Crude hit a one-month high this week — WTI near $80, Brent around $85 — after fighting between the U.S. and Iran resumed and tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz fell by more than half. Brent remains well above its pre-conflict February level. If your family owns mineral rights, the next few royalty checks could benefit if higher prices persist.

Here’s the catch: a geopolitical premium isn’t a trend. Prices set by a chokepoint can reset in a week — they did exactly that after June’s interim deal. Treat the extra income as a windfall, not a new baseline.

Four moves worth making now. First, set aside cash for estimated taxes — royalty income is ordinary income, the 15% depletion allowance only softens it, and the September 15 payment comes due whether or not the spike lasts. Second, expect the phone to ring. Landmen lease and mineral buyers buy when prices spike — and bonus money is fully taxable, with no depletion allowance. Have the terms reviewed before you sign. Third, look at your portfolio. If your acreage already ties your net worth to crude, your investment accounts shouldn’t double that bet.

Fourth: if moving mineral interests to the next generation is on your list, a spike inflates the appraisal. The moment to transfer is when prices reset — not now.

At Lake Hills, we don’t forecast what happens in Hormuz — nobody can. Our systematic process responds to what markets actually do, and treats headline-driven surges as exactly what they are: noise our models were built to filter.

If royalty income is a meaningful part of your family’s picture, this is worth an hour. Give us a call.

For informational and educational purposes only. Not investment, tax, or legal advice. Lake Hills Wealth Management is an SEC-registered investment advisor.

Google logged more than 20,000 searches this week for “warren buffett stock market warning” — search interest up 800%. The line driving it comes from May’s Berkshire Hathaway meeting weekend, when Buffett told CNBC: “We’ve never had people in a more gambling mood than now.”

The numbers around the quote explain the anxiety. Berkshire — now run by Greg Abel, with Buffett’s playbook intact — holds a record $397 billion in cash and Treasury bills as of its most recent quarterly report. The Buffett Indicator, total U.S. market value against GDP, sits above 233% — a record, and well past the dot-com era’s peak near 140%. The CAPE ratio tells a similar story at 41.6: not a record, but a level seen only once before, on the way to the 1999 top of 44.

Here’s what Buffett didn’t say: sell. He spent six decades telling investors not to time the market, and retirement hasn’t changed that.

Valuations aren’t timing tools. They’re a condition. A CAPE above 40 tells you almost nothing about the next twelve months — expensive markets routinely get more expensive. What starting valuations have historically told you is what the next decade looks like from here: thinner returns, less margin for error. That’s not a market call. It’s the base rate.

A condition changes how you plan, not whether you stay invested. The better questions: Does your withdrawal rate still work if the next ten years return half of what the last ten did? How much of your net worth rides on the handful of names driving the index? How much of your future spending depends on multiples staying at records?

Berkshire’s cash isn’t a sell signal either. It’s optionality — a refusal to be forced into bad prices, and dry powder for better ones. Retail sentiment has already swung hard: the AAII’s July 2 survey put bears at 42.3% and bulls at 31.4%. When the mood moves that fast, the plan — not the mood — should be making your decisions.

If you want to pressure-test your plan against a low-return decade, give us a call.

For informational and educational purposes only. Not investment, tax, or legal advice. Third-party data cited are as of July 7, 2026, from sources believed reliable but not guaranteed. Historical valuation relationships are not a guarantee of future results. Lake Hills Wealth Management is an SEC-registered investment advisor. Registration with the SEC does not imply a certain level of skill or training.

Starting this year, if you’re 50 or older and earned more than $150,000 from your employer in 2025, your 401(k) catch-up contributions can’t go in pre-tax anymore. They have to be Roth. It’s a SECURE 2.0 rule, and 2026 is the first year it applies.

For high earners used to the pre-tax deduction, this feels like a tax hike. It isn’t — it’s a timing shift. You give up the deduction now, but that money grows and comes out tax-free later. And the catch-up is real money: an extra $8,000 if you’re 50 or older, $11,250 if you’re between 60 and 63.

There’s an upside most people miss. If your income keeps you out of a Roth IRA, this quietly forces Roth dollars into your plan anyway — and Roth 401(k)s no longer carry required distributions during your lifetime. So the money grows tax-free, comes out tax-free, and never gets dragged back onto a future tax return.

