Global Markets

The ETF industry has reached a historic turning point. Vanguard has officially surpassed BlackRock’s iShares to become the largest ETF provider. The milestone underscores a broader structural shift among investors prioritizing low-cost investments in portfolio allocations.

At a time when the cost of living is rising and market volatility appears to be rising, too, investors may be looking for current income to bolster their portfolios. Current income can especially help investors at or near retirement to adapt to retired life.

The word seems to be spreading that small- and micro-cap stocks have so far been enjoying a stellar 2026. What seems less well known is that the current cycle of market leadership for the two asset classes stretches back to 2025 and has been in place for 14 months.

Dispersion continues to be the definitive story of 2026. As we progress through June and approach the conclusion of the first half of the year, the equity landscape remains distinctly bifurcated. Pockets of deep structural growth stand in contrast to areas grappling with macro headwinds.

In this month’s Allocation Views, strong corporate fundamentals and resilient growth fuel our continued optimism toward equities into June, despite persistent inflation and more restrictive monetary policy.

In addition to a greater range of chips supporting AI development, several factors could cause the current cycle to last longer than expected.

While owning a significant amount of a successful stock can be incredibly lucrative – especially in a company on the rise – the more you own of a single equity, the more closely your personal financial fate is tied to its performance.

For many investors, wealth management still feels segmented. Investments are handled in one meeting, taxes in another, estate planning somewhere else, and major life decisions often happen independently of all three.

Since early 2025, value stocks have enjoyed a strong run, defying market volatility driven by trade tensions, geopolitical stress and macroeconomic uncertainty. That resilience may seem counterintuitive given value’s historically cyclical profile. Yet, we believe the underlying characteristics of value stocks are proving particularly well suited to today’s evolving market landscape.

For many registered investment advisors (RIAs), success has traditionally been measured in assets under management (AUM). As the industry evolves and consolidation accelerates, a broader question is emerging: are you building a practice or an enterprise?

Silver's chart also weakened substantially, although the metal remains near important longer-term support levels and has not yet confirmed the same degree of structural breakdown seen in gold.

Inflation and geopolitical uncertainty are pushing advisors and investors to rethink how they build diversified portfolios.

This past week, the market hit an all-time high. At the same time, Alphabet (GOOG) told investors it would raise $80 billion by selling stock to fund its AI buildout, and the shares fell about 4% on the news.

May saw 148 new ETF launches in May alone – although launch figures were partially driven by a 37-fund rollout from Corgi Insurance Services.

For more than four decades, PIMCO’s Secular Forum has provided a disciplined framework for stepping back from short-term market noise to assess the structural forces that will shape the global economy and markets over the next five years. Yet rarely has this exercise been more consequential than it has recently.

After more than three years of underperformance, our prognosis for global health care stocks remains positive. The sector now offers a broader set of high-quality companies at valuations that appear increasingly disconnected from fair value.

Many advisors deliver capital markets commentary as if the goal were simply to explain what’s happening. They assemble charts, cite data, summarize headlines and hope the client will draw the “right” conclusion.

Equity issuance is all the rage. The SpaceX (SPCX) IPO on Friday, Alphabet’s (GOOGL) up-sized secondary announced last week, and a slew of other major go-public names over the remainder of 2026 (Anthropic, OpenAI) buck the years-long trend of intense buybacks and shareholder-friendly activities by the world’s most valuable companies.

All major U.S. stock indices fell last week, ending a remarkable run of nine straight weekly gains for the S&P 500. But the headline numbers hide an unusually lopsided story.

The Senate passed $70 billion immigration enforcement funding bill, Capitol Hill struggles to find consensus on how to regulate AI, and the Trump Accounts app is live.

Begin with the print itself, because the headline flatters the internals only slightly. The bulk of May's gains came from leisure and hospitality, which added 70,000 jobs, nearly half of them in food services and drinking places; local government contributed 55,000, health care 35,000, and manufacturing a modest 7,000, while financial activities actually shed positions.

Every dollar in a growth equity index reflects two decisions: which companies to own and how much of each to hold. Indexes form intricate systematic rules to make the first decision. The second decision—position sizing—is usually determined by market-cap weighting.

With the latest CPI report showing that inflation is likely here to stay, it could be time to pivot towards ETFs with downside protection.

LPL Research analyzes bond markets as yields rise, exploring Fed policy expectations, inflation trends, and whether bad news is already priced into Treasuries.

Equity markets should remain supported by strong earnings and capital investment trends through 2026, but market concentration and macro risks leave less room for error.

The war in Iran is putting pressure on airlines. Higher jet fuel prices are cutting into profit margins, and the risk of a prolonged conflict may reduce travel demand in Europe and Asia. But for lessors, these gathering clouds may come with a silver lining.

The takeaway for both HY and EM corporates is straightforward. Once oil prices are above breakeven, further moves in oil tend to matter less for credit performance.

If you think tracking error tells you how well a portfolio “tracks” the benchmark, it doesn’t. If you think it signals underperformance, that’s not right either. And if you believe high tracking error is inherently better or worse depending on the manager, that’s not the whole story.

In Part 1, we explored why Dollar Dominance Remains Alive and Well. Today, we will explore the stronger-dollar trade, the one macro trade that nobody is sized for.

The Numbers Are Staggering – The Magnificent Seven stocks now carry a combined market cap larger than the GDPs of Germany, Japan, India, and the UK combined. Meanwhile, 2025 tech-sector capital expenditures rivaled the peak-year spending of the Manhattan Project, rural electrification, the Apollo moon shot, and the Interstate Highway System — all at once.

While job growth has reaccelerated, supporting consumption, the underlying income picture is less encouraging.

Investors have enjoyed a favorable run. If the year ended today, it would mark the seventh time in the last nine years that stock portfolios generated double-digit returns. Housing prices remain near historic highs, while bond investors have benefited from elevated yields over the past three years.

Building resilient portfolios in markets delivering mixed messages can be a challenging affair. In our ongoing engagement with the retail and advisor community at VettaFi, we hear first-hand just how investors are tackling that challenge this year.

Markets have treated AI as a gold rush of LLMs, chips and cloud applications, but as the industry shifts from chatbots to agentic systems — AI that autonomously runs workflows and makes decisions — hyperscalers are now facing a brutal physical bottleneck.

Interest rates remain one of the primary concerns for investors as Kevin Warsh has officially assumed leadership at the U.S. Federal Reserve (Fed). While we believe the possibility of a rate cut has diminished considerably, we are not yet expecting additional rate hikes.

The job market was surprisingly strong in May with non-farm payrolls growing 172,000, beating even the strongest forecasts for the month. As a result, the futures market is now pricing in a quarter-point rate hike later this year and more likely than not another quarter point rate hike sometime in 2027.

It’s no secret that investors are on the lookout for opportunities in their fixed income portfolios. This is especially true in today’s shifting landscape. Equities are hot, perhaps too hot, and many investors want strong performances out of their bonds in order to keep up.

Fertilizers sit at the center of this transmission mechanism. As much as a third of the global supply of these commodities passes through the Strait of Hormuz, which has largely been closed for three months. This has triggered shortages and a price spike.

In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past few months, three of the world’s largest and most consequential private companies—SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI—are preparing to go public in the same year. Together, they could add nearly $4 trillion in market cap to public markets.