Leveraged and Inverse Funds

The S&P 500 was flat in July 2026 as semiconductors fell 29%, energy gained nearly 13% on higher oil, and long-term Treasury yields reached their highest levels since 2007.

Investors remain cautious despite bullish positioning, as rotations curb speculation while record margin debt and high equity allocations raise longer-term risks.

High-net-worth investors and institutional managers continue to allocate heavily to muni bond ETFs to lock in attractive yields.

July 2026 was a flattish month for markets. The S&P 500 index was down slightly. Value did well, while momentum did poorly. Smallcaps, midcaps, and emerging markets, all of which have been the year’s best performers, had a bad month. Commodities, driven largely by oil prices, led the pack, as the fragile ceasefire in Iran failed to hold.

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.

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.

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.

Private equity has become easier than ever for individual investors to buy. Founders, executives, physicians, and business owners now regularly see private funds offered through banks, wealth platforms, feeders, evergreen vehicles, or registered interval funds. However, just because these funds are more readily available, and at lower minimums, does not mean they should immediately be invested in.

In the current macroeconomic landscape marked by higher-for-longer interest rates, investors looking to optimize their short-term capital allocations may want to consider collateralized loan obligations (CLOs) as a higher-yielding potential alternative to traditional cash proxies like money market funds.

Leverage, ratings arbitrage, liquidity transformation, and a growing willingness to embrace complexity and illiquidity are becoming more visible across parts of the financial system.

Discover Aberdeen’s closed-end funds (CEFs) for high yields, illiquid assets, long-term investments, and resilient income for 2026.

If you own treasuries, you need to make two separate decisions rather than one blended bet. The liquidity sleeve holds the bill exposure and does the work people mistakenly ask the long end to do. The duration sleeve stays deliberately small, sized as recession insurance rather than as a conviction call on falling inflation.

On July 28, Morgan Stanley launched two new spot crypto ETFs on NYSE Arca. The Morgan Stanley Ethereum Trust (MSSE) and the Morgan Stanley Solana Trust (MSOL) provide spot price exposure to underlying ethereum (ETH) and solana (SOL), alongside additional distributions from staking yields.

A wave of new active ETFs is reshaping the fund landscape, and advisors now need extra care when screening funds for their models.

Semiconductor exchange-traded funds have gained more than 25% this year. Intel Corporation’s (INTC) second-quarter earnings report after today’s close could test whether that rally continues.

Equity markets have shown resilience amid persistent headwinds, supported by index evolution and earnings strength

In the Warsh Fed's new era of two-way risk, bonds offer something rare: potential downside risk mitigation that investors get paid to hold.

A major milestone for the story of the stock market this year looms this evening. Alphabet (GOOGL) will report its earnings today after the bell. Reports suggest the firm will have big, positive news to share, so investors may have questions.

VettaFi’s Midyear Market Outlook symposium Thursday saw industry leaders take on the big questions. Where is the market going? How should investors and advisors navigate uncertainty and potential volatility? Leaders from Fidelity Investments and Invesco both joined for one of the early segments, focused on innovative U.S. strategies.

AI is changing the investment landscape, but fundamentals still matter, and we remain focused on quality companies with growing free cash flow.

Whenever I speak at investment conferences, I like to point out that we invest in a number of publicly traded airports. I even list them: Spain’s Aena. Aeroports de Paris. Zurich Airport. Airports of Thailand. Two of the world’s largest operators, Grupo Aeroportuario del Sureste and Grupo Aeroportuario del Pacifico, trade in Mexico.

Decades of data across global markets reach the same verdict: the more frequently retail traders trade, the worse they perform. The infrastructure has never been more inviting. The losses have never been more documented. Here are some key statistics we will dive into further.

The first half of 2026 reinforced the importance of balance, selectivity and income generation. Franklin Income Investors Chief Investment Officer Ed Perks discusses how markets have evolved, where opportunities are emerging, and why diversification remains critical heading into the second half of the year.

Entering Wednesday, the Russell 2000 and S&P SmallCap 600 indexes were up an average of 20.8% year-to-date, confirming small-cap stocks are back with a vengeance. Arguably overlooked in that scenario, some vibrant ETFs represent higher-quality approaches to smaller stocks.

On July 15, Direxion launched the Direxion Daily SK Hynix Bull 2X ETF (SKHL), seeking to replicate double the daily performance of the South Korean semiconductor manufacturers Sk Hynix (SKHY). The fund provides leveraged exposure to the world’s leading supplier of high-bandwidth memory chips. It boasts an expense ratio of 97 basis points.

Tax-aware long-short strategies are no longer the exclusive domain of institutional investors. As separate account delivery has expanded access, more advisors are asking whether tax-aware long-short belongs in their clients’ portfolios. Here are five practical considerations to help you decide.