One detail trips people up. If your employer’s plan doesn’t offer a Roth option, high earners can’t make catch-up contributions at all — not Roth, not pre-tax. Most plans already offer Roth to keep the door open, but it’s worth confirming yours does before you assume the money’s going in.

The test is specific: it looks at your wages from that employer last year — the W-2 kind, not your total income. That creates a quirk for business owners. If you take K-1 income as a partner or LLC owner instead of a W-2 salary, you have no wages under the test — so the mandate doesn’t reach you at all.

Here’s what we’d tell any client right now: this is the kind of change that quietly costs people when no one’s watching the calendar. We build it into the plan before payroll does it for you — lining up the Roth catch-up with your bracket, your other conversions, and the rest of the year’s income. We’d rather plan the tax than react to it.

And if you’re weighing a Roth conversion this year, remember the catch-up no longer trims your taxable income the way it did. That leaves less room in your bracket — so size the conversion and the catch-up together, not in isolation.

If you want to make sure your 2026 contributions and conversions are working together, give us a call.

For informational and educational purposes only. Not investment, tax, or legal advice. Lake Hills Wealth Management is an SEC-registered investment advisor. Registration with the SEC does not imply a certain level of skill or training.

If you run a Solo 401(k), the IRS may want a form from you by July 31 — and most owners have never heard of it. Once your plan tops $250,000 in assets at year-end, you have to file Form 5500-EZ. Below that line nothing’s due, with one exception: you always file in the year you close the plan, whatever the balance.

Miss the deadline and the math turns ugly fast. The penalty runs $250 a day, capped at $150,000 per return — the SECURE Act raised it from $25 a day a few years back. For a form most owners didn’t know existed, that’s a brutal price.

Here’s who gets caught. The successful owner whose Solo 401(k) quietly crossed $250,000 mid-career and never knew a form kicked in. Or the one who closed a plan after a strong year, rolled the balance to an IRA, and assumed that was the end of it. Neither did anything wrong — they just never heard the threshold existed.

Here’s the better news. If you’ve missed filings and the IRS hasn’t sent a notice yet, you can still clean it up cheap — $500 per delinquent year, capped at $1,500 total. The catch: that window closes the moment a CP 283 notice lands, and only a correct paper filing with Form 14704 qualifies.

We’d rather check now than fix a six-figure problem later. If you’re not sure whether your plan crossed the line — or whether last year’s filing actually got done — give us a call.

For informational and educational purposes only. Not investment, tax, or legal advice. Lake Hills Wealth Management is a Registered Investment Advisor registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Registration as an investment adviser does not imply a certain level of skill or training. Our current Form ADV, Part 2A is available at adviserinfo.sec.gov.

For four years, the IRS waived the penalty on a rule almost nobody understood. That grace period is over. Starting in 2025, if you inherited an IRA from someone who was already taking their own required withdrawals, you have to take a withdrawal every year — not just empty the account by year ten.

Miss one and the penalty is 25% of what you should have taken. Fix it quickly and that drops to 10%. The rule doesn’t catch everyone: it applies to non-spouse heirs, and only when the original owner had already started their own withdrawals. Surviving spouses, minor children, and a few others are exempt.

For families with seven-figure IRAs, the penalty isn’t the real story. Ten years of forced withdrawals can stack on top of your peak earning years and pull the whole account into the top bracket. That’s a far bigger number than any missed-withdrawal fee.

Here’s what we’d tell any client: the goal isn’t to dodge the distribution — it’s to spread ten years of withdrawals so the IRS doesn’t get a windfall. That means coordinating them with your income, your Roth conversions, and your charitable giving on purpose, not scrambling in year ten.

If you’ve inherited an IRA in the last few years and no one has mapped out the drawdown, give us a call.

For informational and educational purposes only. Not investment, tax, or legal advice. Lake Hills Wealth Management is an SEC-registered investment advisor.

If charitable giving has been on autopilot — a check to the church, a year-end gift to the alumni fund, a wire to the food bank — the rules just changed in ways that make autopilot the most expensive way to give.

