You spent years building your retirement savings with one goal in mind: having enough to live comfortably when you stop working. The strategy that got you here probably leaned heavily on growth. But as retirement gets closer, that same approach may not be the right one to carry you through it.
S&P 500 companies are turning in their strongest earnings season in five years. And a handful of sectors are doing most of the heavy lifting.
Advisors and investors of all kinds are used to closely watching the outcome of each of the Federal Reserve’s meetings, given how critical interest rates are to equity and fixed income markets alike. However, the recent July Fed meeting was particularly crucial. Many were uncertain what direction the central bank would go with interest rates.
The US economy grew less than expected during the second quarter of the year, up 1.5% quarter over quarter, dragged down by strong growth in imports. However, final sales to private domestic purchasers increased by 3.9%, underscoring the strength in domestic demand, which continues to rely too heavily in AI investment spending and strong spending from high-income consumers, or what has been called the K economy.
Market volatility—and the feelings of uncertainty that follow—tend to frighten investors. Yet for investors with an overlay program, one approach to volatility is evergreen—rebalancing.
Electricity has become a major global focus. It essential to powering the modern economy: regions with capacity will generate growth, while those without adequate supplies may be vulnerable to shocks.
As companies race to capitalize on the AI boom, water security is emerging as a material risk across the value chain. While data centers attract headlines, semiconductor fabrication remains one of the value chain’s most water-intensive activities, requiring reliable supplies of high-purity water.
There are 38% fewer companies listed on U.S. exchanges today than at the peak in the mid-1990s. The forces behind that decline—regulatory burden, the abundance of private capital, and the quiet disappearance of mid-sized public companies—are structural, not cyclical.
Growing demand for AI-savvy workers has led some companies, including software makers International Business Machines Corp., Shopify Inc. and Cloudflare Inc., to ramp up entry-level hiring, betting that recent Gen Z graduates will be able to do more with AI tools than existing employees.
JPMorgan Chase & Co. is vowing to funnel $750 billion into housing over the next decade, nearly 40% more than it has over the past 10 years, as part of Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon’s push to invest more money in US communities.
US stocks rose into the first trading day of the month as attention turned to this week’s heavy slate of earnings reports.
The deeper promise may be in human-AI collaboration. AIs may prove most valuable not as autonomous traders but as a counterweight to our very human behavioral biases such as overconfidence, recency bias, and the tendency to bet too big on views that feel certain but aren’t.
In this article, I explain why baby boomers in target date funds (TDFs) should not feel lucky today or in the near future. There’s a 40% chance that the typical TDF will have at least one losing year during the next five years. These are bad odds, especially since retirement with dignity is at stake.
Learn what Trump Accounts for advisors mean for financial planning, including contribution rules, employer funding, 529comparisons, and ETFs.
“Carnage” and “exploding” are very misleading descriptors of what is happening to hyperscaler credit spreads. Yes, the basket of CDS spreads is certainly moving upward, but it is not evenly distributed. Oracle's CDS spreads have moved by multiples, while the other four hyperscalers' CDS spreads have increased by a much more subdued amount, and from unusually tight initial levels.
Chris Galipeau discusses high-conviction insights that go beyond media headlines.
In this video, Chuck Carnevale introduces Charles, the new AI-powered research assistant built into FAST Graphs for Premium subscribers. Charles is designed to help investors research stocks faster, more thoroughly, and with greater confidence—without telling them what to buy or sell.
This week’s vote from the Federal Reserve FOMC committee is going to have implications for quite some time. I think most of the pundits who are writing about this have their analysis wrong. This was not just a vote to not raise rates. I think there was a lot more going on behind the scenes.
Schwab Sector Views is our six- to 12-month outlook for stock sectors, which represent broad sectors of the economy. The Schwab Center for Financial Research (SCFR) combines a factor-based approach with a market and economic assessment to determine the ratings.
Inflation remains a hot topic, directly impacting everything from your grocery bill to interest rates. As of the latest data, two key inflation gauges — the Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) Price Index and the Consumer Price Index (CPI) — show that prices are still above the Federal Reserve's 2% target, with the core PCE at 3.3% and core CPI at 2.6%.
In the race to win a coveted role on the next mega US IPO and manage the ensuing riches, Wall Street’s wealth advisers are ramping up lending to founders and entrepreneurs based on the soaring values of their private companies.
For anyone worried about the gargantuan costs of developing artificial-intelligence infrastructure, it was comforting to think that Big Tech firms could just turn off the spending taps if demand for chatbots and coding tools didn’t pan out. That’s starting to look like wishful thinking.
It’s true enough that history rhymes, even if it doesn’t necessarily repeat. But that creates danger when we pick up resonances from the wrong episode of history, particularly in the fraught task of identifying and avoiding speculative bubbles.
As concerns grow about the market’s biggest companies, investors are looking further down the market-cap scale. Mid-cap innovators are drawing more attention because they have more room to grow.
Following historic inflows, momentum in the covered call ETF market continues unabated. Yet first-generation buy-write products were often viewed somewhat narrowly as high-yield income vehicles built on sacrificing equity upside for immediate cash flow. While early strategies proved the massive appetite for yield, they also exposed key advisor pain points — from steep NAV erosion in bull markets to tax-inefficient distributions.
