Power utilities across the US are already strained from AI data centers. But they’re increasingly facing an even bigger threat: that developers will be forced to walk away from projects, leaving households on the hook for massive infrastructure bills.
The market spent much of this week trying to interpret what Fed Chair Kevin Warsh meant rather than what he actually said and that was entirely avoidable. The decision to leave rates unchanged was defensible. What wasn’t defensible was Warsh’s lack of explanation.
Just as important, the dollar and U.S. Treasuries have continued to behave like hedges in periods of broader market unrest (driven by geopolitics or other conditions). When risk assets come under pressure, Treasury yields have generally fallen, or the dollar has tended to find support.
Lately, it seems like you can’t open a financial publication without stumbling across another article declaring the 60/40 portfolio dead. The pitch is everywhere: bonds are broken, the old rules no longer apply, and investors should modernize by swapping the bonds in their portfolio for Bitcoin, gold, or whatever alternative the asset management industry is currently selling.
The latest earnings reports from Big Tech have laid bare a growing divide in the market's appetite for massive AI spending.
Kevin Warsh became Fed Chair barely ten weeks ago. He has presided over just two sets of monetary meetings and held two press conferences. Nonetheless, more than any chairman since at least Alan Greenspan, he has come under harsh criticism by the press right out of the gate.
You spent years building your retirement savings with one goal in mind: having enough to live comfortably when you stop working. The strategy that got you here probably leaned heavily on growth. But as retirement gets closer, that same approach may not be the right one to carry you through it.
In January 1790, the House of Representatives put a simple question to its new Treasury Secretary: what should America make for itself? Alexander Hamilton took almost two years to answer.
S&P 500 companies are turning in their strongest earnings season in five years. And a handful of sectors are doing most of the heavy lifting.
Advisors and investors of all kinds are used to closely watching the outcome of each of the Federal Reserve’s meetings, given how critical interest rates are to equity and fixed income markets alike. However, the recent July Fed meeting was particularly crucial. Many were uncertain what direction the central bank would go with interest rates.
Every time China tightens its grip on rare earths, the rest of the world becomes a little better at finding them.
The US economy grew less than expected during the second quarter of the year, up 1.5% quarter over quarter, dragged down by strong growth in imports. However, final sales to private domestic purchasers increased by 3.9%, underscoring the strength in domestic demand, which continues to rely too heavily in AI investment spending and strong spending from high-income consumers, or what has been called the K economy.
Market volatility—and the feelings of uncertainty that follow—tend to frighten investors. Yet for investors with an overlay program, one approach to volatility is evergreen—rebalancing.
Electricity has become a major global focus. It essential to powering the modern economy: regions with capacity will generate growth, while those without adequate supplies may be vulnerable to shocks.
Valid until the market close on August 31, 2026
This article provides an update on the monthly moving averages we track for the S&P 500 and the Ivy Portfolio after the close of the last business day of the month.
As companies race to capitalize on the AI boom, water security is emerging as a material risk across the value chain. While data centers attract headlines, semiconductor fabrication remains one of the value chain’s most water-intensive activities, requiring reliable supplies of high-purity water.
There are 38% fewer companies listed on U.S. exchanges today than at the peak in the mid-1990s. The forces behind that decline—regulatory burden, the abundance of private capital, and the quiet disappearance of mid-sized public companies—are structural, not cyclical.
Growing demand for AI-savvy workers has led some companies, including software makers International Business Machines Corp., Shopify Inc. and Cloudflare Inc., to ramp up entry-level hiring, betting that recent Gen Z graduates will be able to do more with AI tools than existing employees.
Sequoia Capital led a $1 billion funding round for Valar Atomics Inc. that the nuclear startup says will help it shift from demonstrating small reactors to producing them in volume.
JPMorgan Chase & Co. is vowing to funnel $750 billion into housing over the next decade, nearly 40% more than it has over the past 10 years, as part of Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon’s push to invest more money in US communities.
US stocks rose into the first trading day of the month as attention turned to this week’s heavy slate of earnings reports.
The deeper promise may be in human-AI collaboration. AIs may prove most valuable not as autonomous traders but as a counterweight to our very human behavioral biases such as overconfidence, recency bias, and the tendency to bet too big on views that feel certain but aren’t.
2008. 1929. 1907. 1893. These dates strike fear into the hearts of investors. Panics, crashes, and bear markets have been part of the investing ecosystem for as long as markets have existed. Some say they are the price of progress — others, a flaw in the system. Whatever you think of periodic market crashes, they’re here to stay.
In this article, I explain why baby boomers in target date funds (TDFs) should not feel lucky today or in the near future. There’s a 40% chance that the typical TDF will have at least one losing year during the next five years. These are bad odds, especially since retirement with dignity is at stake.
Learn what Trump Accounts for advisors mean for financial planning, including contribution rules, employer funding, 529comparisons, and ETFs.
“Carnage” and “exploding” are very misleading descriptors of what is happening to hyperscaler credit spreads. Yes, the basket of CDS spreads is certainly moving upward, but it is not evenly distributed. Oracle's CDS spreads have moved by multiples, while the other four hyperscalers' CDS spreads have increased by a much more subdued amount, and from unusually tight initial levels.
