The Federal Open Market Committee is expected to begin the process of reducing the Fed’s balance sheet. Here’s what it may mean for investors.

We have a light calendar for economic data. The week’s focus will be the FOMC policy announcement on Wednesday. Given the resilience of the market rally in the face of various natural and human threats, the punditry will turn to a favored topic. Expect people to be asking: Will the Fed be the catalyst for a market correction?

All eight indexes on our world watch list have posted gains for 2017 through September 18. The top performer thus far is Hong Kong's Hang Seng with a gain of 28.0%, followed by India's BSE SENSEX at 21.77%. In third is our own S&P 500 with 11.84%.

Value stocks have underperformed most other styles of investing, as well as the broad market, by a wide margin since the beginning of 2015. We see several reasons why, which point to the catalysts for a potential recovery; we do not think Value is past its prime.

With the top two positions at the Federal Reserve soon to be open, Russ discusses how the easy money era goes back a long way.

This is the first of a four-part empirical research study into the fallacy of the “random walk” view on investment reward and risk.

Invesco Fixed Income shares its views on rates around the world.

Last week, investors were lamenting the lack of inflation. This week, they’re fixated on its rise. On Thursday, data showed consumer prices climbed 0.4% in August from a month earlier and 1.9% from a year earlier, a sign that inflation is once again on the upswing after months of soft readings.

Stock market performance has not been driven by the improving health of the global economy. Just as negative interest rates are not a positive for the continued health of the economy, current stock market performance does not augur rosy future returns for stocks. In fact, the opposite is true.

At the October 2002 market low, the S&P 500 stood -49.2% below its March 2000 peak (-48.0% including dividend income), with the Nasdaq 100 having lost more than -82.8% from its high, on the basis of both price and total return. The loss wiped out the entire total return of the S&P 500, in excess of Treasury bills, all the way back to May 1996.

With its ability to validate all transactions in an immutable electronic ledger, the blockchain has the potential to be as disruptive as Amazon was in the late 1990s. When the company went public in 1997, there were serious doubts whether people would willingly give up their credit card information just to buy a book. Since then, Amazon stock is up 8,000 percent, and founder Jeff Bezos briefly overtook Bill Gates in July to become the world’s wealthiest person.

Elected officials at all levels have promised workers they will receive pension benefits without taking the hard steps necessary to deliver on those promises. This situation will end badly and hurt many people. Unfortunately, massive snafus like this rarely hurt the politicians who made those overly optimistic promises, often years ago.

The S&P opened Friday near its Thursday close and began to climb around 2pm. The index closed the day over 2500, another all-time high and a 0.18% gain from Thursday. The index is up 11.68% YTD.

Note: With today's release of August's Retail Sales and yesterday's release of August Consumer Price Index, we've updated this commentary to include the latest Real Retail Sales. Month-over-month nominal sales in August fell by 0.2% (0.21% to two decimals). Real Retail Sales, calculated with the seasonally adjusted Consumer Price Index, decreased by 0.6 (0.61% to two decimals). The chart gives us a close look at the monthly data points in this series since the end of the last recession in mid-2009. The linear regression helps us identify variance from the trend.

Today's report on Industrial Production for August shows a 0.9% decrease month-over-month, which was below the Investing.com consensus of 0.1%. Industrial Production peaked in November 2014, only one point higher than its pre-recession peak in November 2007. The year-over-year change is 1.54 percent, down from last month's YoY increase.

Today's release of the publicly available data from ECRI puts its Weekly Leading Index (WLI) at 143.3, up 1.5 from the previous week. Year-over-year the four-week moving average of the indicator is now at 3.08%, down from 3.65% last week and its tenth consecutive week of declines. The WLI Growth indicator is now at 0.3, also down from the previous week, its lowest since March of 2016.

The University of Michigan Preliminary Consumer Sentiment for September came in at 95.3, down from the August Final reading of 96.8. Investing.com had forecast 95.1.

Robo advice is the newest disruptor in the financial industry and many advisors are not sure how to interpret this new investment advice solution. Some are writing it off as a solution for lower asset customers, some are concerned about the competitive threat, while others are embracing the technology for use in their own business.

A review of last month’s market-moving events across countries and asset classes.

China is dropping its focus on “dirty” industrial growth, while making a massive shift toward renewable energy and a less resource-intensive path to economic success. This reorientation could open up substantial opportunities for equity investors.

So, I am sitting here in downtown Saint Petersburg, Florida at 7:30 a.m. Sunday morning awaiting the “great flood.” It was just a few days ago the computer models had hurricane Irma heading up the east coast of Florida, but Irma changed her mind.

For the first time since we’ve been keeping track, two separate Category 4 hurricanes struck the mainland U.S. in the same year. It should come as no surprise, then, that the combined recovery cost of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma is expected to set a new all-time high for natural disasters.

Global markets have been relatively calm this summer despite many uncertainties. Geopolitical risks have continued across the globe, and in some areas, looming monetary policy changes also appear likely. A key question for many investors is whether the sleepy summer period of low volatility will give way to a more turbulent autumn.

The Federal Reserve is likely to decide next week to begin letting assets roll of its balance sheet as bonds mature, instead of reinvesting the proceeds. This means that the balance sheet will begin to shrink in size and other market participants will be forced to absorb the supply of new issuance of treasury and mortgage backed securities.

Unmet borrower needs continue to grow in the U.S. commercial real estate lending market.

Rick Rieder explains the economic implications of “the Amazon effect.”

Countless articles have been written in the past 10 years predicting (or warning) of China’s imminent financial demise, with the number of articles accelerating in recent years amid China’s debt build-up in the post Global Financial Crisis period. Investing on the basis of a “China collapse” view of the world would likely have resulted in more risk-averse portfolios in the emerging debt space and, hence, lower returns in recent years.

Many investors no longer view the US as the global safe haven to turn to during bouts of volatility. We argue that US and global fundamentals remain strong, however, many global investors seem to be losing religion.

Co-CIO Francis Gannon sizes up the small-cap market, which looks primed for a leadership shift to cyclicals.