Global Markets

The S&P 500 was flat in July 2026 as semiconductors fell 29%, energy gained nearly 13% on higher oil, and long-term Treasury yields reached their highest levels since 2007.

A good financial plan may bring together every aspect of your financial life into a coordinated strategy, providing a clear view of where you are today and helping you prepare for where you want to go. By understanding your complete financial picture, you can make informed decisions that align with your goals, values, and long-term priorities.

Investors remain cautious despite bullish positioning, as rotations curb speculation while record margin debt and high equity allocations raise longer-term risks.

As many of you know, our team at Smead Capital Management has studied the thinking and investment careers of Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett. In today’s Go-Go artificial intelligence-dominated stock market, we’d like to walk you through the concept of the Circle of Competence.

In this article, Russ Koesterich explains how the recent market rotation has pressured tech stocks while creating an attractive long-term buying opportunity.

A clear-eyed view of past experience shows that where wealth taxes have been tried, they have usually been abandoned—and for good reason. As policymakers in California, New York, France, and elsewhere revisit this old idea, they should heed the lessons of this history.

Investors are warming to systematic processes in bond markets. In this new approach, a dynamic multifactor process drives the investment decisions, using predictive factors with demonstrable links to outperformance.

Reducing or eliminating debt might feel like the ultimate financial milestone, but paying off debt early – or avoiding it entirely – can limit future opportunities for building or preserving wealth. During periods of volatility, it may be tempting to get rid of debt for short-term relief, but this could compromise your long-term plan. Staying the course may be crucial to your goals – no matter the market.

Discover why higher Treasury yields, strong ETF demand, and active management are creating new opportunities in muni bonds for advisors.

Reflecting on the first half of 2026 provides a clear roadmap to strategize for the remainder of the year. Before that can occur, however, it’s imperative to check the pulse on the current state of the market and posit what may happen next.

While the outcome of the July FOMC meeting itself was in line with expectations, the aftermath has proven to be far more challenging for the money and bond markets, especially for longer-dated maturities, a.k.a. duration. Investors, as well as Fed Chairman Warsh, have quickly discovered something we have been highlighting about over the last few months: a lack of forward guidance can have unintended consequences.

Investors worried about highly appreciated stock positions and the related capital gains exposure may avoid transitioning concentrated portfolios to more diversified tax-managed solutions. In our view, a multiphase transition may enable them to strike a balance between how fast concentration risk is diversified and the size of their annual tax bill.

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.

On Wednesday afternoon the Federal Reserve held interest rates steady for a fifth consecutive meeting, and stocks buckled: the Dow fell 1,153 points, its worst day since April of last year.

Only about 20–25% of financial Advisors have a formal, documented succession plan, despite the fact that more than a third, managing roughly 40% of industry assets, plan to retire within the next decade. That gap is more than a retirement problem.

By repeatedly describing standard inflation gauges as “imperfect measures of underlying inflation,” Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh has pushed a long-running technical debate into the center of the policy conversation: What is the best way to measure underlying inflation?

This year has offered a vivid reminder of how quickly market conditions can shift—from policy uncertainty, to a sharp geopolitical shock, to a focus on an AI-driven rally. As the themes of the day changed, the case for an overlay persisted.

When we talk about inflation, we usually focus on the Consumer Price Index (CPI). However, the Federal Reserve’s “preferred” inflation measure is the Personal Consumption Expenditure (PCE) index. What’s the difference and why does the Fed prefer the PCE?

High-net-worth investors and institutional managers continue to allocate heavily to muni bond ETFs to lock in attractive yields.

July 2026 was a flattish month for markets. The S&P 500 index was down slightly. Value did well, while momentum did poorly. Smallcaps, midcaps, and emerging markets, all of which have been the year’s best performers, had a bad month. Commodities, driven largely by oil prices, led the pack, as the fragile ceasefire in Iran failed to hold.

The greatest danger posed by AI is not the technology itself, but the race to deploy it before we know how to control it. The recent Hugging Face breach shows how seemingly minor human errors can be amplified by AI, underscoring the risks of treating safety as an afterthought.

The numbers are in, and the story of ETF adoption goes on undeterred. In July, ETFs saw their third month this year of asset inflows exceeding $190 billion. If 2025 was a record-breaking year for ETF asset creation, 2026 is promising to upstage it.

New clients frequently arrive with portfolios that have been built over many years, often across multiple market cycles and advisory relationships. While these portfolios may have generated strong returns, they can also contain concentrated positions, legacy holdings or allocations that no longer align with the client's objectives.

Many of the most critical components of AI infrastructure are produced by a small and increasingly consolidated group of highly specialized companies.

While the Fed left interest rates unchanged, Treasury yields moved notably higher throughout the week, with 30-year yields eclipsing their highest levels in nearly two decades as investors reassessed the outlook for inflation and monetary policy. The S&P 500 ended 1.06 percent higher to close a volatile week of trading, recovering from a mid-week sell-off.

Kevin Warsh considers fewer Fed meetings, the Fed holds rates steady, the Senate moves to avert a shutdown, a new BLS chief is confirmed, and midterms near.

LPL Research highlights strong corporate earnings, AI-driven growth, and a favorable equity outlook while monitoring inflation, oil prices, and risks.

July was an eventful month for both domestic and international markets, with US-Iran tensions flaring up, increasing energy prices and changing investor expectations for the Federal Reserve (Fed) cutting rates.

The financial markets expected the Federal Reserve to leave interest rates unchanged at its recent meeting, and it did just that. However, three members of the FOMC dissented, voting to raise rates by 25bps in an effort to combat stubbornly high inflation.

The Federal Reserve’s preferred gauge of price inflation is set for a methodological update, as the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) is expected to implement revisions to its price index for Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) as early as September.

State Street's July Flash Flows report highlights record ETF inflows, and a major rotation into value and dividend strategies.

This summer has offered little opportunity for a lull. Investors have contended with Federal Reserve (Fed) policy uncertainty, renewed tariff-driven inflation concerns, escalating tensions in the Middle East, questions about the durability of AI-related investment spending and a packed earnings calendar.

The market spent much of this week trying to interpret what Fed Chair Kevin Warsh meant rather than what he actually said and that was entirely avoidable. The decision to leave rates unchanged was defensible. What wasn’t defensible was Warsh’s lack of explanation.

Just as important, the dollar and U.S. Treasuries have continued to behave like hedges in periods of broader market unrest (driven by geopolitics or other conditions). When risk assets come under pressure, Treasury yields have generally fallen, or the dollar has tended to find support.

Lately, it seems like you can’t open a financial publication without stumbling across another article declaring the 60/40 portfolio dead. The pitch is everywhere: bonds are broken, the old rules no longer apply, and investors should modernize by swapping the bonds in their portfolio for Bitcoin, gold, or whatever alternative the asset management industry is currently selling.

The latest earnings reports from Big Tech have laid bare a growing divide in the market's appetite for massive AI spending.

Kevin Warsh became Fed Chair barely ten weeks ago. He has presided over just two sets of monetary meetings and held two press conferences. Nonetheless, more than any chairman since at least Alan Greenspan, he has come under harsh criticism by the press right out of the gate.

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.

In January 1790, the House of Representatives put a simple question to its new Treasury Secretary: what should America make for itself? Alexander Hamilton took almost two years to answer.

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.