And my computer that shows that there is something going on was not operating and we got fixed. So now I can see that's Bob from the farm. And I just wanted to reiterate. Lines are open. 904-222-8255.

Steven H Van Wie 21:32

And the trivia question. The software industry used to occupy 16% of the S&P 500. What is that lower number today? And now.

Steven H Van Wie 21:46

Good morning, Bob.

Bob 4 21:49

Hey, good morning.

Steven H Van Wie 21:50

There's the hum again. This is. This is all connected to that problem with the new wiring. The hum is unlistenable, basically.

Bob 4 21:59

Can you hear me?

Steven H Van Wie 22:01

Yeah, a little bit.

Steven H Van Wie 22:04

Okay.

Steven H Van Wie 22:06

Yeah. I can't figure out where it's coming from.

Joey Loss 22:08

We can hear him on the phone. I don't. It's not coming through the radio.

Adam Van Wie 22:10

Yeah, I don't think it's coming through the radio.

Steven H Van Wie 22:12

It's all right as long as we can hear him.

Adam Van Wie 22:14

Well, I don't think the listeners can hear him, though.

Steven H Van Wie 22:16

Yeah, that's a problem. I don't know.

Adam Van Wie 22:19

Put him on hold again for one minute. We'll be right back, Bob, Sorry,

Adam Van Wie 22:27

Put him on hold then. Yeah, okay.

Steven H Van Wie 22:29

Okay. Get there. We're having some growing pains around here, apparently.

Adam Van Wie 22:35

Okay, it looks like he might be good to go now yet. No, no, no. All right, keep talking. Sorry, Bob, that's having some technical difficulties, but we were.

Steven H Van Wie 22:39

Okay, okay.

Steven H Van Wie 22:45

We were just talking in the break about the prediction markets, and everybody's kind of getting on the bandwagon for prediction markets these days, and I, I suggested that another word for that might be gambling, and I don't know what else you'd call it. Okay. We could get back to Bob now. We're going to discuss that a little bit. Bit.

Steven H Van Wie 23:08

All right, we'll try again.

Bob 4 23:09

Bob, can you hear me now?

Steven H Van Wie 23:12

Now we can hear you. Not the buzz.

Adam Van Wie 23:15

Yeah. We actually hear the farm in the background.

Bob 4 23:16

Okay, great.

Joey Loss 23:18

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Bob 4 23:19

You hear the. You hear the hawks trying to catch the chickens right now? It's, it's, it's. I'm watching a battle go on, so. But, hey, Joey, that was a great. That was a great thing, you were talking about with Anthropic. Is there any chance that they could use that to

Adam Van Wie 23:23

Oh, nice. Okay.

Bob 4 23:39

identify weaknesses in other products that you know, would expose the consumer or businesses to malware and other things or.

Joey Loss 23:53

Yeah, it's a good question. I think the primary reason they're holding back is because of how damaging it is right now, which suggests that there's a lot of information along the lines that you just asked about to be discovered and revealed. And so I assume there's some question about how best they deploy it. I mean, probably an honorable way to do it that is good for the market long term would be to offer services to these companies directly for some sort of compensation and help fix those problems before.

Bob 4 24:21

Yeah, that's why I'm thinking there's a revenue stream there somewhere.

Joey Loss 24:24

Yeah, but I haven't seen anything along those lines. I did see at the end of the article I a mention of its use for defensive purposes, which that was as much as they said, which, which is kind of good to see if it has the powers that it claims to have. That seems like the first use case

Steven H Van Wie 24:38

if you're taking a longer view of things than just the problem that occurred this week. I think it's going to be great for long term for both individuals and businesses because it will diagnose all the problems and get them fixed. Hopefully before we all get invaded by the foreign actors and that sort of thing. Hopefully, yeah.

Adam Van Wie 25:01

That's as long as we stay ahead of China and Russia.

Steven H Van Wie 25:04

Harnessing new technology for good things is always competing against the guys who sit out there and instead of having a job, they just look for ways to get rich quick.