Chris Galipeau discusses high-conviction insights that go beyond media headlines.
On Thursday, July 30, Amazon Inc.(AMZN) released its Q2 2026 earnings report. Given its crucial position as a Mag 7 mega-cap straddling both tech and e-commerce, Amazon’s earnings reports are usually closely watched by the broader investing community.
In this video, Chuck Carnevale introduces Charles, the new AI-powered research assistant built into FAST Graphs for Premium subscribers. Charles is designed to help investors research stocks faster, more thoroughly, and with greater confidence—without telling them what to buy or sell.
The AI bear case is worth taking seriously on price and financing. It is not worth taking seriously on demand. Anyone selling you the whole package as a single story, bull or bear, is selling you a mood, not an analysis. The revenue is real. The cash flow is the thing to watch. Price accordingly.
Mega-cap tech stocks have helped large caps dominate small-cap ETF flows and performance for years. However, this year a shift is taking place. In 2026, small-cap index ETFs are outperforming their large-cap peers as the market has broadened out.
This week’s vote from the Federal Reserve FOMC committee is going to have implications for quite some time. I think most of the pundits who are writing about this have their analysis wrong. This was not just a vote to not raise rates. I think there was a lot more going on behind the scenes.
Schwab Sector Views is our six- to 12-month outlook for stock sectors, which represent broad sectors of the economy. The Schwab Center for Financial Research (SCFR) combines a factor-based approach with a market and economic assessment to determine the ratings.
The yield on the 10-year note finished July 31, 2026 at 4.75% while the 2-year note ended at 4.28%.
Consumer sentiment reached its highest level since March, driven by easing gas prices. The final July reading for the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index came in at 55.2. This marks an 11.5% (5.7 points) increase from June and beat the preliminary reading of 54.4.
Inflation remains a hot topic, directly impacting everything from your grocery bill to interest rates. As of the latest data, two key inflation gauges — the Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) Price Index and the Consumer Price Index (CPI) — show that prices are still above the Federal Reserve's 2% target, with the core PCE at 3.3% and core CPI at 2.6%.
In the race to win a coveted role on the next mega US IPO and manage the ensuing riches, Wall Street’s wealth advisers are ramping up lending to founders and entrepreneurs based on the soaring values of their private companies.
For anyone worried about the gargantuan costs of developing artificial-intelligence infrastructure, it was comforting to think that Big Tech firms could just turn off the spending taps if demand for chatbots and coding tools didn’t pan out. That’s starting to look like wishful thinking.
It’s true enough that history rhymes, even if it doesn’t necessarily repeat. But that creates danger when we pick up resonances from the wrong episode of history, particularly in the fraught task of identifying and avoiding speculative bubbles.
As concerns grow about the market’s biggest companies, investors are looking further down the market-cap scale. Mid-cap innovators are drawing more attention because they have more room to grow.
Following historic inflows, momentum in the covered call ETF market continues unabated. Yet first-generation buy-write products were often viewed somewhat narrowly as high-yield income vehicles built on sacrificing equity upside for immediate cash flow. While early strategies proved the massive appetite for yield, they also exposed key advisor pain points — from steep NAV erosion in bull markets to tax-inefficient distributions.
One of the most noteworthy data points during July was the June CPI report. While some moderation in price pressures was expected, the actual ‘cooling’ in inflation that was reported was greeted as a long sought after welcome development by the financial markets.
LPL Research explores whether hyperscalers can generate attractive returns on massive AI investments through a framework focused on ROIC, growth, and capex.
Fixed income can serve several important purposes within an investment portfolio, including income generation, capital preservation, diversification, and supporting future cash flow needs. Unlike growth assets, an individual bond generally provides a defined schedule of interest payments and a stated maturity date.
Energy markets have reached a precarious moment, with the path of prices over the remainder of the year – and potentially beyond – hinging on two key questions.
In part two of AB’s “Build a Better Path” Disruptor SeriesTM, we shifted from diagnosing the challenge of long-term investing to a potential approach for solving it. With practical, actionable steps, investors have the potential to translate the concept of improving up/down capture into strategies aimed at improving portfolio design.
Cash is king. Not for investors right now, but among the hyperscalers. The craving for capital is high as the AI arms race takes new twists and turns.
Forecasting is always fraught, but geopolitical turmoil makes it especially hazardous. Economic projections are only as reliable as the assumptions behind them, and those inputs can change quickly when conflicts are involved.
In this report, John P Kerschner, Global Head of Securitized Products, Daniel Siluk, Head of Global Short Duration and Liquidity, and Michael Contopoulos, Head of Multi-Asset Macro Investing, make the case for why it’s time for short-duration bonds.
GMO’s liquid alternatives are hedge fund strategies (e.g., equity long-short, global macro, event-driven) managed with an emphasis on risk control and liquidity. The GMO Alternative Allocation Strategy (“ALTA”) is a liquid alternative solution combining several underlying strategies; ALTA is available in a mutual fund with daily liquidity.