Many debates in defined contribution (DC) circles focus on fees, new asset classes, and ever more complex solutions. But the biggest improvement available to plan participants may come from something far simpler: how their fixed income is managed.
Bankers are preparing to sell a jumbo debt package to support the $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. It’s a risky deal and comes at a moment when the bond markets have been wobbling.
Chris Galipeau discusses high-conviction insights that go beyond media headlines.
Private credit is more inherently complex than the traditional bond market. In comparison, private credit information comes at a deficit. That’s because private credit loans are essentially bespoke agreements between a lender and a private borrower.
Despite the move lower late last week, U.S. Treasury yields are still holding well above recent lows and close to highs not seen in more than a year. By contrast, risk assets are firmly bid: U.S. equities have been routinely touching new historical highs, and credit spreads over Treasuries remain tight.
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.
New AdvizorPro data shows RIAs broadened their ETF lineups in Q1 2026, leaning into real assets, active managers, and defense strategies.
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 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.
For private equity firms, capital flexibility is prized today. Merger-and-acquisition (M&A) activity has cooled, while commodity prices and artificial intelligence (AI)-driven disruption have heated up, creating uncertainty for investors. This makes it more challenging to sell portfolio companies, so private equity firms are holding investments longer. As a result, many firms are turning to net asset value (NAV) loans for capital needs.
Private credit managers are increasingly turning to the once-unthinkable: Trading in and out of loans to dump troubled assets and hunt for bargains amid the industry’s first stress test after years of breakneck growth.
Even if armchair investors are fleeing private credit or panicking that their unlisted shares in Anthropic PBC are now invalid, the long-term trend is clear: Public markets keep losing ground to private funds.
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.
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.’’
The Texas Permanent School Fund bought more than 29 million shares totaling about $740 million worth of the State Street IG Public & Private Credit ETF, trading under the ticker PRIV, in the first quarter, according to a filing Friday.
As inflation lingers and market dynamics shift, advisors are rethinking the 60/40 portfolio with managed futures and options income ETFs.
The sooner the mass of retail private credit managers realize they are zombies and give up the ghost, the sooner we can burn the whole thing to the ground and conjure a better model from the ashes. But there is no time like a crisis to have conversations about how to make the structure work better for everyone in the future!
Semiconductor stocks, along with some computer hardware companies, are the market’s latest AI darlings. Momentum and gamma are driving the outperformance, and, in their wake, a supportive narrative is trying to justify it.
You are undoubtedly seeing in the news that high earners are leaving New York, Los Angeles, and other metro areas. This does not begin to address the magnitude of the problem. There are dozens of cities that are trending towards fiscal collapse. Indeed, taxpayers are leaving.
What were the key takeaways from last month’s numbers? Our corporate bond specialists look back at the market’s performance and provide incisive commentary to help you make sense of what drove the market—and what may be on the horizon for fixed income investors.
Stock markets have been hitting all-time highs and credit spreads remain low, yet higher interest rates and mounting floating-rate debt are straining lower-rated borrowers. This tension is surfacing first in leveraged loans as “quiet defaults” become more common — opening up a dynamic set of opportunities for investors specialized in stressed and distressed assets.
Apollo Global Management Inc. announced last week that it will soon provide daily pricing for its private credit. It may not sound like a big move, but its decision to lift the veil on these assets could be the most impactful development in financial markets and investing in a long time.
April delivered a constructive backdrop for preferred securities, with the ICE BofA Fixed-Rate Preferred Securities Index rebounding 2.23% and bringing YTD returns back into positive territory at 0.8%.
The logic of balanced investing is straightforward: equities drive long-term growth, bonds provide income and ballast when stocks fall, and the combination delivers a smoother ride than either asset alone. For decades, the 60/40 portfolio has been the default framework for good reason – it has worked, often brilliantly, across multiple market cycles.
Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. (GS) executives detailed their artificial intelligence strategy for operational efficiency as new data showed the top 100 registered investment advisor firms now manage more than $1.6 trillion in client assets, double what they controlled just two years ago, according to Padi Raphael, global co-head of third party wealth at the firm.
The rules haven't changed. The obligation to capture, retain, and supervise communications is exactly what it was in 2021. What changed was the enforcement spotlight — and firms that have mistaken a quieter SEC for a changed regulatory landscape are building exposure that will surface eventually.
Within private credit, attempts to increase liquidity – the ability to buy or sell an asset quickly, in size, and at prices reflecting fundamental values – are welcome developments, in our view. Yet until these efforts address the market’s inherent structural constraints, including a lack of true price discovery, they will only increase the perception of liquidity without truly improving liquidity.