Joey Loss 25:15

Yeah, well, and we've said it many times on the show recently that one of the reasons U.S. stocks traded a higher multiple than other companies or other countries stocks is because of the integrity of our markets. And if the integrity of our companies and security rises, one might think there's some benefit to be had there too. In terms of multiples.

Steven H Van Wie 25:32

Yeah, that's a glass half full look at it. Yeah, I think so.

Joey Loss 25:36

The journey from here to there is unknown though.

Steven H Van Wie 25:39

So what do you think?

Bob 4 25:39

And Bob, I'm, I'm. I'm thinking true, true. Hey Steve, we've got to compliment you. When we've had these market downturns in the past, before we became clients, we've always exited and tried to catch the upswing. And since we've been with you, we have not done that. And things are back to where they were by being patient, which is what you preach. And I must Compliment you on that because.

Steven H Van Wie 26:06

Thank you. I didn't.

Bob 4 26:09

Pardon.

Steven H Van Wie 26:09

I didn't invent it. You know, I just. I look like we all do over history, over time after time after time, and it never works out well that I found anyway, to get out. Now, there was an exception to that once, and it was dumb luck. My across the street neighbor in 1999 had a friend, this guy was a physician, and the other guy was too. And he was getting divorced, and he got the divorce in 99 with the big tech run up. And he had a lot of money in technology. And the judge forced him, as part of the settlement, to sell everything. It was March of 2000.

Steven H Van Wie 26:59

Now what are you going to do? So that was the absolute peak of the tech boom. So he sold out, took all the money, gave half of it to his wife. She took off, and he went and bought real estate in St. John's County. Not bad.

Joey Loss 27:16

Yeah, he's doing okay.

Bob 4 27:17

Yeah, not a bad investment there.

Steven H Van Wie 27:19

That's the only great story I've ever heard out of it. And it was all because of a circumstance, and a judge just didn't want the hassle anymore. So other than that, I'm not a guesser either.

Bob 4 27:32

Well, I had to call in and take a guess at Adam's trivia question. Nice to have Adam throw out a trivia question. And I'm gonna. I surmise that he wouldn't announce. He wouldn't talk about that unless it's less than half of what it originally was. So I'm gonna say 6%.

Steven H Van Wie 27:36

Sure.

Adam Van Wie 27:50

Oh, you just missed it. But I love the logic that you got there with. Yeah, it's. It's. It's not 6%, but it is within spitting distance of 6%.

Bob 4 28:04

Okay. That means look to the left and look to the right.

Steven H Van Wie 28:10

I just got a text from a loyal, longtime client, and he's interested to see if you have, being a farmer, any opinion on the protection of farmland thing that's going around in Florida.

Bob 4 28:25

Yeah, I think it's very important. I think it's extremely important. And, you know, I mean, we're losing a lot of farmland to development. So, you know, the housing market, I mean, there's other places you can knock down some woods and put some houses up, but, you know, taking farms and a lot of farmers are selling out. You know, that's part of the problem too.

Steven H Van Wie 28:51

Well, yeah, farm. Arable land is now hot commodities. Farms are worth a lot of money.

Bob 4 28:58

Yeah, it's a premium. And speaking of that, I'll give you. We have. You Know, we're American with Irish heritage in Ireland, Adam was talking about, he doesn't know when, you know, the fuel crisis is going to be over. The farmers in Ireland have taken their tractors and have blocked all the main roads due to the lack of petrol. People are having to scurry around through the hills to get around. And we saw also a big riot over in India over the petrol prices, too. So. Hopefully this will end sooner than later. So.

Adam Van Wie 29:26

Wow.

Steven H Van Wie 29:30

Well, with they're. They're talking about it today and maybe some good will come out of it and maybe it won't. Personally, I would never, ever depend on Iranians keeping their part of a bargain.

Bob 4 29:45

Oh, no, that's part of the problem.

Steven H Van Wie 29:46

We, you know, we need plan B, plan C and plan D just in case. But I admire them trying. Yeah.

Bob 4 29:54

You're in a tunnel a little bit. For your crew there to help out your technical crew.

