Weekly Financial Trends and Insights
Every week in our Key Wealth Institute emails, we dive into trending topics and their potential impacts to investors to deliver timely insights and advice from our in-house experts. Here, you’ll find all of our Key Questions in one place, so you always have access to the latest market information.
Key Questions: Do Cracks in the Credit Markets Mean US Corporates’ Financial Health Has Cracked?
In times of macroeconomic uncertainty, both equity and fixed income investors look to the credit markets for indications of economic deterioration and company distress. As of this writing (April 7, 2025), both equity and credit markets have continued their sell-offs associated with President Trump’s April 2nd tariffs policies.
Key Questions: Liberation Day: What Happened? What’s Next?
Wednesday, April 2, 2025, US President Donald Trump announced new tariffs far greater and far broader than anticipated. As a result, and in brief, the impact associated with the president’s new trade policies may potentially cause short-term inflation to rise, economic growth to slow, recession risks to increase, and the geopolitical environment to be altered, possibly for decades to come.
Key Questions: How Much Tech Do You Really Own?
Technology has become an increasingly dominant force in US stock markets – and thus in many investors’ portfolios. Over the past 15 years, tech companies have delivered standout growth and returns, causing broad market indices to tilt heavily toward the tech sector.
Key Questions: What Makes a Good Investment Fund Manager?
Within Key Wealth, we design customized portfolio solutions comprised of high-quality, US publicly traded securities, principally stocks and bonds managed by my colleagues led by Steve Hoedt (equities) and Rajeev Sharma (fixed income). To complement these holdings, we utilize a wide array of investment vehicles spanning the full spectrum of asset classes. Moreover, our investment platform is completely “open architecture," meaning it consists of options solely selected based on our clients’ best interests.
Key Questions: How Do We Invest in Tech?
In the nearly 16 years since the S&P 500 bottomed in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis (in March 2009), technology stocks have vastly outperformed the broader stock market, returning an annualized +20.9% vs. +16.3% for the S&P 500 (as of 1/31/25), and as result, these stocks now represent sizeable allocations within many portfolios.
Key Questions: Q4 Earnings Recap “What Did We Learn From Fourth Quarter Earnings?”
Earnings reporting season for the recently ended quarter is nearly complete, and between the flood of activity from the new administration and the emergence of a potential breakthrough moment in Artificial Intelligence (“AI”), it has been an extremely eventful one. We analyzed dozens of such reports and identified three “key themes” that best summarize the quarter.
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