Access to private equity, private credit, private infrastructure, and private real estate assets can potentially improve long-term investment outcomes for participants.
Get ready each week with high-conviction insights that go beyond media headlines.
LPL Research explores how a potential Warsh-led Fed could reshape policy, Treasury markets, and volatility amid rising deficits and shifting demand.
Gold bugs often claim that when more dollars are in circulation, each dollar buys less; prices rise, and gold, as a store of value, helps protect purchasing power from that decline. As a result, they believe that a rising money supply, in and of itself, is inherently inflationary.
Artificial intelligence unknowns are creating stress in the market, and we don’t see that ending any time soon. For long-term investors, these stressors can create opportunities.
DoubleLine Capital’s Jeffrey Gundlach is repositioning some of his funds for the extreme scenario that the US government could choose to restructure its debt in response to a potential future recession.
Exchange-traded funds can be the source of liquidity that retail investors need after ramping up exposure to private assets, BlackRock Inc. executives wrote in a report.
The generational divide is a part of the human condition – and the investor condition. It’s not just that one group has more experience than the other, or that one is more eager to make its own way, but that both groups can learn totally different lessons from the same event.
April saw a variety of articles published on Advisor Perspectives address core questions with which advisors and their client must contend.
LPL Research examines overlooked tech growth, assessing strong earnings, AI skepticism, and valuation opportunities for investors.
Deglobalization supports diversification: Reversing global trade reduces economic productivity, but the resulting decoupling of international markets increases the protective value of geographic diversification.
Join the experts at Simplify for a product due diligence session exploring the private credit universe and what distinguishes it from traditional bond allocations.
What a week this was! On Tuesday, I participated on a panel at the Bitcoin Conference in Las Vegas, where I discussed why Bitcoin miners have a head start in the race for AI compute.
The poor sentiment toward private credit funds has dragged down many high-quality BDCs, as well as weaker ones. The chaos and bad press surrounding private credit funds are not reasons to avoid BDCs. In fact, we think it’s a reason to consider them.
Although sentiment remains sensitive to headlines around the Strait of Hormuz and energy markets, Franklin Templeton’s Emerging Markets Debt team sees an asset class that has shown it can absorb shocks, even as renewed geopolitical flare-ups or a broader risk-off episode could still test markets.
Streamlining the rules is undoubtedly appealing. The new proposal would do this, in part, by allowing the largest banks to use one method to calculate the risk of their assets instead of two, as currently required. That makes sense as far as it goes. Yet other requirements — including leverage ratios and certain capital surcharges — are being loosened or otherwise made more bank-friendly at the same time.
When Jamie Dimon turned to competitive threats in his shareholder letter this year, the chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase & Co. did something unusual: He named some. Citadel Securities LLC and Revolut Ltd. were two of the firms Dimon picked out.
The rapid institutionalization of the $3 trillion private credit market has left many financial advisors racing to catch up. While the asset class was once a walled garden for pension funds, the mainstreaming of private debt requires a new level of diligence and education. The shift toward transparency is finally allowing advisors to look under the hood of these complex structures.
Here’s where I want to start, because this is the point that almost every government debt analysis, including the article we’re responding to, completely ignores. Government debt doesn’t disappear into a void. By definition, if the Government borrows capital from someone, that capital must flow somewhere.
Sentiment toward BDCs – funds that invest in small and midsize private U.S. businesses – has improved since early March. BDC bond spreads have stabilized and outperformed the broader investment grade (IG) index, suggesting credit investors are increasingly comfortable with downside risk.
BlackRock Inc. is bringing its roughly $2.5 billion money market fund to cryptocurrency exchange operator OKX, with Standard Chartered Plc holding the underlying assets — the latest sign that Wall Street infrastructure and digital-asset markets are converging.
The “American Industrial Renaissance” is an investment theme investors and allocators alike have probably been pitched several times, or at the very least heard about. Supply chains for manufactured goods have evolved to become more complex, while U.S. manufacturing employment as a share of total employment has steadily declined, leaving policy makers to grapple with the ramifications of a shrinking manufacturing base.
With a better understanding of the derivatives and leverage that led to the GFC, we now explore private credit — a small “niche” financial sector, such as subprime mortgages — which is being called the next match to light a financial bonfire.
The primary contagion risk is sector concentration. Software and tech-enabled services represent roughly 15-20% of direct lending portfolios. A meaningful portion of these loans also resides in the Broadly Syndicated Loan (BSL) market – the bedrock of CLO ETFs – leading to a software weighting of 12–18% in typical CLO collateral pools.