Three changes from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) hit in 2026. The standard deduction is now $32,200 for married filing jointly, made permanent. For a family whose itemized deductions together don’t clear that number, charitable giving produces no federal tax benefit. Second, even for families who do itemize, the first 0.5% of AGI in charitable contributions is no longer deductible — a new floor. Third, for households with taxable income in the 37% bracket (above $768,700 MFJ in 2026), all itemized deductions, charitable included, are now limited to a 35% benefit rather than the 37% marginal rate. The rules quietly raised the cost of giving without a plan.

Two structures help families navigate the new rules. The donor-advised fund (DAF) lets a family fund several years of giving in a single tax year and recommend grants to charities over time. The mechanic is “bunching” — instead of giving $20,000 a year for five years, fund a DAF with $100,000 in one year. The single contribution pushes total itemized deductions above the standard deduction once, and concentrates the non-deductible 0.5% AGI floor into one year instead of absorbing it five times. Funded with long-term appreciated stock rather than cash, the family also avoids embedded capital gains tax on the donated shares — up to 23.8% federal savings on the appreciation for top-bracket donors. (Gifts of appreciated stock are limited to 30% of AGI per year, with a five-year carryforward.)

For individuals over 70½ with IRA assets, the qualified charitable distribution (QCD) often offers the most tax-efficient path. Up to $111,000 per person can transfer directly from an IRA to a qualified public charity in 2026. The amount never enters taxable income, satisfies the required minimum distribution dollar-for-dollar once RMDs begin, and bypasses both the 0.5% AGI floor and the 35% deduction cap — because it’s an exclusion from income rather than a deduction. QCDs must go directly to an operating public charity; they cannot be directed to a DAF or private foundation.

If your annual giving is meaningful, the structures are worth revisiting before year-end planning gets compressed.

For informational and educational purposes only. Not investment, tax, or legal advice. Lake Hills Wealth Management is a Registered Investment Advisor registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Registration as an investment adviser does not imply a certain level of skill or training. Our current Form ADV, Part 2A is available at adviserinfo.sec.gov.

The S&P 500 just printed another all-time high. Nvidia has returned more than 60% over the trailing twelve months — more than double the S&P. For families who held the right names through this run, the result is a familiar problem: a single position has quietly become the largest thing on the balance sheet — sometimes 15%, 25%, even 40% of total net worth. The portfolio looks great on paper. The risk underneath it doesn’t.

Concentration is one of those problems most people know they have and almost no one solves. The reasons are predictable: the position has appreciated so much that selling triggers a meaningful tax bill, the stock keeps working so the urgency feels low, and the available alternatives each carry their own friction. So nothing happens, and the position keeps growing.

The right framing isn’t “should I sell.” The right framing is what level of single-stock exposure is acceptable given the rest of the plan, and what the most tax-efficient path to that level looks like. For a family with most of their net worth outside this position, a 15% allocation may be fine to live with. For a family where it represents the bulk of liquid assets, the answer is different. The decision starts with the balance sheet, not the chart.

Once the target is defined, the tools are well understood and not all of them require selling. A 10b5-1 plan creates a disciplined, pre-scheduled trimming schedule that spreads gains across tax years. A protective collar — buying a put and selling a call against the position — defines the worst-case outcome without realizing the gain. An exchange fund swaps the single name for a diversified pool while deferring tax, though it requires a multi-year lockup and typically a $5M minimum. For charitably inclined families, gifting appreciated shares to a donor-advised fund or charitable remainder trust eliminates the embedded gain entirely on the gifted portion. Each tool fits a different situation; none is universal.

One thing worth adding: the longer the position has worked, the harder this conversation gets. The right time to plan around concentration is when the stock is up and you don’t need to do anything urgent. By the time the position is down and the decision feels forced, the optionality is gone.

If a single position has grown into the largest item on your balance sheet, the question worth asking isn’t whether to act, but what the framework for acting looks like.

For informational and educational purposes only. Not investment, tax, or legal advice. Strategies and tools described herein may not be suitable for all investors and may involve risks not fully described in this post. Lake Hills Wealth Management is a Registered Investment Advisor registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Registration as an investment adviser does not imply a certain level of skill or training. Our current Form ADV, Part 2A is available at adviserinfo.sec.gov.

