Brandy Auterson-Hurst:
4 Your Money is brought to you by NelsonCorp Wealth Management.
David Nelson:
It’s now time for your money. We’re joined by David Nelson, CEO of NelsonCorp Wealth Management. Welcome back, David.
Brandy Auterson-Hurst:
Thanks, Brandy. Appreciate it.
David Nelson:
So the economy has been sending some mixed messages lately. What are you seeing right now?
Brandy Auterson-Hurst:
Well, one of the biggest stories that we’re watching and have been watching is the growing divide between hard data and soft data. And our chart today, I think again, hopefully helps explain this to folks. As far as the terminology here that we’re talking about. It’s comparing the economic surprises from the real numbers versus the survey-based sentiment measures. So the blue line tracks basically hard data. It’s the GDP, it’s employment, it’s consumer spending, all the stuff that you can actually measure, measure directly. The red line shows the soft data. This is looking at business surveys and consumer-confident reports. And over the past few months what we’ve seen, you can see the visual here, is that there’s been a huge divide as far as between the two. The hard data is holding up. It’s surprising actually to the upside where the soft data is falling off a cliff. So anyway, the economy is doing better than people think and that creates a lot of noise when trying to figure out as far as where things are really headed.
David Nelson:
All right, so how can investors see through this noise?
Brandy Auterson-Hurst:
Well, I think the bottom line for most individuals out there should view this the way that we view this as an opportunity. This is not something to be necessarily frightened from. We think it’s an opportunity as far as that people can certainly look at and potentially take advantage of.
David Nelson:
All right, David, as always, thanks for joining us.
Brandy Auterson-Hurst:
Thank you.
David Nelson:
If you missed any of our discussion, we’ll make it available for you on ourquadcities.com.
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