Investors often view commercial real estate (CRE) through the narrow lens of the office sector. We think this office-only focus understates how broad the asset class is and its potential. Offices may face well-documented headwinds, but many other CRE segments appear more resilient.
After years weighing how to dive deeper into private credit, JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s $4.3 trillion asset manager is committing to a strategy that will plow tens of billions of dollars into loans sourced by the firm’s commercial bankers.
LPL Research examines the fixed income space as global bonds broaden yields and reduce U.S. concentration, offering diversified income and resilience via non‑U.S. developed and emerging markets.
Billionaire money manager Bill Ackman is giving away a stake in his firm to investors who support his latest hedge-fund launch. This looks like a good deal. And so it should: If you’re selling a fund in the form of an initial public offering, you have to dangle the prospect of a quick buck.
Despite compositional differences – public equities generally represent larger companies with more scale, liquidity, and financial flexibility than the typically smaller, private-equity-owned issuers that dominate the software loan market – the outcome is the same: Neither market has been able to fully retrace the year-to-date sell-off in a meaningful way.
Oil shocks hitting economies with weak demand and strained balance sheets are especially damaging. Firms cannot fully pass on rising costs, so margins shrink, layoffs increase, and investment falls. Tightening monetary and credit conditions would cause inflation to fade faster but job losses, failures, and fragile household finances to be much worse.
Given the misunderstanding linking subprime mortgages and private credit, I discuss how leverage and derivatives, layered atop subprime mortgages, were at the heart of the GFC. A better understanding of that event will help advisors and investors better assess whether recent woes in private credit are an omen of another crisis or an overstated concern.
The S&P 500 reached another all-time high this week, supported by easing concerns around geopolitical risk.
Much of the conversation around private credit versus public high yield focuses on yield levels, default expectations and headline volatility. But we think what matters most is how each market lets investors measure, manage and reprice risk as conditions change.
As private credit managers mount a spirited defense of their industry to discourage investors from fleeing, they’ve found at least one persuasive argument for why much of the cash they lent to software firms at the start of the decade shouldn’t be at risk.
Despite a confluence of economic shocks in the first quarter, markets have held up remarkably well, but cracks appear to be forming beneath the surface.
Pacific Investment Management Co. bought all $400 million of bonds issued Monday by a Blue Owl Capital Inc. private credit fund, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
Bank of America Corp. disclosed it has about $20 billion in private-credit exposure, as the bank and its Wall Street peers seek to calm concerns about the industry’s exposure to the asset class.
Outside of energy commodities, capital markets posted a downbeat March as cross-asset volatility spiked in response to the outbreak of hostilities in the Mideast, and kicked off April in similar, choppy fashion before posting a swift bounce following last Wednesday’s two-week ceasefire agreement.
In a rare plot twist, Goldman Sachs front-run the banking pack today, marking the first time the firm has kicked off the earnings season ahead of JPMorgan Chase since 2018. The storied investment bank delivered notable results, comfortably surpassing analyst’s estimates on both the top and bottom-line.
JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s traders posted their highest-ever quarterly revenue in the first three months of the year, with record stock-trading results boosting the total past the firm’s previous record by almost $2 billion.
BlackRock Inc. Chief Executive Officer Larry Fink sees increased demand for private credit from big institutional investors like insurers, even as retail clients grow skittish over the asset class and seek to redeem more of their shares.
The gap between what advisors are doing and what's now possible in tax-aware portfolio management has never been wider. The tools have outpaced the practice. Here's where I see advisors falling short, and what to do about it.
Michael Bell of Meketa Capital joins the Alternative Allocations podcast to explore why infrastructure investing is shifting from an institutional-only play to a foundational piece of the modern portfolio and what that means for today's market participants.
New ETF launches address concentration and liquidity risks exposed by volatile markets through active and passive strategies.
That article digs into the plumbing behind oil shocks and recession, and exposes why, over the years, I’ve learned to distrust the loudest voices in the room.
Accelerating earnings are protecting the S&P 500 from deeper losses and masking a broader pullback in US equities, according to strategists at Morgan Stanley.
Benefit Street Partners believes private credit has faced scrutiny recently and there are four horsemen of the apocalypse charging toward private credit investors, but three are phantoms. One, however, is real.
Franklin Templeton Institute examines the evolution of private credit, its risk/return characteristics, and why commercial real estate debt represents a viable alternative to traditional fixed income options.
The general field called “credit” has seen massive innovation over the course of my career. An Oaktree colleague asked me about the developments that brought the credit sector to where it is today. I came up with the following list.
Late last month, Blackstone Inc. announced the first inbound Gulf private equity deal since Iran started attacking Middle Eastern hubs, while Citigroup Inc.’s top boss fired off a 600-word memo underlining the bank’s enthusiasm for its business in the region.