The Fed’s preferred inflation gauge — Personal Consumption Expenditures — prints Thursday morning. After April CPI ran at 3.8%, every desk on Wall Street will have a hot take by 9:30. We’ll read those takes. They won’t change a planning recommendation.

For high-net-worth clients, the math that actually drives a tax bill sits on a different time scale than monthly inflation reports. The brackets are set. The rules changed in July when the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) passed. The structural decisions — what to convert, when to gift, how to sequence income — depend on the tax code as it now stands, not on whether April PCE prints at the 3.8% headline / 3.3% core consensus estimates as of publication date, or somewhere on either side. A confident planning process doesn’t reprice itself every 30 days.

The provisions that actually move the needle this year haven’t changed since July, and most clients still haven’t built them into next year’s plan. Roth conversion math is different now that the 2017 tax cuts have been made permanent — the “convert before 2026” urgency is gone, but bracket-filling at 24% or 32% in lower-income years may be among the most impactful planning levers available for many pre-RMD clients. The case now rests on RMD compression and Medicare premium (IRMAA) management rather than rate uncertainty.

On the wealth-transfer side, the $15M per-person estate exemption is now permanent, which changes the gifting calculus for families who built plans around a $7M number. The expanded SALT cap is meaningfully higher than the old $10,000 — though the phase-out for higher-income filers narrows the benefit considerably — and it reverts to $10,000 in 2030, which means the window for state-tax-heavy strategies is finite even though it doesn’t feel urgent today. And for portfolios that have run with the market, future RMDs may land in higher brackets than the projections from three years ago assumed.

None of that depends on Thursday’s print. We watch the macro because it’s our job — inflation matters for the Fed’s path, and the Fed’s path matters for markets. But we don’t let it dictate the calendar on decisions that should be made on their own terms. The planning levers our clients have access to are structural, not cyclical.

If your plan was built under a different tax code, it may be time to revisit the assumptions underneath it.

For informational and educational purposes only. Not investment, tax, or legal advice. Lake Hills Wealth Management is a Registered Investment Advisor registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Registration as an investment adviser does not imply a certain level of skill or training. Our current Form ADV, Part 2A is available at adviserinfo.sec.gov. Tax laws referenced reflect the law as of the date of publication and are subject to change. Individual tax and financial circumstances vary; consult your tax advisor before acting on any information contained herein.

The 30-year U.S. Treasury yield touched 5.19% on Tuesday — its highest level since July 2007. A week earlier, the S&P 500 closed above 7,500 for the first time in history. April CPI ran at 3.8%, and rate-hike odds before year-end have moved from near-zero a month ago to roughly 50%. Kevin Warsh is sworn in as Fed chair on May 22. These aren’t isolated data points. They’re a regime signal.

The question isn’t whether yields have moved. The question is what tends to happen when long-duration yields reach this kind of level with equities near all-time highs. Looking back at three prior episodes, history doesn’t give a single answer. In 2006–07, the 30-year reached its local high in July 2007 and equities held up for nearly four months before the credit system broke — twelve months out, the S&P was down 10.5%; by the GFC trough, it was down 55%. In 2018, the 10-year peaked in November, equities fell 16% by Christmas Eve, the Fed pivoted, and the S&P was 10% higher a year later. In 2022–23, by the time the 10-year reached its local high in October 2023, the equity bear market was already behind us — the next twelve months delivered +37%.

So three episodes, three resolutions: one where the pain was already behind us, one where the Fed pivoted aggressively, and one where the worst was still 12 to 24 months ahead. The current setup most closely resembles 2006–07 in that equities and long-duration yields are rising together rather than one leading the other. That kind of co-movement at extremes has historically not persisted indefinitely — but the form has varied enormously, and the 12-month forward number doesn’t tell the story by itself.

This is a discipline exercise, not a prediction exercise. Our risk signals haven’t triggered. We’re not treating the yield spike as a sell signal. What we’re watching is the 2-year/30-year spread, equity breadth at these levels, and whether mortgage rates push back toward 7.5% from the mid-6% range. Those signals will tell us which regime is actually unfolding.

If you want to talk through how your portfolio is positioned for this, give us a call.

