One of the bigger questions facing advisors and investors right now revolves around credit. Inflation, volatility, and Fed rate hikes all loom, potentially heightening credit risk for portfolios. Navigating that risk may be a crucial task in the second half of this year.
Chief Investment Officer Sean Taylor reviews a strong second quarter for emerging markets, where AI and reindustrialization were key drivers of investor returns.
Assessing the year so far, much of the portfolios’ declines have been a compression of valuations, not a deterioration of earnings. For many of our holdings, the two have moved in opposite directions. Revenues, profitability, and cash flow have continued to build, even as the multiples placed against them have fallen.
The articles that dominated the views in June were very much focused on the realities of investing, addressing everything from how inflation can affect your returns to incorporating AI into retirement evaluations.
Investors are often drawn to healthcare for its innovation and long-term growth potential. Yet in practice, allocations are often concentrated in a few large pharmaceutical companies, whether through direct stock picking or index weightings.
Join the experts at GraniteShares to hear all about their autocallable ETF suite and find out how it could improve your income conversations with clients.
Multiple jobholders accounted for 5.2% of civilian employment in June.
June's employment report showed that 17.6% of total employed workers were part time and 82.4% of total employed workers were full-time.
What does the ratio of unemployment claims to the civilian labor force tell us about where we are in the business cycle and recession risk?
Existing home sales unexpectedly fell 2.4% in June as the median home price surged to a record high of $440,600.
Americans like their electric vehicles to come with a side of gasoline. Sales of conventional hybrid vehicles, which combine internal combustion and electric drivetrains but don’t plug in to recharge, jumped by almost a fifth in the first half of 2026, year over year, while pure battery EVs slumped by a quarter.
Almost two decades ago, when trillions of dollars in private housing debt proved unsustainable, governments had to step in to prevent the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression from eclipsing it.
The busiest airport in New England is tapping the municipal bond market to remodel its facilities and keep up with passenger growth.
It used to be a considered something of a tawdry question, although it could be flattering as well: “What’s your number?” Nowadays, your inquisitor is probably asking about retirement — as in, how much you think you need to retire. And, as it often was before, it’s the wrong question.
The small-cap stock rally we highlighted back in April has continued over the past few months, driven by factors such as robust U.S. economic growth disproportionately benefiting smaller, domestically focused businesses and the AI capital spending boom spreading to smaller tech and energy companies.
One notable group has been absent from the 2026 stock rally: the American tech giants that have charged a nearly four-year bull run.
ClearBridge Investments: Although markets often pause to digest after large gains, history suggests these episodes usually prove fleeting, meaning major indexes could move higher in the second half of 2026.
Markets move on data, earnings, interest rates, and economic conditions. But they can also be heavily influenced by human behavior. Even experienced investors can fall into emotional or psychological patterns that affect decision-making, particularly during periods of uncertainty or market volatility.
As economies become increasingly electrified and power demand grows, the transmission, storage and infrastructure needed to support reliable electricity delivery are evolving. In our view, these trends are creating attractive opportunities across the technologies and infrastructure that underpin the energy transition.
For much of the last decade, investing felt relatively one dimensional. Falling inflation, near zero interest rates and abundant liquidity rewarded long duration growth assets, compressed dispersion and made passive exposure difficult to challenge.
The June jobs report underscored our thesis that while the labor market remains in the 'economic plus column,' some of the prior months' increases in new hiring seemed a bit too high.
Congress is in recess from June 30 through July 13 for the annual July 4 break, so it's relatively quiet in the nation's capital. But there is still plenty worth paying attention to.
On June 30, Defiance debuted the new Defiance KSM TipRanks Analyst ETF (RANK). With an expense ratio of 60 basis points, this fund aims to leverage Wall Street’s highest-rated analyst consensus data to capitalize on U.S. market momentum.
Over the first half of 2026, markets faced some expected — and unexpected — tailwinds and headwinds, ranging from geopolitical developments, blockbuster corporate earnings, increasing artificial intelligence (AI) scrutiny, resilient economic data, and a new Federal Reserve (Fed) Chair.
The capital markets have become an increasingly complex space for investors, complexities that are heightened by the sheer number of ways one can invest.
Model portfolios are seeing billions in inflows, and part of that success may be from how these strategies implement ETFs and private assets.
Here is a look at real (inflation-adjusted) charts of the S&P 500, Dow 30, and Nasdaq composite since their 2000 highs. We've updated this through the June 2026 close.
The S&P 500 real monthly averages of daily closes reached a its all-time high in May 2026. Let's examine the past to broaden our understanding of the range of historical bull and bear market trends in market performance.
