DePaolo & May Strategic Wealth

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DePaolo & May Strategic Wealth Bespoke financial planning and investment management. We grow and protect wealth for successful families, entrepreneurs, and young high earners.

70 million kids now have a Trump Account. Most parents have not claimed theirs.Here is the primer 👇🏦 What it is: a tradi...
10/22/2026

70 million kids now have a Trump Account. Most parents have not claimed theirs.

Here is the primer 👇

🏦 What it is: a traditional IRA for a minor. Anyone can fund it, up to $5,000 a year. Money sits in an S&P 500 index fund and is locked until 18.

💵 The free part: $1,000 from Treasury for kids born 2025-2028. No income test. Only lands in a claimed account.

📅 What changed recently:
- Sep 30: companies can now donate individual stock
- Oct 1: 60M kids auto-enrolled
- Oct 19: Musk pledged 1 SpaceX share to every kid in America - 🚀Under-40 expansion floated

🎓 Vs. the 529: for school, the 529 still wins. Tax-free beats tax-deferred. California has no 529 deduction either way.

🔑 The move that isn’t as obvious: at 18 it can be converted to a Roth while the kid is in a near-zero bracket. $5,000 a year from birth, converted at 18 and left alone, is roughly $2.9M at 60 at a 7% return. Hypothetical, but that is the point of the account.

⚠️ The catch: kiddie tax. Sequencing matters.

Full breakdown with the charts: link in bio.

DePaolo & May Strategic Wealth is a California-registered investment adviser. Educational only, not individualized advice. Hypothetical returns are not guaranteed. Clients may hold positions in SpaceX or Dell. Disclosures at dmstrategicwealth.com/disclosures.

OrangeCounty WealthManagement TaxStrategy SpaceX

🧐 A 10% return is not a 10% return.💸 In California, a top-bracket household hands over 54% of ordinary income and 37% of...
09/24/2026

🧐 A 10% return is not a 10% return.

💸 In California, a top-bracket household hands over 54% of ordinary income and 37% of long-term gains. The number you keep is the one that really matters.

📊 Tax-aware investing was built for that gap. Long-short accounts run a real investment strategy and pass through capital losses along the way, losses you use against gains you already have. For households whose biggest tax line is income, not gains, a specialized class of hedge fund does the same thing with ordinary losses. Either way the portfolio stays invested and keeps compounding.

The category went from $2 billion to more than $150 billion in three years. Our new post covers how these work, what the losses are worth, and where they fit in a plan. Link in bio.

Hypothetical illustration for educational purposes only. Not investment or tax advice. Tax-aware strategies involve leverage and short selling and carry risk of loss. Private fund strategies are available only to eligible investors. Tax benefits depend on individual circumstances and are subject to changes in tax law.

The Treasury just became a bigger buyer of its own bonds.This morning Treasury Secretary Bessent doubled the size of Tre...
08/19/2026

The Treasury just became a bigger buyer of its own bonds.

This morning Treasury Secretary Bessent doubled the size of Treasury’s long-end buyback program, from $2B to at least $4B per operation, focused on 10- to 30-year bonds. The quarterly schedule was already set two weeks ago, so this was somewhat of a surprise, and it was meant to be.

Why now? The 30-year hit 5.31% yesterday, its highest yield since 2007. After the announcement it fell back to around 5.19%. The 10-year dropped to 4.65%. Long bonds have been rising amid record demand for debt - between both the government and big companies clamoring to fund the AI race. All while inflation has remained stubbornly high.

Officially, this is “liquidity support.” Practically, it looks like a soft ceiling on long rates. Not full yield curve control like the Bank of Japan ran for years, where the central bank pins yields at a target. Call it YCC-light: the Treasury signaling a level it won’t let the market trade through without a fight.

$4B per operation is a rounding error next to what the government has to borrow. In this case, the signal is more important than the actual size of the operation. Traders spent the summer testing how high long yields could go. Now they know where the Treasury gets uncomfortable, and markets tend to trade around that level once they can see it.

For bond holders, this helps long duration if the line holds. The catch is that buybacks don’t fix the deficit or inflation, and interventions that fight fundamentals have a mixed track record. Ask Japan.

For stocks, lower long rates take pressure off valuations and corporate borrowing costs. Equities rallied on the news for a reason. Consumers also have potentially lower mortgage rates to look forward to.

Our take: this probably caps rates for a while. It doesn’t fix what pushed them up in the first place, but it’s helpful to know where Washington stands on the matter. Especially since the new Federal Reserve chair has been particularly tight-lipped since taking office.

This is commentary, not advice. Investing involves risk. dmstrategicwealth.com/disclosures

📊 Our Q2 2026 Quarterly Update just dropped - here’s what drove the quarter and what we’re watching from here (link in b...
07/17/2026

📊 Our Q2 2026 Quarterly Update just dropped - here’s what drove the quarter and what we’re watching from here (link in bio).

🕊️ Peace, Provisionally - a June 17 memorandum turned a binary risk into a fragile truce. Oil gave back nearly its entire war premium.

📈 Best Quarter Since 2020 - the S&P 500 gained 14.9% and the Nasdaq 21.4%, with leadership handed back from energy, defense, and gold to technology.

🔥 Inflation Is the Hangover - PCE at 4.1%, the highest since 2023. Those prints reflect April’s oil, not July’s. Base effects turn favorable into the fall.

🏛️ A New Fed Chair - Warsh held rates and dropped the easing bias. We read him as a dove in hawk’s clothing, laying the groundwork for cuts in 2027.

💪 Earnings Are Doing the Driving - 23.3% growth expected in Q2, a second straight quarter above 20%, with estimates revised higher straight through a war.

