As more individuals turn to non-traditional financial advice — offered through social media, artificial intelligence, or other online services and platforms — advisors will be tasked with fostering a greater sense of trust with the public.

Elon Musk has bucked the trend of industrial conglomerate breakups, including such illustrious companies as General Electric and Honeywell International Inc., and decided to form a somewhat unwieldy company that makes rockets, spacecraft, satellites, antennas, modems and now computer chips. With SpaceX’s purchase of Musk’s xAI in February, the world’s leading space company was married to an AI startup and the X social media platform.

While US financial markets brace for what could be the three biggest initial public offerings ever, most entrepreneurship in the US is headed in the opposite direction: New businesses are shrinking.

There is a growing risk of economic overheating in the US as the artificial intelligence boom expands beyond semiconductors and spills into the broader economy — never mind the tame wage growth and house prices that would typically point in the opposite direction.

The average size of a single-family house built in the 1960s was about 1,500 square feet, and homes within multifamily units were about 800 square feet. Now those figures are more than 2,000 square feet and more than 1,200 square feet, respectively.

We separate this article into two parts. Part one is the optimistic case: an AI-induced, productivity-led economic boom in which the benefits spread quickly to society. Part two will address a more bearish outlook: the possibility of a large gap in the distribution of AI's productivity benefits, accruing to corporations much more quickly than to employees.

The U.S. stock market is extremely expensive. In the past, stock markets have not remained expensive for long. Is it because of artificial intelligence? Perhaps, but a similar argument was made during the dot-com bubble.

Vanguard’s Total World Stock ETF (ticker VT) is an elegant product: a single fund that gives you cap-weighted exposure to the entire global equity market. For investors who want simplicity, it’s hard to beat. But is simplicity costing you money?

Put succinctly, the world today requires substantially more electricity than only a few years ago. AI, electrification, reshored manufacturing, and population growth in the developing world are converging into a demand curve that the existing global power system simply cannot meet.

Private credit managers are increasingly turning to the once-unthinkable: Trading in and out of loans to dump troubled assets and hunt for bargains amid the industry’s first stress test after years of breakneck growth.

US stocks advanced as investors struck an upbeat tone ahead of a long holiday weekend, with optimism fueled by hopes for resolution of hostilities in the Middle East, resilient economic data and relentless enthusiasm for artificial intelligence-linked trades.

Hedge funds have been selling the scorching rally in US semiconductor stocks to book profits, while keeping their overall exposure to the AI theme, according to traders at Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

Even if armchair investors are fleeing private credit or panicking that their unlisted shares in Anthropic PBC are now invalid, the long-term trend is clear: Public markets keep losing ground to private funds.

At first glance, the retreat of foreign asset managers is ominous. Signs of a domestic retail frenzy are everywhere. Cash deposits in local brokerage accounts have reached 137 trillion won ($91 billion), a two-third jump from six months ago.

There’s a whiff of panic among investors these days. US Treasury yields have climbed to levels unseen in more than a year at the same time as a furious rally has left stocks near all-time highs. Surely, both moves can’t coexist for long, goes the narrative.

Wall Street is racing to turn computing power into a tradable commodity with the first ETFs being filed even before the futures contracts they would track have started to trade.

Nvidia Corp., facing more investor skepticism, used its latest quarterly report to tout progress in diversifying the company, which aims to rely less on the giant data center operators that have fueled its runaway growth.

Najimah Roberson, a lifelong renter, spent the past two years searching around Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for a home she could afford — getting outbid nearly 30 times along the way.

Reassessing legacy systems through a modern lens can help firms identify where closed, context-aware platforms may offer a stronger foundation for communication governance, operational efficiency and regulatory confidence. Open AI models helped kickstart automation in compliance. Closed platforms will likely make it sustainable.

The next generation may inherit substantial assets. Whether they inherit the health to enjoy them — or the burden of managing preventable family health crises — may matter just as much. Advisors who broaden the definition of legacy planning may be better positioned to protect both.

AI is unlikely to replace wealth managers — at least not in the foreseeable future. But it now has the power to expose the gaps between genuine, client-first investment advice and other approaches in a way the industry has not yet seen.

Space has evolved from a niche corner of the stock market into an area that offers the potential for diversity and growth. The euphoria around SpaceX’s market entry is driving fresh investor flows into the sector. Since the news of the offering first became public in early December, smaller space and related stocks have soared.

Turns out, loading up on technology giants isn’t the only route to better returns. Value companies, too, stand a decent chance of trouncing the market — as long as several conditions are met.

For much of the year, chip stocks have been powering the market higher. Now, Nvidia Corp.’s earnings have a chance to confirm that the rally has more room to run — or add another brick to investors’ wall of worry.

Veteran strategist Jeff Currie said the world is in the early stages of a commodity supercycle that may last another decade or more as the artificial intelligence buildout collides with chronic underinvestment in energy and materials capacity.

