Money Life with Chuck Jaffe

Ryan Dykmans, president and chief investment officer at Dunham & Associates Investment Counsel , is expecting a market downturn that comes "in large chunks," and while he is not sure of what will trigger it, he does think it won't be excessively far off. With that in mind, he discusses the importance of preparing for it today to avoid the potential to respond emotionally. Moreover, in "a much more...

Lynette Zang, chief executive officer at Zang International , says that between inflation and other concerns, investors need to be more heavily invested into gold to protect their savings and the value of the time they put in to build their financial nestegg. Zang says there is enough uncertainty in the global economy and the international banking system to make real assets an appropriate store of...

Michael Kelly, portfolio manager and global head of multi-asset at MetLife Investment Management , says the artificial-intelligence evolution has broad implications but has to this point been narrow in terms of how many companies it has impacted. That's a sign of how early into this cycle the economy is, and as the impact of A.I. starts to broaden, it will spill over into nearly everything else an...

Bryant VanCronkhite, senior portfolio manager at Allspring Global Investments , says that with the economy at full-employment levels, he expects the Federal Reserve to shift its focus back to inflation, but he says the central bank is boxed in when it comes to making moves. As a result, he thinks new Fed chair Kevin Warsh will rely on new data to re-define inflation measures and come away with a n...

Marta Norton, chief investment strategist at Empower , expects a "grind it out" market for the rest of the year, setting up for "normalization" on earnings that keeps markets moving forward but at a slower pace in 2027. Norton says there is "less of a margin of safety" for valuation and for fundamentals, "which doesn't necessarily mean the market sells off, but it means maybe some of the momentum...

Brandon Thurber, chief market strategist at Regions Asset Management , says that despite a prevailing sense of nervousness, the market can remain on its upswing, and is likely to see a pickup after mid-term elections and lasting at least through the first quarter of 2027. With interest rates on the rise, Thurber says the market's potential for growth hinges largely on the power of earnings, but he...

Talley Leger, chief market strategist at The Wealth Consulting Group , says he sees the stock market rallying into the first quarter of 2027, noting that "earnings drive stocks and rates make noise." At that point, Leger expects the Standard & Poor's 500 to hit the 8,500 target he set on it during a Money Life interview last January, slightly behind schedule but still reflective of a strong, conti...

Jordan Rizzuto, managing partner at GammaRoad Capital Partners — which uses quantitative analysis of market risk through trends, economic expansion and consumer sentiment — says that the stock market's return to record highs on narrow breadth is "indicative of what you see with a market that has already sold off materially or a market that is loading up for fuel for another leg higher." Since the...

Steve Rick, chief economist at TruStage , is forecasting slightly faster economic growth for 2027 — 2.2% real GDP growth compared to about 2% this year —  "so nothing great ... good, but nothing to write home about." That should be enough to keep the economy moving forward, and Rick cautions against reading too much into some negative numbers, noting that unemployment levels reflect the classic le...

David Trainer, founder and president at New Constructs , put a pre-IPO Anthropic in The Danger Zone today, saying the $2 trillion valuation is "absolutely absurd" for a business that is burning tons of cash, facing vicious competition and "with no conceivable profit margin ... when it's being valued as if it will have profits bigger than the most profitable companies in the world today." He says W...

Steve Cucchiaro, chief executive and chief investment officer at 3Edge Asset Management , says that the market is masking potential troubles, flirting with record highs despite having "more than 85% of the S&P 500 companies in bear markets." As a result, he says investors need to b e prepared to get defensive, riding with the "short-term factors that are propelling the market higher" without losin...

Cheryl Smith, economist at Trillium Asset Management , says she is seeing "more economic warning signs," and worries that one of them — interest rates going up, but much later than might have been anticipated based on headlines — could be setting up a compressed timeline for increases, with the rapidity of the move creating more problems than would have surfaced in a slower uptrend. On the stock m...

Kristian Kerr, head of macro strategy at LPL Financial , says that the market has shaken off the impact of higher oil prices, leading investors to a sense of complacency, where they think only a much higher spike in crude prices will upset the economy. He feels, however, that "the longer we are at these levels the harder it becomes to ignore," noting that the same kind of thinking can also be appl...

