On Friday, the August U.S. employment report surprised to the upside, with 162,000 jobs added during the month. Year to date, the labor market has shown impressive resilience, with hiring also becoming more balanced across sectors than in previous years.
Before Friday’s jobs report, it was roughly a toss-up in the financial markets whether the Fed would raise rates at the next meeting in mid-September. Now, the odds favor a rate hike and it’s not hard to see why.
From an earnings perspective, this summer proved to be a largely fruitful one for many companies within the S&P 500.
As clients come to advisory shops more informed, due to the plethora of financial advice available online, firms will need to be able to “stress test the information or bias” they arrive with. A comprehensive team, with training across advisory areas, can offer clients more depth of service.
Equity markets can be as difficult to forecast as the weather, yet investors often assume future return patterns will predictably follow recent trends. In today’s turbulent market climate, we think fundamental research can help investors build conviction in long-term company forecasts that may be obscured by the AI-driven cloud cover.
If you’re planning on driving anywhere this Labor Day weekend, be prepared to pay the highest gas prices ever for this time of year. The national average hit $4.14 per gallon on Thursday, an approximately 30% increase from last year, according to AAA.
The U.S. ETF market reached $16.4 trillion in AUM in August 2026, driven by record product launches and a defensive shift to Treasuries.
Chris Galipeau discusses high-conviction insights that go beyond media headlines.
Around 2020, Apple Inc. Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook returned from a trip to Asia unusually energized about a new product category: foldable phones.
Before I discuss why I disagree with the “AI bears,” I want to state that I respect their opinions, have evaluated their concerns, and have simply derived a different set of conclusions. That is an important statement, because this particular group of “AI bears” includes some of the sharpest risk minds in the business, and they have been early to almost every warning that later mattered.
It's been 40 years since I began my career on Wall Street and the lessons I learned along the way from some all-time investment greats always hold true.
My goal with this letter will be to not interrupt your long weekend too much. But there are some things that are happening that are important. My basic thesis for quite some time has been that we are in a Muddle Through Economy, which I’ve always meant that to me the GDP will grow slightly south of 2% over time.
Cerulli projects a $2 trillion surge in advisor-held alternatives over five years, as interval funds reshape how RIAs access private markets.
Sift through the filings of pension funds and insurers around the world and one thing stands out: some of the biggest holders of US assets have little protection against a weaker dollar, leaving the currency at risk of steeper declines if sentiment suddenly turns.
How should investors think about today’s stock market valuations? The answer likely sits between rich and cheap. If earnings keep growing rapidly alongside AI spending, the market, in aggregate, may be fairly priced despite CAPE's warning. But a recession — or a slowdown in planned AI spending — is a real risk to that outcome.
After several challenging years, important parts of the health care sector appear to be reaching an inflection point. Policy uncertainty has weighed on pharmaceutical companies, constrained biotech funding has pressured the drug-development ecosystem and the normalization of pandemic-era has challenged select tool and device companies. More recently, however, several of these headwinds have begun to moderate.
Global fixed income and equity ETF strategies posted gains and saw inflows surge in August, even amid ongoing macroeconomic turbulence and elevated long-term borrowing costs. International equities maintained their year-to-date lead over U.S. stocks throughout the month, led by notable strength in emerging markets.
Stocks have enjoyed a powerful run off the spring lows and have largely shrugged off concerns around growth, inflation, higher interest rates, the effects of artificial intelligence (AI), geopolitics, and policy uncertainty. As the calendar turns to September, however, they are entering what has historically been, from a seasonality perspective, the most challenging month of the year for equities.
Nvidia Corp. has agreed to acquire artificial intelligence startup Hugging Face in a transaction valued at about $13 billion.
The topic d’jure is that Kevin Warsh just gave his first Presser (Oh yes, we love that word) as new Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and it was fascinating, although in fairness, I have a Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance streak in me that delights in what others might consider head-rolling minutiae.
Record fixed income ETF inflows in August pushed year-to-date ETF totals past $1.4 trillion, with short-term bonds leading the surge.
US stocks flipped between small gains and losses on Wednesday after a three-day skid, as oil prices halted a sharp advance, easing inflation concerns as traders weigh the Federal Reserve’s potential path for interest-rate hikes.
AI-driven scarcity is allowing companies perceived as lower quality to post the revenue growth, margin expansion and rising returns that investors associate with quality, lifting estimates, multiples and stock prices.
Should the recent value rotation be viewed as a regime shift-driven change in market preference, or a simple reversal trade? We think there is a compelling case to be made for the former. In a regime of higher interest rates and stubbornly above-target inflation, the market is increasingly focused on capex intensity, free cash flow conversion, and the cost of capital.
As government bond yields across the world erupt, corporate credit has rarely looked calmer. Yet even in that market, about $1 trillion of bonds are telling a much different story.
Massive AUM may earn an RIA a buyer’s attention, but it does not automatically earn a premium valuation in the rapidly evolving M&A landscape.