The Texas Permanent School Fund bought more than 29 million shares totaling about $740 million worth of the State Street IG Public & Private Credit ETF, trading under the ticker PRIV, in the first quarter, according to a filing Friday.

Investors need to understand what they own, how it may perform in different environments, and why it is structured the way it is. When advisors build this education into their work, it gives clients the discipline and expectations they need to stay the course when volatility rears its head.

Student loan debt is a legitimate concern, and the return on a college degree varies enormously by field, institution, and student. The key is to look realistically and specifically at each student’s needs and interests, each family’s finances, and all the sources of funding and support that might be available.

The percentage-of-assets fee is so embedded in advisory economics that most firms treat it as a fixed constant rather than a business decision. It shapes how you staff, how you plan, and how you define the relationship with clients. But the AUM model is neither as old nor as inevitable as it feels.

Bringing family into an advisory firm is not a shortcut. It can add complexity and raise expectations. But when the mission is clear, standards are applied consistently, and systems are strong, involving family can create meaningful long-term stability. That stability, however, depends on fairness.

The 30-year rate increased six basis points to 5.18% on Tuesday, a level last seen on the brink of the global financial crisis in 2007, rising alongside US government yields across maturities.

Investors are pouring money into commodities funds as the US-Iran war stokes inflation, according to Invesco Ltd.

The nothing-burger that came out of the Xi-Trump summit drove home a new reality for global investors. The NACHO trade, which stands for “not a chance Hormuz opens,” is on. Prospects of prolonged inflation have risen, sending global bond yields higher and the US dollar stronger.

Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell steps down this month after proving himself an exemplary public servant. Compelled to deal with a president intent on telling the central bank what to do, his response was exactly right. Reluctant to confront the White House until he had no choice, he then did so firmly, without needless drama or any trace of ego.

We’ve all been in meetings that “could have been an email,” so why not have a jury trial that could have been an AI prompt?

The sooner the mass of retail private credit managers realize they are zombies and give up the ghost, the sooner we can burn the whole thing to the ground and conjure a better model from the ashes. But there is no time like a crisis to have conversations about how to make the structure work better for everyone in the future!

Semiconductor stocks, along with some computer hardware companies, are the market’s latest AI darlings. Momentum and gamma are driving the outperformance, and, in their wake, a supportive narrative is trying to justify it.

You are undoubtedly seeing in the news that high earners are leaving New York, Los Angeles, and other metro areas. This does not begin to address the magnitude of the problem. There are dozens of cities that are trending towards fiscal collapse. Indeed, taxpayers are leaving.

What do “the utilities of retirement” refer to? Buy gas and electric stocks and live off the dividends? No. Not in this article. We’re talking about utility as an economic term of art, meaning reward, pleasure, and satisfaction.

I was in West Texas recently to witness firsthand the emerging practical applications of artificial intelligence. What I saw bolstered my conviction about the technology’s progress and the need to mold it rather than resist the change.

Investors were forced to pay attention Friday, when the most interest-rate sensitive corners of the market saw big plunges in an ugly market selloff. The small-cap Russell 2000 Index dropped 2.4% for the biggest single-day decline since November.

NextEra Energy Inc. agreed to pay about $67 billion in stock for Dominion Energy Inc. in the biggest power acquisition ever, creating a giant utility extending from Florida to the data centers clustered in Virginia.

Yields on US bonds dipped as much as three basis points Monday after Iran’s semi-official Tasnim reported that Washington proposed a temporary waiver on Iran oil sanctions until the final agreement, citing a source close to the negotiation team.

In the race to build the infrastructure that powers artificial intelligence, Alphabet Inc.’s Google has an enviable position: The company has a healthy cloud computing business, makes its own chips, and has struck deals to share them with companies like Anthropic PBC and Meta Platforms Inc.

America is fast becoming a country with two economies: a stagnant one for men and a growing one for women. So far this year, the US has created more than 165,000 private-sector jobs, and 72% of them went to women. To some extent this reflects a structural change in the economy, as growth is in industries more likely to employ women, such as healthcare.

Rising bond yields curbed traders’ appetite for risky bets early Friday, sending stocks lower following a weeks-long record-setting rally driven by a rush of cash into all things artificial intelligence.

Investors shed government bonds around the world, propelling borrowing costs to multi-year highs from Japan to the US amid intensifying fears that war-driven inflation will force central banks to pursue higher interest rates.

Elon Musk’s ambitions for artificial intelligence are coming together in a former vacuum-cleaner factory in Memphis, Tennessee.

With stocks near all-time highs, the need for change is hardly obvious. Proponents argue that requiring fewer reports will reduce the time and cost of compliance. Some blame an increase in disclosure demands over the last three decades for a sharp decline in the number of public companies.