LPL Research explores whether hyperscalers can generate attractive returns on massive AI investments through a framework focused on ROIC, growth, and capex.
Fixed income can serve several important purposes within an investment portfolio, including income generation, capital preservation, diversification, and supporting future cash flow needs. Unlike growth assets, an individual bond generally provides a defined schedule of interest payments and a stated maturity date.
Energy markets have reached a precarious moment, with the path of prices over the remainder of the year – and potentially beyond – hinging on two key questions.
In part two of AB’s “Build a Better Path” Disruptor SeriesTM, we shifted from diagnosing the challenge of long-term investing to a potential approach for solving it. With practical, actionable steps, investors have the potential to translate the concept of improving up/down capture into strategies aimed at improving portfolio design.
In this report, John P Kerschner, Global Head of Securitized Products, Daniel Siluk, Head of Global Short Duration and Liquidity, and Michael Contopoulos, Head of Multi-Asset Macro Investing, make the case for why it’s time for short-duration bonds.
GMO’s liquid alternatives are hedge fund strategies (e.g., equity long-short, global macro, event-driven) managed with an emphasis on risk control and liquidity. The GMO Alternative Allocation Strategy (“ALTA”) is a liquid alternative solution combining several underlying strategies; ALTA is available in a mutual fund with daily liquidity.
Personal income (excluding transfer receipts) was up 0.13% in June and was up 3.81% year-over-year. However, when adjusted for inflation using the BEA's PCE Price Index, real personal income (excluding transfer receipts) was up 0.24% month-over-month and up 0.14% year-over-year.
The Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation gauge, the core PCE price index, climbed 3.3% year-over-year in June. This marks a slight decrease from May's 3.4% reading. On a monthly basis, core prices rose 0.1%.
US stocks rose at the open on Thursday as Microsoft Corp. soared 16% after reporting the fastest cloud unit growth in four years. Top semiconductor companies, like Micron Technology Inc. and Nvidia Corp., gained as well.
Europe’s big banks have joined the global stock trading party. Danger lurks, however: When the market turns, it is often brutal.
The conventional wisdom in tech is that it’s better to overspend than miss out on a blockbuster hit. Of course, Big Tech’s investors hate when their companies overdo it.
If you’d rather get ahead of where income allocations are heading than read about them in next quarter’s flow report, this is the session.
Oil markets have entered a period of heightened volatility. Geopolitical tensions, shifting supply expectations, and uncertain demand forecasts continue to weigh on investor sentiment. This environment can make traditional energy investing challenging. However, it also increases interest income generation strategies like the Amplify Energy & Natural Resources Covered Call ETF (NDIV).
The Federal Reserve left its policy rate unchanged in July, with three participants dissenting in favor of a hike. Prior to the meeting, markets had priced roughly a one-third probability of a rate hike, so the hold was dovish relative to market pricing.
As families prepare for college move-in season, the packing list usually starts with the obvious essentials: bedding, a laptop, chargers, school supplies and plenty of snacks.
U.S. economic growth rebounded at the beginning of 2026, according to the BEA’s latest estimate. Real GDP rose at a 1.5% annual rate in Q2, falling below the 2.1% forecast, but marking an acceleration from the 0.5% final estimate seen in Q4 of last year.
Once again, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) decided to remain ‘on hold’, keeping the fed funds trading range at 3.50%–3.75%. Although there had been earlier conjecture in the money and bond markets the Fed may raise rates at the July gathering, that sentiment ultimately faded, and the final result was largely expected.
U.S. equities finished lower last week as investors weighed an escalating conflict with Iran against renewed concern over the scale of AI-related spending. The technology-heavy NASDAQ Composite was the worst performer, falling 2.1 per cent, while the S&P 500, an index of the largest U.S. companies, declined 0.6 per cent.
Private equity has become easier than ever for individual investors to buy. Founders, executives, physicians, and business owners now regularly see private funds offered through banks, wealth platforms, feeders, evergreen vehicles, or registered interval funds. However, just because these funds are more readily available, and at lower minimums, does not mean they should immediately be invested in.
South Korea and Taiwan are grabbing the majority of financial news headlines when it comes to international exposure, but a peek inside Latin America reveals potential opportunities. Brazil, in particular, could be offering investors ample value in both equities and bonds beyond those aforementioned countries already benefiting from the artificial intelligence (AI) buildout.
A continued escalation in the Middle East, where the Iranian-backed Houthis joined the conflict in an attempt to disrupt Saudi Arabian crude shipments that pass through the Red Sea via the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, drove oil prices higher, while new tariff announcements and Alphabet's earnings release created headwinds for equities.
Considering that the Federal Reserve has been meeting this week, it’s safe to say that inflation is likely front-and-center on the minds of many advisors and investors. After all, energy prices and supply chain constraints have kept inflationary pressures far more persistent than the Fed would like.
The Federal Reserve concluded its fifth meeting of the year by holding the federal funds rate (FFR) steady in the 3.50%-3.75% range.
Clients do not need us to predict whether the next 10% move is up or down. They need help staying invested in a way that matches their goals, their time horizon, and their actual tolerance for risk. Staying invested is easier when clients understand what each part of the portfolio is designed to do.
Investors overwhelmingly recognize the value of financial planning, but a substantial planning gap remains. The desire for guidance is there. Access remains the challenge.
