(Washington)

After a long and quite public back and forth about the potential for an interview, are President Trump and Robert Mueller close to meeting? Trump’s team has apparently responded to Mueller’s request for interview with a counteroffer on the terms. The two parties have been in discussions since at least January. The basic core of the counteroffer is that Trump is happy to talk about collusion with Russia, but not about obstruction of justice. Though Rudy Giuliani, who is on Trump’s legal team, said they did leave the door open to possible questions on obstruction.

FINSUM: This seems like a positive development. It appears like it would be good for all sides to have this investigation finished once and for all, and a sit down with Trump could potentially resolve things.

(Washington)

In what seems to have amounted to the “shot heard round the world” of financial markets, this week Elon Musk, Tesla CEO, tweeted that he may take the company private at $420 and that he already had the funding secured. As expected, this sent markets into a tizzy, with the stock gaining sharply as it moved towards the stated price. Now, however, the SEC has announced it is investigating the legality of the tweet, and is investigating the particular statements made. The SEC maintains that such a statement should have been made in an SEC filing rather than a tweet, and it wants to investigate if funding was actually secured. If not, it could mean Musk was intentionally misleading the market.

FINSUM: Musk has been on a very rocky path lately, and this SEC inquiry is not going to help. That said, the idea of taking Tesla private still seems like a good one to us.

(New York)

Morgan Stanley has put out a warning about the worryingly declining breadth of the stock market this year. The bank says that “Fewer stocks are carrying the load of the market, a sign of exhaustion and, in our view, a bad signal for further price gains”. The bank appears to be quite correct. According to the article “Bloomberg points out that Amazon.com, Netflix and Microsoft accounted for 71% percent of the S&P’s gains through early July. Along with Apple, Alphabet and Facebook, they accounted for 98% percent of the gains”.

FINSUM: Honestly that could not be a more worrying sign on breadth. 98% of gains from from 6 stocks. That does not spell widespread strength. However, earnings have been good for the last month (when the reporting period for these stats ended), so gains may have been better lately.

(New York)

Be careful of sketchy deal solicitations that are floating around the market right now. Apparently there are fake securities firms, either posing as real ones or using aliases, who are soliciting deal interest in the advisor market. Many times the fake deals will cite endorsement from the SEC or other regulators, often fictitious ones (e.g. The Bureau of Financial & Protection Services). The SEC itself issued the warning to investors about the phony deals.

FINSUM: Any advisor will know these are fake and that the SEC does not endorse deals, but many clients could fall for these scams.

(New York)

We became concerned for our advisor readers today when we read an article in the FT warning that many trading platforms are at serious risk of hacking. The article says that many trading platforms, such Charles Schwab, TD Ameritrade, and Interactive Brokers, secure data in an unencrypted or partially unencrypted format, leaving them highly vulnerable to hacking. If a hacker got your password, they would be able to do anything you could on the platform. Generally speaking larger brokers had safer platforms than smaller ones, and both Schwab and TD Ameritrade emphasize that they are making progress on the issue.

FINSUM: This seems like a major risk that has gone ignored. We wanted to make sure to warn our readers as we are aware that many of you use Charles Schwab and TD Ameritrade.