Gold has always had a way of testing investors’ expectations. Just when the headlines appear most supportive—inflation is rising, geopolitical risk is escalating and confidence in fiat currency is being questioned—gold can suddenly move in the opposite direction.
On the heels of arranging a record $85 billion equity-raise for Alphabet Inc., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. has scored a lesser-known victory for the tech giant in the municipal bond market.
The US insurance industry recently joined the fossil-fuel industry in its fight to avoid being sued over the damage oil, gas and coal emissions have done to the planet. Given that insurers are supposedly among the world’s biggest sufferers of those same climate-fueled losses, this was a perplexing choice — until you think about why Big Insurance and Big Oil might be on the same team.
There are two processes that we cannot escape: aging and math. This applies not only to human beings but also to large government social-insurance programs.
Chris Galipeau discusses high-conviction insights that go beyond media headlines.
Given all the interest and hype over the SpaceX IPO, many advisors and investors have been increasingly gravitating towards thematic ETFs that focus on the space industry. Given that the SpaceX IPO is the largest IPO in history, this should not come as a surprise to anyone.
The K-shaped economy has become shorthand for a tidy story. The rich pull away while everyone else falls behind. It fits the mood, and it makes for a sharp headline. The problem is that it’s mostly wrong.
Recent economic data continues to point to a resilient U.S. economy. The unemployment rate held steady at 4.3% in May, while payrolls increased by 172,000 jobs. Hiring remained strongest in leisure and hospitality, though there were also encouraging signs from more cyclical areas of the economy.
During this time of year, we like to take stock of what happened in the first half of the year and compare it with the expectations we had at the beginning of the year when we published our full-year outlooks.
The U.S. economy faced intensifying headwinds in May as both consumer and wholesale inflation metrics surged to multi-year highs.
Despite everything we have seen in the economic data, which can be confusing, the US consumer has refused to crack. My friend Dr. Ed Yardeni, whom I have known since '98, has the most compelling explanation I have heard for why.
The current economic downturn is best described as hybrid and structurally driven. It leans heavily on demand constraints, though it is triggered and complicated by ongoing supply shocks.
New York City’s pension system said it’s seeking bids for roughly $92 billion of stock index-tracking funds now overseen by BlackRock Inc. and State Street Investment Management.
Join the experts at MassMutual Strategic Distributors for an educational webcast exploring income riders and how to evaluation variable annuities beyond surface level features so you can match the right rider to each client’s investor profile and retirement goals.
Goldman Sachs and Innovator panelists say buffer ETFs can help advisors move cash-shy clients into stocks with built-in downside limits.
In this video, Chuck Carnevale responds to a viewer's question about building a retirement income portfolio for a 63-year-old investor. Rather than recommending specific stocks, Chuck focuses on the process he uses to identify high-quality income investments using the principles of value investing and the FAST Graphs platform.
SpaceX made history with a $75 billion IPO that instantly turned it into one of the biggest public companies in the world. Now it has to win over the market.
The ETF industry has reached a historic turning point. Vanguard has officially surpassed BlackRock’s iShares to become the largest ETF provider. The milestone underscores a broader structural shift among investors prioritizing low-cost investments in portfolio allocations.
At a time when the cost of living is rising and market volatility appears to be rising, too, investors may be looking for current income to bolster their portfolios. Current income can especially help investors at or near retirement to adapt to retired life.
In this month’s Allocation Views, strong corporate fundamentals and resilient growth fuel our continued optimism toward equities into June, despite persistent inflation and more restrictive monetary policy.
In addition to a greater range of chips supporting AI development, several factors could cause the current cycle to last longer than expected.
While owning a significant amount of a successful stock can be incredibly lucrative – especially in a company on the rise – the more you own of a single equity, the more closely your personal financial fate is tied to its performance.
For many investors, wealth management still feels segmented. Investments are handled in one meeting, taxes in another, estate planning somewhere else, and major life decisions often happen independently of all three.
Silver's chart also weakened substantially, although the metal remains near important longer-term support levels and has not yet confirmed the same degree of structural breakdown seen in gold.
Inflation and geopolitical uncertainty are pushing advisors and investors to rethink how they build diversified portfolios.
With the challenges presented in the broader market environment and the rate regime, are you making the most out of your fixed income exposures? Active management can help fixed income investors navigate today’s unusual environment, giving funds the flexibility to react to events in real-time. Join Fidelity for a product due diligence session exploring three active strategies: FBND, FLTB, and FAAA.
