The US trade deficit narrowed in April as a surge in oil exports helped offset ongoing increases in imports of equipment powering the data center buildout.
Interactive Brokers Group Inc. is offering exchange-traded funds from BlackRock Inc. in savings plans in Europe, the latest platform to provide the booming product that’s become increasingly popular with mom-and-pop investors on the continent.
The history of megacap initial public offerings shows that the stocks usually slump in the first year of trading. But upcoming listings from SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI are big enough and systemically important enough to the market that those analogies may not apply.
There is an old adage that the stock market climbs a wall of worry, which describes its ability to keep rising even amid negative economic news or events. This defies logic, yet I have watched it prove true time after time.
Quantum computing is being hailed as the next technology to revolutionize computing, following in AI's footsteps. But promising headlines loaded with industry jargon have a long history of appearing well ahead of reality. Accordingly, it’s important to better understand what quantum computing is, why it matters, and whether the hype is justified and worth investing in.
2026 is heading toward a four-peat of double-digit returns on U.S. stocks, but it will require P/Es to remain high — investors need to remain optimistic. In the past, when P/Es were high, investor fear kicked in and P/Es declined, causing stock market losses. Time will tell, but diversification is a reasonable strategy no matter the outcome.
If the market has correctly named the companies that will dominate the AI era, cap weighting will look brilliant, because it owns them in size and will ride them up for free. The real question is: How much do you want to bet the market chose the correct companies?
My industry soundings are far more upbeat: When it happens, it would start as a trickle, but very quickly — in just a handful of weeks, if not days — transform into an oil flood. I’m on the side of the bears, as you may have guessed.
Credit heavyweights like DoubleLine Capital LP and Oaktree Capital Management are buying debt now that can perform well if the artificial intelligence boom turns into a credit bust.
US stocks bounced back on Monday from the worst rout this year, as a selloff in technology stocks eased and traders assessed flaring tensions in the Middle East, which supported oil prices and energy shares.
The bar for a Federal Reserve rate hike is falling as the job market remains robust in the face of stubborn price pressures, according to Collin Martin at the Schwab Center for Financial Research.
Apple Inc. investors have spent nearly two years clamoring for the iPhone maker to make a big splash with artificial intelligence. Their wait may finally be coming to an end this week at the company’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference.
Google parent Alphabet Inc.’s municipal-bond market debut was met by a surge of investor interest.
The $1.8 trillion private credit industry is finding out that trying to shake investor angst about the market is more of a marathon than a sprint. Such is the nature of long-term lending — there are few quick answers to the concerns that the market became too concentrated on software assets, a sector that’s ripe for disruption by artificial intelligence.
SoftBank Group Corp.’s payments unit is buying the life insurance unit of T&D Holdings Inc. for ¥134.3 billion ($840 million) to broaden its offerings and better compete in Japan’s ballooning fintech market.
Some of that tension is also being felt by their clients, advisers say. Along with the anticipation of a life-changing windfall, the initial public offering is eliciting more complicated emotions, as well, ranging from apprehension to confusion.
Currencies in the developing world sank after a blowout US jobs report provided the clearest sign yet that the labor market is breaking out of a prolonged period of lackluster hiring, undercutting the case for rate cuts from the Federal Reserve.
The largest ski resort in the US, in a corner of Utah long popular with wealthy travelers and second-home buyers, is expanding — and turning to the municipal bond market to help pay for it.
When someone told me recently that her favorite use of AI is for financial advice, I was horrified. I am a retirement economist, and my first reaction was self pity: Now I know how doctors feel when people use AI for medical questions.
Elon Musk can still enchant investors with his vision of the future. Any questions about SpaceX’s record-breaking initial public offering — be it about the valuation, the company’s trajectory or technical execution — were brushed aside as the retail marketing for the deal got under way.
The stock market keeps setting records. Bitcoin has minted millionaires. Gold has peaked at new levels. Yet one of the most popular trades is to sit in cash or, more precisely, money-market funds.
Soaring US power bills are threatening to claim their biggest victim yet — the nation’s largest electric grid operator.
While insurance coverage has broadly kept pace with rising catastrophe exposure, the protection gap — in absolute terms — has gone up as the value of exposed assets has grown, the Swiss Re Institute said on Wednesday.
A seemingly endless appetite for buying US stock dips has propelled Vanguard Group’s S&P 500-tracking ETF past $1 trillion in assets, making it the first fund of its kind to reach a milestone once thought unimaginable for the ETF industry.
JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon plans to discuss the upcoming SpaceX initial public offering with thousands of the bank’s high-net-worth clients, part of an unprecedented nationwide push in coordination with the rocket maker’s leaders.