John Kosar, chief market strategist at Asbury Research , says this is "one of the oddest markets" he's seen, with stocks nearly at record highs, two-decade highs in the yield of long-term Treasury bonds, a war, tariffs, oil priced at over $100 per barrel, and yet less stocks are making fresh highs and the Magnificent Seven stocks are carrying the load for the entire market. If the "big gorilla sto...

David Trainer, founder and president at New Constructs has been cautious about artificial-intelligence stocks for a long time, noting that few of them pass his firm's rigorous evaluation criteria to be "attractive" investments, but he now says that liquidity concerns for the big-name A.I. players have him convinced that the market is in an A.I. bubble. That doesn't mean a crash is imminent — he no...

Brian Levitt, chief global market strategist at Invesco , says investors are watching dual forces at play: a structural growth story in artificial intelligence and a cyclical upswing in the global economy. That has allowed the market to "absorb all of this," from higher oil prices and rising Treasury yields to the first of what will likely be multiple interest-rate hikes by the Federal Reserve. Le...

Paula Pant, host of the Afford Anything podcast, says there are reasons why Americans feel like they can afford nothing these days, despite a stock market and economy that clearly are representing good times, noting that individuals are stuck in the contrast between rising asset values and stagnant income. "Your 401k balance might be doing really well, but you can't eat that," she says, which crea...

Joe Saul-Sehy, host of the Stacking Benjamins podcast, visits Money Life to catch Chuck up on the things he missed at FinCon 2026 — held last week in California — but also to discuss how the personal finance world is changing in the face of lingering inflation, rising interest rates, increased influence from artificial intelligence, Robert Kiyosaki's $1.2 billion debt problem and much more. Saul-S...

Matthew Timpane, senior market strategist at Schaeffer's Investment Research , says he expects the market to rally once the midterm elections are through, particularly because the third-year of the presidential cycle tends to be the most bullish, most notably the first half of those years. For the short-term — as the market finishes a September in which it has shown none of the usual seasonal sign...

Alex Edmans, author of " The Madness of Markets: Why Smart Investors Make Crazy Decisions - And How to Exploit Them ," says that even smart investors sometimes make poor financial decisions, noting that overconfidence, fear, excitement, and the tendency to overreact to market news can cause investors to trade too frequently and buy high/sell low. Edmans says the financial industry is amplifying th...

Dan Sotiroff, associate director of passive strategies at Morningstar goes "Off The News" discussing the firm's just-released " State of US ETFs 2026 " report, which found that heightened competition is increasingly pushing fund firms to open "complex, narrowly focused strategies that may resemble gambling more than long-term investing. He says that the issues are strange and getting weirder, citi...

Emily Roland, co-chief investment strategist at Manulife John Hancock Investments , says that investors have been making themselves miserable while living through "the greatest four-year bull market in S&P 500 history," which may make them too worried about interest rate hikes. She says the market and economy are strong enough to push through rate hikes, at least until the Federal Reserve moves th...

Jonathan Treussard, founder of Treussard Capital Management , says "the market is playing chicken with itself" by pushing interest rates on long Treasury bonds above 5 percent, but it's not quite ready to live with tighter economic conditions and he is not sure if the rate picture is the "something that breaks" to create a market meltdown. Treussard says that the market can continue powering forwa...

Ryan Redfern, chief investment officer at Shadowridge Asset Management , expects the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates this week, "but I don't think the market cares at the moment," so while there may be some short-term jitters over the move, it is more likely setting up a rally starting in November, carrying into the best eight months of the four-year presidential cycle, the period after mi...

Jeff Mortimer, chief investment officer at Elyxium Wealth , says he continues to lean into market weakness and is comfortable with heightened volatility, but he says the strong earnings that are under-pinning the market will keep most downturns looking like buying opportunities. "We remain in a mid-cycle bull market," Mortimer says, "which is important for listeners to understand in that it can ch...