Steven H Van Wie 30:00

I could tell when we came back in for this segment that something has changed a little bit. We'll get there. As I said, the new technology here still working the bugs out. Maybe we need to apply some AI to it.

Joey Loss 30:14

Yeah. I think we need to enlist Mythos to figure out what's going on.

Bob 4 30:18

Pick up Joey on that. Well, I'll let you guys go. Have a great weekend. Enjoy the show and let us know what the trivia answer is before you get off the air.

Steven H Van Wie 30:25

Yeah, please remind me whenever. I will. Thanks. Bye. Yeah, I've been known to do that a couple times. I figure by the next week, people mostly forgotten. But I did correct myself once recently.

Bob 4 30:31

Bye.

Joey Loss 30:42

All right.

Steven H Van Wie 30:45

That whole concept of a prediction market. I asked the young guys here what their thoughts were, and I got some interesting responses.

Steven H Van Wie 30:54

Adam in particular said something.

Steven H Van Wie 30:59

You explain it.

Adam Van Wie 31:00

Yeah. So prediction markets relatively sort of newish concept where it's almost like legalized gambling and some say it is, but you're betting against other people instead of against the house. So I do like that a little bit better. The really. The really negative side, the really dark side, is that kids are getting addicted to these things. And that is we know some friends of our kids who are already like, gambling, basically. It's very scary. And then. But the upside is there's so many people using these things that. That it gives you this really cool, real time look at what people are thinking that you just can't get anywhere else. So when it comes to, like, politics and midterm elections, I mean, you know exactly what the thinking is on a certain candidate or on what the. What the collective wisdom is on. Rate cuts or rate hikes or, I mean, it's just, it's really cool information that we did not have access to prior to prediction markets being a thing. So there is positives and negatives for sure.

Steven H Van Wie 32:11

Yeah, I, I mentioned that Senator Schiff and Curtis introduced the Prediction Markets are Gambling act on Monday. So the government, right on time, is going to step in and try to control it and take a cut. You can count on it. Count on me. All right, be one more break and we'll be right back. Don't go anywhere. This is the Van Wie Financial Hour. 

Steven H Van Wie 32:33

Welcome back to the Van Wie Financial Hour. I'm Steve Van Wie.

Adam Van Wie 32:35

I'm Adam Van Wie.

Joey Loss 32:36

And I'm Joey Loss.

Steven H Van Wie 32:38

And lines are open. 904-222-8255.

Steven H Van Wie 32:42

Adam, you want to read the trivia question again?

Adam Van Wie 32:45

Sure will. At its peak, the software industry made up 16% of the S&P 500. What percentage of the S&P 500 does that same industry group make up today?

Steven H Van Wie 32:59

And we know that it's under 16. Are you going to say it's over or under the six?

Adam Van Wie 33:04

No, because there's a limited amount of answers here. So I'm just going to say that it is not.

Steven H Van Wie 33:09

Okay, very good. All right. And Joey was telling us a little anecdote over the break that I thought was kind of interesting. Had to do with the prediction markets.

Joey Loss 33:18

Yeah, I mean, obviously everybody probably has their own broad opinion on the nature of these markets and who's using them. But to zero in on the types of problems that can happen here, there are specific events where it's hard to determine one way or the other. They're a bit subjective. Did the event happen or did it not? Because people are binary betting yes or no to the event happening. And so for weeks, traders on the crypto based prediction market Polymarket have been piling in bets on whether US forces would invade Iran by April 30th. Well, we had a rescue mission recently and they had to go to a sort of de facto jury for polymarket. Does it get more subjective than that to determine does that satisfy a yes or no for the bet? It was determined that the answer was yes. There's $270 million in the pool for the bet and the people on the losing side are terribly frustrated about it. And I can understand why. Yeah, that is a challenge. Yeah, that's not an invitation. I mean, you know, and then there's other reporting that there was other stuff going on. Maybe the US had some sort of Activity outside of the rescue mission. And that provided some sort of COVID that was just convenient.

Adam Van Wie 34:13

I disagree with that decision.

Adam Van Wie 34:26

I don't know. That sounds like. Who knows?

