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In a relatively light week for traditional economic data, a mix of corporate earnings, business surveys, Federal Reserve minutes, and the latest read on the consumer from the University of Michigan helped paint an increasingly clear picture for investors.

It’s the first word that comes to mind to describe Q1 2026 U.S. company earnings. S&P 500 earnings growth is looking set to reach 28% year over year (yoy), more than double the consensus estimate of 12% at the start of the reporting season.

The artificial intelligence (AI) boom has transitioned from an equity market narrative to a defining force in fixed income. Hyperscalers (Amazon (AMZN), Alphabet (GOOG/L), Meta (META), Microsoft (MSFT), and Oracle (ORCL)) are shifting from internal cash flows to substantial bond issuance to fund massive data center, graphics processing unit (GPU), and power infrastructure buildouts.

Thanks to strong gains in markets over recent years, the 60/40 default portfolio has quietly morphed into a bundle of expensive U.S. growth equities and credit exposures offering narrow spreads over Treasuries.

Goldman Sachs Asset Management (GSAM) made a big announcement this week, touting $100 billion in total ETF AUM. The milestone comes following the firm’s recent acquisition of Innovator ETFs adding several notable funds to the firm’s overall roster.

Chris Galipeau discusses high-conviction insights that go beyond media headlines.

After three decades of watching market cycles play out from both sides of the trade, I’ve come to a simple conclusion: Wall Street’s love of simple rules is one of the most dangerous aspects of investing.

Global equity markets moved modestly higher this week as first-quarter earnings season continued to deliver strong results.

Despite these higher costs, a projected 45 million Americans are expected to travel at least 50 miles from home this weekend, setting a new record. Close to 40 million will drive while some 3.7 million will fly.

This week marked the passing of former Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank. His signature legislation, the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, was the most recent increment in a long-running history of tighter financial regulation. Some of those rules are now coming under scrutiny, with the goal of making bank lending more competitive.

This piece examines the distinction between volatility and drawdown risk in portfolio construction, and why managing routine market fluctuations may not address the drivers of long-term wealth outcomes. The article is attached as a Word document, and the related chart is included as a separate image file.

New AdvizorPro data shows RIAs broadened their ETF lineups in Q1 2026, leaning into real assets, active managers, and defense strategies.

Last Friday closed with the 10-year Treasury yield at 4.60%, a one-year high, and the doom commentary about rising interest rates was waiting before the bell even rang. Hyperinflation. Bond market breakdown. Paradigm shift. A 1981 fair-value retest.

Private markets (private equity, private credit and real estate) have historically delivered an “illiquidity premium”. Institutions and family offices have recognized this illiquidity premium and have historically allocated significant capital to capture it.

In this video, Chuck Carnevale explains why he believes a diversified dividend-growth stock portfolio can be a better long-term strategy for retirees than the traditional 60/40 stock-and-bond allocation. Using a real-world portfolio he created in August 2021, Chuck demonstrates how an all-equity income portfolio can provide both rising income and capital appreciation while helping investors stay ahead of inflation.

Artificial intelligence (AI) might be the talk of the town these days, but quantum computing is the quiet thunder rumbling in the background. It just got much louder with the U.S. White House commiting to roll out a massive $2 billion funding package distributed across nine quantum computing companies.

Now, that prospect feels much farther off. Indeed, as government debt grows and macroeconomic pressures and inflation reemerge, investors face a complicated rate environment. Dividends can provide a solution.

There is currently a stark contrast between everyday consumer confidence and financial market behavior. On one hand, persistent inflation and elevated living costs have driven consumer sentiment to historic lows. On the other hand, financial market participants are exhibiting aggressive risk appetite, with margin debt surging to an all-time high record on the heels of major equity market gains.

In this second quarter update, Western Asset believes global fixed-income markets face a more complex backdrop as geopolitics, rapid AI adoption and private credit scrutiny intersect.

Chasing performance by deviating from a benchmark has long been the hallmark of active managers. But it may be time for a rethink. Our research suggests that investors allocating to core equities should consider refreshing the criteria they use to identify portfolio managers that can consistently beat their benchmarks.

By moving beyond benchmark constraints, active portfolios can access off-the-run bonds, specific securitized tranches, and maturity buckets with superior risk-reward profiles. They also have the flexibility to adjust positioning throughout the market cycle — reallocating across sectors, ratings, and issuers as conditions evolve to capture opportunities and mitigate drawdowns.

I still don’t think the Fed is close to a rate hike, but for the upcoming June FOMC meeting, a shift in the language of the policy statement from an easing bias to one of a ‘balanced’ outlook seems to be the most likely scenario. However, the fed funds futures market has now fully priced in a rate hike for March 2027, a remarkable shift from its pre-war status of discounting almost three rate cuts for the same timeframe.

Stephen Dover shares key insights from the Franklin Equity team about how artificial intelligence is changing the economics of the software industry.

College costs continue to rise, and for many families, education is one of the most meaningful investments they will make. Preparing for those expenses often requires planning years, sometimes decades, in advance.

Recently, Matthew Bartolini, global head of research strategists at State Street Investment Management, sat down with VettaFi to discuss where inflation stands, opportunities within portfolio construction, and much more.

From the April payroll report released on May 8, we realize that not all industries are equally impacted by AI. Diagnostic imaging centers, an area where AI is thought to replace humans, have increased demand for workers, whereas bookkeeping demand has declined in recent years.