Private markets benefited enormously from the post-Great Financial Crisis era of ultralow interest rates that stretched through much of the 2010s and into the early 2020s. Amid regulatory change and muted returns in traditional fixed income during this time, investors were increasingly pushed into alternative areas of capital markets in search of yield.
The first quarter of the year has offered an early reminder that markets rarely move in straight lines. After the extraordinary enthusiasm that carried investors through 2025, much of it centered on the promise of artificial intelligence, the new year has quickly reintroduced elements of uncertainty.
While Wall Street obsesses over the Magnificent Seven, a handful of under-the-radar forces may shape the next leg of this market, for better and for worse.
Global equities declined during a volatile first quarter as the war in Iran roiled energy markets and fueled inflation fears that destabilized the economic growth outlook. Mounting geopolitical hazards add to existing worries around concentrated equity markets and the potential for AI to disrupt businesses.
Last month at the Exchange conference in Las Vegas, Anna Paglia, State Street Investment Management’s chief business officer, discussed how the firm’s private credit lineup came to be and how the firm sets about developing some of its products.
Across corporate lending markets, some investments are easier to trade and exit than others – differences that deserve particular attention today.
As strikes on Iran continue and the Strait of Hormuz remains effectively closed, it’s clearly too early for market watchers to stop thinking about geopolitical risk.
Finance has been moving fast. From crypto to prediction betting to exchange-traded funds to private credit, new markets—and risks—are proliferating.
It was a rough first quarter for the Broadleaf Growth Equity Portfolio and the markets in general as investors tried to identify market leadership buffeted by AI spending concerns, talk of escalating private credit market risks, and ultimately, the emergence of War in Iran.
March 2026 was a rough month for financial markets. Broad indexes experienced large selloffs, led by international stocks, though many of these still remain up in 2026. The dollar rallied strongly, breaking its year-plus downtrend.
Private Credit
The Retirement Hack Hiding Inside Most DC Plans
Many debates in defined contribution (DC) circles focus on fees, new asset classes, and ever more complex solutions. But the biggest improvement available to plan participants may come from something far simpler: how their fixed income is managed.
The Ellison Family’s $49 Billion Ask Is an Acid Test for Markets
Bankers are preparing to sell a jumbo debt package to support the $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. It’s a risky deal and comes at a moment when the bond markets have been wobbling.
Fundamental Backdrop Strong. Watch for Pullbacks.
Chris Galipeau discusses high-conviction insights that go beyond media headlines.
The Case for Active Management in the Private Credit Market
Private credit is more inherently complex than the traditional bond market. In comparison, private credit information comes at a deficit. That’s because private credit loans are essentially bespoke agreements between a lender and a private borrower.
Measuring What Matters in Public and Private Fixed Income
Despite the move lower late last week, U.S. Treasury yields are still holding well above recent lows and close to highs not seen in more than a year. By contrast, risk assets are firmly bid: U.S. equities have been routinely touching new historical highs, and credit spreads over Treasuries remain tight.
Bank Deregulation Taking Shape
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.
Real Assets or Active ETFs? Where RIAs Allocate
New AdvizorPro data shows RIAs broadened their ETF lineups in Q1 2026, leaning into real assets, active managers, and defense strategies.
The Cost of Being Too Liquid
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.
Key Convictions: Second Quarter 2026
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.
NAV Loans: Flexibility for Private Equity When Holding Periods Extend
For private equity firms, capital flexibility is prized today. Merger-and-acquisition (M&A) activity has cooled, while commodity prices and artificial intelligence (AI)-driven disruption have heated up, creating uncertainty for investors. This makes it more challenging to sell portfolio companies, so private equity firms are holding investments longer. As a result, many firms are turning to net asset value (NAV) loans for capital needs.
Private Credit’s Unthinkable Becomes Reality as Trading Revs Up
Private credit managers are increasingly turning to the once-unthinkable: Trading in and out of loans to dump troubled assets and hunt for bargains amid the industry’s first stress test after years of breakneck growth.
A Simple Way to Avoid Messes Like the Anthropic Shares Shock
Even if armchair investors are fleeing private credit or panicking that their unlisted shares in Anthropic PBC are now invalid, the long-term trend is clear: Public markets keep losing ground to private funds.
What Barbarians Like to Take Private
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.
Dispersion Revisited
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.’’
Texas Fund Revealed as Big Backer of State Street Credit ETF
The Texas Permanent School Fund bought more than 29 million shares totaling about $740 million worth of the State Street IG Public & Private Credit ETF, trading under the ticker PRIV, in the first quarter, according to a filing Friday.