Cliffwater LLC’s flagship private credit fund capped redemptions at 5% in the second quarter after investors looked to pull about 17% of shares, in a sign of enduring pressure on the $1.8 trillion market.
Foreign investors led by the likes of Stanley Druckenmiller and major Wall Street banks are returning to Argentine stocks this year after some had exited ahead of 2025’s volatile midterm election cycle.
Wellington Management Co. agreed to buy the asset-management division of Hartford Insurance Group Inc. as the Boston-based investment firm pushes ahead with a wealth expansion.
It’s so hard in our industry to “benchmark” things like comp, benefits and work-from-home philosophies, because if you show me 15 teams or firms, I’ll show you 15 different ways to answer these questions. I know the WFH question is a big one, and many teams are struggling with it.
More and more Americans are feeling financially behind in 2026. More than eight in 10 have reported having at least one financial regret from 2025, according to a recent survey from Omni Calculator. 28% said making rushed decisions without enough planning were the leading cause of financial mistakes.
As billions of dollars leave Bitcoin and Ether funds, money is flowing into a corner of crypto that promises something investors have long struggled to find in digital assets: a clearer path from economic activity to token value.
When clients sense that nothing is expected of their answer, they relax. They pause. They speak more slowly. They wander a little as they search for words, and in that wandering, something real often appears. This is where conversations change.
A private credit fund jointly managed by Future Standard and KKR & Co. sold $900 million of junk bonds on Monday, according to people familiar with the matter, in a rare high-yield offering by a publicly traded credit fund.
Blackstone Inc. has entered an agreement to provide Nippon Life Insurance Co. with investment services, adding to an increasing number of tie-ups between private investment firms and Japanese insurers.
Google parent Alphabet Inc. is poised to enter the municipal-bond market’s prepaid energy space by participating in a $1 billion transaction out of California, a major development in the evolution of a booming segment.
A key source of demand for corporate bonds may be fading now that managers of company pension funds have more than enough money on hand to pay their retirees.
As advisors, our role is not to solve fiscal policy; it is to ensure our clients are positioned to weather the uncertainty that comes from that gap, stay committed to their long-term plans, and not let macroeconomic anxiety drive short-term decisions they will regret.
Individual expertise matters. But in complex situations, making good decisions also depends on your financial professionals sharing information. When you support and expect their collaboration, you are no longer the communication relay.
While the mass affluent market may not be feeling the brunt of inflation woes or the rising cost of living, its financial planning is still being impacted by current economic headwinds.
Investors are about to get a read on the durability of the soaring rally in cybersecurity stocks when two of the industry’s major players report earnings in the coming days.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX is negotiating to pay razor-thin fees to Wall Street firms handling its IPO — but banks are still likely to rake in about $500 million from the record-setting market debut.
The announced expansion comes as the US races to provide huge amounts of electricity for AI data centers, with nuclear power emerging as one of the big winners. The Trump administration is pushing to quadruple output from nuclear plants which will require a leap in uranium fuel production to meet the challenge.
Caution has become the most expensive position on Wall Street. A hot inflation reading this week — sending the annual gauge to its highest in about three years — landed alongside fresh strikes in the Persian Gulf and enduring expectations that the Federal Reserve may need to keep policy tight.
Investors are pouring money back into municipal bonds as higher yields and the approaching summer reinvestment season draw cash into the tax-exempt market.
Goldman Sachs announced a partnership with Anthropic in early May, though you probably shouldn’t view it as just a cool innovation story. It is infrastructure in motion. When institutions like Goldman move, pay attention to what problem they believe they are solving.
Before I recommend what to do, I want to first state what not to do. Don’t invest as if you think you know what long-term inflation will be. Will we return to the double-digit inflation of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s? The answer is: Nobody knows.
The assumption that muni equals tax-free is deeply embedded in how the asset class gets discussed and presented. But for high-net-worth clients in high-tax states, the gap between partially exempt and fully exempt is material enough to be worth a conversation.
It’s not often that investors encounter something truly new in markets. But they will soon when Space Exploration Technologies Corp., OpenAI and Anthropic PBC go public with trillion-dollar valuations, or close to it. No company listed in the US has ever come to market so extravagantly priced — by a long shot.
Mentioning artificial intelligence to the graduating class of 2026 has been sure to get you booed. And why not? Fresh graduates have spent the past few years being told about the wonders of AI and watched seniors struggle to get a toehold in the labor market.
The industry is entering a more customized phase of liability-driven investing, he said. While earlier stages focused on adding duration and raising fixed-income allocations, better-funded plans are now tinkering at the margins to more precisely match their holdings with their obligations.
