If you're feeling frustrated by the soaring grocery prices and stagnant inflation, then you are not alone! Despite hopes for some relief, it seems like the cost of groceries just keeps climbing, leaving you wondering when the price hikes will stop.

In this episode:

• Get a financial advisor's perspective on inflation and grocery price trends.
• Prepare for upcoming tech company earnings reports.
• Explore the performance of teams like the Chiefs, Ravens, Lions, and 49ers.
• Examine the coaching abilities of Andy Reid and Bill Belichick.
• Gather NFL playoff games and Super Bowl predictions.

It'll be interesting to see how they expect AI to hopefully positively impact their earnings going forward. - Sean

Tech Company Earnings Reports

Anticipation is building for the forthcoming earnings reports from major tech companies such as Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft. Attention is drawn to their substantial combined market cap, which exceeds $10 trillion, and their solid cash balance, which reduces their reliance on borrowing for innovation and expansion. The potential role of artificial intelligence in their future plans, especially for companies like Apple and Microsoft, is discussed alongside the potential impact of AI on employment.

Relevant Resources:

https://www.kiplinger.com/investing/stocks/17494/next-week-earnings-calendar-stocks

Important Disclosures

Connect with Your Hosts:

Cody Demmel on LinkedIn

Sean Roth on LinkedIn

Jon Kerstetter on LinkedIn

Welcome to coachable wealth, where we blend the worlds of sports and finance to bring you strategies as you navigate your wealth building journey. John, Cody and Sean are here to help you elevate your financial advisor relationship to meet your long term goals. Now, let's get to it.

JonI watch almost a whole UNC Florida state game, and I think Cody knows, but I'm a little bit of a closet UNC Tar heels basketball fan. I don't really have any rhyme or reason why behind that, but I don't know.

As a kid, I just kind of started following them. Probably just because all the hype with Michael Jordan and yeah, after the Super Bowls, I'm going to have nothing productive to input to this conversation. You're going to start watching college basketball. What are your thoughts on? Obviously we had some big NFL playoff games this weekend.

I think what we all wanted to happen didn't happen on both sides, the AFC and the NFC. Obviously the Chiefs look good. I think the Ravens kind of gave one away with some mistakes and penalties. On the other side, you have the Lions just, I don't know if you want to call it blowing 17 point lead in the second half, and you can make all kinds of comments about them going forward on fourth down or things like that, but that was kind of what got them there and they stuck to it, so you respect it. But now, as far as the Super Bowl, I think I'm all in for the 49 ers.

Oh, really? Yeah. I'm not a big Chiefs. And all of the other things that surround Chiefs games that I don't even want to mention, I think I could certainly do without. Not a swifty?

No, not at all. I'm sure you guys saw that video of Mahomes and Kelsey messing with Justin Tucker's equipment on the field. I was kind of hoping I'd see Justin Tucker hit like a 60 yard game winner. That would have been good. How about you, John?

As I said last week, I was rooting for the Ravens and the Lions, so we didn't get either of those outcomes. But I don't know. Like the Chiefs, you put them in that situation. They're just one of those teams that they know how to win. Yeah.

Andy Reid prepares them. Mahomes knows how to lead them. They just get in that spotlight and they know how to win these big games. And I saw something this morning that was interesting. If you take Mahomes, his first six years in the league compared to Tom Brady, they're almost tracking identically for the first six years.

The biggest difference was Super bowl victories. Mahomes is obviously one behind Brady in the first six years, but it's just amazing how, I mean, Brady, what, a year ago he's kind of been out of the league and now we have another superstar like Mahomes who's just tracking the same as Brady did with stats. So is this Mahomes 6th year? Yeah. So he could, if they do win the Super bowl, he would tie Tom Brady with three.

I think I saw that, too, and it was kind of crazy. So Mahomes has made the AFC championship game every single year since he's been a starter. I know we spoke about that briefly last year, but, yeah, again, going to the Super bowl and having the chance to win three Super Bowls in your first six years is kind of crazy. And then also regarding that, I saw the stats between them. Mahomes, like quarterback rating, touchdowns and interceptions are all better than what Tom Brady's were, which is kind of, especially looking at this year, like, mahomes really doesn't have that many targets or weapons, I should say.

