Mutual Funds

All eyes are on the macro economy. A significant market correction in late July triggered the abrupt collapse of Situational Awareness, L.P., a $45 billion, highly leveraged, AI-focused hedge fund. The collapse forced selling of many technology hardware stocks that were winners in the first half of 2026.

Last week the S&P 500 rose 1.2 percent and the NASDAQ gained 2.1 percent, hitting a fresh record close earlier in the week, while the Russell 2000 fell 0.8 percent. The bigger story, however, was in rates. The 10-year Treasury yield pushed through 5.2 percent, its highest level since June 2006, and the two-year briefly topped 4.9 percent, its highest in over two years.

Assessing the wall of worry. Here, we assess the market's growing wall of worry, explain why these worries warrant attention, and justify our continued constructive intermediate-to-long-term stock market outlook.

Economic data from last week continued to paint a picture of a robust U.S. economy with an accelerating pace of growth. After a strong durable goods report showed business fixed investment continuing to rise on the back of ongoing AI data center buildouts, the Atlanta Fed’s GDP Now estimate for third-quarter real economic growth remained at an elevated 5 percent.

Globalization is being reorganized around security and resilience, creating uneven risks and opportunities across markets.

Yields have pushed higher with some points on the curve reaching yield levels not seen since the mid-2000s. While it is nearly impossible to pinpoint a specific catalyst for any move in the financial markets, below are a few of the factors that have helped push interest rates higher.

It’s a complicated economic environment to retire in, with high costs and significant geopolitical and policy uncertainty. Still, people want and often may need to retire. However, thanks to innovation in the asset management world, investors have an increasing array of options.

The bond market has become the central story for investors. The remarkable development over the past several weeks is not rising inflation expectations but rising real interest rates. Real rates have increased roughly 40 basis points in just three weeks, one of the sharpest moves I can remember over such a short period. Meanwhile, longer-term inflation expectations have actually edged slightly lower.

Retail investors buy corporate bond ETFs expecting steady coupons and ballast against stock market volatility. Traditionally, fixed-income portfolios were anchored by defensive issuers like banks, industrials and utilities.

As bond yields have risen, mortgage rates are again facing upward pressure, extending the U.S. housing market's post-pandemic affordability challenges. Beyond mortgage rates, trends in wage growth, taxes, and insurance costs also continue to shape the affordability outlook.

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

In the first quarter of this year, as the Strait of Hormuz closed and oil prices exploded, Berkshire Hathaway made a couple of moves that might have flown under people’s radars.It cut its stake in Chevron by roughly a third. Then it bought an airline.

Understanding why investor optimism wins over a full market cycle is one of the most underrated edges an investor can own, and it has almost nothing to do with waving pom-poms. 

The financial markets are navigating a storm. The Treasury yield sell-off intensified this week, pushing the 10-year Treasury yield up to an intraday high of 5.20%, its highest level since 2007.

Decided to go independent? Here's how to design your RIA's client model, exit plan, technology, and compliance foundation before you file paperwork or sign a custodian agreement.

I’m talking about the cash I have sitting here that I desperately want to get into the market. Earlier this year, I got a chunk of money from selling a house. I have no desire to own another home (that’s a story for another time.) Instead, I used some of the money to pay off some debt. The rest is just sitting in my savings account earning absolutely nothing.

Before evaluating whether a long-short strategy belongs in a portfolio, we think it helps to understand what's actually happening under the hood. Let's start at the beginning.

A snowball effect of asset values can similarly empower wealth effects: the tendency for consumers to spend more as the value of their investments rises. Wealth effects are surprising at first glance: household investments may be illiquid and tend not to produce substantial cash flow. However, a rising net worth builds a consumer’s confidence in their ability to afford purchases.

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.

Northern Trust Asset Management will move six mutual funds with $33 billion in assets into ETFs in early 2027, its first such conversions.

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.

In September 2024 and June 2025, I wrote memos that were critical of governments’ attempts to override the laws of economics, based on my conviction that trying to do so is likely to prove ineffective and potentially harmful.

Asset owners want private-market exposure, but liquidity remains their biggest hurdle, an opening advisors can meet with public alternatives.

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.

I do not know whether quantum computing is in that kind of window right now. Nobody does, and I am suspicious of anyone who claims certainty in either direction. What I can say is that the pattern-matching is uncomfortably familiar.