May saw 148 new ETF launches in May alone – although launch figures were partially driven by a 37-fund rollout from Corgi Insurance Services.
As shareholders rush to pull money from private credit funds over troubling questions about software exposure, opaque loan values and non-payments, some bond investors are doing the opposite: buying their debt.
For more than four decades, PIMCO’s Secular Forum has provided a disciplined framework for stepping back from short-term market noise to assess the structural forces that will shape the global economy and markets over the next five years. Yet rarely has this exercise been more consequential than it has recently.
After more than three years of underperformance, our prognosis for global health care stocks remains positive. The sector now offers a broader set of high-quality companies at valuations that appear increasingly disconnected from fair value.
Many advisors deliver capital markets commentary as if the goal were simply to explain what’s happening. They assemble charts, cite data, summarize headlines and hope the client will draw the “right” conclusion.
Attractive yields and strong credit fundamentals are setting the municipal bond market up for a solid second half of the year, said Paul Malloy, the head of municipals at The Vanguard Group Inc.
The Senate passed $70 billion immigration enforcement funding bill, Capitol Hill struggles to find consensus on how to regulate AI, and the Trump Accounts app is live.
Begin with the print itself, because the headline flatters the internals only slightly. The bulk of May's gains came from leisure and hospitality, which added 70,000 jobs, nearly half of them in food services and drinking places; local government contributed 55,000, health care 35,000, and manufacturing a modest 7,000, while financial activities actually shed positions.
Every dollar in a growth equity index reflects two decisions: which companies to own and how much of each to hold. Indexes form intricate systematic rules to make the first decision. The second decision—position sizing—is usually determined by market-cap weighting.
LPL Research analyzes bond markets as yields rise, exploring Fed policy expectations, inflation trends, and whether bad news is already priced into Treasuries.
Equity markets should remain supported by strong earnings and capital investment trends through 2026, but market concentration and macro risks leave less room for error.
The takeaway for both HY and EM corporates is straightforward. Once oil prices are above breakeven, further moves in oil tend to matter less for credit performance.
If you think tracking error tells you how well a portfolio “tracks” the benchmark, it doesn’t. If you think it signals underperformance, that’s not right either. And if you believe high tracking error is inherently better or worse depending on the manager, that’s not the whole story.
While job growth has reaccelerated, supporting consumption, the underlying income picture is less encouraging.
Investors have enjoyed a favorable run. If the year ended today, it would mark the seventh time in the last nine years that stock portfolios generated double-digit returns. Housing prices remain near historic highs, while bond investors have benefited from elevated yields over the past three years.
Building resilient portfolios in markets delivering mixed messages can be a challenging affair. In our ongoing engagement with the retail and advisor community at VettaFi, we hear first-hand just how investors are tackling that challenge this year.
Several articles enjoyed strong performance during the month of May, though there does not seem to have been a unifying theme, unless it is pointing out mistaken beliefs or unexamined conventions.
Crypto has clearly matured considerably as an asset class, and it's exciting to hear more advisors speak about the opportunity it presents — without being scared away by its volatility. The real question today is how much of a portfolio allocation is appropriate given their specific objectives and constraints.
Interest rates remain one of the primary concerns for investors as Kevin Warsh has officially assumed leadership at the U.S. Federal Reserve (Fed). While we believe the possibility of a rate cut has diminished considerably, we are not yet expecting additional rate hikes.
Probably the most popular insight to make its way from finance theory into everyday usage is that "diversification is the only free lunch" in investing. The idea dates back to Harry Markowitz in 1952. He, and those building on his work, demonstrated that in an efficient market, investors shouldn't earn extra return for bearing company-specific risks that can be diversified away.
The rise in US yields has extended across the entire Treasury curve, creating a charged backdrop for Fed policymakers and their new chairman, Kevin Warsh, who helms his first meeting and press conference next week.
US stocks have further to run as corporate earnings growth underpins sentiment despite some signals suggesting equities may have risen too far, JPMorgan Asset Management’s Jack Caffrey said.
Interactive Brokers Group Inc. is offering exchange-traded funds from BlackRock Inc. in savings plans in Europe, the latest platform to provide the booming product that’s become increasingly popular with mom-and-pop investors on the continent.
The history of megacap initial public offerings shows that the stocks usually slump in the first year of trading. But upcoming listings from SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI are big enough and systemically important enough to the market that those analogies may not apply.