Besides obviously Travis Kelsey and he relied heavy on Travis Kelsey this weekend. Yeah, I think Mahomes started out, what? He started out like ten completions in a row. Yeah. And I think Kelsey had what, five or six in the first quarter or two.

Yeah. Just going back to your security blanket whenever things are coming up, just going back to what makes you feel comfortable. That's obviously what the Chiefs did. And I mean, their defense obviously stepped up a ton yesterday, too. Right.

But, yeah, it definitely was unfortunate that the Lions could not hold on to that lead at halftime and collapsed. Yeah. I think the 49 ers have the record for most championship game appearances. I forget what the number is off the top of my head, but it's a pretty ridiculous number. I think it's around 18 or 19.

Yeah, I think yesterday was their 19th. Yeah, I think they're now eight and eleven in those games. Well, if you go back to Joe Montana days, Steve Young, I mean, they were in it every year. Yeah. 49 ers of the Cowboys were going head to head almost every year for that.

I forget, maybe like the 90s, early 90s, mid 90s in that time frame, but to your point. Yeah, they were just facing each other almost every year, I felt like. And then last night they were saying since Shanahan and John lynch took over, they've been on a heck of a run for the last six seasons, right? Yeah. And they've had a bunch of different quarterbacks every time.

Yeah. So I love the rematch. Everyone's making this the rematch, but it's almost like the Niners, outside of George Kittle, have a completely different team that lost to the Chiefs in the Super Bowl a few years ago. Yeah, I think the Lions too. Fun, young team to watch, but they said yesterday during the broadcast that the Lions have not won a road playoff game since 1957.

Oh my God. I think that was the year that the burger King debuted the Whopper. They also said, I think the president was, I think Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1957. That is crazy.

That's almost 70 years ago. Yeah. Wow.

That has to be so frustrating to be a Lions fan, being up by 17 and a half looking. I mean, they were dominating the game. They were pretty much moving the ball with ease, and then in the second half just completely fell apart. Was almost a great year to be a Michigan sports fan. Yeah, almost.

Sean, from a coaching aspect, do you think? I don't know. I call it a kind of monumental collapse for the Lions. Do you think that just the pressure of the spotlight kind of got to him? The inexperience?

Yeah, I think the Niners definitely looked like they've been in championship and Super bowl games before. I think Shanahan is the best coach in the NFL, hands down, and I think he's able to make know. And the Lions, I think, just didn't make plays when they needed to going forward on fourth down, which is what got them there. So I respect that they stuck with it, but when it came down to it, I think the Niners just made the plays when they needed to be made and they were close to getting that onside kick. I thought it was a good bounce.

Anything could have happened there, but it was tough to watch at the end. I know being an Eagles fan, we probably don't give Brock Purdy enough credit for kind of what he does on a weekly basis, but he kind of fits that mold. He doesn't do anything spectacular, but he just does enough to make the plays and obviously get those victories. Yeah, it's almost like he's very similar to Jimmy G. Jimmy Garoppolo.

And I think it's like the Mike Shanahan builds a system where you don't have to rely on a top ten quarterback in the NFL. Obviously, he had a top ten or top five season, but will he have that kind of success if he was playing for the New York Giants? Maybe not. Yeah, they build a great system built around receivers, tight ends, running backs, and kind of takes a lot of pressure off the quarterback, which is good to see when, in today's world you see, like if you don't have a Mahomes, most teams aren't going to do anything. Exactly.

I mean, if you put Mahomes on the 49 Ers with their weapons and their game plan, I think they would be unstoppable. They might be the first team to go undefeated and win the Super bowl. Yeah, they were also saying that 49 Ers and the Lions were probably the two most physical teams in the NFL. So it's probably no surprise that they made it this far just with that type of physicality that they've shown all season. Yeah, the Ravens also were up there, but then yesterday they had some costly mistakes where they didn't keep their composure and got what I think three or four personal fouls after the play.