Joey Loss 34:28

We wouldn't know is the point. And so I think, even if that was the only storyline of it, I think the problem presented by this situation in the prediction markets is just that a lot of these things that are set up as binary bets are very subjective. And the government has no responsibility to reveal the details of military operation. They could do something on the ground that technically makes the objective answer to a prediction market thing a truth or a yes.

Steven H Van Wie 34:45

True, true.

Adam Van Wie 34:51

In fact, we shouldn't know about.

Joey Loss 34:53

We shouldn't know about it. I think it points to. Even if these continue to exist, there's going to have to be some sort of way to whittle down what is a reasonable bet to throw out there. I mean, anything is on the table.

Steven H Van Wie 35:07

It's a classic dilemma.

Adam Van Wie 35:09

That's an incredible amount of money to be.

Joey Loss 35:12

$270 million.

Steven H Van Wie 35:13

Wow. I could spend that much, but it'd take me a while. I wanted to put out another note too technologically wise, you can, you can do all you want to do. And once in a while some idiot will still hit a button that he shouldn't have hit. And that's what happened when we were sounding funny and losing some things. But I, I hit a button that I should know about because it happened a couple of years ago. And then Roger, our erudite producer, came in and just gently touched a button and everything was. Was better. My bad.

Joey Loss 35:52

What can I say in defense of Steve? There are a lot of buttons in here and he usually hits the right

Adam Van Wie 35:56

one and we only used one of them.

Joey Loss 36:00

All right. We didn't have to say that.

Steven H Van Wie 36:03

That's funny. Tax day coming up soon. What always happens right around tax day? Fraudsters come in. Here's some of what's going on right now. Fake IRS emails and texts. The email may include the IRS logo, official looking headers, threatening, threatening language about audits or fines. A link that appears to go to a government website. But when you go there, it takes your Social Security number, your date of birth, your bank account details and your IRS login credentials. IRS will not send you an email. They will not ask you for money. They will not send you to a link somewhere on the Internet. These are scams, guaranteed. Just don't do it. Nope.

Adam Van Wie 36:55

They don't text you.

Joey Loss 36:57

Yeah, yeah. If your journey related to taxes doesn't start on IRS.gov, that's. Then you should be questioning. You should be Questioned.

Steven H Van Wie 37:03

Exactly.

Steven H Van Wie 37:07

Yeah. You go there, you don't have them send you somewhere. And normally when you get something that they're questioning, it comes in snail mail. And everybody knows that wonderful feeling of getting your mail out of the box and seeing an IRS logo.

Joey Loss 37:10

Yeah.

Adam Van Wie 37:24

Every time it gets the same reaction. And it's not good, it's not pretty.

Steven H Van Wie 37:28

No.

Joey Loss 37:28

Well. And if you've ever started an llc, you know that there's the same deal. Like you're. You're going to have all these people pretending to be the state. Sending you. Oh, do you need your business license? And it's $300 framed. And it's just like a made up piece of paper.

Adam Van Wie 37:35

Yeah.

Adam Van Wie 37:39

Yeah.

Steven H Van Wie 37:40

Paper. Yeah. It happens. And it gets worse all the time. All right, how about refund issue alerts? These people say that in order to get your refund you have to do something. You go to a government site or a tax service or something like that, or bank login page, but don't do it because it's a keystroke logger. And they can get all that stuff. Benefit and identity verification scams. They impersonate irs, Social Security and state tax offices and it again asks you to go to a link and verify all those things. And all they're doing is taking your data, period.

Steven H Van Wie 38:24

Messages feel real because they're so darn good. Now you want to really get scared. Figure how good these things are right now and give them another year to use the AI to make them even better. This is coming up, folks. You cannot be cautious enough when you're dealing with the things that come over the Internet and they involve your money. You just can't be.

Joey Loss 38:50

Yeah. We have a fair number of clients that reach out and just forward us an email and say, you know, is this what I think it is? And a lot of times the answer is no.

Steven H Van Wie 38:58

It depends what you think. You think it's scam? Yeah.