From the US Market Desk: Now What?
Chris Galipeau discusses high-conviction insights that go beyond media headlines.
Why the 60/40 Portfolio Needs a New Playbook
As inflation lingers and market dynamics shift, advisors are rethinking the 60/40 portfolio with managed futures and options income ETFs.
A Proposal to Save Private Credit (Sort Of)
The sooner the mass of retail private credit managers realize they are zombies and give up the ghost, the sooner we can burn the whole thing to the ground and conjure a better model from the ashes. But there is no time like a crisis to have conversations about how to make the structure work better for everyone in the future!
Gamma And Momentum: A Recipe for Moonshots & Tears
Semiconductor stocks, along with some computer hardware companies, are the market’s latest AI darlings. Momentum and gamma are driving the outperformance, and, in their wake, a supportive narrative is trying to justify it.
On the Horizon: America’s Municipal Default Crisis
You are undoubtedly seeing in the news that high earners are leaving New York, Los Angeles, and other metro areas. This does not begin to address the magnitude of the problem. There are dozens of cities that are trending towards fiscal collapse. Indeed, taxpayers are leaving.
The Fed Sees Dissents Amid a Fluctuating Economy
What were the key takeaways from last month’s numbers? Our corporate bond specialists look back at the market’s performance and provide incisive commentary to help you make sense of what drove the market—and what may be on the horizon for fixed income investors.
‘Quiet Defaults’ Are Driving a More Compelling Backdrop for Opportunistic Credit
Stock markets have been hitting all-time highs and credit spreads remain low, yet higher interest rates and mounting floating-rate debt are straining lower-rated borrowers. This tension is surfacing first in leveraged loans as “quiet defaults” become more common — opening up a dynamic set of opportunities for investors specialized in stressed and distressed assets.
Apollo’s Pricing Plan Will Transform Private Credit
Apollo Global Management Inc. announced last week that it will soon provide daily pricing for its private credit. It may not sound like a big move, but its decision to lift the veil on these assets could be the most impactful development in financial markets and investing in a long time.
Rates Rally, Spreads Tighten and Preferreds Rebound
April delivered a constructive backdrop for preferred securities, with the ICE BofA Fixed-Rate Preferred Securities Index rebounding 2.23% and bringing YTD returns back into positive territory at 0.8%.
The Case for Liquid Alternatives in Today’s Environment
The logic of balanced investing is straightforward: equities drive long-term growth, bonds provide income and ballast when stocks fall, and the combination delivers a smoother ride than either asset alone. For decades, the 60/40 portfolio has been the default framework for good reason – it has worked, often brilliantly, across multiple market cycles.
Scaling RIA Growth: The Goldman Sachs AI Playbook
Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. (GS) executives detailed their artificial intelligence strategy for operational efficiency as new data showed the top 100 registered investment advisor firms now manage more than $1.6 trillion in client assets, double what they controlled just two years ago, according to Padi Raphael, global co-head of third party wealth at the firm.
How FINRA Took the SEC’s Baton With Off-Channel Penalties
The rules haven't changed. The obligation to capture, retain, and supervise communications is exactly what it was in 2021. What changed was the enforcement spotlight — and firms that have mistaken a quieter SEC for a changed regulatory landscape are building exposure that will surface eventually.
Daily Pricing Is Not Daily Liquidity
Within private credit, attempts to increase liquidity – the ability to buy or sell an asset quickly, in size, and at prices reflecting fundamental values – are welcome developments, in our view. Yet until these efforts address the market’s inherent structural constraints, including a lack of true price discovery, they will only increase the perception of liquidity without truly improving liquidity.
Private Assets in Target-Date Funds: A Balanced Assessment
Access to private equity, private credit, private infrastructure, and private real estate assets can potentially improve long-term investment outcomes for participants.
What a Move!
Get ready each week with high-conviction insights that go beyond media headlines.
Warsh, Policy Direction, and Treasury Market Consequences
LPL Research explores how a potential Warsh-led Fed could reshape policy, Treasury markets, and volatility amid rising deficits and shifting demand.
Gold Bugs Faulty Thesis: M2 & Inflation
Gold bugs often claim that when more dollars are in circulation, each dollar buys less; prices rise, and gold, as a store of value, helps protect purchasing power from that decline. As a result, they believe that a rising money supply, in and of itself, is inherently inflationary.
AI: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Artificial intelligence unknowns are creating stress in the market, and we don’t see that ending any time soon. For long-term investors, these stressors can create opportunities.
Gundlach Takes Longshot Bet in Case of US Debt Restructuring
DoubleLine Capital’s Jeffrey Gundlach is repositioning some of his funds for the extreme scenario that the US government could choose to restructure its debt in response to a potential future recession.
