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.
There is an old adage that the stock market climbs a wall of worry, which describes its ability to keep rising even amid negative economic news or events. This defies logic, yet I have watched it prove true time after time.
The job market was surprisingly strong in May with non-farm payrolls growing 172,000, beating even the strongest forecasts for the month. As a result, the futures market is now pricing in a quarter-point rate hike later this year and more likely than not another quarter point rate hike sometime in 2027.
It’s no secret that investors are on the lookout for opportunities in their fixed income portfolios. This is especially true in today’s shifting landscape. Equities are hot, perhaps too hot, and many investors want strong performances out of their bonds in order to keep up.
Fertilizers sit at the center of this transmission mechanism. As much as a third of the global supply of these commodities passes through the Strait of Hormuz, which has largely been closed for three months. This has triggered shortages and a price spike.
In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past few months, three of the world’s largest and most consequential private companies—SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI—are preparing to go public in the same year. Together, they could add nearly $4 trillion in market cap to public markets.
Labor market fundamentals have improved meaningfully from last year’s near standstill while inflation has moved higher, driven in part by the Iran conflict and the resulting increase in petroleum and gasoline prices. As a result, Federal Reserve (Fed) officials are likely becoming more concerned about the risk of broader inflation pressures, a theme highlighted in this week’s ISM Manufacturing and Services PMI releases.
As we go to press, fighting in the Mideast has escalated, sending crude higher, but stocks, in early Monday trade, have shown remarkable stability following Friday’s deep selloff.
Metals Focus has released its Gold Focus 2026 report. It includes comprehensive historical supply and demand data for 2017-25 and its 2026 forecast.
Chris Galipeau and Taylor Topoussis discuss high-conviction insights that go beyond media headlines.
We are halfway through 2026, and the planning priorities that have defined our client work this year are in focus. Some of what we are doing is recurring: fixing compliance errors, correcting quarterly estimate miscalculations, and keeping tax positions aligned with economic reality.
Quantum computing is being hailed as the next technology to revolutionize computing, following in AI's footsteps. But promising headlines loaded with industry jargon have a long history of appearing well ahead of reality. Accordingly, it’s important to better understand what quantum computing is, why it matters, and whether the hype is justified and worth investing in.
In this episode of ETF of the Week, host Chuck Jaffe sits down with Todd Rosenbluth, Head of Research at VettaFi, to discuss the NEOS Enhanced Income 1-3 Month T-Bill ETF (CSHI).
If the market has correctly named the companies that will dominate the AI era, cap weighting will look brilliant, because it owns them in size and will ride them up for free. The real question is: How much do you want to bet the market chose the correct companies?
Credit heavyweights like DoubleLine Capital LP and Oaktree Capital Management are buying debt now that can perform well if the artificial intelligence boom turns into a credit bust.
US stocks bounced back on Monday from the worst rout this year, as a selloff in technology stocks eased and traders assessed flaring tensions in the Middle East, which supported oil prices and energy shares.
The bar for a Federal Reserve rate hike is falling as the job market remains robust in the face of stubborn price pressures, according to Collin Martin at the Schwab Center for Financial Research.
Apple Inc. investors have spent nearly two years clamoring for the iPhone maker to make a big splash with artificial intelligence. Their wait may finally be coming to an end this week at the company’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference.
