In the ranks of the world’s 20 best-performing stock markets this year, every second index is European.

Whether in sports or financial markets, averages often grab headlines, but they can conceal as much as they reveal. Variation—including the dispersion of metrics like credit spreads for high-yield bonds—is the real story.

This has been a bumpy year for the US economy. Although there was a massive boom in AI-related investments in 2025, policy-induced uncertainties and disruptions to official data releases clouded the picture.

U.S. stocks, as measured by the S&P 500 Index, are on pace for 14% growth in earnings for Q3 2025. This marks the fourth consecutive quarter of double-digit growth and comes in well ahead of analysts’ Sept. 30 estimates of 7%.

Despite the increasing need for retirement income security, many defined contribution (DC) plan sponsors hesitate to adopt new lifetime income solutions due to concerns over fiduciary liability and plan flexibility.

Following a rocky start to the year, the municipal bond market has shown strong performance in Q3 2025, outperforming broader bond indexes due to factors like easing oversupply and growing demand.

This article argues that the Federal Reserve's decade of ultra-loose monetary policy following the 2008 crisis, including nearly ten years of near-zero rates, has warped the perception of a "normal" interest rate environment.

Despite an intra-year drawdown of 18.9%, the S&P 500 is poised for a strong 2025, currently up about 14%. This pattern of experiencing a large correction on the way to significant annual gains is common; since 1980, the average yearly drawdown has been over 14% while the index gained an average of 10.7%.

Nvidia's strong earnings initially squashed AI bubble fears but a deep dive into its financials, revealing high customer concentration, triggered a major tech sell-off.

As investors start to take sides in the AI race, Sam Altman’s buddies are getting burned.

The Federal Reserve's balance sheet has significantly shrunk from its peak of nearly $9 trillion in 2022, shifting the reserve environment from "abundant" to "ample." While some advocate for further reduction, arguing it would increase market volatility and allow for lower rates, this move would necessitate a major operational change in how the Fed conducts monetary policy and would not dramatically lower short-term rates.

Kostas Bintas, the high-profile head of metals at Mercuria Energy Group Ltd., has renewed his bullish prediction for copper prices as he warned that a rush to ship metal to the US risks draining the rest of the world’s inventories.

The article argues that the oil market is mistaken to predict long-term prices will remain near the current $60-per-barrel level through 2030, believing oil will be more expensive due to tightening supply/demand balance.

This article questions if the high valuation multiples are justified, arguing that investors will soon need to see actual cash flow results from this massive CapEx bonanza.This aggressive spending has caused their collective free cash flow growth to turn negative, raising concerns since stock valuation is based on future free cash flow.

Despite the "America First" focus of the current administration, international markets, particularly emerging markets (EM), have outperformed domestic financial markets. This surprising trend is highlighted by the strong performance of EM debt and equities, driven primarily by U.S. dollar weakness and corresponding monetary easing by EM central banks.

This month, the global investment community is celebrating the 25th anniversary of the world’s first fixed income ETFs, the iShares Core Canadian Short Term Bond Index ETF (XSB) and the iShares Core Canadian Universe Bond Index ETF (XBB).

The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), a crucial hub for managing global risk, experienced a nine-hour trading halt due to a data center fault on Friday, disrupting markets from S&P 500 futures to crude oil. This major outage underscores the CME's integral role in global market machinery, where its platforms handle volumes exceeding 26 million derivatives contracts daily.

Nasdaq’s International Securities Exchange proposed quadrupling the daily trading limit for options tied to BlackRock Inc.’s iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF as demand from investors increases.

This article argues that the pursuit of high returns by institutional investors, like insurers and pension funds, through illiquid and opaque private market investments is a repeating mistake that risks underfunding future liabilities.

The dominance of Jensen Huang and Nvidia in the AI hardware market is facing a significant challenge, signaling a shift in the industry's power dynamic. This is driven by news of Google potentially selling billions of dollars in its own Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) to Meta, following a similar major deal with Anthropic.

With corporate bond spreads widening and Oracle Corp.’s credit default swap spiking to a multi-year high, Wall Street is getting worried that a flood of debt sales from Big Tech is overwhelming buyers and could blow up credit markets.

Financial planning helps families organize, save, and invest intentionally. It turns goals into a roadmap, budgeting for major purchases, setting aside for retirement, and aligning investments with life milestones. But at some point, the question shifts from how to grow wealth to how to protect and structure it.

This year has certainly been a significant one for me. For the markets and the economy, it has been a big year as well. Rate cuts and no recession have been positive for stocks and bonds.

As wealth continues to grow along with soaring equity markets, and technology enables customization and choices once reserved for a select few investors, financial advisors are tasked with constantly evolving to maintain their value position.

Interest rates are undergoing one of the steepest reversals in half a century. In 2020, governments could borrow for 30 years at just over 1%. Fast forward to 2025 and U.S. 30-year yields have risen above 5% for the first time since 2007.

According to market theory, persistent outperformance shouldn’t exist. However, companies with high and stable profitability, strong balance sheets, and disciplined capital allocation have demonstrated the ability to deliver superior returns with lower risk over time.

Multi-strategy hedge funds have been around for more than three decades. Will they make it to a half century? Ray Dalio, founder of 50-year-old hedge fund Bridgewater Associates has his doubts about this thriving subsector of asset management.

