Earnings, the Jobs Report, and Some Hot Retirement Tips

In This Article:

On this episode of Motley Fool Money, host Chris Hill together with Motley Fool analysts Jason Moser and Ron Gross hit on some of this week's biggest market stories. The Fed cut interest rates, and jobs numbers looked great, but investors shouldn't overthink the big stuff when it comes to their portfolios. Apple's (NASDAQ: AAPL) most recent quarter hammered home that iPhones are a smaller part of the story. Cereal might be so yesterday, but Kellogg's (NYSE: K) snacks division is doing great. Also, highlights from Shopify (NYSE: SHOP), Spotify (NYSE: SPOT), Procter & Gamble (NYSE: PG), Under Armour (NYSE: UA) (NYSE: UAA), Pinterest (NYSE: PINS), Square (NYSE: SQ), and Beyond Meat (NASDAQ: BYND). And, as always, the analysts share some stocks on their radar.

On the back half of the show, The Motley Fool's resident retirement expert Robert Brokamp chats with Chris about, yes, retirement. Learn some alarming retirement trends, some tips for saving enough, advice about college spending, and more.

To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool's free podcasts, check out our podcast center. A full transcript follows the video.

This video was recorded on Aug. 2, 2019.

Chris Hill: It's the Motley Fool Money radio show! I'm Chris Hill. Joining me in studio this week, senior analysts Jason Moser and Ron Gross. Good to see you as always, gentlemen! We've got the latest earnings from Wall Street. Retirement expert Robert Brokamp is our guest. And as always, we'll give you an inside look at the stocks on our radar.

But we begin once again with the big macro. This week, we got the jobs report for July. Unemployment rate stayed at 3.7%. The fed meeting resulted in a rate cut of 0.25%. And Jason, we had more talk of tariffs and the trade war with China. I'm curious, through all of this noise -- I'm not saying there's not some substance there -- what do you focus on as an investor? I'm guessing it's not necessarily, say, for example, the 0.25% rate cut from the Fed?

Jason Moser: Well, there's a lot to digest there. I think it's a good question, what do you make of it all? For me, we talk often about with the interest rate environment being so low and the stock market being the only place to be. For me, it all comes back to the consumer. With everything that's going on, a lot of this comes back to the consumer. I wonder where we go from here. With unemployment rates so low -- clearly, a lot of people are out there working, yet you look at wage growth, and that's really a problem. A lot of people are working, but they're not making a lot of money. And we are in an economy right now, where it's really easy to do a lot of stuff for pretty cheap, with the exception of a few things -- housing, healthcare. Those are two things right there. You think of housing and healthcare, education being a third. Those are areas that are becoming prohibitively expensive for a lot of people. And in the face of consumers that are facing a little bit more of a challenging time, I wonder if there's not a disconnect there. We heard a lot of the big bank CEOs talk about feeling good about the consumer. I feel like that's backward looking. I feel like if you look at it going forward, there's some challenges on the horizon for the consumer that could end up playing out on the economy a little bit more quickly than we imagined.