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Jim: Hi everyone, welcome to another day in Paradise, today’s day in Paradise is December 9, 2015 and this is our midday, midweek conference call held every Wednesday at high noon. We’ve got several correspondent reports this morning, but first a high noon conference call introduction from Bernie Murff, Bernie, what’s up today?

Bernie: I thought that I would highlight something that has recently come up in conversations with several of our clients and that is traditional Long Term Care rate hikes and how we can try to help you manage those. As part of our Wealth Management Planning we do offer different types of Long Term Care, however, a lot of our clients already have policies that they purchased many years ago. We have seen over the past several years rate increases anywhere from 40-60%. If you have been impacted by this, please reach out to me and we can help you navigate the different options to see what makes the most sense for you from both a coverage and cost standpoint. There are multiple ways that we can help you manage this piece of your financial picture.

Jim: THANK YOU BERNIE!

There are only two ways we manage your account and we look at directing investment ownership as if we were a head coach: We either put the offense on the field or the defense. We have had the offense on the field since October 7^th. If we were characterizing where on the field we are, I would say that we are midfield, we have the ball and are proceeding to enter our opponents territory.

To continue in the football analogy, if we continue to get first downs we will continue to keep our quarterback and offensive players on the field. If the quarterback gets sacked and we run out of downs then we will have to put the defense on the field.

Our correspondent analysts starting with our head economist Scott Brown are telling us that the quantitative easing that has taken place since 2008 will end when the Fed does raise rates; he also thinks it could take as much as 10 years for the US balance sheet back to good levels. Scott has told us before and he mentions it again that it will be the pace of rate increases and not the increases themselves that will matter.

Our head strategist, Jeff Saut, points out that we are in the midst of tax loss selling, something we would find a lot of this year with the extreme volatility of the market and no trend. That kind of market is going to show a lot of mistakes or unrealized losing trades if you will. This is the period of time trading to realize those loses takes place. It’s also a favorite time for what’s known as a Santa Claus rally, almost an exact counterpunch to tax loss selling. Who will win that tug of war? I suppose we will find out shortly. Jeff’s indicators show a short term bias to the upside. We’ll keep you posted as we help Jeff keep score.

Michael Gibbs, our esteemed portfolio manager friend here at Raymond James continues to look at the big fundamental picture as well; he continues to purvey the Chinese markets, noting exports are down though noting imports on the upswing. He’s also painted the corner with all the spilt oil found as surplus available in the market place because the Saudi’s announced they will leave production unchanged.

Each of these gentlemen’s full unabridged memos will be posted when the transcript for this investor teleconference is posted on our website this Friday, look for it around noontime, this Friday, December 11^th.

Our own view continues to be taking action that helps us weather through this volatile period, we have added lots of extra income into our Staby Equity and Income portfolio model thanks to our option selling strategies for increasing income and reducing risk. This is a valuable add to our accounts as we look at the Chicago option markets simultaneously as we buy or own stock on the New York Stock Exchange. We have been able to increase the income dividend flow by 30-35% this year, taking our dividend income yield of 2.7% up to over 4%. This has been a good year to create extra income while price appreciation has been a struggle in the aggregate, even though our Staby Equity portfolio model has been positive all but one day this year.

Bernie, I’m going to take the phones off mute and please ladies and gentlemen, please let us know if you have any questions or comments.

Thank you everyone for dialing up and in today, we are around from now through the rest of the year to help with anything else that comes to your mind. Have one great rest of your week!

"ClearBridge" - Morning Tack

What to Expect When You’re Expecting (a Fed Hike)

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