The trade dispute with the U.S. is proving to be a 'full-blown blizzard' for Canada, threatening to freeze cross-border commerce in a deeply integrated relationship. Despite the majority of goods remaining duty-free, new tariffs—reaching 35% in key sectors—have caused a sharp decline in Canadian exports, pushing the nation toward recession.

At Vanguard, we are always working to make our target-date funds (TDFs) better. That means regularly reviewing our glide-path design and diving into specific asset allocation topics to ensure that our strategies evolve with the market and continue to meet our clients' needs.

Corporate America delivered another exceptional earnings season, with third-quarter S&P 500 earnings growth tracking over 13% and achieving one of the highest beat rates ever recorded. Companies successfully adjusted to shifting macroeconomic pressures, including tariffs, as expectations continued to rise. The impressive results were bolstered by robust revenue growth and significant investment from mega-cap technology firms.

Although most economists have issued dire warnings about the damage tariffs and other ill-advised policies would cause, the US economy’s aggregate indicators have remained quite robust. Some of the costs may simply have been postponed, but rapid advances in AI could well offset them when they fall due.

The 20th century Baby Boom was one of the most powerful demographic events in the history of the United States. We've created a series of charts to show seven age cohorts of the employed population from 1948 to the present.

Today, one in three of the 65-69 cohort, one in five of the 70-74 cohort, and one in ten of the 75+ cohort are in the labor force.

The labor force participation rate (LFPR) is a simple computation: You take the civilian labor force (people aged 16 and over employed or seeking employment) and divide it by the civilian non-institutional population (those 16 and over not in the military and or committed to an institution). As of September, the labor force participation rate is at 62.4%, up from 62.3% the previous month.

This impressive performance, fueled largely by the prominent allocation to the "Magnificent Seven" tech stocks, highlights the strong adoption of ETFs and VOO's role as the premier choice for U.S. equity exposure amidst a challenging macro environment. This success helped the entire ETF industry surpass its previous trillion-dollar record.

This article argues that a grateful mindset is a powerful strategy for improving financial and investment decision-making, citing research that links gratitude to better outcomes and overall well-being.

Some clients don’t want to expose everything and may find it annoying to be asked deeply personal questions. I do think, with some work, everyone can come around to share more about themselves if they are approached correctly. Here are some suggestions.

You don’t need a massive budget or an in-house team to market effectively. You need a focused, sustainable approach designed for small firms like yours. Here’s what that looks like in action — and how to start seeing results without burning out.

Referrals aren’t dead; they’ve evolved. When clients know you are there for more than their investments and when every moment reinforces the value you bring to your clients, referrals become a natural outcome.

Google, once seen as lagging after the launch of ChatGPT, is now surging in the AI race with its new Gemini 3 model winning praise and driving investor confidence.

Investor certainty about a Federal Reserve interest rate cut in December has surged to approximately 80%, driven by signals from Fed officials and recent mixed economic data, especially regarding the labor market.

As investors shift away from volatile artificial intelligence stocks, the health-care sector has emerged as the clear winner this month, with the S&P 500 Health Care Index up 10%. This rotation, fueled by aggressive buying from hedge funds and mutual funds, reflects investor interest in defensive value amid concerns over an AI stock bubble.

Jeff Schulze, Head of Economic and Market Strategy at ClearBridge Investments, discusses key spending, employment and other policy factors he is following as we look forward to 2026.

Like ducks on a pond, markets often appear calm on the surface while churning furiously underneath. For financial markets, above the surface, attention has focused on equity market valuations and record-tight levels of credit spreads, but a deeper look reveals even more extreme dynamics below.

In a recent episode of the Money Metals podcast, host Mike Maharrey sits down with Jordan Roy-Byrne, CMT, MFTA, editor and publisher of The Daily Gold, to unpack where gold and silver are in the current cycle.

Yes, we may be in the second market bubble of this century. Alternatively, the market may be pricing in a shift as fundamental as the transition to either electricity or the internet. Either way, investors must think clearly, act deliberately, and avoid the kind of blind speculation that turned past booms into bloodbaths.

Investors are needy. Insatiable, really. But it makes sense: If an investor buys a share of a company, they’re going to want some benefit from it.

Kalshi Inc.’s Chief Executive Officer Tarek Mansour got my attention when he claimed last week that prediction markets could rival stock exchanges in a few years. Of course, this does not mean that people will buy and sell stocks on Kalshi, but that prediction markets will be where information is aggregated and prices set, with the New York Stock Exchange and its ilk relegated to processing orders.

The release of OpenAI's ChatGPT three years ago sparked an artificial intelligence mania on Wall Street, fundamentally reshaping the stock market landscape. This AI-driven frenzy has minted new market leaders, made the S&P 500 significantly more concentrated, and served as the dominant driving force behind the current bull market in US stocks.

Emerging market (EM) equities have seen exceptional outperformance in 2025, with major countries like South Korea and Brazil posting massive gains. The primary driver of this trend has been a weakening U.S. dollar, which historically encourages capital flow outside the United States. The critical question now for investors is whether this dollar weakness marks the start of a multi-year downtrend or is simply a temporary correction.