Welcome to Ask an Advisor, where we here at Team Clark go deeper on all things investing,

helping you save your money so you can retire early if you want and retire happy,

which is West Moss's specialty. Yes, I love that. I think about it a. So. And today, Wes, you are going to talk about a couple of things. One is there's so much going on in the news all the time. So why is the stock market doing so well? About right. And then also estate planning and how that can go very wrong. Arry.

It can go awry big time. Even if you have a great plan in place. And this was prompted by a listener who emailed in and said, hey, how could there be such a mess with all these celebrity states if they're so buttoned up? So we'll talk about that too. It can get so ugly. Yeah. So we all should be doing our state plan, even if it's a very simple, you know, nothing going on right now in your life and you're young. I think it's so important to always think about it. Clark always says that because none of us want to think about death. A thousand percent not. So let's start with the economy. Okay. As opposed to thinking about death. I was writing about

this earlier in the week with a thought that there's really two economies and there's one stock

market. Again, if you watch financial television like I do 24-7, you're always hearing different

opinions about things are good or things are bad or the market should not do so well. The market has more room to run. In 2025, it's been a really, not an extraordinarily

strong year for stocks, but pretty good. It's been a really strong year for the S&P 500. And

we've also seen some broadening out beyond just the S&P 500, which is, we know, is very tech-heavy.

We've seen strong performance from financial companies, industrial companies, utility companies.

So there's been some real broadening out.

But the question is, what's happening in the real economy and the Main Street economy?

And I would just start this by saying that the stock

market and its performance can very often be disjointed from what's happening in the economy.

We can have a good economy and a bad market. And I think what we're seeing today is a really good

market and in just an okay economy. I'm not going to see the economy's bad,

but we're in an interesting position. What's really driving and what always drive stocks is earnings.

That's the first principle of all equity investing. If earnings rise in any given year,

it's pretty hard for the stock market level,

not to follow to some extent. Earnings expectations early this year were somewhat muted in the

single digit range, but what we've seen so far in 2025, and remember, this is despite

all of the geopolitical events we're seeing, we've had this massive back and forth about tariffs starting in March and April.

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