The china question is news on trade detent good enough for bulls to hang there hat on it?

Overall, I feel good after the Samsung news about Apple because everyone was saying it was an Apple specific story and Apple only, but Samsung is having the same problems. Overall, mobile sales in China are down 16% percent last year. Clearly, they have issues and the stock is selling at 7 times free cash flow and the stock is down 33% from its highs and sentiment could not be any worse. I do not think that you need to see Apple bottom for the market and technology to rally. Because in technology there are some great themes out there to hang your hat on such as the cloud, payment processing, recurring revenue subscription, AI, machine learning, etc. I'm talking about secular themes that peoplecontinue to go back in and can focus on. In the down draft the day before Christmas there where things that I was buying all different types of companies, but a lot of it was technology. Mainly, because it got hit so hard and certain companies represented good value. Because I feel so good about the seculargrowth stories , but I can buy many different types of growth stories and they will be higher one year from now and I have conviction in that. I want to pick at the quality names that were thrown out, but have themes behind them.I am not really focused on Apple, what I am focused on is markets providing opportunities over the course of the year. In 2018, was a year that volatility returned as long-term investors you can use volatility to your advantage when companies are miss priced. An example of that at the end of the third quarter we rebalanced early and we had cash and we where buying short-duration bonds to protect our portfolios. Also, on Christmas eve we where buying and throughout the week into yield plays such as MLP'S and alternative equity with high yields. We were playing defense with bonds and income playsthat were washed out and that were on sale. I think that volatility is here to stay for awhile because the market is vulnerable to a lot of headline risk. We used it as an opportunity to get long and to stay long. We have an energy tilt, a value tilt, a yield tilt, some select financials, and defensive higher-yielding equity and those have worked for us because of the price we paid.Are equities overvalued,undervalued,or cheap? We believe that equities are cheap right here. We believethat global equities are selling for 12.4 times earnings and U.S. equities are at 14.2 times. If you believe that earnings are going to come through this year. We believe that earnings are going to come in between 4-5 percent which is at the lower end of consensus and we still believe equities are cheap.Given the growth and inflation outlook stocks are cheap by historical metrics. The reality is we are where we are today and stocks are cheap. How do you look at the recent downturn? We are looking at it as a good buying opportunity but expect more volatility with headlines. It all depends upon how the headline risk sorts itself out between the Federal Reserve and a meaningful China Trade deal. I would not expect to see anything to be resolved until June-July of 2019. We believe that the Federal Reserve will be patient and wait on the data and more importantly the April earnings reports to evaluate it'sposition. We also believe that China will go slowly into an opening up of its markets and an unexpected trade deal because now Europe and Japan are behind the U.S. with wanting China to open upits markets to imports and wants China to play fair like the rest of the world.Thank you,John C. Verducci 111