During the American cigar craze of the 1990s, a couple of my neighbors purchased humidors and began collecting. The holy grail for them was Cuban Cohibas, banned from import by longstanding U.S. sanctions.

Artificial intelligence (AI) might be the talk of the town these days, but quantum computing is the quiet thunder rumbling in the background. It just got much louder with the U.S. White House commiting to roll out a massive $2 billion funding package distributed across nine quantum computing companies.

I have often written about one of the few indicators in economics that has earned its reputation over the years, and for good reason. It has preceded virtually every US recession since World War II. I’m talking about the inverted yield curve.

Now, that prospect feels much farther off. Indeed, as government debt grows and macroeconomic pressures and inflation reemerge, investors face a complicated rate environment. Dividends can provide a solution.

There is currently a stark contrast between everyday consumer confidence and financial market behavior. On one hand, persistent inflation and elevated living costs have driven consumer sentiment to historic lows. On the other hand, financial market participants are exhibiting aggressive risk appetite, with margin debt surging to an all-time high record on the heels of major equity market gains.

Rare earth elements are critical to global defense systems, electrification, data centers, and the future of artificial intelligence. How can investors hedge against geopolitical risks and tariffs? In this episode of ETF of the Week, host Chuck Jaffe sits down with Todd Rosenbluth, to break down Sprott Rare Earths Ex-China ETF (Ticker: REXC). Discover why this specialized materials fund might be in the perfect position to complement your equity portfolio and safeguard your supply chain investments.

Elon Musk has bucked the trend of industrial conglomerate breakups, including such illustrious companies as General Electric and Honeywell International Inc., and decided to form a somewhat unwieldy company that makes rockets, spacecraft, satellites, antennas, modems and now computer chips. With SpaceX’s purchase of Musk’s xAI in February, the world’s leading space company was married to an AI startup and the X social media platform.

In this second quarter update, Western Asset believes global fixed-income markets face a more complex backdrop as geopolitics, rapid AI adoption and private credit scrutiny intersect.

Chasing performance by deviating from a benchmark has long been the hallmark of active managers. But it may be time for a rethink. Our research suggests that investors allocating to core equities should consider refreshing the criteria they use to identify portfolio managers that can consistently beat their benchmarks.

For private equity firms, capital flexibility is prized today. Merger-and-acquisition (M&A) activity has cooled, while commodity prices and artificial intelligence (AI)-driven disruption have heated up, creating uncertainty for investors. This makes it more challenging to sell portfolio companies, so private equity firms are holding investments longer. As a result, many firms are turning to net asset value (NAV) loans for capital needs.

While US financial markets brace for what could be the three biggest initial public offerings ever, most entrepreneurship in the US is headed in the opposite direction: New businesses are shrinking.

By moving beyond benchmark constraints, active portfolios can access off-the-run bonds, specific securitized tranches, and maturity buckets with superior risk-reward profiles. They also have the flexibility to adjust positioning throughout the market cycle — reallocating across sectors, ratings, and issuers as conditions evolve to capture opportunities and mitigate drawdowns.

I still don’t think the Fed is close to a rate hike, but for the upcoming June FOMC meeting, a shift in the language of the policy statement from an easing bias to one of a ‘balanced’ outlook seems to be the most likely scenario. However, the fed funds futures market has now fully priced in a rate hike for March 2027, a remarkable shift from its pre-war status of discounting almost three rate cuts for the same timeframe.

Industry discussions on Janus Henderson’s ETF lineup are typically centered around its fixed income funds given the firm’s history in this asset class. However, the issuer also has equity ETFs that are garnering attention, which include a fund that’s close to crossing the $1 billion assets under management (AUM) threshold: the Janus Henderson Small-Mid Cap Growth Alpha ETF (JSMD).

Stephen Dover shares key insights from the Franklin Equity team about how artificial intelligence is changing the economics of the software industry.

Some institutional investors who had grown accustomed to outperforming the broader private equity composites are finding they have not done so consistently in recent years. Their diagnoses of the problem often center on specific decisions or biases they made in their recent manager selection, whereas a likely culprit is a falloff in the persistence of outperformance among private equity managers.

There is a growing risk of economic overheating in the US as the artificial intelligence boom expands beyond semiconductors and spills into the broader economy — never mind the tame wage growth and house prices that would typically point in the opposite direction.

College costs continue to rise, and for many families, education is one of the most meaningful investments they will make. Preparing for those expenses often requires planning years, sometimes decades, in advance.

Nvidia is now a textbook fit for quality-focused indexes in ETFs given its strong underlying business fundamentals. The company has become the smartest kid in the quality classroom, scoring exceptionally high on metrics like high return on equity (ROE), strong return on invested capital (ROIC), stable earnings growth, and low balance sheet leverage.

The average size of a single-family house built in the 1960s was about 1,500 square feet, and homes within multifamily units were about 800 square feet. Now those figures are more than 2,000 square feet and more than 1,200 square feet, respectively.

Recently, Matthew Bartolini, global head of research strategists at State Street Investment Management, sat down with VettaFi to discuss where inflation stands, opportunities within portfolio construction, and much more.

Concerned about overfunding your 529 plan? Discover the strategic flexibility of modern 529 accounts. From tax-free Roth IRA transfers to building a multi-generational educational legacy, learn how to maximize your unused education savings for long-term wealth building.

