Meta's Comeback, Rates at 19-Year Highs, and Why AI Still Can't Look You in the Eye

In this episode of Money Matters, brought to you by Greenberg Financial Group, Dean Greenberg, Todd Glick Jr., Dave Sherwood, Dylan Greenberg and Sebastian Borsini take stock of a September that has treated the big indexes better than the calendar usually allows. The S&P 500 and the Nasdaq have eked out gains for the month on the back of a tech bounce, while the Dow, the Russell 2000 and the equal weight S&P are all lower, and we spend real time on what that split means if your own portfolio is not keeping pace with the headlines. Dave runs the math on what a typical 60/40 mix might reasonably show year to date when the bond side is fighting the highest 10-year yield in 19 years, and Dean explains why he stays cautious inside a trading range with an election a few weeks out.

Meta is the story of the week. A few weeks after the headlines had it going the way of the tobacco companies, the lawsuit is settled and the stock is running on Muse, a personal AI agent that hit number one on the App Store. Dean has been using it to shop for a television, Todd lays out why an agent that learns you is different from a search box, and the whole table gets into the glasses, the memory chips behind all of it, and what happens to chip stocks once the CHIPS Act buyback restriction expires in December. Then Dean draws the line that matters for this business. Computers ran the trading in 1987 too, right up until they sold the market down twenty percent in a day, and the circuit breakers we have now exist because humans had to step back in. AI can build a portfolio. It cannot ask what you actually want your life to look like, which is why we say we do not plan for your retirement. We plan for what comes after it.

The rate side is where the planning conversation gets practical. Diesel has doubled in twelve months, the 30-year mortgage is back above seven percent, and the show walks through why a short term bond fund is sitting flat this year while the long bond fund is down more than six percent. We explain why we build ladders of individual bonds for larger accounts instead of bond funds, what a multi-year guaranteed annuity can do in a taxable account that a bond cannot, and why the money sitting in your checking account may be the most expensive thing you own. There is also a look at the bottom of the Dow, a sell call on Netflix, the retailers that are still winning, and Oracle's data center trouble.

Firm news: our free interactive financial planning workshop is Friday, Octo