Smart Investing with Brent & Chase Wilsey

Will the senior housing market boom continue going forward?

Investors may think with the population getting older that investing in senior housing could be a great investment going forward. They could be right as the oldest boomers turn 80 at the end of this year. What’s even more amazing is that the US population of 80-year-olds and older will hit 18.8 million in the next five years, that is a 27% increase from today. Senior housi...

How much electricity will AI need? To train AI models companies use graphics processing units, also known as GPUs. They are now starting to build larger clusters of GPUs, which requires even more electricity. How much electricity you may ask? AI data centers use about 30 Megawatts of electricity at a time. If you don’t understand megawatts, let’s just say it’s a lot of power. Picture 30 Walmart stores and how much electricity they ...

Job openings post a sharp decline

The Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, also known as the JOLTs report, showed job openings of 7.6 million in the month of December. This was below the estimate of 8 million and the reading of 8.09 million in the month of November. While this may sound disappointing, this still leaves the ratio of open jobs to available workers at 1.1 to 1. A softening labor market is still not a bad thing cons...

What bank earnings reveal for 2025

Most big bank earnings are out now and the news and the guidance did lean on the positive side. A concern was revealed, which was no surprise to us that loan growth was only up 1.1% from a year ago. It is expected to see loan growth for 2025 of around 2.6%. Bank of America was the big winner here reporting loan demand grew 5 % from last year, but regional bank KeyCorp disappointed investors with t...

Businesses should do well with reduced regulations going forward

Reducing regulations saves companies both time and money and time is always money. Starting in 2025, it is expected that for every new regulation that goes on the books, 10 regulations must be eliminated. I was unaware of what is known as the congressional review where a new President along with Congress can undo certain rules that the previous administration put on t...

Millennials are a little gun shy on buying a home, but they have good reason to be concerned

Looking back 30 to 40 years ago when families purchased a home, they did it as a place to raise a family and they weren’t so focused on how much money the house would be worth in the short term. Millennials who were born between 1981 to 1996 and are now between the ages of 29 and 44 years old are old enough to remember the 2008 Great Recess...

The job report was good, but why is that bad?

Before we go into why the good report was bad, let’s talk about some of the data. The expected number of payrolls was 155,000, which came in well above that at 256,000 jobs for the month of December and also increased from November when it was 212,000 jobs. This high increase in payrolls caused unemployment to drop to 4.1% and came along with an increase in average hourly earnings of 0....

Watch out for record fraud when shopping.

With technology, shopping has become so easy and set records in 2024 of around $5.3 trillion. While this by itself is a problem as some people are over shopping, it has also invited more fraud than ever before and for the first three quarters of 2024 there was an increase of 14.5% to $8.7 billion of shoppers who lost money to fraud. Two things are happening here. First, consumers may be to...

We could see a huge increase in oil demand in 2025!

With oil trading under $70 a barrel, gas prices have continued to fall. But unless the world starts producing more oil in 2025, we could see a big reversal in the price of oil. I base that on an estimate from the International Energy Agency as they expect a huge increase in the demand of oil. They are estimating oil consumption of 1.1 million barrels per day, which would be a 31% ...

Is investing just looking too good these days?

When everything is going up including stocks, commodities and cryptocurrencies, one has to stop and think is this the top? In November US equity trading increased by 38% compared to November 2023. The last time we saw this type volume was in 2021 when meme stocks were the major craze. The CEO of Robinhood, Vlad Tenev, stated a few weeks ago that they’re looking at expanding into sports...

You should be prepared for the upcoming stock market correction! At Wilsey Asset Management we are prepared for an upcoming correction in the stock market. That doesn’t mean we or you should sell all your positions and go to cash. What it does mean is you should take a close look at your portfolio and see if you’re over concentrated in certain positions, especially those that are trading at lofty valuations based on earnings, sales...

Job openings remain strong, what does that mean for our economy?

The Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, also known as the JOLTs Report, showed job openings of 7.74 million in the month of October topped expectations of 7.5 million and increased from September’s reading of 7.4 million. While it was nice to see the increase, I wouldn’t be surprised to see job openings decline further from here. Openings peaked in March 2022 at o...

Changes in the SEC under Trump that you should know

There will be many changes under Trump, but for investors the SEC, which is also known as the Securities and Exchange Commission could be a big one. The current head of the SEC, Gary Gensler, is likely gone for sure. He has been tough on Wall Street and even tougher on cryptocurrencies. It is likely Trump will appoint a new SEC chairperson who will want to have less control over W...

Don’t let the presidential election be your investment indicator

Presidential elections, especially this one, make people become very emotional, but don’t let that sway you away from investing. Looking back to 1950, the S&P 500 index gained 12.1% per year under Democrats and 7.1% under Republicans. So based on that tad bit of information, you would think that Democrats are better for the stock market than Republicans. If we dig...

T-bills could be your worst investment

Right off the bat you’re thinking what how could they say such a thing? Warren Buffett has hundreds of billions of dollars in T-bills! Why do we think it’s the worst investment? First off, Warren Buffett spends all day long reading, researching, analyzing and when he sees a good value investment, he will likely sell what he needs from T-bills to buy those good long-term investments. If you are...

Where does private equity invest the money, you give them?

Private equity invests money in many different areas, but the problem that they are having is that both them and venture-capital are sitting on $2.6 trillion, which is a record high. Ultimately, they are having a hard time finding where to invest. A private equity firm generally has to earn between 12 and 14% on their investments to cover their management fee and pay invest...