BlackRock Touts ETFs as Liquidity Antidote to Private Exposure
Exchange-traded funds can be the source of liquidity that retail investors need after ramping up exposure to private assets, BlackRock Inc. executives wrote in a report.
The Market’s Cultural Headwaters
The generational divide is a part of the human condition – and the investor condition. It’s not just that one group has more experience than the other, or that one is more eager to make its own way, but that both groups can learn totally different lessons from the same event.
Advisor Perspectives’ Top 5 Articles Examine Big Topics
April saw a variety of articles published on Advisor Perspectives address core questions with which advisors and their client must contend.
AI Wave Continues to Power Technology Earnings Boom
LPL Research examines overlooked tech growth, assessing strong earnings, AI skepticism, and valuation opportunities for investors.
Q1 2026: Different Signal, Same Noise
Deglobalization supports diversification: Reversing global trade reduces economic productivity, but the resulting decoupling of international markets increases the protective value of geographic diversification.
Private Credit Goes Mainstream: What Advisors Need to Know
Join the experts at Simplify for a product due diligence session exploring the private credit universe and what distinguishes it from traditional bond allocations.
Earnings Drive Stock Prices
Get ready each week with high-conviction insights that go beyond media headlines.
Nations Are Scrambling for AI Sovereignty. Bitcoin Miners Hold the Keys.
What a week this was! On Tuesday, I participated on a panel at the Bitcoin Conference in Las Vegas, where I discussed why Bitcoin miners have a head start in the race for AI compute.
BDCs: Not All Yield Is Created Equal
The poor sentiment toward private credit funds has dragged down many high-quality BDCs, as well as weaker ones. The chaos and bad press surrounding private credit funds are not reasons to avoid BDCs. In fact, we think it’s a reason to consider them.
Resilience Through Volatility
Although sentiment remains sensitive to headlines around the Strait of Hormuz and energy markets, Franklin Templeton’s Emerging Markets Debt team sees an asset class that has shown it can absorb shocks, even as renewed geopolitical flare-ups or a broader risk-off episode could still test markets.
More Wall Street Leverage Won’t Help Main Street
Streamlining the rules is undoubtedly appealing. The new proposal would do this, in part, by allowing the largest banks to use one method to calculate the risk of their assets instead of two, as currently required. That makes sense as far as it goes. Yet other requirements — including leverage ratios and certain capital surcharges — are being loosened or otherwise made more bank-friendly at the same time.
Jamie Dimon Is Competing With Everyone. He’s Not Alone
When Jamie Dimon turned to competitive threats in his shareholder letter this year, the chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase & Co. did something unusual: He named some. Citadel Securities LLC and Revolut Ltd. were two of the firms Dimon picked out.
Mastering the Private Credit Learning Curve: A Guide for Advisors
The rapid institutionalization of the $3 trillion private credit market has left many financial advisors racing to catch up. While the asset class was once a walled garden for pension funds, the mainstreaming of private debt requires a new level of diligence and education. The shift toward transparency is finally allowing advisors to look under the hood of these complex structures.
Government Debt: Not What The Doom Crowd Thinks It Is
Here’s where I want to start, because this is the point that almost every government debt analysis, including the article we’re responding to, completely ignores. Government debt doesn’t disappear into a void. By definition, if the Government borrows capital from someone, that capital must flow somewhere.
Differing Signals in BDCs, and Orderly Defaults in High Yield
Sentiment toward BDCs – funds that invest in small and midsize private U.S. businesses – has improved since early March. BDC bond spreads have stabilized and outperformed the broader investment grade (IG) index, suggesting credit investors are increasingly comfortable with downside risk.
BlackRock Targets the Idle Cash Piling Up on Crypto Exchanges
BlackRock Inc. is bringing its roughly $2.5 billion money market fund to cryptocurrency exchange operator OKX, with Standard Chartered Plc holding the underlying assets — the latest sign that Wall Street infrastructure and digital-asset markets are converging.
American Industrial Renaissance: Fact or Fiction?
The “American Industrial Renaissance” is an investment theme investors and allocators alike have probably been pitched several times, or at the very least heard about. Supply chains for manufactured goods have evolved to become more complex, while U.S. manufacturing employment as a share of total employment has steadily declined, leaving policy makers to grapple with the ramifications of a shrinking manufacturing base.
GFC 2.0 or False Alarm: What Private Credit Is and Isn’t
With a better understanding of the derivatives and leverage that led to the GFC, we now explore private credit — a small “niche” financial sector, such as subprime mortgages — which is being called the next match to light a financial bonfire.