Yeah, there was some playing on the Ravens end. Yeah. Going back to your comment about the Lions being one of the toughest teams and the 49 ers, it's amazing what happens. As a coach, I love to see teams that can just run the football when they want. In a league where everyone wants to be five wide receivers shotgun all the time, it's good to see teams that line up under center, hand the ball off, and I think over time you just start to wear people down.

I mean, the Lions have a stable of running backs and the 49 ers, I think have the best running back in the NFL at least this past season. So it's good to see teams, just those two teams are other teams out. I don't know about you guys. Every time I hear Dan Campbell talk, I want to run through a brick wall, put the pass back on, so it's hard to not like him. Yeah, he's definitely going to be a good coach for them going forward, too.

Speaking of coaches, I think it's interesting that seems like Bill Belichick is not going to be a coach next year in the NFL. I guess he's obviously looking for the right opportunity to get back into coaching and as of now may potentially be working for media companies next year and then potentially on the openings, we'll look at where he wants to coach going into 2025. Yeah, that is interesting. I heard that also, too, Cody. It looks like all these franchises are going the younger route.

They kind of want that young, hot coordinator coach. I for one thought Belichick was going to get hired, probably at the Falcons at least for a couple years, but I saw they hired somebody. So that was a surprise to me, too, that Belichick is probably not going to get a head coaching job this year. Maybe he'll get back into it next year. Yeah, I guess he already has his eyes potentially on the Cowboys.

So as an Eagles fan, as we're all Eagles fans, I really hope that does not happen going into 2025. If the Cowboys don't live up to the expectations next year and Mike McCarthy gets fired, I really do not want to see Bill Belichick as the Cowboys head coach. Yeah. And he doesn't seem like the lay on a beach and retire kind of guy. No, he needs something to do.

Yeah, I was just going to say that he doesn't seem like he could sit in the beach. Speaking of the beach, did you see those videos of Nick Saban in Florida boogieboarding? Yeah, I saw. It looked like someone who has not ever boogie board before. He tried to take away that was already, like, crashing.

It was not pretty. Enjoying his retirement, what, two, three weeks in? Yeah, he deserves it. Yeah. So speaking of the last week, the fourth quarter GDP came out.

The most recent inflation numbers came out. Inflation. Over the last three, four, five months, the trend has been going down. But I think the biggest surprise to me is just with the whole commentary of potential recession. Now it's strong towards a soft landing and probably no recession, but just the overall GDP number came in over 3%, I believe.

What, 3.3%? Just being able to sustain that, I think that's positive in the right direction here. Yeah, exactly. One of the goals of the Fed was to get inflation back to 2% and the way they were going to do that is they have to slow down the economy without putting us into a recession. So seeing GDP still strong over 3% and then the core PCE number came out at 0.2% month over month, which is a lot lower than where we were just last year.

And then year over year, it's all the way down to 2.9, which I think is the lowest we've seen since before the pandemic. So hopefully they continue this trend and get inflation down to their goal of 2% and then potentially start looking at cutting interest rates. Yeah, that's a good point. And I think another thing is people are still spending money. Looking at University of Michigan's consumer sentiment index had a 29% jump in the last two months, which is the highest in quite a while, I think 30 years, and it's not the highest it's ever been, but people aren't acting like there's a recession coming when it comes to their personal finances.

They're out there spending money. So that's another good indicator, I think, like John said, that the indication is going towards either a softer landing or no recession at all. That's good to see. I think the traveling is interesting. I think it was the CEO of American Airlines.

I think I caught him on CNBC last week and they were mean. There's really no slowdown the travel end. I mean, flights are sold out. Hotels are, I think they said like 80 plus percent occupancy. And they said the luxury travel for the cruises, like Viking cruises are like all time highs.

I think some people thought it might be like a Cody one time thing that travel was peaking, but it seems to be sustained that everyone is still traveling. And to your point, Sean, I mean, just the consumer, they're spending. Yeah. I saw a note this morning that JPMorgan came out with their outlook for 2024. And I guess the theme that they're calling it is 2024.

