The index that has served investors well for decades is suddenly considered passé. This puts prudent advisors in a bind. The main driver is recency bias. After several strong years in the market, many investors, especially those who have never lived through a serious bear market, assume that strong returns are forever.
Sometimes the best lessons are the simplest ones, and right now, the market is offering a good old-fashioned lesson on the benefits of diversification. Stay invested, stay diversified, and stick to your financial plan.
As the days grow shorter and the nights longer, Americans will turn their clocks back, shifting from daylight saving time to standard time. But the clocks won’t be the only thing changing. Americans will also head to the polls, with the potential to reshape Congress in the 2026 midterm elections.
Credit problems in the AI space are not going to be contained to just the AI space. It is going to have impacts all throughout the economy and global markets. I guarantee you central banks are paying attention as it is affecting what they have to charge for sovereign debt.
Equity investors are meting out some of the harshest punishments ever for companies that miss expectations, just as strategists sound the alarm that earnings growth has likely peaked.
The AI investment boom has become one of the largest sources of demand in the U.S. economy. Announced annual capital spending across large U.S. technology companies points to more than $1 trillion in desired investment, up dramatically from only a few years ago.
Narratives are almost always wrong: clever stories that explain the past and say nothing about the future. One may be right. AI may become the dominant technology of the century and render much of the present economy obsolete.
Q3 was a period of transition in the bond market thanks to Federal Reserve changes, a surge of AI-driven debt issuance, and rising interest rates.
Your leaders probably don’t know what the right thing is to measure and motivate, so they just picked something. Give them an alternative, while showing them you are engaged and want to grow. Their approach to motivation might change as a result.
For most of the past year, investors have been trying to answer what seems like a fairly straightforward question: How can the stock market continue to rise when interest rates keep moving higher? The conventional answer is that interest rates simply do not matter as much as they used to.
What matters most now is not merely whether I can improve a client's financial position. It is how I help advance the financial and personal direction of that client's life in a meaningful way.
By generation, Gen Z and Millennials now make up 88% of online betting activity. Gen X trails at 9%. Boomers barely register. As recently as this spring, Millennials were the bigger group. Then Gen Z passed them, and Bank of America called it a “turning point.”
For nearly four years, economists have been predicting that consumers would fail to sustain the economy. Yet despite many reasons for consumers to retrench, real personal consumption expenditures (PCE) grew 2.6% through September. The bottom line: Consumers keep worrying but keep spending.
If you only looked at the price of gold in September, you’d be forgiven for believing the bull market had run out of steam. The yellow metal fell 6.3% during the month, and some in the financial press were quick to say it had failed as a safe haven.
Societal angst about AI continues to grow. Whether it’s concern about misalignment or potentially misdirected investment, the AI-may-be-bad narrative is gaining traction. In stark contrast, the AI trade in financial markets was alive and well in September of 2026.
Wall Street has spent weeks trying to make peace with the great bond selloff. Friday offered some short-lived relief — along with a warning about the damage from stubbornly high yields across investment strategies of all stripes.
Higher-for-longer interest rates are forcing buyout firms to face facts. Struggling since 2023 to sell companies purchased in the long decade of ultra-cheap debt before the Covid pandemic, they’ve tried to placate investors with clever financial engineering to help keep some money turning over.
In the first quarter of this year, as the Strait of Hormuz closed and oil prices exploded, Berkshire Hathaway made a couple of moves that might have flown under people’s radars.It cut its stake in Chevron by roughly a third. Then it bought an airline.
Understanding why investor optimism wins over a full market cycle is one of the most underrated edges an investor can own, and it has almost nothing to do with waving pom-poms.
The week began with calls for a potential slowdown in AI spending amid growing safety concerns and included a midweek Fed rate hike for the first time since 2023. The S&P 500 finished slightly lower for the second week in a row despite continuing signs that economic growth is strong. Shorter-term bond yields pushed higher as investors priced in the potential for additional rate hikes, both in the U.S. and abroad.
Clients value advisors who are knowledgeable about philanthropy as well as those who collaborate with philanthropic specialists when deeper expertise is needed. Advisors who coordinate deliberately with specialists, rather than working around them, are best positioned to meet those expectations.