Private Credit Jitters: Spillover into CLO ETFs?
The primary contagion risk is sector concentration. Software and tech-enabled services represent roughly 15-20% of direct lending portfolios. A meaningful portion of these loans also resides in the Broadly Syndicated Loan (BSL) market – the bedrock of CLO ETFs – leading to a software weighting of 12–18% in typical CLO collateral pools.
Commercial Real Estate: It’s More Diverse Than You Think
Investors often view commercial real estate (CRE) through the narrow lens of the office sector. We think this office-only focus understates how broad the asset class is and its potential. Offices may face well-documented headwinds, but many other CRE segments appear more resilient.
JPMorgan Readies Fresh Private Credit Push After Needling Market
After years weighing how to dive deeper into private credit, JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s $4.3 trillion asset manager is committing to a strategy that will plow tens of billions of dollars into loans sourced by the firm’s commercial bankers.
Rethinking Fixed Income Allocation in a Multi‑Polar World
LPL Research examines the fixed income space as global bonds broaden yields and reduce U.S. concentration, offering diversified income and resilience via non‑U.S. developed and emerging markets.
Bill Ackman Is Dangling the Chance of a Quick Buck
Billionaire money manager Bill Ackman is giving away a stake in his firm to investors who support his latest hedge-fund launch. This looks like a good deal. And so it should: If you’re selling a fund in the form of an initial public offering, you have to dangle the prospect of a quick buck.
Software Stuck in a Trough
Despite compositional differences – public equities generally represent larger companies with more scale, liquidity, and financial flexibility than the typically smaller, private-equity-owned issuers that dominate the software loan market – the outcome is the same: Neither market has been able to fully retrace the year-to-date sell-off in a meaningful way.
Resilience Meets Overbought Readings
Get ready each week with high-conviction insights that go beyond media headlines.
Quarterly Review and Outlook First Quarter 2026
Oil shocks hitting economies with weak demand and strained balance sheets are especially damaging. Firms cannot fully pass on rising costs, so margins shrink, layoffs increase, and investment falls. Tightening monetary and credit conditions would cause inflation to fade faster but job losses, failures, and fragile household finances to be much worse.
Will Private Credit Cause the Next GFC?
Given the misunderstanding linking subprime mortgages and private credit, I discuss how leverage and derivatives, layered atop subprime mortgages, were at the heart of the GFC. A better understanding of that event will help advisors and investors better assess whether recent woes in private credit are an omen of another crisis or an overstated concern.
Markets Climb as Risks Ease and Earnings Deliver
The S&P 500 reached another all-time high this week, supported by easing concerns around geopolitical risk.
Private Credit vs. Public High Yield: Understanding the Tradeoffs
Much of the conversation around private credit versus public high yield focuses on yield levels, default expectations and headline volatility. But we think what matters most is how each market lets investors measure, manage and reprice risk as conditions change.
Private Credit's Biggest User Is in an Even Worse Place
As private credit managers mount a spirited defense of their industry to discourage investors from fleeing, they’ve found at least one persuasive argument for why much of the cash they lent to software firms at the start of the decade shouldn’t be at risk.
Q2 Strategic Income Outlook: Everything Everywhere All at Once
Despite a confluence of economic shocks in the first quarter, markets have held up remarkably well, but cracks appear to be forming beneath the surface.
Pimco Buys All $400 Million of Bonds Sold by Blue Owl BDC
Pacific Investment Management Co. bought all $400 million of bonds issued Monday by a Blue Owl Capital Inc. private credit fund, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
BofA Discloses $20 Billion of Loans to Private-Credit Firms
Bank of America Corp. disclosed it has about $20 billion in private-credit exposure, as the bank and its Wall Street peers seek to calm concerns about the industry’s exposure to the asset class.
The Economy Takes Multiple Shocks in Stride
Outside of energy commodities, capital markets posted a downbeat March as cross-asset volatility spiked in response to the outbreak of hostilities in the Mideast, and kicked off April in similar, choppy fashion before posting a swift bounce following last Wednesday’s two-week ceasefire agreement.
Double-Digit Growth and the Visibility Gap
In a rare plot twist, Goldman Sachs front-run the banking pack today, marking the first time the firm has kicked off the earnings season ahead of JPMorgan Chase since 2018. The storied investment bank delivered notable results, comfortably surpassing analyst’s estimates on both the top and bottom-line.
JPMorgan Traders Blow Past Expectations With Record Haul
JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s traders posted their highest-ever quarterly revenue in the first three months of the year, with record stock-trading results boosting the total past the firm’s previous record by almost $2 billion.
