Small Cap

Our investment teams weigh what comes next for stocks, bonds, and AI to help you explain what may come next.

Election Day delivered a decisive shift in the political landscape. Democrats regained control of both the House and Senate and captured several key governorships. Affordability concerns, unease about the economy and dissatisfaction with the war in Iran all played a role, consistent with polling heading into the vote.

The strong October nonfarm payrolls report has effectively settled the debate over what the Federal Reserve (Fed) is likely to do at its December Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting. We expect the Fed to raise the federal funds rate by another 25 basis points. Beyond December, however, the outlook remains far less certain. We continue to expect the Fed to remain on hold throughout 2027.

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

Portfolio Manager Denny Fish explains why the market was justified in assigning a higher level of regulatory risk to the AI ecosystem after the midterm elections. But in his view, the secular strength of this theme, along with the massive bottlenecks and geopolitical implications, mean that this historic investment cycle will likely continue.

Franklin Templeton Institute’s Stephen Dover and Larry Hatheway opine on the US stock market’s recent volatility in the wake of the US midterm elections and the path forward for investors.

A stock trading at half its former price is not necessarily a bargain. Perhaps its earnings power has halved or its balance sheet can no longer support the business. Maybe its generous dividend is being financed with borrowed money. A low valuation ratio tells us what we are paying relative to one measure of fundamentals. It does not, by itself, tell us what the business is worth or whether those fundamentals will endure.

The 2026 midterms may have changed Washington, but they haven’t changed the macro regime. Tariffs, geopolitics, and deficits remain key forces for investors.

Amid a rapidly changing world, where China’s rise as an industrial powerhouse has nations around the globe on alert, we believe that American reindustrialization will be an important driver of investment returns in the decade ahead. 

We have been writing extensively about the rapid evolution of crypto ETFs, and recent data reinforces why digital assets remain top of mind for wealth managers. According to CoinShares, financial advisors hold roughly 55% of Wall Street’s total bitcoin ETF stake at the end of the second quarter, cementing their role as primary drivers of long-term digital asset adoption.

The voters have spoken, and they’ve decided that divided government is the best path forward. Democrats have been handed a majority in the House and Senate where they’ll have to work with a Republican president to manage the country’s financial well-being. What does history tell us about markets and the economy under divided rule? Here are four things that investors should consider.

October reminded investors that markets rarely move in response to a single factor. The US economy continued to expand at a moderate pace, supported by healthy consumer spending and solid business activity, even as markets contended with higher energy prices, renewed inflation concerns and heightened geopolitical tensions.

Notwithstanding that the major U.S. equity indexes are sitting on healthy double-digit gains heading into the final two months of 2026, the calm at the index level belies a lot of churn and rotation underneath.

Taken together, these trends point to a healthier, broader economic backdrop than the AI-driven narrative alone would suggest. For us as investors, it reinforces the case for individual, fundamental stockpicking over simply riding the AI wave. There's more supporting this market than one theme, and that breadth matters for how we position portfolios.

Following the U.S. midterm elections, investors will naturally focus on what the results mean for fiscal policy, geopolitics, and the regulatory outlook. But there’s another more immediate way the midterms have already mattered for the economy: The campaigns themselves have provided a meaningful boost to U.S. growth.

One concern raised by the recent backup in rates is whether CRE is about to relive the stress of 2023, when depressed post-pandemic office demand coincided with rising rates and a regional bank crisis, including Silicon Valley Bank and First Republic Bank. The selloff in public REITs suggests investors are repricing property values for a higher-rate world.

Elevated Treasury yields have created attractive income opportunities across the fixed income markets. Corporate and municipal bonds offer additional yield opportunities, while positively sloped yield curves provide investors with further motivations to extend maturities. For many investors, the opportunity to capture higher income and lock it in for longer periods has renewed interest in exploring bond swaps.

Sometimes the best lessons are the simplest ones, and right now, the market is offering a good old-fashioned lesson on the benefits of diversification. Stay invested, stay diversified, and stick to your financial plan.

We expect the rotation to continue. The earnings bar is high—very high. Any minor misstep has led to punishment, which has led to rotation. Rotation is not a bad thing, and if you are running a diversified equity portfolio, you should be in good shape.

The Federal Reserve meeting last week was largely uneventful. The S&P 500 and the 10-year Treasury yield ending the trading session almost exactly where they stood before the Fed’s announcements. Despite some disagreements within the Fed, there was virtually no forward guidance.

While market valuations remain on the loftier side, investors face a familiar dilemma. Chasing pure growth leaves portfolios vulnerable to sharp drawdowns, while hiding in traditional “deep value” risks inheriting mature businesses in structural decline — classic value traps.

A few years back, I compared two island-nations whose leaders came to power in 1959. At the time, Cuba was by far the wealthier of the two—rich in sugar, tobacco and tourism—while Singapore was a sleepy former colonial outpost with almost no natural resources.

Last week, the AI trade began to crack further with Alphabet’s release, missing on both the top and bottom lines. Mirroring Meta’s print from the prior week, massive AI capex turned free cash flow negative, alarming investors.

As the days grow shorter and the nights longer, Americans will turn their clocks back, shifting from daylight saving time to standard time. But the clocks won’t be the only thing changing. Americans will also head to the polls, with the potential to reshape Congress in the 2026 midterm elections.

With the one constant being that gold fell again, this time by 6.6%, October’s price action is a mirror image of what happened in markets in September. In September, tech and momentum led the charge higher, with anything value- or rate-related leading the selloff. October was the exact opposite.

