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DMA Business Group, Houston, TX (2026)

08/25/2026

Stability Is the Setup, Not the Payoff

By Mario Meléndez, Partner, DMA Business Group.

Latin America is having a moment. New governments promising order and discipline have put the region in the spotlight. As someone who builds businesses here, I read this attention with pride and caution — because attention and prosperity are not the same.

Here is the pattern: voters across several countries have grown frustrated with institutions that couldn't deliver both opportunity and security, and turned toward leaders promising decisive action. El Salvador is the most cited example — a country that went from among the most violent in the world to one where daily life and commerce function normally. The economic fact is simple: you cannot build a business in a neighborhood you're afraid to walk through. Security is the precondition for investment. Full stop.

But precondition is exactly the right word.

Stability doesn't generate wealth. It permits it. A safe street with no productive business on it is still a poor street. Lower crime, restored order, and macroeconomic discipline clear the ground — but something has to get built on it. That requires strong institutions, rising productivity, real innovation, and diversified economies.

This is the trap I watch for. A country stabilizes, headlines turn glowing, capital and talent take notice — and then momentum stalls because the harder work of building productive capacity never starts. The setup gets mistaken for the payoff.

Fixing your cash crisis, cleaning up operations, restoring order to a chaotic business — that's stabilization. Necessary, but completely insufficient. It buys you the right to compete, not the win. What you do after the fire is out determines whether you actually grow.

My message to business owners across the region is to use this window deliberately. The attention and stability are real.

Build productive capacity now. Invest in your people, systems, and differentiation while the ground is stable — because the moment of global focus is the moment to lay foundations, not celebrate.

The region has done the hard work of stabilizing. The harder work is what comes next.

08/21/2026

When the Bond Market Holds Its Breath, Pay Attention

By Jose Landaverde, Managing Partner, DMA Business Group

Something quiet is happening in the U.S. bond market this week, and most business owners will scroll right past it. They shouldn't.

Treasury yields are climbing as investors brace for July's inflation data. The 10-year note pushed above 4.7%. Oil is near $80. Underneath the numbers sits a question that will shape borrowing costs for every company that touches the dollar: is the Federal Reserve about to raise rates?

For two years the conversation has been about when cuts arrive. But inflation has been running near its highest in three years, after a soft jobs report the market now prices roughly a coin-flip chance of a September hike — down from two-thirds a week ago. Nobody knows. That uncertainty is the story.

Here is why a bond auction in Washington matters to a business owner in San Salvador, Dallas, or anywhere.

The 10-year Treasury yield is the price of money. It's the benchmark underneath mortgages, auto loans, business credit lines, and the discount rate used to value your company. When it rises, capital gets more expensive and selective. Cheap money rewarded growth at any cost. This era rewards businesses that generate real cash and don't depend on the next round of financing.

I've watched two kinds of companies in a tightening cycle. The first treats debt as fuel — every expansion financed with a loan, assuming rates stay low. The second treats debt as a tool with a price tag, borrows deliberately, and keeps margin to absorb a bad quarter. When money gets expensive, the first discovers its growth was rented. The second buys the assets the first is forced to sell.

My advice is not to predict the CPI number — you can't, and neither can the professionals on television. Build as if you don't get to choose the rate environment. Because you don't.

Stress-test your business against borrowing costs a point or two higher than today. Protect your margins while it's a choice, not an emergency.

The market is holding its breath waiting for one data release. Smart operators don't wait for it — they've already made themselves indifferent to it.

08/12/2026

The July jobs report gave everyone a number to be angry about: payrolls fell by 23,000 when economists expected growth. Markets flinched. Headlines ran red. And almost none of it meant what people thought it meant.

Here is what actually happened, and why it matters to anyone running a business — not just to traders.

The 23,000 decline wasn't the private economy collapsing. It was driven by a loss of roughly 53,000 government jobs, most of it seasonal noise that economists expect to get revised away. Strip that out and private payrolls actually rose by 30,000. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate ticked down to 4.1% — which sounds encouraging until you learn why it fell: fewer people were working or even looking for work. The labor force shrank again.