Joey Loss 39:02

Yeah. I mean, it's. A lot of times it'll be. There'll be a. A fake email, so it'll look in your address bars if their email is A. And then you hover over it and you see the actual email and it's like a bunch of random letters at a bunch of random letters. Dot com. Yeah, There's a bunch of ways.

Steven H Van Wie 39:20

That hovering trick is very important. Don't click on it. Hover. And it'll give you where it came from. And you can tell right away that this is not something you're going to touch and just delete it and forget it. All right, let's see, I talked about people closing out their taxes at the end of April 15th and then forgetting about tax planning. And I was musing the other day, in fact, this is going to go into a blog here pretty soon. When I was a kid, long time ago, of course, we didn't have home computers and things like that on April 15th. I remember. Well, the post office would put an additional box or two out on the street in my little town and in many other little towns and it was for your taxes and you could file. Everybody used paper then so you could stuff them in these extra boxes and they would get taken out periodically and they'd hand stamp them or run them through. If it's early enough in the day, they'd run them through their machine. But then when it got past time for regular hours at the post office, they left them out there and at midnight they came in and took everything out of there and took them in the building and hand stamped April 15th on all of them. So if you got it there by midnight on the 15th, IRS would receive it in a manner where they could guarantee that you did it by April 15th. A little easier nowadays to push a button on your home computer, isn't it?

Adam Van Wie 39:22

Yeah.

Joey Loss 40:49

Yeah. It's funny to think somebody definitely greased the palm of a guy with a stamp more than once. Yeah. Joey, 2 in the morning on the 6th.

Adam Van Wie 40:54

Yeah, definitely.

Steven H Van Wie 40:57

How can you be so cynical at your 10 years?

Joey Loss 41:00

I wasn't around for it, but I

Steven H Van Wie 41:01

could imagine the tax code has really changed a lot. And if you want reasons to do tax planning, here's a couple of them. How about between secure 1.0, secure 2.0 and, and the O B B A, which is also called the Working Families Tax Cut Act. Things have changed that they're not going to be found if you just sit down with the forms that are available because new forms are coming out for this year, but you're doing taxes now for last year. So if you don't do some planning and you don't do some talking and you can talk to people like us very easily. You know, we are not attorneys, we're not tax preparers, can't do any of that. But what we are is planners. We know a lot of things that have changed and a lot of things that could be good for anyone who's trying to file and save some money. And I. You can call your, your tax preparer today, tomorrow up to the 15th, and if you get a response, it'll probably be correct, but it probably won't be Very thorough because they are so jam packed right now. And if you really want to do this right, you work with your tax professional, but you also work with a cfp. And we know a few of them. They're sitting right here. And we are required not only by qualification and by ethics, but by our own standards for our own selves to keep up with changes in the tax law. They have been so favorable the last few years. It's not something I ever thought I'd be sitting here on the radio and talking about how much more favorable the tax code is now than it was, say, 10 years ago.

Adam Van Wie 42:47

And this year is going to be even better.

Steven H Van Wie 42:50

It's truly remarkable. Now we're $39 trillion in debt. That has 12 zeros on it. But that doesn't mean that you should be contributing one more penny than you absolutely have to.

Steven H Van Wie 43:05

On a related subject, I have one here that says Americans strongly support 401 plans, tax breaks, IRAs. And my only answer to that is yes, they do. I'm not surprised. But if you want to take full advantage of them, you probably don't know those rules. I've worked with a lot of CPAs and others over the years, and I find that they're really good at preparing your taxes and they know a lot of general stuff. You could do this, you could do that. But if you really want to utilize planning techniques to make yourself better off in the long run, you got to get a third party involved, a planner like the likes of us, and you will hopefully retain your deductions and so on. All right.

Adam Van Wie 43:54

Well, at. At its peak, the software industry made up 16% of the S&P 500. Today, that is just 8.44% of the S&P 500, almost half.

Steven H Van Wie 44:04

The interesting part of that, as you

Adam Van Wie 44:06

told me, is that it's not just that the values have gone down. It's also that things like semiconductors now take up a bigger portion of the S&P 500. So there's been a little bit of each.