A new peptide ETF launched today, holding the drugmakers behind GLP-1 weight-loss treatments along with the companies that make and deliver them.
Stocks enjoyed a profitable week in the lead-up to third quarter earnings season. The tech-heavy NASDAQ started the week strong, ending Monday at a record high.
Global income strategies offer a compelling value proposition for investors: a steady stream of income generated from dividend-paying equities, government bonds and structured instruments like equity-linked notes (ELNs) from around the world.
We see a reason for advisors to evaluate the support surrounding the strategy. Questions about onboarding existing holdings, applying restrictions, monitoring tax budgets and managing ongoing trading belong with the implementation provider. Understanding exposures and portfolio fit is where our consultation team can help.
Global equity markets finished the third quarter only modestly higher, but the path beneath the surface was anything but calm. The AI and momentum trade that powered markets in the first half unwound sharply in July, leadership broadened through August as capital returned to areas that had been left behind, and the market narrowed again in September.
While the current bull market celebrates its fourth birthday next week, the average bull market lasts about five and a half years. Yet there has been nothing average about this one.
Bank lending rarely commands the attention that payrolls, inflation or consumer spending do. But it helps determine how much momentum the economy can sustain. The Role of C&I Loans: Commercial and industrial (C&I) loans, the workhorse of corporate finance, pay for everything from working capital to machinery and software.
The Northern ETF SKOR crossed the $1 billion AUM threshold following $247 million in recent inflows amid surging corporate bond yields.
CLOs simply offer strong yield potential that often outpaces corporate bonds with similar credit ratings. Given that the ‘income’ portion of fixed income is often a key priority for investors, attaining high yield on a consistent basis gives CLOs a compelling use case.
The outlook for government policy, bond markets, and monetary policy appears less settled than it has been for much of the post-COVID period. The debate about public debt, the functioning of the Treasury market, inflation persistence, and the future path of interest rates has intensified. Global bond yields have been soaring.
Criticism of the AI and data center investment boom often centers on two distinct employment concerns. The first is that broader AI adoption could displace workers across industries as firms increasingly automate certain tasks. The second is that while data center construction generates jobs, these facilities require relatively few permanent employees once operational.
With the 10-year Treasury yield at its highest level since 2002, buying bonds at 5% is the first real alternative that stock investors have had in nearly two decades.
Our Senior Portfolio Manager and Head of Global Sustainable Investing, Kris Nelson, sees markets balancing several competing forces this week, from renewed oil-price volatility to softer labor data and increasingly demanding expectations around AI earnings.
Taylor Topousis and Christian Galipeau discuss high-conviction insights that go beyond media headlines.
Earlier last week, a supertanker loading crude in the Gulf of Oman was fixed at $1.01 million a day for a voyage to Asia, with another deal reportedly agreed at $1.16 million.
Higher interest rates are dominating the news of late, raising more questions than answers. Why are they moving up? Can they be tamed? And in the credit world, the question has arisen: as rates rise, are we at risk of loans underperforming?
The market continues to hold near all-time highs despite pressure from higher bond yields. This week brought relatively little economic data, but the important takeaway is that the underlying economy still looks strong. High-frequency indicators, jobless claims and consumer spending data continue to point to solid growth, while this week’s CPI, PPI and retail sales reports will provide the next important test for both the economy and the Federal Reserve.
For most of the past year, investors have been trying to answer what seems like a fairly straightforward question: How can the stock market continue to rise when interest rates keep moving higher? The conventional answer is that interest rates simply do not matter as much as they used to.
As Election Day approaches, investors may be asking what the upcoming midterm elections could mean for policy and markets. While there may be potential shifts in control, the policy impact is likely to be limited. Meanwhile, political rhetoric tends to heat up as elections draw closer, which could lead to an uptick in market volatility.
By generation, Gen Z and Millennials now make up 88% of online betting activity. Gen X trails at 9%. Boomers barely register. As recently as this spring, Millennials were the bigger group. Then Gen Z passed them, and Bank of America called it a “turning point.”
Global investing is changing. Geopolitical tensions, shifting trade relationships, energy costs and divergent central-bank policies are increasingly influencing which companies and markets are best positioned to navigate the environment.
We have a number of logistics routes that run close to our home, which can snarl traffic. Freight rail lines cut across local roads, and long columns of trucks crowd local highways. Transit delays are frequent, and their duration always seems proportional to how much of a hurry I am in.
For insurance investors, bond yields play a defining role in long-term planning, with the effects of their levels and movements rippling across balance sheets. Liabilities may move inversely to asset values, and today’s investment decisions have implications far into the future. That makes bond yields critical variables for prudent insurance investors. There are also insights in the “why” behind higher rates.
The Fed's recent rate increase may not develop into a hiking cycle as extensive as the one that began in 2022 because much of today's inflation pressure comes from supply constraints rather than broad economic overheating, where demand exceeds the economy's productive capacity.
