Healthcare

The BlackRock Model Portfolio Solutions team made significant allocation shifts during the week ended September 24, 2026. The team recently managed over $300 billion and often causes shockwaves in the ETF industry.

The U.S. economy remains resilient despite headwinds including sticky inflation, trade instability and rising geopolitical tensions. State and local government tax revenues have followed suit and have posted solid growth, aided by robust equity market returns.

Second-quarter earnings were strong, particularly in technology, but crowded ownership often determined whether good news was rewarded. The selloff in semiconductors arguably reflected crowded positioning and concerns surrounding the sustainability of the earnings boom. The net result: multiples compressed while earnings revisions held up.

This week, there are a few things that we need to pay attention to: the large move in interest rates and what it means (and more importantly, what it doesn’t mean!); and the constant barrage of doom and gloom on energy and AI. Let’s jump in.

Creating significant wealth requires concentration of capital, attention, risk, and decision-making.

Last week we looked at the Federal Reserve’s inflation problem. This week, let’s look at the other half of its mandate: maximum employment.

The Federal Reserve hiked rates, and we expect there are more to come. With a hawkish Fed and a resilient economy, long-term yields may stay elevated.

It’s really starting to feel like autumn now. August PPI, CPI, and Retail Sales are in the books, the September FOMC meeting is out of the way, and we can now look forward to Jobs Week on Wall Street. Football is in full swing, and earnings season begins before you know it, with Pepsi (PEP) posting results on Thursday, October 8, followed the next morning by Delta (DAL).

Major US equity indices finished the week mixed. The NASDAQ gained 0.7 per cent while the Dow and S&P 500 slipped. The divergence reflected a tug-of-war between fears of slower AI development early in the week and a rebound in AI-linked shares by Friday.

The Texas Stock Exchange (TXSE) is more than a regional milestone — it is a shift in competition among U.S. capital markets. After months of anticipation, the TXSE reached a major landmark last week as Texas Capital’s TXS and OILT ETFs became its first primary listings, followed a day later by PWRX as the first new ETF to launch on the exchange.

Creating an estate plan is an important step, but it is only one piece of your financial life. If your estate documents, investment strategy, retirement plan, tax strategy, and beneficiary designations are not working together, even a well-crafted estate plan may not achieve the outcome you intended. Coordinating these elements may help support your wealth is transferred efficiently, your wishes are honored, and unnecessary complications are reduced.

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.

Early this week, I was in Los Angeles at the All-In Summit along with about 4,000 others, including tech investors, money managers and entrepreneurs. The ticket wasn’t cheap, but it was well worth it.

I typically avoid business books when I am on vacation. But I made an exception during our sojourn last month for Andrew Ross Sorkin’s 1929. Nearly a century after the Great Crash, that era is still being studied for lessons that might be relevant in the current day. The potential for financial instability is ever-present.

The Federal Reserve increased rates by 25 basis points this week, a remarkable turnaround with major implications for portfolios of all kinds; one underexamined impacted area may be annuities.

The K-shaped economy is real, and it is old. What changed isn’t the shape of the economy; it’s just that the media found a narrative that gets lots of clicks and views, and we let headlines do our thinking for us.

When it comes to personal finance, conventional wisdom says the best way to live is debt-free. There are many important reasons why this is tried and true, but for high-net-worth individuals, lending can be an optimal way to access cash in the near term without sacrificing long-term gains on your assets.

AI-driven healthcare innovation is creating strong investment opportunities by improving efficiency, expanding access, and delivering better patient outcomes.

Last week, the refining margin on European gasoil, the benchmark that sets the price of diesel and heating oil across much of the world, closed at roughly $94 a barrel over Brent crude, according to Bloomberg data. That figure is normally somewhere between $12 and $18.

Many market participants have highlighted how value investing is back as the equity market rally broadened out beyond high-flying growth names. However, taking an index-based approach to the value style requires looking under the hood. Not all value ETFs are created equally.

With a handful of stocks attracting most of the recent headlines, it’s easy to forget that investors continue to find opportunities across a broad range of sectors.

Portfolio Managers Jonathan Coleman and Aaron Schaechterle outline why they believe momentum in small-cap stocks relative to large caps can continue, highlighting favorable earnings growth prospects, appealing relative valuations, and other structural tailwinds.

LPL Research analyzes rising U.S. debt, Treasury yields, and fiscal trends, highlighting implications for markets and investors.

Target-date funds have become a staple qualified default investment alternative (QDIA) because they help participants invest appropriately without requiring them to act. But as retirement nears, income needs become more pressing and financial situations diverge—a situation dynamic defaults seek to address.

Chapter 3 of this series ended with a simple question. If the math so plainly says avoid big losses, respect valuations, and mind your timing, why does so much of the industry preach the opposite?

