State Street’s chief investment strategist, Michael Arone, says he’s still bullish on the market heading into 2026—just not comfortably so. “I’m uncomfortably bullish,” Arone said last Thursday to a crowded room of wealth managers at the Forbes/SHOOK Top Advisor Summit at the Wynn Las Vegas. “We’re going to get stimulus from the One Big Beautiful Bill—with a big tax refund next season, more rate cuts from the Fed, and continued double-digit earnings growth,” he said. “That’s a powerful combination but the margin for error is small.” With the S&P 500 hovering near record highs and trading around 26 times trailing…

A widespread outage at Amazon Web Services on Monday reverberated through the global economy, offering a stark reminder of the financial industry’s deep dependence on a handful of tech giants. The disruption, primarily centered on AWS’s massive US-EAST-1 region in northern Virginia, caused connectivity issues and elevated error rates for thousands of companies worldwide, immediately disrupting financial services on trading platforms and consumer banking apps, among others.The incident, attributed by AWS engineers to an issue within the EC2 internal network and later tied to a Domain Name System failure, quickly became a global systemic risk test for finance. Cryptocurrency exchange…

In the 1990s, Muhlenkamp Fund’s clever value investing formula made it a star among no load mutual funds. Then the long tech bull market left it in the dust. A new generation is making a comeback. Twenty years ago Wexford, PA-based Muhlenkamp Fund was a perennial star on Forbes annual mutual fund Honor Roll list. Year-after-year it bested the S&P 500 using a low risk investment formula seeking large and small cap companies whose return on equity surpassed their price-earnings ratios and whose revenue growth was at least 10% a year. It owned stocks like Ford, Alaska Airlines and Lockheed…

Lawrence Golub, billionaire founder and CEO of private credit firm Golub Capital, emphatically dismissed fears that the rapid growth of private credit, specifically direct lending, is leading to a bubble. Speaking at the ninth annual Forbes/SHOOK Top Advisor Summit in Las Vegas, NV, on Friday, Golub argued that direct lending continues to offer investors superior risk-adjusted returns and acts as a necessary hedging tool for traditional 60/40 portfolios with stocks and bonds. “It’s for sure not a bubble,” he said to a room full of financial advisors. Golub asserted that an allocation to private credit and direct lending improves the…

A palpable sense of optimism is returning to Wall Street, as the long-dormant engine of high-stakes dealmaking roars back to life. Investment banking revenues at the financial district’s five largest institutions, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, which will be announced later this week, are poised to break through the $9 billion threshold in the third quarter for the first time since 2021.This resurgence marks a dramatic turnaround, representing a 13% increase from a year ago and a staggering 50% recovery from the lows of 2023, according to Bloomberg. While still shy of the record…

“I want to make it really clear, OK? We’re not going to buy back a lot of stock at these prices,” said billionaire JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon during the bank’s annual meeting in May of 2024. “Buying back stock of a financial company greatly in excess of two times tangible book is a mistake. We aren’t going to do it.” At the time, JPMorgan’s shares traded at 2.4 times their tangible book value, a measure of a bank’s market price compared to its tangible net worth. That figure strips out goodwill and other intangibles and focuses on assets that…

Firm: RFG Advisory Name: Shannon Spotswood Location: Vestavia Hills, AL Team Custodied Assets: $5.8 billion Background: Shannon Spotswood grew up in Seattle after being born in Nashville and knew from an early age she wanted a career on Wall Street. By the time she was 14, she had asked her parents for a subscription to The Wall Street Journal. After double-majoring in economics and political science at the University of Arizona, she moved to San Francisco to pursue finance. Her early roles included investment banking at Volpe Brown Whelan, where she worked on the Netscape IPO—the first internet IPO—and portfolio…

Firm: Alaska Wealth Advisors Name: Dave Valdez Location: Anchorage, AK Team Custodied Assets: $934 million Background: Anchorage native Dave Valdez immigrated to the United States with his family from the Philippines in 19tk. His mother worked for the State of Alaska and would save every dividend check from Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend, an annual payment distributed to residents from the state’s oil revenues, to put him through college. Valdez earned an undergraduate finance degree from Seattle University and a master’s from the University of Alaska Anchorage. After working for Charles Schwab and TD Ameritrade, and consulting for hedge funds and…

Firm: Evercore Wealth Management Name: Chris Zander Location: New York, NY Team Custodied Assets: $13.6 billion Background: Chris Zander grew up in New York City, where he captained Columbia University’s baseball team before graduating with a degree in political science. He joined U.S. Trust Company after school and spent the next 15 years there as a wealth advisor, later running the firm’s family office group while earning his MBA in finance from Fordham at night. In 2008, Zander and 10 colleagues broke away to co-found Evercore Wealth Management and Evercore Trust Company, in partnership with publicly traded investment bank Evercore.…

As banks move beyond isolated use cases toward scaling generative AI, they’d be wise to remember that AI is as much a people story as it is a technology shift. Most banks can’t hire their way to AI salvation: The traditional approach of targeting highly specialized talent with advanced degrees is impractical, costly, and often unnecessary. The key for banks to become AI-ready lies in democratizing the technology, making it accessible to as many employees as possible and encouraging experimentation. This combination not only accelerates adoption but can uncover unexpected use cases. The top banks are already doing this, such…