While a gold ETF is a convenient way to play gold's price, you don’t possess any gold. You have paper. And you don’t know for sure that the fund has all the gold, especially when it sees inflows. In such a scenario, there have been difficulties or delays in obtaining physical metal.
When headlines announce that the stock market has reached an all-time high, investors often wonder whether they should stop buying stocks, sell their holdings, or wait for a correction. But those questions can distract from what matters most: the individual businesses they own and the prices they pay for them.
Four years after the sea change in interest rates began, the tide hasn’t reversed. The rate hikes of 2022 weren’t just a blip in a multidecade yield compression trend—they initiated a fundamental repricing of capital.
Broadly speaking, when advisors and investors consider adding focused industry exposure to a portfolio, there needs to be a strong justification for doing so. Take the AI industry, for example, where sustained buildout has driven many to target key tech players for exposure.
I write my letter as if I’m writing to friends, which I consider you to be. How many times do you get together with friends and you focus on just one topic? The usual friendly dinner conversation covers lots of topics. This week is a multiple topic letter, but with so much happening, how could it not be?
Western Asset’s Ion Dan explains why he thinks the fundamental case for agency mortgage-backed securities has strengthened.
US Treasury yields have moved sharply higher, with the 10-year yield rising roughly 45 basis points over the past month to about 5.25%. That has understandably revived concerns about what higher bond yields could mean for equities.
The S&P 500 hit a new record high in 3Q as strong earnings offset headwinds from oil returning to $100/bbl, the Fed hiking rates, and the 10-year Treasury crossing 5%.
Emerging markets (EMs) have historically been associated with commodity exports and low-cost manufacturing. Those characteristics remain relevant in parts of the investable universe, but the sources of competitive advantage have broadened materially.
With markets around the globe rattled by the bond sell-off, it may be time to pivot towards safe havens that still generate strong yield.
Active ETF flows offer a window into where the ETF ecosystem is going, and what its shifts and changes might mean for broader ETF innovation.
September ETF launches highlighted active strategies and an AI hardware ETF as year-to-date inflows reached a record $1.54 trillion.
Advisors choosing between two similar ETFs often let the lower expense ratio decide, but that fee says little about a fund’s liquidity. It may not even point to the cheaper fund to own, according to State Street Investment Management research.
Headlines are popping up left and right about how high the 10-year Treasury yield has risen. While investors make decisions about what is the “right” longer-term cost of government debt, many journalists focus on single-factor ways of viewing it.
In 1954, golfer Tommy Bolt won the inaugural Rubber City Open at Firestone Country Club in Akron. Four years later, he returned to Akron as the reigning US Open champion, where in the third round he was paired with an 18-year-old amateur making his tour debut.
The U.S. economy is handing investors a muddled picture. Housing is stuck, hiring is lopsided, and households feel worse than the jobs data suggest. Add a string of geopolitical shocks and a Federal Reserve (Fed) under new leadership still establishing its reaction function, and the signals markets rely on are harder to read. Investors will have to adjust to this market, where clarity is scarce.
Investment performance is often measured by what a portfolio earns. But for investors with substantial assets across taxable, tax-deferred, and tax-free accounts, what they keep after taxes can be just as important.
ClearBridge Investments: With the economy still resilient, a gradual Federal Reserve hiking cycle could help broaden market leadership beyond the Magnificent Seven.
Sometimes, there’s safety in size. Semiconductor Goliath Nvidia (NVDA) is proving as much. Already one of the world’s largest companies by market capitalization, Nvidia is up 29.5% year-to-date. That extends a five-year run in which the stock surged 1,066%.
Hand-picking individual securities from an enormous fixed-income universe can be inefficient. That’s why AB developed a dynamic credit scoring model known as core score, which ranks investment-grade and high-yield corporate bonds by their attractiveness.
Is now the time for senior loans? Shifting yields and rising pressure make the floating rate yield vehicles an intriguing place to watch.
On the surface, the municipal bond market may not check the “dynamic” box. After all, individual muni bonds and ETFs such as the ALPS BBH Intermediate Municipal Bond ETF (MNBD) are positioned, rightly so, as conservative, income-bearing investments.
Stocks chopped this summer as high hopes for AI product and infrastructure development were offset by rising inflation and an increasingly hawkish Federal Reserve.
For decades, investors have used growth and value allocations as a foundational block of equity portfolio construction. The distinction has been intuitive and practical. Investors expected growth to provide exposure to faster-growing companies, often with higher valuation multiples and greater sensitivity to earnings expectations.
There are many reasons to own bonds, but for many investors, one of the most important is principal preservation. Years of saving, investing, and market growth may help build wealth. Bonds can then play a different role, helping preserve that wealth while providing a predictable stream of income and cash flow.