And the reason they're doing that is they're saying 2% growth rate for the year. The most recent one was a little higher. Zero recessions, which is completely different than what a lot of people thought the last couple of years. They think we are going to get down to 2% inflation. And then they also think unemployment may bump up a little bit to 4%.

But again, that's pretty much what the Fed said that needs to happen to get inflation down to 2%. Rates are coming down or potentially coming down. Inflation is on its way down. And they said prices are starting to stabilize. I don't know.

Personally, I went to the grocery store yesterday and grocery prices are still sky high. I'd love to see those come down, but I don't know. When I go to the store and I check out, I just look at myself and I'm like, when did two bags of groceries become this expensive? And it seems like those are things that just have not gone down. Maybe the prices stabilized, if you want to say that, but they've stabilized at a big increase, in my opinion, over the last four years.

I'd say, yeah, I think that's what it is. They're not going up anymore in price, but they're staying where they were over the last couple of years. And that's why if we start looking at the month over month and year over year inflation, it's coming down. Even though the actual price of the groceries aren't coming down, they're staying at the higher, they're just not increasing even more. And if we can get oil prices down, it would be interesting.

And gas prices then go down. Would that have a positive impact on things like groceries. Because a lot of rationale is, well, this is what it takes to get ship these groceries from wherever they come from. So it'd be nice to see that happen. If gas prices can go down and we can maybe catch a break for a loaf of bread at the grocery store.

Yeah, that'll be just another. What else? Coffee. They said coffee's at an all time high, too. Oh, really?

I mean, you know, Americans love coffee, so they have no budget. What they'll spend on having their daily late from Starbucks or wherever it's from, it is crazy. Drink it. I don't really drink Starbucks, but whenever I go with my wife, I swear her coffee is like $8 every single time we go. But she also gets, like, all the special, I don't know, creamers or whatever you get into it.

It's pretty much like a milkshake. I'm coming up on 30 years old, and I can confidently say I've never had a cup of coffee at this point in my life. That's pretty impressive. I definitely cannot say that now. Pre workout, on the other hand, that's substitute.

Yeah. I used to take pre workout almost every day after work before I worked out, but, I don't know, more recently, it's been giving me the shakes or whatever, so I stopped taking it. Yeah, it gets you all wiry. Yeah. I've been dabbling into the PGA Tour a little bit here.

I think PGA Tour at this point is just to look at the nice weather and the golf courses. I saw they're playing at Tory Pines in California, and I believe it was the farmers insurance open. So I did watch some of that over the weekend, and then Saturday, I watched some of the North Carolina versus Florida state game, and then I also. I think I watched some of the Villanova college basketball game also. How is Villanova doing this year?

They're, like, right in the middle of the pack in their conference, I think right around 500. Okay. I'm a Kansas basketball fan, and they had a tough game this weekend against Iowa State that they unfortunately lost. I think they lost two games in a row. Now, on a little bit of a downstrike for Kansas, I tried to watch a little bit of the 76 ers on Saturday versus the Denver Nuggets, and bead sat out, Maxi sat out, Harris sat out, Harris sat out.

So, yeah, fifths of their team starting lineup wasn't even playing, but they still almost won the game. Yeah, it'll be interesting to see how much. So, Joel and Bead is having a crazy season again. For the Sixers. And I know a lot of people always talk about the load management that he potentially has.

And I think it went into effect this year where if you miss a certain amount of games, you can't win the MVP. And I saw that they asked him about that. He said, honestly, at this point, I don't care about winning that mvp. I want to win the championship. So that's definitely good to hear as a Sixers fan.

So if he's going to miss some of these games to be healthy for the long haul, should hopefully be a good playoff run for the Sixers. And hopefully it's not a second round exit again for what, like the fourth year in a row or many not being a Sixers fan. I am a big san Antonio spurs fan just from being a kid. And while their record is, to put it bluntly, they're in last place in the Western Conference. But I think watching them, they have, I think, the best young player in the NBA, Victor Wembiana.

