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We are expecting inflation in energy prices and a decline in interest rates when the poop hits the AI mania fan. For these reasons, we are overweight in oil stocks and home builders. These industries prospered in the 1970s, once the stock market mania broke in late 1972!

The top-performing non-leveraged ETFs of 2026 span a distinct blend of digital assets and localized international equity plays.

The first phase of the artificial intelligence investment trade was relatively straightforward: if you wanted to capture the AI boom using familiar names, you bought semiconductors.

Despite rising global yields and renewed inflation concerns, equities moved higher in May on the back of a strong US earnings season and continued momentum in AI-related stocks. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite gained 8.4% for the month, while the S&P 500 rose 5.3% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 2.9%.

Learn what's in store for the remainder of 2026 and the challenges that lie ahead in our mid-year outlook for U.S. stocks and the economy.

Space ETFs have seen strong inflows coupled with standout performance, capturing significant market attention. For investors, the rapid pace of capital deployment into the space economy underscores a compelling investment opportunity. For this edition of Bull vs Bear, writers Zandile Chiwanza and Elle Caruso Fitzgerald debate the use cases for space ETFs in portfolios.

Businesses are racing to build the physical infrastructure that makes AI usable at scale – data centers, the graphics processing unit (GPU) hardware stack, power, and cooling.

If you’re not familiar with the name Leopold Aschenbrenner, you should be. A 24-year-old wunderkind, Aschenbrenner was hired by OpenAI in 2023 to work on the company’s “superalignment” team, essentially trying to figure out how to keep AI systems safe once they become smarter than the people building them.

The dollar is supposed to be dying. We’ve heard that argument for the better part of a decade, and it’s getting louder, not quieter. Dollar dominance isn’t fading. In fact, the events of late April 2026 just delivered the loudest counter-signal in years.

The reality is, the American people wouldn’t accept the level of taxation necessary to maintain the warfare/welfare state. There would be a tax revolt. So, the government resorts to a less obvious tax.

Risk appetite remains firmly intact as optimism surrounding a potential resolution to the war with Iran continues to improve investor sentiment. The S&P 500 has now advanced for eight consecutive weeks, with price action remaining remarkably resilient throughout the recovery.

Kevin Warsh was officially sworn in as 17th Federal Reserve chair on May 22. Warsh is likely to build consensus at the Fed rather than push for aggressive action to cut rates.

Recent market volatility and the conflict in Iran have understandably pushed many emerging market investors to the sidelines. But periods of uncertainty have historically offered attractive entry points into emerging market debt (EMD), particularly when underlying fundamentals are improving and asset flows are likely to increase.

This persistent growth highlights how central low-cost core index products remain to advisor and retail portfolios alike. Even as asset managers roll out specialized strategies, capital continues to flow within broad-market beta.

Thanks to strong gains in markets over recent years, the 60/40 default portfolio has quietly morphed into a bundle of expensive U.S. growth equities and credit exposures offering narrow spreads over Treasuries.

Chris Galipeau discusses high-conviction insights that go beyond media headlines.

Despite these higher costs, a projected 45 million Americans are expected to travel at least 50 miles from home this weekend, setting a new record. Close to 40 million will drive while some 3.7 million will fly.

After a slowdown earlier in the year, stronger April and May data support the view that weakness in January and February, followed by a rebound in March, was largely weather-related rather than the start of a broader deterioration in housing demand.

I’ve long been a student of game theory, the branch of mathematics that studies how rational actors make decisions when their outcomes depend on what everyone else does. It’s a helpful framework for understanding markets and geopolitics, and right now, there’s no better place to apply it than Taiwan.

Kevin Warsh set to be confirmed as the next Fed chair, Senate committee meets to consider the CLARITY Act, President Trump heads to China, and the gerrymandering wars heat up.

Early detection, I believe, is one of the smartest investments you can make, whether we’re talking about your portfolio or your health.

The generational divide is a part of the human condition – and the investor condition. It’s not just that one group has more experience than the other, or that one is more eager to make its own way, but that both groups can learn totally different lessons from the same event.

Deglobalization supports diversification: Reversing global trade reduces economic productivity, but the resulting decoupling of international markets increases the protective value of geographic diversification.

What a week this was! On Tuesday, I participated on a panel at the Bitcoin Conference in Las Vegas, where I discussed why Bitcoin miners have a head start in the race for AI compute.

April saw a strong rally, which fully reversed the stock market’s losses in March. US markets set new all-time highs, and European stocks came within whispering distance of their all-time highs as well.

One of the most important decisions anyone will make in their lives is whether, and whom, to marry. A well-chosen partnership can lead to a happy steady state and help to weather downturns. But even the best long term partnerships can have their ups and downs. For currencies that are wedded to the U.S. dollar, the war in Iran has put some stress into their relationships.