Join the experts at Precidian Investments as they explore how to recognize, mitigate, and manage currency risk and how to better approach your international exposures.

We separate this article into two parts. Part one is the optimistic case: an AI-induced, productivity-led economic boom in which the benefits spread quickly to society. Part two will address a more bearish outlook: the possibility of a large gap in the distribution of AI's productivity benefits, accruing to corporations much more quickly than to employees.

The U.S. stock market is extremely expensive. In the past, stock markets have not remained expensive for long. Is it because of artificial intelligence? Perhaps, but a similar argument was made during the dot-com bubble.

Vanguard’s Total World Stock ETF (ticker VT) is an elegant product: a single fund that gives you cap-weighted exposure to the entire global equity market. For investors who want simplicity, it’s hard to beat. But is simplicity costing you money?

Put succinctly, the world today requires substantially more electricity than only a few years ago. AI, electrification, reshored manufacturing, and population growth in the developing world are converging into a demand curve that the existing global power system simply cannot meet.

Private credit managers are increasingly turning to the once-unthinkable: Trading in and out of loans to dump troubled assets and hunt for bargains amid the industry’s first stress test after years of breakneck growth.

US stocks advanced as investors struck an upbeat tone ahead of a long holiday weekend, with optimism fueled by hopes for resolution of hostilities in the Middle East, resilient economic data and relentless enthusiasm for artificial intelligence-linked trades.

From the April payroll report released on May 8, we realize that not all industries are equally impacted by AI. Diagnostic imaging centers, an area where AI is thought to replace humans, have increased demand for workers, whereas bookkeeping demand has declined in recent years.

Global bond yields are reaching frightening levels due to the continued war in Iran and the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Continued high oil prices and the threat of reverberating inflation are causing investors to demand higher yields on government bonds.

Hedge funds have been selling the scorching rally in US semiconductor stocks to book profits, while keeping their overall exposure to the AI theme, according to traders at Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

Equities advanced in April, but hedges remain few and far between, as traditional risk mitigants like bonds and gold continue to show a correlation with stocks.

Watching your children step into financial independence is one of the most rewarding and complex milestones families experience. As young adults begin earning income, managing expenses, and making major life decisions, the habits and financial knowledge they develop can shape their long-term success.

Even if armchair investors are fleeing private credit or panicking that their unlisted shares in Anthropic PBC are now invalid, the long-term trend is clear: Public markets keep losing ground to private funds.

Sustainable investing in fixed income has come of age. Against a backdrop of heightened geopolitical tensions, persistent economic and trade uncertainty, sustainable fixed income continued to demonstrate its appeal in 2025.

Stocks’ rally off the March 30 lows has been nothing short of wild, with internal market dynamics showing some performance divergences that we haven’t seen for decades. For example, in the first 6 weeks of the rally, the S&P 500 Growth index beat the S&P 500 Low Volatility Index by more than any other 6-week window on record.

At first glance, the retreat of foreign asset managers is ominous. Signs of a domestic retail frenzy are everywhere. Cash deposits in local brokerage accounts have reached 137 trillion won ($91 billion), a two-third jump from six months ago.

Emerging markets (EM) are using low-cost renewables to cut fuel imports, stabilize power costs and improve energy security—positioning EM as the growth engine of the energy transition. Countries and companies that leverage their dominance in critical minerals and green technology could pull ahead, creating dispersion in potential outcomes for investors.

Model portfolios are a key pillar for asset managers competing for advisor and investor attention. They offer straightforward, pre-packaged tools that help investors target and achieve specific financial goals. Designing and operating models, however, takes a particular set of skills. Goldman Sachs Asset Management recently made a big hire therein.

With mega tech AI capital expenditure projected to cross a staggering $660 billion to $750 billion, according to estimates from firms like Goldman Sachs, CreditSights and Bloomberg, saying the stakes are high for Nvidia and the AI ecosystem is an understatement. It’s no wonder we can focus on little else this week.

While most institutional investors recognize that private equity and public equity share similar economic risks, they often seem to ignore how their aggregate equity portfolio is affected by their substantial allocation to private equity.

Join the experts at SS&C ALPS Advisors and VettaFi for a 30-minute discussion on May 21st at 12:30 pm ET on how the war has changed the playing field for North American midstream companies with impacts enduring well beyond the price spike.

The Kansas City Fed Manufacturing Survey revealed regional activity continued to increase in May. The composite index came in at 8 this month, down slightly from 10 in April but still indicating continued expansion.

There’s a whiff of panic among investors these days. US Treasury yields have climbed to levels unseen in more than a year at the same time as a furious rally has left stocks near all-time highs. Surely, both moves can’t coexist for long, goes the narrative.

Wall Street is racing to turn computing power into a tradable commodity with the first ETFs being filed even before the futures contracts they would track have started to trade.

Nvidia Corp., facing more investor skepticism, used its latest quarterly report to tout progress in diversifying the company, which aims to rely less on the giant data center operators that have fueled its runaway growth.

Najimah Roberson, a lifelong renter, spent the past two years searching around Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for a home she could afford — getting outbid nearly 30 times along the way.

In the past year, new models from industry leaders have continued to boost AI’s capabilities. According to various capabilities tests, Anthropic’s Mythos model has leapfrogged other AI models – including in the ability to thwart or support cyberattacks.