For informational and educational purposes only. Not investment, tax, or legal advice. Lake Hills Wealth Management is a Registered Investment Advisor registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Registration as an investment adviser does not imply a certain level of skill or training. Our current Form ADV, Part 2A is available at adviserinfo.sec.gov.

The PHLX Semiconductor Index has staged a rare surge. From the March 30, 2026 intraday low to the May 12 close, SOX gained 65.4%; measured close-to-close, the index rose 64.1%; and from the March 30 low to the May 12 intraday high, the move reached 68.2%.

That is not a normal rally. It is a regime event.

The question now is not whether semiconductors have run hard. They have. The better question is what has tended to happen after similar 6-week surges in SOX history.

The Setup

The current move covers 43 calendar days, or 30 trading sessions, from March 30 to May 12. It is one of a handful of comparable 30-session SOX surges since the mid-1990s, clustered around 1998, 2000, 2002, and now 2026.

Methodology: Six weeks equals 30 trading days, nine months equals 189 trading days, one year equals 252 trading days, and max drawdown is the worst close-to-close decline from the trigger-date close over the following 252 trading days.

Source: Nasdaq Global Index Watch and Yahoo Finance historical OHLC data for the PHLX Semiconductor Index (SOX / ^SOX). Calculations by Lake Hills Wealth Management. Returns are price-index returns and exclude dividends. Nasdaq is the official source for SOX and verifies the current March 30 to May 12 values. Yahoo Finance was used only to extend the analog study further back into the 1990s and early 2000s.

The Lesson from History

The forward return analysis does not give one clean answer. That is the point.

After similar moves, SOX has followed three very different paths. In 1998, the rally was the beginning of a much larger advance. In 2000, the rally marked exhaustion before a severe unwind. In 2002, the index initially faded, then recovered over the following year.

So the current setup is not automatically bearish. It is also not automatically bullish.

The better conclusion is that the next 30 to 45 trading days matter more than the prior 30. After a move this large, the market usually needs to prove whether leadership is broadening, narrowing, or failing.

What We’re Watching

The first thing we are watching is breadth. If more semiconductor components participate on pullbacks and recoveries, the rally is healthier. If the cap-weighted index keeps rising while the median semiconductor stock stalls, the setup becomes more fragile.

The second issue is equal-weight versus cap-weight performance. Strong markets can be led by large companies, but late-stage moves often become too dependent on a small group of winners. If equal-weight semis continue to lag, that would argue for more caution.

The third signal is trend behavior after the surge. The bullish path would likely involve sideways consolidation, reduced volatility, and support holding above key moving averages. The bearish path would likely involve a fast break in leadership names, failed rebounds, and a sharp deterioration in breadth.

The Honest Read

We do not know which analog this is yet. Anyone who says they do is probably overstating what history can tell us.

What we do know is that semiconductors have already delivered an unusually large move in a short period of time. That changes the risk/reward. It does not require abandoning quality positions, but it does argue against blindly adding exposure into strength.

For clients, this is a discipline exercise rather than a prediction exercise. We are not treating the rally as a sell signal by itself. We are also not treating it as an all-clear. We are defining the evidence in advance and letting the tape tell us whether this is a durable leadership phase, a blowoff, or a relief rally.

That is the entire game in a regime like this one: respect the strength, recognize the rarity, and know what would change your mind before the market forces the decision.

Why This Matters for Portfolios

Most investors do not get hurt because they fail to identify the perfect historical analog. They get hurt because they never define the conditions that would prove their thesis wrong.

After a 64% to 68% move in six weeks, the risk/reward has changed. The opportunity now is not in chasing the headline move. It is in watching whether leadership broadens, digestion holds, and risk remains compensated.

That is how we are approaching semiconductors today.

If you want to talk through how this applies to your portfolio specifically, give us a call or reach us at lakehillswm.com/contact.

For informational and educational purposes only. Not investment advice, a recommendation to buy or sell any security, or an offer to provide advisory services. References to historical analysis are for context only and do not imply future results. LHWM and its representatives may hold positions in securities discussed. Lake Hills Wealth Management is an SEC-registered investment adviser. For full disclosures, visit lakehillswm.com/customer-disclosures/ or search “Lake Hills Wealth Management” at adviserinfo.sec.gov.