Stocks closed near session highs to end the week Friday, but the major indexes also fell slightly over the five day period. Investors continue to keep an eye on bank earnings as well as fears of a potential 100 basis point hike in order to curb rapidly rising inflation. Eddy Gifford, Wealth Advisor at TACTIVE, joins Closing Bell to discuss today's close, what to watch as earnings season kicks off, and more.  

Closing Bell

Stocks Close Near Session Highs, But Indexes Fall Slightly for the Week

let's turn back to the major indexes joining me now is Eddie Gifford wealth adviser attack Tive at the tech space for active investing. Eddie good to see you on the show here. We certainly had a positive day in the markets. The NASDAQ's became technology names up 1.8%. How do you interpret today's market action? I think we're in a market that's really trying to find its footing. I think that the good news is that the bulls are battling, so to speak. We see we see them fight back a few days this week and so it looks like at least there's some money that's that's coming in and there's some buyers here. So that's a good thing. NASDAQ obviously has been beat up the most this year. So to see a little bit of recovery there. It makes us feel, makes us feel a little bit good about the whole situation. That is kind of pretty bad. So it is interesting. We also got some comments from President biden just as we were heading into the market close, but I'm meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman talking about opening up and loosening the global supply chain when it comes to oil gas prices. One of the biggest contributors, if not the biggest contributor to higher inflation, is that a positive for the stock market going into next week. I think it's a positive from the standpoint that we've been dealing with this high inflation for a while now and the inflation is basically a three headed monster, the first being the money supply, which happened because of Covid, the good thing is that we can use interest rates to combat money supply, but we can't use interest rates, the combat stuff like oil. And so if we're kind of loosening the purse strings, so to speak and allowing more oil to bring down gas prices and that's going to at least have a short term positive influence on traders in general in the technology space. A space that you cover here closely. Eddie. Do you see opportunity, do you think that there are moves that investors can make as the bulls stage a fight here and push the stock market higher? That could be rewarding for investors. I think there's a few moves you can make here. I think that they don't lose size or don't lose sight of the bigger trend, which is still kind of showing down, but you can go and pick out or put out some good stocks here. Vertex is one that we've used this year. It's up over 30% year to date. And uh, Just in case if if the market rolls over altogether and goes down by another 50% because we don't know if this is a rally or this is the real thing. And uh, we could kind of short the NASDAQ against that. And so we can kind of heads ourselves On a entire index, but then by a company that we believe in at the same time. We're really not making any recommendations to just go 100% long now without any type of stops or hedge in place though. So another question that I have for you is we got the big bank earnings this week, earning season will continue obviously for the next few weeks up next will be these technology names, netflix, apple google meta just to name a few. What are you watching this earnings season? Really, I'm just trying to see if there's an appetite for risk out there. A lot of people have been beat up by the market this year. A lot of people are scared of what could happen if this inflation is running hotter than expected for longer than expected. So I'm just really watching to see that if we get some negative news, which we probably will because we always do is like, can we, can we battle back again like we did this week And if that does happen, you can definitely make the case for, hey, we're at the bottom and we can start kind of moving back in of course dollar cost averaging in over the next 6 to 12 months is not a bad idea. Or if you're going all in right now again, like put some type of heads or stop in place just just in case we're wrong. And this is a bear market rally. I mean you remember 4003 NASDAQ 100 dropped 83% but it had a rally of 50% positive while it was doing that. So we just have to really manage risk the result. Yeah, I think that's a good point. Two more questions for you first bank stocks obviously kind of hit or miss mixed bag for the earnings that we got this week. Very strong results from city relatively speaking and a disappointment that we saw actually for JPMorgan yesterday. What's the challenge for these banks when it comes to loan growth? I think the biggest challenge right now is the fact that they all have these requirements uh that basically kind of breathe their capital so they can't loan out as much as they maybe want to even though the interest rates are higher and they can collect a little bit more of a premium. So dealing with that dealing with the fact that there are people that maybe, you know, the good news is we've seen good things from retail this week. The bad news is that inflation is still high and it hasn't really kind of moved into the overall markets as far as like the consumer is concerned at this point. So these consumers are going to get to the point where they're going to have to make the choice do I pay the energy bill or do I pay the mortgage? And it's an unfortunate situation. But if inflation does stay elevated, we could see not only less loans from the banks because of capital requirements, but we can start to see more defaults. We can start to see more foreclosures and stuff like that starts happening. We can see the banks go down even more. I'm hopeful that that won't happen. But I'm not convinced at this point. As consumers look to save money Eddie where they can, what's your best advice? What are ways to save money in this environment? Well, I think it's one of those things where the first place I would start for anybody is if you've got consumer debt, that's your credit cards, that your lines of credit, that type of stuff every time the Fed steps in and they'd raise rates, that's a direct increase on those rates. And so If we're expecting a 1% hike in a couple of weeks and another, you know, 2% over the rest of the year or whatever they're expecting now we can see that interest rate climbed pretty fast. And so the first step would be pay down those consumer lines, get those off the books. Uh, other than that, I would say try to be more efficient with your day plan ahead. Don't, don't take 18 trips today. Try to do one trip and hit all of all of your parents at once. You could eat in and it's, it's still more expensive than it was last year, but it's not as expensive as eating out. And then, you know, I know that we don't like to and I know that it's not necessarily good for markets, but we can start saying no, watch a movie at home instead of going to the movies. Uh, and, and just kind of hunker down a little bit because it could get a little bit more rocky before we really kind of see that light at the end of the tunnel. Yeah, sometimes it is good to simplify. I think whether or not we are in a recession or head there. Simplification can definitely be a good thing. Eddie Gifford, wealth wealth adviser, attractive Eddie, Thank you so much.