So the scary number was less scary than it looked, and the reassuring number was less reassuring than it looked. Both headlines lied, in opposite directions.
I spend my days advising companies, and this is the lesson I keep returning to: a single data point almost never tells you what to do. Composition tells you what to do.

A shrinking labor force is not a temporary weather pattern. It's structural. When fewer people are available to work, the businesses that win are not the ones that hire the fastest — they're the ones that need to hire the least to grow. Systems, automation, well-designed processes, and retention of the people you already have stop being "nice to have" and become the whole game.

There's a second lesson here about how to read your own numbers. Owners do to their P&L exactly what the market did to this report: they react to the headline. Revenue is up: celebrate. Revenue is down, panic. But revenue up because one client tripled their order is a completely different business than revenue up because your base broadened. One is fragile. One is durable. Same top-line number, opposite meaning.
Discipline is refusing to act on a number until you understand what it's made of.
My advice to business owners watching this report: don't manage to the headline, and don't let a soft or strong month dictate your strategy.

The economy will keep handing you misleading headlines. Your job is to stop trusting them.

07/30/2026

A Small Country That Stopped Waiting for Permission

By Jose Landaverde, Managing Partner, DMA Business Group

I have spent most of my career watching El Salvador be described in someone else’s vocabulary. Fragile. Emerging. A country to be helped. So when the ASI reports that industrial exports reached $2,635.8 million by May — $340.8 million more than last year — and that industrial GDP grew 4.4% in the first quarter, my instinct isn’t to celebrate. It’s to ask what actually changed.

Here is what I think changed: we stopped optimizing for survival and started optimizing for capacity.

Look at what the numbers are made of. Gross capital formation of $3,078.2 billion. Food and beverage exports past $300 million. Metalworking growing alongside a construction boom. That is not a country consuming stimulus. That is a country buying machines. Machines are a bet on the future — you don’t import a production line if you think the roof is coming off in eighteen months.

And this happened during tariff turbulence and global uncertainty, not after it resolved. That distinction matters enormously to anyone deciding where to place capital.

But I want to be honest with my fellow Salvadoran business owners, because celebration without discipline is how good decades end.

We have 19 free zones. Costa Rica has 60. Half our industrial exports go to Central America — a market that grows when we grow, which is a lovely thing and also a concentration risk. Agriculture contracted. And the talent gap is real: we are generating demand for skilled labor faster than we are generating skilled labor.

Growth exposes weaknesses that stagnation hides. A company that couldn’t scale never had to discover it lacked systems.

So my counsel is unglamorous. Formalize. Professionalize your finance function. Build the compliance and reporting infrastructure that lets a foreign partner say yes without a six-month diligence nightmare.

The window is open. Windows close.

07/22/2026

Property Doesn’t Move. Your Money Does.

By José Landaverde, Managing Partner, DMA Business Group

A new survey of European property taxation makes a point that American investors keep learning the hard way: the purchase price is the least interesting number in the deal.

Europe taxes a home four separate times — at purchase, annually while you hold it, on the rent it produces, and on the gain when you sell. Belgium hits you at nearly every stage, with transfer taxes reaching 12.5% before you’ve unpacked a box. Cyprus and Malta charge no annual property tax at all. Germany forgives the entire capital gain if you hold for more than a decade. Same continent, same currency, radically different outcomes.

I want to draw out a comparison that rarely gets made in the U.S. press.

Latin American tax codes and the European framework are attacking the same problem from opposite directions. In much of Latin America, the property tax is thin, the cadastral values are stale, and enforcement is uneven — so governments compensate through transaction taxes and indirect levies that punish activity rather than holdings. Europe went the other way: heavy, transparent, predictable, and published. You may hate the Belgian rate, but you can calculate it before you sign.