And I think it's only a matter of time until some people see that and whether there's trades or free agents want to sign there. But watching him, and I know Embiid, I think, dropped 70 on Victor Wembiana the other day, but Victor kind of had a quiet double double against Embiid, too, and beads no slouch on defense. So it's good to see that, at least from my standpoint. I have no affiliation with the Sixers, but it was from being an outsider fan. Ambie is definitely having a great year, but it was good to see a rookie kind of drop 35 on him, too.

Yeah, he's going to be really good going forward. How old is he, like 18/19? Is he even 19 yet? He may be 19. I think.

Yeah, he's going to be crazy good, which is obviously a good thing. I mean, sticking to the long haul for the Spurs. I mean, obviously they don't have to look longer term like what you were saying, Sean. If they make some trades, try to build around them here, I'm sure obviously they probably won't do anything this year because as you said, they're in last place right now. But going into the offseason, depending on who the free agents are, making some trades to try to start building their franchise for the longer term, especially knowing that you have someone who's 19 years old and has a long career in front of them, I mean, they're looking at another lottery pick when, if they're in last place, they're going to have the highest percentage to win the first pick overall, which would.

I don't know if a team's ever won two number one picks in a row in the NBA since the lottery, every system. But I think the Sixers were maybe not back to back, but we had number one Markel Foltz. Unfortunately, neither of those worked out for the Sixers. So hopefully spurs don't make the same mistake. Trust the process, right?

Wasn't that their slogan back, that I was actually at a Spurs Sixers game when the spurs were still really good and the Sixers were going through their. Trust the process. And in typical Greg Popovich fashion, he benched Duncan, genobly, Parker. Everybody was on the bench and the Sixers I think ended up beating him by like 30 points. And I was in the front row, had my genobly jersey on.

It was a good environment. As I say, the spurs have the coach too, to bring them back to start a nice little dynasty here for them. They got another top draft pick and build that foundation. Yeah, I think there were like 21 seasons straight of playoff appearances. Oh, wow.

About two or three years ago when they first didn't make it. If they have a five year gap in between that and can go right back to that, I think that kind of cements him. Obviously he had some great players and every good coach needs some really good players, but probably cement him as one of the best coaches of all time. Yeah. Going into this week, we have some of the largest stocks inside the S and P 500 reporting earnings.

So we have Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft. So five of the largest companies inside the S and P 500 have a combined market cap of over $10 trillion. So next couple of weeks are for. I was just thinking these high interest rates have very little impact to the companies that Cody just mentioned. I would say all five of them have extremely strong cash balances.

So they don't have to go out into that longer duration to loan money for innovation or any additional credit. They have the money in hand. So I think that's kind of one of the real positives that's going to help them too. This week in the earnings season, they don't have to worry about those higher rates. Yeah, that's definitely a good call.

So hopefully a lot of the analysts out there are saying that maybe some of the valuations inside the US, especially us tech, are extended or you have to pay a lot more for these companies compared to some of the other valuations around the world. But hopefully their earnings will come in strong this week and then potentially the valuations aren't near as extended as what they look like right now. So it definitely will be an important week for the stock market, but hopefully all those earnings will come in pretty strong. And I think the other big theme, Cody, artificial intelligence, especially for Apple starting to get into it, Microsoft kind of being the leader in it. I guess Amazon's going to dabble in it.

So that seems to be a pretty big theme, too, going forward. Yeah, it'll be interesting to see how they talk about that and what their plans are going forward, whether it's potentially maybe cutting the workforce. We've seen a decent amount of companies potentially laying off some people because they think AI can take some of the jobs. But it'll be interesting to see how they expect AI to hopefully positively impact their earnings going forward.

We hope you enjoyed this episode of coachable wealth, brought to you by Morton Brown Family wealth, an SEC registered investment advisor. This podcast is designed for educational and informational purposes and not intended as investment advice. More information can be found at www.mortonbrownfw.com.