Sustainable Investing

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

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.

Trump Accounts are now available nationwide. Explore how the new tax-advantaged accounts work, who can contribute and key considerations for families evaluating their long-term savings options.

Doshi said gold holding $4,000 during the correction and later rallying to $4,700 before last week's Fed rate hike strengthened his conviction that the broader gold bull market remains intact despite continued headwinds from the Iran war oil shock.

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.

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.

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.

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

Pacing isn't pausing. Calls to "pace the frontier" mean slowing the release of powerful artificial intelligence (AI) models to test and control them better, not halting development or spending.

Janus Henderson Investors today announced two senior investment appointments that will further deepen the firm’s leadership across its global equities franchise.

The new investment case for global power, security and affordability. The phrase “energy transition” has served as a useful political and cultural shorthand, but it has become a misleading framework for capital allocation. Franklin Templeton Institute explodes new opportunities for investors—and where shifts in thinking may be needed.

Advancements in technology, combined with significant stock market gains in recent years, have created a new set of opportunities—and challenges—for investors. For example, investors holding a concentrated position in a highly appreciated stock may face a difficult trade-off between the risk of a market downturn and the potentially significant tax cost of diversifying the position.

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

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

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.

Every few months, a new essay declares that the US debt trap has finally sprung. The latest one making the rounds from The Economist is well written and genuinely unsettling. It argues that Washington has borrowed so recklessly that the Federal Reserve no longer dares to raise interest rates. Doing so, the piece warns, would detonate the whole structure and send financing costs spiraling out of control.

Equity markets generally moved lower as rising yields and energy prices created a more challenging backdrop. Higher yields can be particularly difficult for long-duration equities, where a greater share of expected cash flows sits further into the future.

Some investors are questioning how much further this year’s rally can run with the S&P 500 Index up 12.3% through the first eight months of the year. Encouragingly, history suggests that strong starts tend to persist; when the S&P 500 has gained more than 10% through August it has advanced from September through December in 25 of 28 instances, an 89% positive hit rate.

As wealth management firms scale, sustained organic growth increasingly depends on strong business leadership. Firms that build scalable client acquisition strategies, develop talent and create operational infrastructure can position themselves to grow beyond founder-led models and capitalize on the industry’s long-term opportunities.

Benchmark-Free has been a flagship strategy for half of GMO's history. As we approach our 50th anniversary in 2027, Ben Inker reflects on our first 25 years of Benchmark-Free investing.

As students get closer to making a final college decision, the last two years of high school are particularly important. Parents will want to review their financial strategy to meet the costs of college, including a review of current savings, financial and merit aid, scholarships and loan options.

Labor Day signals more than summer’s end. It marks a return of focus to the economic and market forces that will shape the remainder of the year. From resilient earnings and record AI spending to rising bond yields and the midterm elections, there is no shortage of forces shaping the market outlook.

To kick off our fourth season of the Alternative Allocations podcast series, I sat down with John Bowman, CEO of CAIA Association, to explore the massive changes underway across our industry. John and I discussed CAIA’s seminal paper “The World Rewired,” and the implications for private markets.

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.

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.

The month of August reminded many investors that the markets rarely move in a straight line. A combination of encouraging economic fundamentals, uncertainty in the bond market and renewed geopolitical turmoil led to increased volatility and shifting market leadership. But the underlying backdrop reinforced that the US economy continues to expand at a sustainable pace.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent made waves with his recent announcement that the Treasury would at least double the size of its buybacks of long-term debt in the coming months. He argues that long-term yields do not reflect fundamentals, suggesting that the Treasury's intervention is aimed to restore proper market functioning.

August was a good month in financial markets, with the S&P 500 up around 2.7%. The market leaders came from the commodity complex, with gold and bitcoin (not sure how this should be classified) being the two top performers.

AI-driven scarcity is allowing companies perceived as lower quality to post the revenue growth, margin expansion and rising returns that investors associate with quality, lifting estimates, multiples and stock prices.

The high-yield market appears expensive at first glance. Spreads sit near the tight end of their historical range, which implies limited compensation for credit risk. However, spreads relative to their historical levels do not capture the full opportunity set of the asset class. Corporate fundamentals remain healthy, defaults are low, and the quality of today’s high-yield universe is higher than its long-standing reputation might suggest.

Massive AUM may earn an RIA a buyer’s attention, but it does not automatically earn a premium valuation in the rapidly evolving M&A landscape.

Despite ongoing geopolitical tensions, growing questions about the scale of AI-related spending and steadily rising bond yields, market volatility remained remarkably subdued this summer.

Beneath relatively muted index-level volatility, single-stock implied volatility remains high. In today’s low-correlation environment, individual stocks are moving more independently, keeping single-name volatility high even as those moves offset at the index level.