The lesson for American taxpayers is not that one system is superior. It is that predictability has enormous economic value, and we chronically underprice it. A 12.5% tax you can model beats a 4% tax that arrives as a surprise assessment or a reclassification three years later.

If you are buying property abroad — and more Americans are — build the full four-tax model before you fall in love with the listing. Ask what the taxable base actually is, not just the headline rate. Cadastral value and market value are not the same animal.

And remember: you still owe the IRS on worldwide income. Europe’s rules don’t replace yours. They stack on top.

07/18/2026

The Tax Code Doesn’t Care What You Call It

By: José Landaverde - Managing Partner, DMA Business Group

Every few years, a new financial product arrives promising that the old rules no longer apply. Prediction markets are this year’s version, and the World Cup has turned an obscure regulatory debate into a question millions of Americans will face at filing season.

Here is the pitch being circulated: because platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket are regulated as derivatives markets and route trades through clearinghouses, the payouts should be treated as investment income — fully deductible losses, and under the boldest reading, a preferential rate carved out of Section 1256. Compare that to sportsbook winnings, where you can only deduct losses if you itemize, can never write off more than you won, and now face a cap on how much of those losses you can claim at all. The gap is real, and it is tempting.

My professional read is that the gap is also fragile. The IRS has said nothing. Courts, historically, have looked past the wrapper and asked what the activity actually is. A contract that pays out based on whether Argentina lifts the trophy is economically a bet, no matter how elegant the clearing infrastructure sitting behind it.

So what should you do?

Distinguish between what is defensible and what is aggressive. Reporting event contract payouts as capital gains is a position with a real argument behind it. Reaching for Section 1256 treatment on a soccer match is, in my view, an invitation to back taxes and penalties.

More importantly: understand that you are the one bearing the risk. Not the platform, not your broker, not the commentator on television. When the IRS eventually speaks — and it will — the amended returns will land on your desk.

Document every trade. Keep your 1099s. Take a position you can explain to an auditor without flinching.

Aggressive is not the same thing as smart.

06/12/2026

Esta semana arrancó el torneo más grande de la historia del fútbol. Por primera vez, la Copa del Mundo se disputa en tres países simultáneamente — Estados Unidos, México y Canadá — con 48 selecciones y 104 partidos. El mundo tiene los ojos puestos en Norteamérica. Y El Salvador, aunque no juega en la cancha, sí puede jugar en otra.

El impacto económico directo e indirecto del torneo supera los $5,000 millones de dólares para los tres países organizadores. Pero el efecto no se detiene en las sedes. Se expande hacia toda la región. Y para el empresario salvadoreño, hay tres ventanas concretas que no deben ignorarse.

Primero, el consumo. Los salvadoreños en EE.UU. — más de 2 millones — gastarán en bares, restaurantes, productos y streaming durante semanas. Las empresas con presencia o clientes en ese mercado tienen una ventana de activación de marca que no se repite en cuatro años.

Segundo, el turismo de tránsito. Con vuelos conectando Centroamérica hacia las sedes, El Salvador puede posicionarse como escala o destino complementario para visitantes latinoamericanos. Hoteles, agencias, gastronomía y retail tienen oportunidad real si actúan ahora.

Tercero, la visibilidad regional. Algunas ciudades sede podrían recibir hasta 500,000 visitantes adicionales. Donde hay flujo de personas, hay necesidad de servicios, logística y proveeduría. Las pymes exportadoras tienen una apertura.

El Mundial dura un mes. Las decisiones de negocio que tomes esta semana pueden tener retorno por años.

¿Está su empresa estructurada para capitalizar el momento — fiscal, operativa y financieramente?

06/08/2026

Compartimos nuestro Calendario Fiscal de El Salvador para el mes de Junio 2026.

Conectamos negocios con recursos y tecnología. Descubre como aquí: www.dma.com.sv

05/04/2026

Compartimos el Calendario Fiscal de Mayo 2026 para El Salvador 🇸🇻

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