Active ETFs are punching well above their weight in 2026. Despite representing just 12% of total ETF assets, actively managed funds have captured 40% of year-to-date flows, Todd Mathias, head of North America ETF product strategy at Franklin Templeton, told attendees at an April 27 roundtable discussion at the firm’s Manhattan office.

Despite the turbulence, the global LCC market remains an enormous force. Four of the world’s 10 largest airlines—Ryanair, Southwest, IndiGo and easyJet—operate on a low-cost model. The broader budget travel market is projected to exceed $315 billion by 2028, according to Statista.

When silver demand outstrips mining and recycling output, silver users must tap into aboveground stocks. That generally means rising prices to incentivize those holding silver to give it up.

The spring edition of our Investment Directions takes on a new look. As the weather heats up, our “summer body” of work embraces a slimmed down word count, Q&A format, and visualfirst approach – better for consuming on the go, or preferably, outdoors.

Kevin Warsh's bid to become the next chair of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) unfolded amid sharp political tension, legal uncertainty, and pointed questions about his independence from President Trunp. During a combative Senate confirmation hearing, Warsh sought to reassure lawmakers that he would not allow political pressure to dictate monetary policy, even as unresolved Justice Department investigation into current Chair Jerome Powell threatens to delay his confirmation and underscores broader concerns about the politicization of the central bank.

During and after World War II, Allied forces established airbases across remote Pacific Islands, bringing with them food, medicine, tools, and machinery that the indigenous people had never encountered before.

For ultra-high-net-worth individuals and families, wealth brings opportunity, but also extraordinary complexity. Multi-generational estate planning, concentrated equity positions, private investments, tax-efficient strategies, philanthropic structures, and family governance decisions all intersect in ways that demand thoughtful oversight.

At this point, investors of all ages are well aware just how much inflation can cut into one’s spending power, whether it be for everyday expenses or big-time purchases.

Stocks have been on a bit of a rollercoaster over the past two months. If your nature is to tune out the noise and check in occasionally, you might have missed it. After a 9 percent sell-off earlier in the year, markets quickly rebounded and have recently traded at all-time highs.

New Federal Reserve (Fed) chairs don’t come along often. Since 1980, only five individuals have led the Fed: Jerome Powell is currently in his second term, Janet Yellen served one term and Alan Greenspan famously held the role for more than 18 years.

It’s a busy macro stretch as company earnings reports come in fast and furious. A focus on real data and earnings may be a welcome development for investors wary of geopolitical headlines. The team at Wall Street Horizon will keep you up to speed with the latest trends, and you can access our industry-leading forward-looking corporate event data to stay ahead of markets.

Even in the event that the Middle East conflict eases and shipping resumes as usual through the Strait of Hormuz, it would likely take time for the global economy to normalize after one of the largest oil supply disruptions in decades.

GMO has posted a new 7-Year asset class forecast for 1Q 2026.

As always, I hope you’re having a good 2026 and that all is well with you, my readers, and your family and friends. Here’s my latest.

Yes, much of the blame lies with energy prices, which surged due to the war in Iran. Still, the March reading of the Consumer Price Index (CPI) serves as a reminder of the work to be done to damp inflation.

Despite compositional differences – public equities generally represent larger companies with more scale, liquidity, and financial flexibility than the typically smaller, private-equity-owned issuers that dominate the software loan market – the outcome is the same: Neither market has been able to fully retrace the year-to-date sell-off in a meaningful way.

I was working in one of our regional offices this week when the network on our floor experienced a brief outage. People were clearly not prepared for a return to an analog world, and grew increasingly anxious as the minutes ticked by.

The history of the U.S. airline industry is really a history of consolidation driven by crisis. The pattern has been remarkably consistent. Historically, when an external shock has hit—a recession, a war, an energy spike—the weakest carriers have folded or been acquired, while the strongest have emerged leaner and more profitable.

Oil shocks hitting economies with weak demand and strained balance sheets are especially damaging. Firms cannot fully pass on rising costs, so margins shrink, layoffs increase, and investment falls. Tightening monetary and credit conditions would cause inflation to fade faster but job losses, failures, and fragile household finances to be much worse.

Exchange-traded fund flows surpassed $500 billion in the first three and a half months of 2026 as the industry continues its rapid expansion with more than 300 new launches and record trading volumes.

Today we're going to look at the underlying data and find that while the world is not ending anytime soon, there are actually good reasons for the disparity in forecasts. So, it’s okay if you’re confused. The stock market just hit an all-time high, energy is volatile and will be a negative on global growth, to say the least.