Following the Q1 GDP third estimate, the 'Buffett Indicator'—the ratio of corporate equities to GDP—now stands at 218.1%. This marks the fourth-highest reading in history.
Join the experts at SS&C ALPS Advisors and CIBC Private Wealth for a product due diligence session covering the ALPS Clean Energy ETF (ACES).
Widowhood does not happen on paper. It happens in the middle of grief, changing income, tax questions, family expectations, housing decisions, administrative demands, and a profound shift in identity. The math may still work, but the human operating system has changed. And that is why advisors need to stress test — not only for portfolio survival, but for survivor usability.
After years of working with advisors and studying client behavior, the reasons clients leave come down to three core patterns. They are predictable. They are preventable. And they almost always trace back to a conversation that never happened in the first meeting.
I have spent the better part of my career watching how organizations manage access to sensitive data — who has it, who should have it, and how long it takes anyone to notice when those two things stop matching. In financial services, that gap tends to be measured in months.
A wave of profit taking in the gold market has brought a three-year bull run to an end, but there’s little evidence yet that investors are putting on large-scale short positions in anticipation of further declines.
In 2003, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency made a visionary attempt to use prediction markets for geopolitical forecasting. However, it created a huge controversy in Congress and was quickly killed.
During the June 30, 2026, World Cup round of 32 match between France and Sweden at the 82,500-capacity MetLife Stadium, the logistical scale of a global mega-event was on full display. Moving 80,663 fans safely through a sprawling transit corridor and securing a massive open-air venue demands complex engineering. Underpinning the operation is a capital-intensive ecosystem of physical AI, advanced sensors, and automation software.
Rising prices increase the value of collateral in every margin account, which automatically increases how much each investor can borrow under Reg T. Debt rises BECAUSE the market rose, not the reverse. That single fact is what breaks the ratios we’re about to examine, and it lies at the core of why margin debt risk is so often misjudged.
Royce Investment Partners: In this second quarter recap, Francis Gannon discusses how US small-and micro-cap stocks have continued to lead the US equity market in a robust period for equities.
Fixed income transition costs are increasingly driven by what happens in credit markets. As credit trading becomes more efficient, the cost of transitioning fixed income portfolios is coming down, and how those transitions are executed is changing too.
The shortened trading week brought the second quarter of 2026 to a positive close. Stocks ended slightly lower for month, but closed the quarter on a nice uptick. The US and Iran resumed peace talks, helping stocks push higher.
It feels like gold has tanked this year, but the yellow metal was only down about 7 percent through the first six months of 2026. The sharp price rally to kick off the year exacerbated the scope of the ensuing correction. Gold is down about 28 percent from its record highs.
The first half of 2026 has provided a considerable amount of news for investors to digest. Notably, equity markets were higher by nearly 10%, oil prices spiked over 50% before retreating nearly back to where they started, there is a new Chair of the Federal Reserve in Kevin Warsh, and AI infrastructure spending surged.
Stocks staged a powerful recovery in Q2. The S&P 500 gained 15% and closed near record highs as oil round-tripped back to pre-conflict levels, AI enthusiasm returned, and the rally broadened well beyond the handful of names that led the market for three years.
Significant interest appears to be accumulating around capacity expansion in the market. The primary mechanism driving this activity may be a structural capital expenditure cycle (CapEx). One where a prevailing market dynamic could transform one company’s CapEx directly into another company’s revenue. .
AI may reshape the labor market in ways that are difficult to predict, and it won’t be the first time this has happened. In the short term, the labor market appears to have stabilized and there are some early signs of acceleration.
Bitcoin tumbled as renewed geopolitical tensions rattled digital asset markets, eclipsing what had been a muted reaction to Strategy Inc.’s latest sale of the token earlier in the week.
After losing roughly $1 trillion in market value in less than two months, Nvidia Corp.’s stock is the cheapest it’s been since before the AI boom kicked off and sent the shares into the stratosphere.
AI represents a huge shift for financial advisors, who are always learning and adapting to a shifting investing landscape.
Our monthly market valuation updates have long had the same conclusion: US stock indexes are significantly overvalued, which suggests cautious expectations for investment returns. This analysis focuses on the P/E10 ratio, key indicator of market valuation, and its correlation with inflation and the 10-year Treasury yield.
Here is the latest update of a popular market valuation method, Price-to-Earnings (P/E) ratio, using the most recent Standard & Poor's "as reported" earnings and earnings estimates, and the index monthly average of daily closes for the past month. The latest trailing twelve months (TTM) P/E ratio is 25.3 and the latest P/E10 ratio is 39.5.
