Can You Keep Your Poise and Tune Out the Noise?

The drumbeat of unnecessary, repetitive, and extraneous information and news (read: noise) will always be a constant part of our lives. The challenge is to define and identify what information is truly meaningful, and what is false or useless, and then how to deposit it into our personal knowledge bank. Finally, and we believe most importantly, is the pursuit and application of wisdom, or the ability to think and act using our knowledge, insight, understanding, and common sense, growing slowly with experience over time.

Instead of being distracted, worried, and reactionary, one of our central goals at Towerpoint Wealth is to help our clients be more confident and purposefulinvestors, which ultimately leads you to gain greater economic peace-of-mind. However, as we are all now acutely aware, the global public health and economic uncertainty surrounding the coronavirus/COVID-19 disease makes the attainment of this economic peace-of-mind a much more difficult endeavor.

Reducing and even flat-out ignoring noise is a difficult thing to do, as it oftentimes is a battle against deeply-entrenched habits. Our smartphones, our friends, and the media are regularly our greatest economic enemies, and at Towerpoint Wealth, we believe that a large part of our legal fiduciary obligation to each of our clients is to help you properly tune out. The discipline needed to filter is one of the primary determinants along the path to successfully building and protecting longer-term wealth. And as we continually nurture our client relationships at TPW, we not only set the expectation that we will be explicitly objective about the importance (or lack thereof) of newsworthy external events and the glut of immediately-available information (even if they may not like what they hear from us), but also act as an “information filter,” taking our knowledge and experience and having it translate into the wisdom our clients desire.

Please do not mistake our commentary about noise as being at all insensitive or tone-deaf to the seriousness of the coronavirus situation. More than 100,000 worldwide infections, and at at least 3,383 confirmed deaths do to COVID-19 are sobering figures, and we recognize there are many unanswered questions about what may lie ahead. Additionally, we certainly do not advocate clients walk around with their head in the sand, as it is important to have an awareness and understanding of what is happening. We simply want to help you avoid and ignore the shorter-term distractions that none of us have any control over. Put differently:

Excellent illustration courtesy of Napkin Finance

As mentioned in the Special Report we issued on February 26 (Coronavirus and the Stock Market Pullback), we firmly believe the US consumer is on solid footing, and will continue to be one of the key drivers of US economic growth in 2020, and that any drop in corporate earnings and economic activity due to the COVID-19 disease will be more than made up for over the remainder of the year. Additionally, we encourage you to click on our March 2020 Monthly Market Commentary found below for our updated outlook and details.

In summary, we think you will enjoy (and ask you to think about) Barry Ritholz’s tongue-in-cheek list below:

What’s Happening at Towerpoint Wealth?

Our esteemed Client Service Specialist, Raquel Jackson, stopped by the office last weekend to do some over-and-above work, and enlisted the help of her three daughters, Zaida (18), Zenia (14), and Daijah (3), while doing so!

Our President, Joseph Eschleman, and Director of Operations, Lori Heppner, enjoyed a delicious lunch together at Tiger on the K Street Mall (now known as “The Kay”).

In addition to filtering information, washing hands, and appreciating the good people we have around us, a number of trending and notable events occurred over the past few weeks:

• Katherine Johnson, famed NASA mathematician, dead at 101
• Doctors use the gene-editing tool Crispr inside a body for the first time in an attempt to treat blindness
• Deadly tornado cuts a devastating path through Tennesee
• Three candidates (Biden, Sanders, Gabbert) remain in the hunt for the Democratic presidential nomination
• Hachette Book Group employees staged a walk-out in protest against its decision to publish Woody Allen’s upcoming memoir
• Former MVP and fan favorite Steph Curry returns to action for the Golden State Warriors after a four month layoff with a broken hand
• Mortgage rates fall to an all-time low amid coronavirus concerns

Lastly and as always, we sincerely value our relationships and partnerships with each of you, as well as your trust and confidence in us here at Towerpoint Wealth, and encourage you to reach out to us (info@towerpointwealth.com) with any questions, concerns, or needs you may have. The world continues to be an extremely complicated place. We are here for you, and look forward to connecting with, helping, and being a direct, fully independent, and objective expert financial resource for you.

– Nathan, Raquel, James, Joseph, Lori, Steve, and Jonathan