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

The exchange-traded fund (ETF) market is pacing toward a record-breaking year in 2026, driven by an unprecedented wave of new product launches and historic capital inflows.

Since ChatGPT was first released in 2022, the artificial intelligence (AI) trade has dominated US equity markets. Gains have been driven by three interrelated forces: enthusiasm for artificial intelligence, growing concentration in the largest technology companies and strong price momentum.

Investment bubbles are inherently dangerous beasts. Like a natural Ponzi scheme, an investment bubble needs to draw in ever larger amounts of capital to keep it going. Nothing attracts capital like apparent success, so an inflating bubble that is creating fortunes for those who got in early will inevitably draw in capital. Unfortunately, this means the amount of money lost when the bubble bursts can outstrip the gains created on its way up.

We know from recent history why this question feels so timely. Fixed income remains a foundational portfolio building block, offering low-correlated or uncorrelated diversification and downside risk mitigation. However, holding long-dated bonds in recent years has been notoriously painful.

Looking ahead, markets are priced for additional hikes. And our base case is that the FOMC will likely deliver one or two more 25-bp rate hikes through this year and into early next. However, looking further out, anticipating appropriate Fed policy through a financial-conditions-targeting framework has its own limitations. Hence, a neutral rate anchor is still useful.

The appeal of a portfolio of individual bonds for many investors are the known qualities that they can provide: a known stream of cash flow, a known redemption value, a known redemption date, and a known yield; all of which are locked in at the time of purchase.

LPL Research analyzes S&P 500 margin expansion, assessing how much is structural versus cyclical and what that means for future earnings forecasts.

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).

Global growth remains resilient but uneven. In the United States, expansion is supported by private demand, a stable labor market and AI investment, while Europe and Japan continue to show surprising strength despite ongoing risks.

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are developing faster than investors anticipated just a few years ago, fueling a popular narrative that AI will trigger widespread job cuts. Yet there’s little evidence to back this view. Instead, we find that AI is changing hiring patterns, altering skill requirements and shifting the mix of work performed within firms.

While the AI trade absorbs nearly all available investor attention, owning energy covers our absolute risk while creating the risk budget to cover the AI relative risk more effectively.

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.

Federal Reserve (Fed) chair Kevin Warsh has established his hawkish credentials. Franklin Templeton CIO, Sonal Desai sees scope for further yield curve steepening and a range of selective opportunities, based on capturing income and focusing on quality rather than counting on lower rates or tighter spreads.

The Federal Reserve delivered the 25-basis-point increase the markets had largely anticipated, but the overall message was somewhat more hawkish than expected. The decision was unanimous, and the new dot plot points to another rate increase this year. Four participants apparently see the possibility of raising rates at each remaining meeting, so there is clearly a meaningful hawkish contingent on the FOMC.

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.

Dividend growth is back, and it’s fair to say that outperformance among dividend growth stocks may simply be overdue amid a shift in U.S. equity market leadership beyond a small group of mega-cap technology companies.

Goldman Sachs Asset Management launched two new ETFs Monday, expanding exposure to emerging and international equities. The ETF duo includes the Goldman Sachs Data Enhanced Emerging Markets Equity ETF (GEMQ) and the Goldman Sachs Data Enhanced International Equity ETF (GIEQ). That pair joins an ETF landscape in which those segments are seeing growing interest.

This has been an incredible year in that Wall Street has spent all of it raising its earnings estimates, and the second-quarter season only accelerated the trend. Analysts began the year expecting S&P 500 earnings to grow about 15%.

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.

Chris Galipeau and Taylor Topousis discuss high-conviction insights that go beyond media headlines.

In August, a flurry of ETF-related deals were announced and expected to close by early 2027. Goldman Sachs is buying NEOS Investments. T. Rowe Price plans to add F/M Investments. Victory Capital is acquiring First Eagle.

A popular narrative for the rise in bond yields over the past few months is that the debt-funded AI capital expenditure cycle is crowding out the Treasury market. The crowding-out argument can appear compelling: AI companies are expected to continue to issue unprecedented amounts of debt at a time when Treasury supply remains elevated. Because both ultimately draw from the same pool of investor capital, yields must rise to clear the market.

As summer officially gives way to fall on September 22, it's not just the weather that's changing. The global monetary policy landscape is shifting as well. After spending much of the past two years focused on supporting growth, central banks have increasingly turned their attention back to inflation, especially with oil prices climbing back above $100 per barrel.

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.