If you’re planning on driving anywhere this Labor Day weekend, be prepared to pay the highest gas prices ever for this time of year. The national average hit $4.14 per gallon on Thursday, an approximately 30% increase from last year, according to AAA.

If you look deeply into a speculative bubble, you can already see the collapse. If you look deeply into a market collapse, you can already see the bull market. The road up and the road down are the very same road. Even so, aside from knowing that our investment position presently requires a safety net regardless of shorter-term conditions – we have utterly no opinions, preferences, or scenarios about the market outlook even a month or a quarter from now.

What if you could capture the potential gains of the S&P 500, but limit your losses if the market goes down? Or earn above-market income given the right stock market conditions? How about gaining some market exposure while protecting principal with FDIC insurance, up to applicable limits?

For the past six weeks, we’ve walked through the forces creating America’s K-shaped economy, housing, healthcare, education, wages, incentives, and the political consequences when enough people decide the system is not working for them. This week let’s look at the situation from a more optimistic angle.

After several challenging years, important parts of the health care sector appear to be reaching an inflection point. Policy uncertainty has weighed on pharmaceutical companies, constrained biotech funding has pressured the drug-development ecosystem and the normalization of pandemic-era has challenged select tool and device companies. More recently, however, several of these headwinds have begun to moderate.

Anchoring is one of the most powerful—and underestimated—forces in financial decision‑making. Once an emotional label attaches itself to an idea, it becomes the lens through which people interpret everything that follows.

Most people experience transportation through roads and airports. Traffic jams on highways and delays at major hubs are familiar frustrations. But the world's most important transportation network lies largely out of sight.

Highly concentrated US equity markets have been a consistent theme in recent years. Now, after the latest reconstitution of a major US equity benchmark, concentration is taking on a new form, with the Magnificent Seven’s grip loosening and semiconductor stocks gaining more influence. In essence, millions of passive investors received a new portfolio without making a single decision.

The autism care economy is expanding across healthcare, technology, education, and behavioral services. As a result, investors are beginning to look at the companies serving it through a broader investment lens.

In a week that saw NVIDIA, the largest company in the world, report strong earnings that sent its stock sharply higher and reinvigorated optimism in the artificial intelligence (AI) trade, fiscal and monetary policymakers continued to provide the biggest headlines.

San Antonio has been my adopted home for close to 40 years now. I’ve watched it grow through more than one boom cycle, but recent Redfin data suggests we could be looking at a bust.

The appeal of democratic socialism is real because the pain it speaks to is real. I won’t pretend otherwise. But intentions are not outcomes, and history has handed us the outcomes in ink, from Caracas to the old Soviet bloc to the Nordic countries that quietly kept their capitalism. The promise is a beautiful cake. The aftertaste is shortages, capital flight, inflation, and a new elite standing where the old one used to be.

Treasury’s pivot toward long-bond buybacks gives duration buyers their first clear green light in months — and the November midterms may add a second leg.

Earnings have built a strong foundation. As we wrote earlier this month, earnings have provided a strong foundation for stocks this year. With second quarter earnings growth for the S&P 500 on track to exceed 30% (excluding private investment mark-ups) and analysts continuing to raise estimates, it's safe to say this season strengthened the fundamental case for equities.

European equities have long been written off as the ultimate value trap — a sleepy, slow-growth market living in the shadow of Wall Street’s tech-fueled mega-rally. But a massive shift in market dynamics is unfolding across the Atlantic.

Equity markets stumbled this week despite an economic backdrop that continues to show signs of broadening. While concerns about consumer strain are mounting, those worries have so far been offset by ongoing strength in business investment, particularly spending tied to artificial intelligence (AI).

It’s been a busy year in the game of ETF landgrab. And a colorful one, too. From exciting M&A deals to some splashy building-from-scratch newcomers, we are seeing a little bit of everything as asset managers look to build scale and capture the impressive growth momentum of the ETF market.

In the first part of this series, I promised that the next enemy we would face is the one you cannot fire, mute, or unfollow, because it is “You.” You can learn every valuation metric ever invented, memorize the two questions that decide everything, and still hand most of your returns back to the market for one simple reason.

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.

For years, Russell index reconstitutions have been treated as a routine maintenance event. Thousands of stocks are ranked, memberships are adjusted, and markets move on

Equity markets continued to push higher this week, with nearly all major indices in the U.S. and abroad closing near or at record highs. While longer-term interest rates continued to drift higher, shorter-term interest rates moved lower as investors pushed out both the timing and magnitude of potential Federal Reserve rate hikes.

The biggest political news of recent months is the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America. We suppose this started in New York City, with the election of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, but it has spread to Michigan and other states.