The stock market doesn’t wait for GDP. The ratio of consumer discretionary stocks to consumer staples has fallen about 19% from its late-2025 peak, suggesting the so-called “smart money” has been quietly moving out of what people want and into what people need for most of this year.⁵

Credit problems in the AI space are not going to be contained to just the AI space. It is going to have impacts all throughout the economy and global markets. I guarantee you central banks are paying attention as it is affecting what they have to charge for sovereign debt.

Starting December 6, 2026, Nasdaq and NYSE Arca will officially launch extended trading sessions, expanding U.S. stock trading to up to 23 hours a day, five days a week.

In today’s modern financial landscape, market-capitalization-weighted indices dominate the investment ecosystem with trillions of dollars tracking broad market indices such as the S&P 500 and the Russell 1000. However, a research article by RAFI Indices™, adapted from the CFA Institute Research Foundation series The Active Side of Indexing, exposes flaws within cap-weighted benchmarks.

Large-cap stocks may be better built for 5% Treasury yields than their smaller rivals, according to State Street Investment Management’s quarterly outlook. The 10-year yield climbed 0.81 percentage points last quarter to 5.28%, a near 20-year high.

The strength of the US economy during the third quarter was hardly a surprise. We expected economic growth of 3.5%, and the first estimate came in only slightly below that at a 3.4% quarter-over-quarter, seasonally adjusted annualized rate. Consumer spending and investment tied to the AI and data center buildout remained the primary drivers of growth.

Chuck Carnevale analyzes seven stocks using FAST Graphs, showing how earnings, cash flow, and valuation charts reveal the business behind the stock price—and why a popular stock is not always an attractive investment.

Today I want to tell you about the city of Shenzhen. Unless you are in global manufacturing, you may not have heard of this Chinese city of 18 million people. As recently as 1979, the area had only 30,000 residents, living in small fishing villages. Today, it is one of the most modern cities in the world. It is also quite wealthy.

In this episode of the Money Metals Midweek Memo, host Mike Maharrey considers how artificial intelligence could affect trust, cybersecurity, and investors’ access to their money. He also discusses silver’s sharp correction, the long history of gold jewelry, and ways listeners might use precious metals as a physical store of value.

The economy appears to be settling into a new equilibrium. Economic growth has moderated to a sustainable pace. While inflation has picked up over the last few months, there does not seem to be a fundamental shift in the underlying trend.

The AI investment boom has become one of the largest sources of demand in the U.S. economy. Announced annual capital spending across large U.S. technology companies points to more than $1 trillion in desired investment, up dramatically from only a few years ago.

Royce Investment Partners: Co-CIO Francis Gannon details why recent volatility looks like the typical pattern of a US small-cap leadership cycle.

Investors may be overlooking one of the most established drivers of long-term wealth creation: dividend yield. In his October insight, Richard Bernstein, Global Head of Macro & Customized Investing, examines the broad availability of dividend opportunities, how income-focused stocks have performed relative to growth stocks, and why dividend yield may help investors balance portfolios increasingly geared toward capital gains and higher risk.

After overshooting projections for years, AI capex is slowing down. The shift doesn’t spell the end of the AI trade but a move to a more mature, predictable cycle that favors higher-quality borrowers.

Milton Friedman famously said, “inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon,” emphasizing that sustained inflation occurs when money expands persistently faster than real output.

How many eyeball-grabbing headlines can we stuff into the next few weeks? For tech investors, AI concerns mount, with rising credit default swap prices among the hyperscalers and sagging neocloud equities.

The credit market had become more discerning. Companies with greater leverage, more uncertain cash flows, or business models requiring enormous amounts of capital appeared to be more scrutinized.

LPL Research examines three keys to earnings season: broader profit growth, margin pressures, and high expectations amid continued AI investment.

Economic data that continued to show a strong U.S. economy, housing aside, took a back seat this week as investors once again focused on potential risks to future growth: rising energy prices, sticky inflation, and most importantly, questions about the sustainability of the artificial intelligence (AI) boom.

The human brain has a remarkable ability to adjust what it considers to be normal, oftentimes very quickly. Experiencing or achieving something that might have previously seemed like a long shot can quickly shift our mindset to expect that outcome over and over again. While yields have been very attractive for the past few years compared to the past several decades, we recently experienced a spike even higher across a range of fixed income products.

US midterm elections take place on Tuesday, November 3. Currently, the Republican party is in control of the House and the Senate. This vote will essentially be a referendum on the Republican party’s body of work. It’s likely the composition of either the House or the Senate will change.

Ken Griffin told a room full of investors recently that we are “almost certainly” in an AI bubble. He may well be correct in that assessment, and there are plenty of media narratives that support that view.

Rick Polsinello, Christian Galipeau Discuss high-conviction insights that go beyond media headlines.

The next two weeks bring an unusually crowded lineup of potential market-moving catalysts, including a Federal Reserve (Fed) policy meeting, the busiest stretch of third-quarter 2026 earnings season, the Treasury’s Quarterly Refunding Announcement and the midterm elections.

We have been arguing that the reset higher in yields has restored the dual role of bonds in multi-asset portfolios: providing attractive income while once again offering the potential for meaningful risk mitigation. This month’s tech market turbulence has provided a clear example: As equities came under pressure, U.S. Treasury yields fell amid a flight to safety, allowing duration to behave like a diversifier again.

Last year, U.S. charitable giving hit a record $617.20 billion, according to Giving USA. That’s the first time it’s ever topped $600 billion. Individuals gave $394.2 billion of that, foundations gave $117.15 billion, bequests added $62.19 billion and corporations contributed $43.67 billion.