What's up! It's episode 103 of Payne Points of Wealth and the FED just doesn't want us to have a good time. J Powell, again, talking extremely hawkish in its comments as we're recording this. However, we've got a hot job market, unemployment is still staying extremely low, close to a 50-year low. We just keep adding jobs and wages continue to go up as this economy is still on solid footing. Should we be rooting for a bad economy or rooting for a good economy? Well, we're going to give you our view. On the Tipping Point, we're going to talk about end-of-the-year tax and financial moves you can make to make sure you're on solid footing. 

• The little boy who cries wolf [1:10]

It's time in the markets, not timing the market. Let's just take the Federal Reserve's conference call the other day, in the course of a half hour the market went up 400 points from what was perceived as dovish comments then closed 500 points down. That's virtually a thousand-point swing, a thousand points in a period of two hours! You're gonna invest in that mess? The whole idea is that this short-term volatility tells you nothing. Trying to game it or time it is so futile, it's ridiculous. Meanwhile, when you have a diversified portfolio, you're making money every day. Your dividends accrue, your interest is accrued, you earn it, it's yours, and you get paid to wait! 

It's the end of the year. It's coming up on tax time so this is the time to really look at your portfolio. We thought it would be a good time to talk about some of the pro moves that we use with our clients at our boutique firm Payne Capital Management, some of the strategies we use at the end of the year that our listeners can apply to their portfolio to optimize their portfolio for their financial independence. 

One of the things that we like to do towards the end of the year, especially with a volatile year as we've had, are tax swaps. Over time investments will have a lot of embedded unrealized capital gains so whenever we can do some tax loss harvesting it saves folks a lot of money on the back end. This may be the biggest year ever for tax loss harvesting. 

A few other tax strategies that are great at the end of the year that no one looks at are Roth conversions, charitable contributions from retirement accounts, and making sure that you're maxing out your retirement plan contribution.

• Alibaba holding group, a data-driven colossus in retail, logistics, lending, and more has generated 89 billion in free cash flow over the past five years. The equivalent in the US would be Amazon which has only generated 75 billion over the last five years. Yet, its shares are lower than their debut price back in 2014. Alibaba's market value of $168 billion is just a sliver of Amazon's trillion dollars. There might be some opportunity in China

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