The rules governing global commodity markets are starting to witness a profound shift, which is putting critical minerals at the forefront of policy. On a recent episode of ETF Guide’s Metals in Motion, Justin Tolman, Senior Portfolio Manager and Economic Geologist at Sprott Asset Management, discussed this dynamic.

Friday, July 10, may have been ordinary for those outside the investment community, but for folks engaged with the market, it marked an opportunity to gain exposure to the second most valuable company in South Korea. On Friday, SK Hynix (SKHY) became available to U.S. investors via the Nasdaq.

In June we pointed out that Health Care looks cheap. Even though it has been rallying hard of late, the sector continues to trade at a 59% price-to-sales discount to the S&P 500, despite having an 18% return on equity (ROE) that is just a hair below the 19% ROE accorded the S&P 500.

Although economic conditions did not change much between the first and second quarters, investors were far more bullish in the second quarter.

For decades, traditional index-based ETFs have served as the low-cost foundational anchor for core allocations, consistently demonstrating that outperforming a broad market index is an uphill battle.

After a difficult start to the year, investor sentiment reached a low point near the end of March as concerns around inflation, geopolitics, and rising interest rates weighed on risk assets.

The current level of stock market valuations remains – easily – the most speculative extreme in U.S. financial history, beyond both the 1929 and 2000 extremes. Our baseline estimate is that the S&P 500 has a material risk of losing something on the order of 75% over the completion of this cycle.

LPL Research examines how sticky inflation, Fed leadership changes, and AI-driven borrowing are shaping the fixed income outlook for 2026.

Fixed income investors continue to grapple with an uncertain macro environment, dominated by higher-for-longer interest rates and a new-look U.S. Federal Reserve, in which rate hikes may be forthcoming. Rather than make a directional bet on interest rates to combat duration risk, consider floating-rate ETFs, a compelling option.

Every year in early July, we update our interactive Periodic Table of Commodities Returns to reflect the performance of raw materials in the first six months of the year. Maybe I’m biased, but I believe it’s one of the clearest snapshots of the commodities landscape you’ll find anywhere.

If you knew you were standing inside a stock market bubble, you wouldn’t be standing in it for long. You’d sell. So would I, and so would everyone reading this. And if spotting market bubbles was something everyone could do in real time, the bubble couldn’t form in the first place.

Morningstar data shows most active strategies lag passive indexes, but selective active fixed income ETFs can generate alpha.

For investors using direct-indexed equity strategies, tax-loss harvesting becomes a major focus, as it may help improve after-tax returns—but we think the calendar for tax-loss selling can make a big difference. Weekly tax-loss harvesting, in our view, offers the potential for more efficient tax-loss harvesting and more effective index tracking in turbulent markets.

Markets enter the second half of 2026 facing a familiar wall of worry—geopolitical conflict, oil prices, inflation, Federal Reserve policy, and questions around the durability of an AI-led equity rally. Yet the economic backdrop still looks resilient: growth remains solid, inflation has moderated, unemployment is reasonable, and market leadership appears to be broadening.

Fixed income experts James Donahue, John Lloyd and Mike Talaga revisit the levels of supply related to the AI buildout and explain why they remain cautious towards investment grade tech issuance.

Discover the top 10 most-read charts from the first half of 2026, covering historic market valuations, record margin debt, recession indicators, and global index performance.

Chief Investment Officer Sean Taylor reviews a strong second quarter for emerging markets, where AI and reindustrialization were key drivers of investor returns.

Assessing the year so far, much of the portfolios’ declines have been a compression of valuations, not a deterioration of earnings. For many of our holdings, the two have moved in opposite directions. Revenues, profitability, and cash flow have continued to build, even as the multiples placed against them have fallen.

On June 30, Defiance debuted the new Defiance KSM TipRanks Analyst ETF (RANK). With an expense ratio of 60 basis points, this fund aims to leverage Wall Street’s highest-rated analyst consensus data to capitalize on U.S. market momentum.

Rising prices increase the value of collateral in every margin account, which automatically increases how much each investor can borrow under Reg T. Debt rises BECAUSE the market rose, not the reverse. That single fact is what breaks the ratios we’re about to examine, and it lies at the core of why margin debt risk is so often misjudged.

Significant interest appears to be accumulating around capacity expansion in the market. The primary mechanism driving this activity may be a structural capital expenditure cycle (CapEx). One where a prevailing market dynamic could transform one company’s CapEx directly into another company’s revenue. .

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

Higher rates, weaker underwriting, and software concentration are exposing vulnerabilities in direct lending and leveraged loans, while high yield bonds appear better positioned.