In my years working with advisors, teams, and firms, I’ve had to confront the topic of compensation many times. It’s hard to grow when you don’t have the right incentives in place to encourage people to focus on actually doing it and hard to team effectively when people may think they are being treated unfairly.
Heading into the September 16 FOMC meeting, the debate over whether the Fed should raise rates or hold is heated. To help you appreciate the range of views, I present this article as a courtroom exercise. I will let the prosecution make its case for a rate hike, and the defense for a hold.
Benchmark-Free has been a flagship strategy for half of GMO's history. As we approach our 50th anniversary in 2027, Ben Inker reflects on our first 25 years of Benchmark-Free investing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 debt problem is real. It just isn’t a bomb. As we’ve written before, the debt and deficit problem isn’t what you think. It’s a tax on future growth, collected slowly, and normal interest rates are simply the price of money doing its job, not the crisis the headlines keep selling.
To some, the debate over inflation targeting is largely an academic exercise. But its outcome will have direct consequences for the paths of global interest rates and global markets. Some background on how we arrived at this juncture, and where we might go from here, follows.
The truth about the runaway costs of healthcare turns out to be a little more complex than any single source we've named. Hospitals, insurers, private equity, administrators, pharmaceutical companies… pull the thread on any one and we land in the same overextended, bloated, extractive system.
U.S. debt may not be at an immediate breaking point, but persistent deficits, higher rates, and rising interest costs are narrowing fiscal space and market tolerance.
Shares of Meta Platforms Inc. have been under pressure all year due to questions about its spending on artificial intelligence. But a trial accusing its social media platforms of targeting children goes beyond that, raising existential questions about the future of its core business.
“Think Like An Investor” is chapter 1 of a 5-part series examining the narratives around “investing for the long run. Learning to think like an investor rather than a speculator is not a personality quirk or a matter of taste. It is the entire game, and the good news is that it is a skill you can actually build, starting today.
Earnings drive market corrections. That’s the finding, and the next serious decline won’t arrive with a headline about capital spending or the deficit but will begin exactly where all eight of the others began, in the profit cycle, surfacing in credit spreads and revision breadth well before it reaches any earnings report you can actually read.
Alphabet Inc. is looking to raise as much as $25 billion from its latest US investment-grade bond offering, a deal that will test investor appetite for AI-related debt following a July selloff.
In the span of a few weeks, a new college student takes on loan debt, gets their first credit card offer, and starts managing daily expenses on their own. They're buying groceries, splitting costs with roommates, saying yes to things they probably can't afford yet. No other period of life throws that many financial decisions at someone with that little experience.
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.
US earnings are set to grow briskly in 2026, but much of the expected gains are being driven by expanding profit margins that may be hard to sustain. Equity investors should ask whether portfolios are exposed to businesses with durable demand and profitable reinvestment—or merely a favorable margin cycle.
Brent crude crossed above $100 a barrel this week, all due to a 20-mile-wide stretch of water some 6,500 miles away from the U.S. Tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz—the Persian Gulf bottleneck that carried roughly a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil before the fighting started—has fallen to virtually zero.
The US 30-year bond yield is trading above 5% for the longest stretch since the dawn of the financial crisis, echoing investor concerns about a growing debt pile and sticky inflation.
The relative cheapness of Treasuries versus interest rate swaps mechanically affects how corporate bond spreads are measured, but it appears to have limited influence on how corporate bond spreads actually behave.
LPL Research analyzes China’s declining crude imports, inflation risks, and the resilient U.S. economy driving above-trend growth.
Whenever I speak at investment conferences, I like to point out that we invest in a number of publicly traded airports. I even list them: Spain’s Aena. Aeroports de Paris. Zurich Airport. Airports of Thailand. Two of the world’s largest operators, Grupo Aeroportuario del Sureste and Grupo Aeroportuario del Pacifico, trade in Mexico.
Decades of data across global markets reach the same verdict: the more frequently retail traders trade, the worse they perform. The infrastructure has never been more inviting. The losses have never been more documented. Here are some key statistics we will dive into further.
The bonds sold by hyperscalers to fuel their artificial intelligence ambitions have become a drag on investor portfolios from London to Tokyo.
The current level of stock market valuations remains – easily – the most speculative extreme in U.S. financial history, beyond both the 1929 and 2000 extremes. Our baseline estimate is that the S&P 500 has a material risk of losing something on the order of 75% over the completion of this cycle.
