If owning a home is still the American dream, then it is increasingly out of reach for many young Americans. The average age of a first-time homebuyer is now 40, up from 33 just a few years ago and 29 in 1981.
Anduril Industries Inc. founder Palmer Luckey, Lockheed Martin Corp., Palantir Technology Inc.’s Shyam Sankar and other investors are putting $130 million into Valar Atomics, a nuclear startup that’s aiming to build thousands of advanced nuclear fission reactors within a decade.
Adam Giddens used to mainly rely on screening services and social-media buzz when looking for stocks to buy. Lately, though, he’s turned his attention to a different kind of influencer: Donald Trump.
When it comes to inflows, it seems like ETFs are content with beating themselves. After a record 2024 that saw inflows amass just under $1.14 trillion, ETFs did it again by edging past that level today. And they’re not done. State Street Investment Management is projecting total inflows could end the year at $1.4 trillion.
To better understand how the AI industry is funding itself and the potential risks involved, we believe it is helpful to draw on historical context from the dot-com bubble, when similar deals were common amid a thriving technology sector.
Last week’s economic data sent mixed signals. Consumer sentiment plummeted to a near-record low on economic anxiety, and the manufacturing sector continued its long contraction.
The recent fun and games involving the NBA and the gambling indictments are certainly amusing on their own merits, but do they say something else?
Actively managed ETFs, particularly those of the fixed income variety, are among the fastest-growing ETF segments today. That growth has been facilitated in part by advisors moving away from higher-fee mutual funds and issuers converting popular mutual funds to the ETF wrapper, among other factors.
After implementing the first interest rate cut of the year, the prospect of further easing by the U.S. Federal Reserve could make fixed income investors nervous.
MPLX (MPLX) has reported third-quarter 2025 financial results that aligned with market expectations. MPLX has recently announced positive updates for investors, including a 12.5% increase in its unitholder distribution and a strategic new opportunity to support data centers in Texas.
After the first rate cut of 2025 and the prospect of more rate cuts to come, the capital markets are now wondering at what pace the U.S. Federal Reserve will institute them. For fixed income investors looking for options that balance credit quality and yield, municipal bonds should be considered.
A sad chapter in Boeing Co.’s history closed on Thursday when a federal judge approved a non-prosecution agreement with the Department of Justice that drops criminal charges against the company for failures of its aircraft design and manufacturing process that led to two deadly crashes and an inflight accident that by miracle didn’t kill anyone.
For many crypto investors, it’s fine to focus on Bitcoin and Ethereum. After all, those two assets combine for nearly $2.7 trillion of the crypto universe’s total market capitalization of $3.75 trillion. “Dominant” doesn’t begin to underscore the status of bitcoin and ether.
This lack of transparency around private assets has helped the industry grow and innovate; it has also created a rapidly expanding multi-trillion-dollar black box that could pose systemic risks.
We often hear about the Fed chair, but who are the governors at the Fed and what is their role? Recent events have raised the profile of other Fed interest rate voters.
U.S. tech equities driven by the artificial intelligence (AI) theme have been a prime catalyst for market gains this year. Have valuations exceeded their underlying fundamentals? If so, one potential avenue to diversify tech exposure is the Invesco China Technology ETF (CQQQ).
The all-ETF portfolio is becoming a reality, as product offerings have evolved into a comprehensive tool kit for total portfolio construction.
For investors, a concentrated portfolio of equity-market winners tends to work just fine — until it doesn’t. At the moment, the S&P 500 is a case in point: Its earnings remain both spectacular and spectacularly concentrated around the artificial intelligence story.
Investors’ certainty that the Federal Reserve would follow its recent interest-rate cut with another in December has evaporated.
There is (another) framework for a deal with China. That is a positive for risk markets. There is increasing evidence of waning tariff effects on company earnings and outlooks. That is a positive for risk markets. The interaction of the two is by far the most intriguing.
Financial markets are obsessed with AI, and the broader public is aware of its looming impact on jobs and wages. Yet for the Federal Reserve, the concern has barely registered.
Though many AI-related stocks continued to struggle, including Advanced Micro Devices despite solid earnings, indexes rebounded early as a private jobs report exceeded forecasts.
It’s been a good year for international equity ETFs. As a category, broad exposure funds tapping into both developed and emerging market equities have delivered outsized gains relative to U.S. markets this year, as well as much sought portfolio diversification.
The Federal Reserve’s (Fed) balance sheet runoff — commonly referred to as quantitative tightening (QT) — is set to conclude on December 1. Since initiating QT, the Fed has reduced its balance sheet by over $2 trillion, largely through the drawdown of its overnight reverse repo program (O/N RRP).
It's been a minute since we’ve touched on traditional stock splits. Our last look at this type of share-price engineering came in Q2, when reverse ETF splits were happening all around us. For individual investors, when a company’s management team chooses to split its stock, it can have more impactful implications for longer-run returns.