BlackRock Sees Private Credit Tumult as Way to Take Market Share
BlackRock Inc. Chief Executive Officer Larry Fink sees increased demand for private credit from big institutional investors like insurers, even as retail clients grow skittish over the asset class and seek to redeem more of their shares.
Tax Planning Isn't Enough: Where Advisors Are Still Falling Short
The gap between what advisors are doing and what's now possible in tax-aware portfolio management has never been wider. The tools have outpaced the practice. Here's where I see advisors falling short, and what to do about it.
Infrastructure Investing—Growth, Income and Inflation Protection in One Asset Class
Michael Bell of Meketa Capital joins the Alternative Allocations podcast to explore why infrastructure investing is shifting from an institutional-only play to a foundational piece of the modern portfolio and what that means for today's market participants.
ETF Roundup: 3 March ETF Launches Target Concentration Risk
New ETF launches address concentration and liquidity risks exposed by volatile markets through active and passive strategies.
Oil Shock: Will The Fed Intervene (Part 2)
That article digs into the plumbing behind oil shocks and recession, and exposes why, over the years, I’ve learned to distrust the loudest voices in the room.
Morgan Stanley Says Earnings Shield S&P 500 From Iran War
Accelerating earnings are protecting the S&P 500 from deeper losses and masking a broader pullback in US equities, according to strategists at Morgan Stanley.
Public Insights on Private Credit: Only One of Private Credit’s “Four Horsemen” Is Real
Benefit Street Partners believes private credit has faced scrutiny recently and there are four horsemen of the apocalypse charging toward private credit investors, but three are phantoms. One, however, is real.
The Evolution of Private Credit
Franklin Templeton Institute examines the evolution of private credit, its risk/return characteristics, and why commercial real estate debt represents a viable alternative to traditional fixed income options.
What’s Going on in Private Credit?
The general field called “credit” has seen massive innovation over the course of my career. An Oaktree colleague asked me about the developments that brought the credit sector to where it is today. I came up with the following list.
Finance Titans Bet Mideast Resilience Will Outweigh War Fallout
Late last month, Blackstone Inc. announced the first inbound Gulf private equity deal since Iran started attacking Middle Eastern hubs, while Citigroup Inc.’s top boss fired off a 600-word memo underlining the bank’s enthusiasm for its business in the region.
A Cycle of Reset
Private markets benefited enormously from the post-Great Financial Crisis era of ultralow interest rates that stretched through much of the 2010s and into the early 2020s. Amid regulatory change and muted returns in traditional fixed income during this time, investors were increasingly pushed into alternative areas of capital markets in search of yield.
Investing Through Crosscurrents
The first quarter of the year has offered an early reminder that markets rarely move in straight lines. After the extraordinary enthusiasm that carried investors through 2025, much of it centered on the promise of artificial intelligence, the new year has quickly reintroduced elements of uncertainty.
What Could Move Stocks in 2026
While Wall Street obsesses over the Magnificent Seven, a handful of under-the-radar forces may shape the next leg of this market, for better and for worse.
Middle East War, Energy Shock Test Fragile Markets
Global equities declined during a volatile first quarter as the war in Iran roiled energy markets and fueled inflation fears that destabilized the economic growth outlook. Mounting geopolitical hazards add to existing worries around concentrated equity markets and the potential for AI to disrupt businesses.
State Street’s Paglia Highlights Firm’s Private Credit Suite
Last month at the Exchange conference in Las Vegas, Anna Paglia, State Street Investment Management’s chief business officer, discussed how the firm’s private credit lineup came to be and how the firm sets about developing some of its products.
A Data-Driven Look at Public Credit Liquidity
Across corporate lending markets, some investments are easier to trade and exit than others – differences that deserve particular attention today.
Lessons From Past Conflicts for Today’s Stock Market
As strikes on Iran continue and the Strait of Hormuz remains effectively closed, it’s clearly too early for market watchers to stop thinking about geopolitical risk.
Wall Street Watchdogs Pull Back Amid Trump’s Deregulatory Push
Finance has been moving fast. From crypto to prediction betting to exchange-traded funds to private credit, new markets—and risks—are proliferating.
Growth Equity Portfolio First Quarter Review
It was a rough first quarter for the Broadleaf Growth Equity Portfolio and the markets in general as investors tried to identify market leadership buffeted by AI spending concerns, talk of escalating private credit market risks, and ultimately, the emergence of War in Iran.
QuantStreet April 2026 Letter: Iran War
March 2026 was a rough month for financial markets. Broad indexes experienced large selloffs, led by international stocks, though many of these still remain up in 2026. The dollar rallied strongly, breaking its year-plus downtrend.