In a week that saw NVIDIA, the largest company in the world, report strong earnings that sent its stock sharply higher and reinvigorated optimism in the artificial intelligence (AI) trade, fiscal and monetary policymakers continued to provide the biggest headlines.
As the month of August came to a close, the first index mutual fund got to celebrate a key milestone. The mutual fund in question is the Vanguard 500 Index Fund (VFINX), which originally launched on August 31, 1976.
San Antonio has been my adopted home for close to 40 years now. I’ve watched it grow through more than one boom cycle, but recent Redfin data suggests we could be looking at a bust.
Over seven years ago, I wrote a piece using the 1960s TV sitcom Gilligan's Island to provide a simple example of why productivity is the most important driver of economic growth. In this article, I present the next episode of Gilligan’s Island, describing what happens after the benefits of innovation stop driving economic growth.
Most of us keep a chunk of cash on hand — for rent, groceries, the occasional emergency, or simply because we haven’t gotten around to investing it yet. In the finance industry, this is called your “float.” We think the single best thing most people can do with it is own a Treasury Bill ETF — and yet almost nobody does.
The US plans to use its newfound assertion of control over billions of barrels of Venezuelan crude oil to refill the nation’s depleted emergency reserve, President Donald Trump said Sunday.
The appeal of democratic socialism is real because the pain it speaks to is real. I won’t pretend otherwise. But intentions are not outcomes, and history has handed us the outcomes in ink, from Caracas to the old Soviet bloc to the Nordic countries that quietly kept their capitalism. The promise is a beautiful cake. The aftertaste is shortages, capital flight, inflation, and a new elite standing where the old one used to be.
Our real gross domestic product (GDP) forecast for 2026 is 2.5% (based on our Global Investment Management Survey) versus the Federal Reserve’s (Fed's) forecast of 2.2% and the Wall Street consensus of around 2%. The economy remains resilient and the consumer is strong.
We often hear that consumption accounts for roughly 70% of the US economy and that, as long as consumers keep spending, the economy will continue to grow. There is certainly some truth to that.
This week, we take on the objection that scares people most: that AI and the data centers that run it are coming for their jobs. Let's separate what people currently believe from what the data currently shows, and then talk about why the jobs argument, even where it has merit, points toward building more data centers rather than fewer.
This week, our Portfolio Manager Olga Bezrokov sees tentative signs of improvement emerging in Europe, although she cautions that the recovery remains uneven across countries and sectors.
A chorus of investors is urging Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh to express a strong determination to deal with high inflation to boost the long end of the Treasury market.
When a driver sees an unfamiliar light on the dashboard, the hope is that it’s a false positive that will go away on its own. But a persistent warning must be addressed before it becomes a bigger problem. The global economy is moving forward with several warning lights flashing, and those signals are becoming harder to ignore.
Investors who focus only on tomorrow’s gold price may miss the larger purpose of owning precious metals. Gold and silver are not merely vehicles for chasing a rally. They are tools for preserving purchasing power during periods of fiscal and monetary instability.
The US Army is planning to deploy small reactors to power five bases across the country, investing $2.2 billion to accelerate the Trump Administration’s efforts to boost America’s nuclear industry.
U.S. labor force participation is declining due to an aging population, slowing immigration, and other factors. This could impact economic growth and earnings moving forward.
In choppy waters, many novice ship passengers will experience sea sickness. The only sure remedy is to wait it out. Symptoms will pass, as will the rough waters.
Victory Capital Holdings, Inc. (VCTR) announced an acquisition of First Eagle Investments Wednesday, a deal that will create a combined asset manager with $571 billion in client assets, the companies said.
The Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation gauge, the core PCE price index, climbed 3.3% year-over-year in July. This marks no change from June's reading. On a monthly basis, core prices rose 0.2%.
I was recently asked how to instill accountability and urgency in this next generation. Set expectations and offer guidance. Remember, this is a generation that largely grew up not speaking to other people and definitely not calling anyone.
European equities have long been written off as the ultimate value trap — a sleepy, slow-growth market living in the shadow of Wall Street’s tech-fueled mega-rally. But a massive shift in market dynamics is unfolding across the Atlantic.
When a typical business finds its supply chain costs have risen, it will absorb the increase to keep its customers happy. Nvidia isn’t a typical business. It enjoys gross profit margins of 75% and commands between 70% and 90% of the global market for artificial-intelligence chips.
Interest rates are moving higher, and the forces behind the move appear to be persistent inflation and an economy that continues to grow more strongly than many anticipated. Economic growth is generally advantageous, and moderate inflation is a normal feature of a healthy economy.
In the first part of this series, I promised that the next enemy we would face is the one you cannot fire, mute, or unfollow, because it is “You.” You can learn every valuation metric ever invented, memorize the two questions that decide everything, and still hand most of your returns back to the market for one simple reason.