Watching your children step into financial independence is one of the most rewarding and complex milestones families experience. As young adults begin earning income, managing expenses, and making major life decisions, the habits and financial knowledge they develop can shape their long-term success.

Sustainable investing in fixed income has come of age. Against a backdrop of heightened geopolitical tensions, persistent economic and trade uncertainty, sustainable fixed income continued to demonstrate its appeal in 2025.

Stocks’ rally off the March 30 lows has been nothing short of wild, with internal market dynamics showing some performance divergences that we haven’t seen for decades. For example, in the first 6 weeks of the rally, the S&P 500 Growth index beat the S&P 500 Low Volatility Index by more than any other 6-week window on record.

Emerging markets (EM) are using low-cost renewables to cut fuel imports, stabilize power costs and improve energy security—positioning EM as the growth engine of the energy transition. Countries and companies that leverage their dominance in critical minerals and green technology could pull ahead, creating dispersion in potential outcomes for investors.

With mega tech AI capital expenditure projected to cross a staggering $660 billion to $750 billion, according to estimates from firms like Goldman Sachs, CreditSights and Bloomberg, saying the stakes are high for Nvidia and the AI ecosystem is an understatement. It’s no wonder we can focus on little else this week.

While most institutional investors recognize that private equity and public equity share similar economic risks, they often seem to ignore how their aggregate equity portfolio is affected by their substantial allocation to private equity.

Enterprise software is undergoing its most significant reset in a generation. Artificial intelligence (AI) is reallocating value within software—creating clear winners and exposing vulnerabilities in business models that have worked well for the past two decades. We believe investors who treat software as a uniform asset class will make costly mistakes.

Institutional investors have spent years hearing about the promise of artificial intelligence. That phase is giving way to a more practical question: not whether AI can create more scale, but whether that scale can be governed, validated, and translated into better fiduciary decisions. For OCIO providers, AI without discipline is not an advantage.

The exchange-traded fund marketplace continues to expand. Now with more than $20 trillion in assets under management ($14 trillion in the U.S., growing at an 18% five-year annualized clip), 2026’s volatility and emerging investment themes have taken the universe to new heights.

Inflation surged higher in April, with the Consumer Price Index (CPI) jumping 3.8 per cent from 3.3 per cent in March and the Producer Price Index (PPI) up six per cent from four per cent in March. The increase in the CPI owed much to energy and food prices.

Although a lot has changed since our last quarterly, its central theme – dispersion – feels like it’s only become more pronounced. We wrote last time that ‘‘we believe we’re entering a new era of dispersion in the performance of financial assets.’’

On Friday, May 15, the 10-year Treasury yield closed at 4.59%, its highest level since February 2025. The 30-year Treasury yield closed near 5.12%, a level last seen in 2007. Those are significant moves because they reflect a repricing of the market’s inflation, growth, and Federal Reserve expectations.

Chris Galipeau discusses high-conviction insights that go beyond media headlines.

That Buffett cash hoard has also created a lot of speculation, innuendo, and assumptions, which is what I want to walk through in today’s discussion. Primarily, what that cash hoard actually represents, the popular theories explaining it, and what it really costs shareholders to hold.

For shareholders, the upside justifies the gamble. For bondholders, the downside is real and the upside belongs to someone else. That wedge – the classic asset substitution problem – is what credit investors are increasingly pricing, and until the re-leveraging impulse shows signs of reaching a plateau, the divergence across the capital structure is likely here to stay.

Emerging market debt is compelling as a medium‑term structural allocation, particularly for investors seeking to diversify away from concentrated U.S. exposures.

I’ve long been a student of game theory, the branch of mathematics that studies how rational actors make decisions when their outcomes depend on what everyone else does. It’s a helpful framework for understanding markets and geopolitics, and right now, there’s no better place to apply it than Taiwan.

A frequently asked question in recent weeks is whether the market is simply ignoring the risks stemming from the current geopolitical conflict, especially given the spike in oil prices that has pushed inflation pressures higher.

In this thought provoking presentation, Chuck Carnevale, co founder of FAST Graphs and widely known as “Mr. Valuation,” challenges one of Wall Street’s most accepted investing principles, the traditional 60/40 portfolio split between stocks and bonds. Drawing from decades of investment experience, Chuck explains why he believes blindly allocating large portions of retirement assets to fixed income may actually increase long term financial risk rather than reduce it.

The summit in Beijing between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping delivered little in the way of diplomatic breakthroughs but bears important cross-asset implications.

As Kevin Warsh takes over as Federal Reserve chair with his own goals, he may face challenges even beyond rate policy, from inflation to independence to a bulbous balance sheet.

Leadership transitions at the Federal Reserve (Fed) are rare. Only seven individuals have served as Fed chair since the 1970s, underscoring how infrequent turnover is at the Fed’s top job. That rarity is why investors pay close attention when a new chair is appointed, especially when the incoming leader brings a different perspective. Kevin Warsh has been a vocal critic of Fed policy and communication in recent years.

The stagflation narrative dominating financial social media isn’t completely wrong. That’s what makes it so dangerous. After more than 30 years of managing client portfolios through actual inflationary cycles, not watching them on YouTube, I’ve learned that the most damaging investment advice isn’t built on outright lies.