In this video, Chuck Carnevale, co-founder of FAST Graphs and widely known as “Mr. Valuation,” examines 15 dividend-paying companies selected for their potential to generate rapidly growing income. These are not simply the fastest dividend growers in the market. Each company was also chosen for its financial strength, operating history, and current valuation.

We think it’s time for investors to consider moving from a short-duration bias toward core (plus) bond portfolios. Valuations have become more attractive across fixed income, with all-in yields approaching compelling levels. We share our views on when and why.

Funding a college education can be one of the biggest financial goals for a family, and it often requires a comprehensive approach.

Markets are largely reducing expectations for a near-term U.S. Federal Reserve (Fed) rate hike, and we agree. July’s weak jobs report, the underwhelming retail sales report, and continued softening of the monthly inflation figures give the Fed room to stay patient in the coming months.

The most durable assumption in global investing is also the most outdated: that the United States is fundamentally a consumption story and China is fundamentally a capital-expenditure story.

James Carville, Bill Clinton’s chief political advisor, once quipped that if he could be reincarnated he wanted to come back as the bond market because “You can intimidate everybody.”

Interest rates are moving higher, and the forces behind the move appear to be persistent inflation and an economy that continues to grow more strongly than many anticipated. Economic growth is generally advantageous, and moderate inflation is a normal feature of a healthy economy.

This may come as something of a surprise since the financial press has not written or said much about how well this important—and opportunity-rich—subset of small-cap has performed over the last several months.

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

Without a doubt, the number-one story in the financial markets of late has been the run-up in longer-dated Treasury (UST) yields. Indeed, headlines in both traditional and social media have centered on the fact that bond yields are now at levels not seen in nearly 20 years, or the time period right before the Financial Crisis hit in 2007.

The 30-year U.S. Treasury yield has touched roughly 5.3% in the past week, a level not seen in nearly two decades. Global counterparts in Europe, the U.K., and Japan have climbed to similar heights.

Most of us try to be mindful not to put all our eggs in one basket. But the now-familiar concern that most portfolios are quite concentrated in a relatively small group of large US tech companies means that investors may still be doing just that.

For 11 of the 12 years following the 2008 financial crisis, U.S. stocks beat international markets. But that trend has flipped: Over the past four years, international equities have taken the lead.

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.

On August 19, the US Treasury announced that it will at least double the size of its long-term bond buybacks, from $2 billion to $4 billion per operation, between September 9 and the November Quarterly Refunding. The announcement followed a rise in the 30-year Treasury yield to roughly 5.3% and is drawing attention to how the Treasury may respond if pressure at the long end persists.

Outdoor sports and exercise are more difficult at the height of summer. Runners slow their paces, and teams start their practices early to beat the heat. Competitors must marshal their energy carefully to perform at their best.

After recovering from the “tariff tantrum” that saw stocks of all sizes and styles bottoming out in early April of 2025, equities finished 2025 in admirable shape, carrying the positive momentum into 2026.

Market leadership has broadened beyond mega-cap tech, but the next phase is likely to reward disciplined, diversified investors, write Chris Galipeau and Lukasz Kalwak of Franklin Templeton Institute.

U.S. equities were mostly higher last week, though gains were modest and trading was quiet. The S&P 500, an index of the largest U.S. companies, rose 0.4 per cent and closed on Thursday at a new record high.

Margin of safety has nearly vanished from today’s market, as heavy AI debt, off-balance-sheet financing, and a stressed bond market leave stocks little room for error.

With the US fiscal year 2027 (FY27) state budget season now largely complete, several important trends have emerged. Most states and local governments adopted their budgets without major delays or political impasses, an encouraging sign for two important credit considerations: governance and financial management.

Governments can print money, but they cannot print credibility. Once investors begin to question a country's fiscal trajectory, borrowing costs rise, confidence erodes, and policy choices become increasingly constrained. The age of cheap debt allowed many governments to overlook these limits. Today, they are becoming harder to escape.

Small-cap equities are winning out against their large-cap counterparts in a classic David versus Goliath ETF battle. After years of mega-cap technology dominance, small-cap equities have delivered investors a historic first half of 2026.

This bargain-hunting environment sets up a stark divide for upcoming earnings. Walmart (WMT) remains uniquely positioned as its dominant grocery business continues to draw trade-down traffic from higher-income households, whereas Target (TGT) faces headwinds due to its heavier mix of discretionary home and apparel goods.

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

Franklin Templeton Institute finds valuations across fixed income sectors becoming more attractive, with all-in yields approaching compelling levels—a signal to consider moving from a short-duration bias toward core bond portfolios.

Royce Investment Partners: Co-CIO Francis Gannon examines the myth that rate hikes are bad news for US small-cap returns—and finds that history tells a different story.