🗳️ The Political Calendar - flows and election incentives support markets through the summer. We get incrementally more guarded into November and year-end.

👉 Read the full Q2 update with our economic review, market outlook, and portfolio highlights - link in bio.

500. 🎉 Grateful to have you here. Cheers to the next 500! 🚀
06/17/2026

500. 🎉 Grateful to have you here. Cheers to the next 500! 🚀

🇺🇸 Washington has stopped subsidizing strategic industries from the sidelines — and started buying them outright.Since J...
06/17/2026

🇺🇸 Washington has stopped subsidizing strategic industries from the sidelines — and started buying them outright.

Since January 2025, the federal government has committed roughly $20.9B across 16 separate deals that involve direct equity ownership of American companies. In our view, that’s the early architecture of a de facto U.S. sovereign wealth fund, assembled one strategic company at a time.

So, what’s next?

The pattern behind every deal is the same 👇

🏛️ A chokepoint China controls
🔩 A material the military can’t do without
⚙️ A real domestic project, not a concept
💵 Often, federal funding already in place

That screen points away from the crowded megacap names and toward the unglamorous corners of the supply chain — rare earths, uranium, semiconductors, the metals inside every weapon and data center.

We sort our watchlist into two tiers by how much federal backing is already there:

✅ Tier 1 — the government already owns it (MP, INTC, LAC, CCJ, USAR…)

🧭 Tier 2 — strong structural pull, deal not yet signed

📈 The harder question isn’t which names. It’s when, and at what price. This kind of buying tends to arrive into weakness rather than a melt-up — so we treat the list as a watchlist for a pullback, not a buy-everything-today signal.

Full thesis + both tiers → link in bio.

The largest IPO in history happened last week — and it lived up to the billing.SpaceX priced at $135, raised about $75B,...
06/16/2026

The largest IPO in history happened last week — and it lived up to the billing.

SpaceX priced at $135, raised about $75B, and closed its first day up ~19% at $160.95, putting its valuation north of $2 trillion. The deal ran several times oversubscribed, drew an unusually large retail allocation, and by today the stock was near $200. For scale: it dwarfs the previous record — Saudi Aramco’s $29B in 2019 — by nearly 3x.

What’s made it even more fascinating is everything happening around the listing:

📈 The index split. Nasdaq rewrote its rules to fast-track SPCX into the Nasdaq-100 (~early July). The S&P said no — its profitability and seasoning requirements stand, so S&P 500 entry is off the table until mid-2027 at the earliest. Same company, two index families, opposite answers.

📣 The product wave. Within a day of listing, issuers rolled out ~10 single-stock 2x long and short ETFs tied to the ticker — the same playbook that turned Tesla and Nvidia into retail phenomena, now running on SpaceX at full speed.

💥 The pre-IPO story. The investors who saw the biggest gains owned SpaceX while it was still private, through vehicles like ARK’s Venture Fund. While this IPO is done, the names widely expected to follow (OpenAI, Anthropic) are in the fund as well.

A genuinely historic debut, and a lot more underneath it. Read more about what we’re watching at the link in bio.

The rate your bank quotes you isn’t the cost of money. It’s the cost of money plus their cut.There’s a way around the ma...
05/31/2026

The rate your bank quotes you isn’t the cost of money. It’s the cost of money plus their cut.

There’s a way around the markup — one institutions have used quietly for decades.

It’s called a box spread loan. You borrow against your portfolio at a rate that tracks the risk-free curve — recently ~4%, versus the 6–13% on a typical bank securities-backed line or margin account.

Why it’s different:

➡️ You borrow straight from the listed options market — no bank balance sheet, no markup
➡️ Every trade clears through the OCC, the same clearinghouse that’s run since before 1987
➡️ Nothing gets sold — no capital-gains hit, and your investments stay invested
➡️ The cost is even treated as a capital loss under IRS Section 1256, not interest

To be clear: we’re not a lender. We advise on whether this strategy fits, size it against the right cushion, and coordinate the tax treatment. The loan itself is executed through your custodian (like Schwab) and the options market.

Full breakdown on our Insights hub — link in bio.

Investing involves risk including possible loss of principal. Securities-backed borrowing carries the risk of a margin call. DePaolo & May Strategic Wealth is an investment adviser, not a bank or lender, and does not originate or fund loans.

Educational only — not investment, tax, or legal advice. See full disclosures on our site.

📊 EARNINGS SEASON UPDATE 🔥Markets are making all-time highs despite continued back and forth on political headlines. Why...
05/11/2026

📊 EARNINGS SEASON UPDATE 🔥
Markets are making all-time highs despite continued back and forth on political headlines. Why? Earnings. Companies are massively beating estimates, raising forward guidance, and seeing huge margin expansion. Earnings growth is the highest it’s been since 2021. The AI-fueled boom continues.

Be sure to follow us for more market updates.

Thanks to our research provider FactSet for the great data as always.

🏆 Honored to be named one of the Top 25 Financial Advisory Firms — Rising Stars in the country by USA Today & Statista f...
04/16/2026

🏆 Honored to be named one of the Top 25 Financial Advisory Firms — Rising Stars in the country by USA Today & Statista for 2026.

This award reflects what we’ve been building from day one: a modern, independent firm that always puts clients first.

No outdated constraints, no big-firm product bias — just a relentless focus on doing what’s best for clients and providing real solutions.

Thank you to every client who trusted us to manage their wealth. You’ve all helped us achieve this recognition.

Cheers! 🎉

🔗 View the full story / rankings at the link in our bio

Disclosure: The 2026 USA TODAY Best Financial Advisory Firms ranking is researched by Statista Inc. based on recommendations and AUM growth. Not indicative of future performance. Not an endorsement. No fee was paid to participate.

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