Artificial Intelligence

What do you do if you have a standard that’s not being met? Move the goalposts! Of course, you could work harder to meet the goal. But that’s hard. So, why not just change the standard and make it easier to meet?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

As we go to press, fighting in the Mideast has escalated, sending crude higher, but stocks, in early Monday trade, have shown remarkable stability following Friday’s deep selloff.

Chris Galipeau and Taylor Topoussis discuss high-conviction insights that go beyond media headlines.

The world is not ending. It is restructuring. But restructuring, as I noted at the outset, comes with an asterisk. What is really happening is a replacement, of assumptions, of guarantees, of the architecture that held everything together for eighty years.

In light of all this, our own view is that markets remain well positioned to continue to rally over the medium term, though given their stratospheric rise of late, a bit of a pullback might be in order in the short term.

With tech stocks pushing to new highs on enthusiasm around transformational technologies, the real question isn’t just momentum. It’s whether markets are becoming frothy, even bubble‑like, reminiscent of the dot‑com era. We don’t think so.

Confirming that the bar is high for artificial intelligence (AI) semiconductor makers’ earnings reports, shares of Broadcom (AVGO) plunged 12.59% on June 4, a day after the chip giant delivered quarterly results. The results weren’t the problem. It was a lack of a positive update regarding AI semiconductor demand.

In the first phase of the generative AI boom, the winning strategy was straightforward: own the physical bottleneck. Alphabet’s plan announced this week to raise $80 billion suggests that the next phase may hinge on something else—the ability to finance AI capacity at scale without undermining returns.

The latest Emerging Markets Insights discusses companies across various sectors that have expressed cautious optimism for the second half of 2026 despite ongoing geopolitical pressures and higher input costs. Templeton Global Investments highlight what they observed at a recently attended summit.

Ride the momentum wave. Discover how tech-fueled factors propelled momentum and high-beta ETFs to historic, benchmark-crushing gains.

When it comes to systematic investing, numbers tell only part of the story. Traditional quantitative models rely on prices, earnings, and balance sheet data, but words matter too.

The top-performing non-leveraged ETFs of 2026 span a distinct blend of digital assets, next-generation semiconductor technology, and localized international equity plays. For advisors assessing portfolio allocations heading into the second half of the year, these performance figures highlight a sustained risk-on appetite among investors.

Get ready for an absolute blockbuster of a summer, and then some. While mega-cap tech stocks have been busy hogging the headlines on the corporate event calendar, a quiet transformation has been taking place just off the exchange floors. The IPO market, which spent the better part of the last few years stuck in a defensive crouch, has officially smashed the accelerator to start 2026.

It’s May 2026 and once again civilization and financial markets have made it 5-ish months into a new year without self-combusting like a Spinal Tap drummer. It is important to note that dozens of people and stocks spontaneously combust every year, but despite the increasing universality of AI, it’s “just not really widely reported.”

The U.S. economy appears resilient, judging from key economic measures. AI-driven capex continues to power investment, support equity markets, and sustain a wealth effect that has propped up consumption. Real GDP growth remains positive. Private sector balance sheets are in generally good condition and many higher income and wealthy households have benefited from equity markets gains.

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.