The Ascend Letter

Planning Corner: A Business Owner's Advantage? Optionality

When it comes to working with business owners, most advisors fall short for one reason. They pour all their attention into the owner's personal wealth and overlook the thing that actually creates it. The business.

Their personal wealth is fueled by the operations. The two are not separate problems. They are one problem, and good planning has to treat them that way.

That is millions of businesses, and with them millions worth of value, innovation, and community jobs, at risk of quietly vanishing over the next decade. And that is before we even factor in whatever AI does to this landscape.

The part most owners underestimate is timing. A proper exit is not an event, it is a process, and doing it right usually takes 3 to 5 years.

Entity structure, cash flow analysis, building a management team that can run the place without you, and a real succession plan. Start early and you leave on your terms, and for top dollar. Start late and you take whatever the moment hands you.

Remember this: It's about positioning the company to sell, even if that isn't the goal right now.

If you own a business, the best time to start was a few years ago. The second best time is today.

The Macro

The week belonged to Nvidia, and then it didn't.

The company reported $96 billion of revenue in a single quarter. That is more than $1 billion a day. For a company already this enormous to still be growing more than 100% a year is almost unheard of. The market loved it at first. Nvidia rallied, pulled the whole tech sector up with it the next day, and for a moment the AI trade looked bulletproof again. Then by Friday, most of that gain had quietly disappeared.

Marvell told the more revealing story. It also beat on both the top and bottom line, a genuinely strong quarter. And the market punished it anyway, deciding the beat simply was not big enough. When good news gets sold, it tells you expectations have climbed so high that merely "great" is no longer sufficient.

Then came Jackson Hole. Fed Chair Warsh used his first big speech to plant his flag, a firm commitment to the 2% inflation target and a firm refusal to hand the market the forward guidance it's grown accustomed to. Stocks sold off while he spoke, then climbed right back to where they started within the hour. A whole lot of buildup for what amounted to a nothing burger, though his hawkish tone did nudge up the odds of a September rate hike.

Underneath it all, longer-term yields caught their breath but remained elevated. So the real question for this week is whether the Treasury's move into the bond market and a surprise US oil deal with Venezuela, can steady things and hand the market one more leg higher heading into the midterms.