Wall Street excels at creating catch phrases. The latest one is the “debasement trade.” JP Morgan analysts coined the term earlier this year. Thanks to macroeconomic and geopolitical factors such as lower interest rates, rising fiscal deficits, trade policies, and global geopolitical tensions, concern is rising about the debasement or devaluation of fiat currency.
Big tech names performed strongly last week, carrying the S&P 500 into positive territory. Fears of an AI bubble are making investors wary of the breakneck pace of capital expenditures. Amazon’s (AMZN) stellar earnings after Thursday’s close indicate the capex boom is pressing on, however.
Even with the government shutdown casting a shadow over Washington D.C., equity markets have continued their upward march, fueled by a trifecta of positive surprises: cooler-than-expected inflation, another rate cut by the Federal Reserve (Fed) and easing trade tensions.
Open enrollment is a crucial time to review and choose employee benefits. It's an opportunity to make informed decisions that can significantly impact your financial and health well-being.
Something remarkable happened the other day: I tried an AI device I didn’t instinctively loathe. It was a smart ring, created by two former Meta Platforms Inc. employees, that finally met some of the key criteria I think about when it comes to wearable tech and artificial intelligence, an intersection already fraught with failure and no shortage of justifiable anger.
High concentration makes it hard for diversified active portfolios to outperform. While the mega-caps include great businesses, active strategies may avoid or underweight popular stocks over concerns about valuations, business models and interrelated risks, or because of regulations on weighting individual holdings.
The US stock market has roared past every caution sign on its way to a dizzying 36% surge since the April lows. It’s now staring down one favored by investing legend Warren Buffett.
Global bond sales have soared to a record this year as borrowers take advantage of easy market conditions to fund everything from the boom in artificial intelligence projects to a revival in acquisitions.
AstraZeneca Plc’s profit rose more than analysts anticipated last quarter, buoyed by demand for its blockbuster cancer and diabetes drugs.
In their latest article, Why Hold Expensive Slow-Growing Stocks? An Alternative Framework for Value and Growth Indices, Chris Brightman, Campbell Harvey, Que Nguyen, and Omid Shakernia, argue that traditional style-box construction forces investors to hold stocks that are neither true “value” nor true “growth”—notably, expensive, slow-growing companies that have historically underperformed.
China’s “anti-involution” policy to tackle deflation, announced in 2024, is still in its early stages. Some effects are already visible, but compared with China’s last deflation fight in 2014–2015, the policy may take longer to work, in our view.
German officials announced a massive stimulus program in early 2025. The results have been underwhelming so far, but we believe the economic boost to Germany and Europe is still coming.
Q3 Earnings growth continues to improve, with 64% of constituents reporting thus far, S&P 500® EPS growth for Q3 2025 accelerated to 10.7%
LPL Research reports on Fed rate cut, U.S.–China trade truce, strong earnings, and AI spending scrutiny amid narrowing market breadth and volatility risks.
Advisors may sometimes feel like they’re venturing out to solve the world’s personal financial problems alone. They don’t have to feel that way when they’re recommending active funds with the requisite expertise and experience behind them. Vanguard active ETFs can offer that.
Every month, TMX VettaFi publishes hundreds of articles across our ETF-focused websites. Reviewing the pieces that capture our readers’ attention provides a clear picture of prevailing advisor and investor sentiment. In October, five articles stood out. They primarily focus on the surging themes of AI, international equities, and alternatives.
Advisors are using exchange traded funds to expand beyond public markets to private markets to modernize 60/40 portfolios.
AUM-based compensation was a necessary evolution. But it isn’t the endpoint. If our profession is serious about being a profession, not an asset-gathering enterprise, we must continue to evolve. That means taking a hard look at how we get paid.
Remember that people have different communication and learning styles. What works for one person who “gets it” doesn’t work for another. If a message is important, make sure to use several modes of communication — written, verbal and interactive — wherever possible.
Investors who watched the robotics space peak back in 2021 may see the current rally with apprehension. Back then, the narrative of a China-driven logistics and e-commerce boom sent robotics stocks to dizzying heights. What followed was China’s economy first slowing down, and then a pandemic-fueled demand shock. The sector fell hard.
There can be only one Highlander, but Palantir’s Alex Karp shows there can be multiple highly paid, outspoken chief executive officers of richly valued tech companies with cult followings and unsettling stores of political power. That still doesn’t guarantee it’s a durable model for success.
As policy priorities evolve, Japan’s focus on “responsible fiscal expansion” could reshape bond dynamics.
On this episode of the “ETF of the Week” podcast, VettaFi’s Head of Research, Todd Rosenbluth, discussed the Capital Group Municipal Income ETF (CGMU) with Chuck Jaffe of Money Life. The pair discussed several topics related to the fund to give investors a deeper understanding of the ETF.
Eric Balchunas, Senior ETF Analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, offers a tour through the ever-evolving world of ETFs – covering crypto funds, the rise of exotic products, industry flows, the coming multi-share class structure, and more.
