Bond Market

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2025 Retirement Guide Navigating Market Volatility with Confidence

2025 has been a wild ride for investors, especially the month of April. Volatility is normal for stock market investments but the tranquil markets of 2023 and 2024 had lulled some investors to sleep as the market seemed to reach new highs every day. Stocks should be viewed as long-term investments and as investors we should not worry about daily swings in the market. Every investor is different, especially when it comes to retirement spending goals. For some investors nearing retirement or entering retirement, the market volatility begins to feel different as their time horizon begins to shrink before they need the money to fund their retirement.

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Stock Market Volatility April 2025: Tariffs and Fed News Explained 

In recent weeks, U.S. stock market volatility has spiked to levels only reached during the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic (Spring 2020) and the global financial crisis (2008-2009).  This heightened volatility reflects investor reactions to rapidly changing political and economic developments concerning trade policy and Federal Reserve independence. 

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Navigating 2025 Market Volatility: Financial Strategies for Investors 

Watching stock prices fall is an uncomfortable experience for investors no matter the circumstances under which it occurs. It can feel uncontrollable and make us feel powerless over something so incredibly important to our futures. It’s perfectly reasonable to dislike that experience. As I’m checking in with my clients, I want to hear how they are feeling right now. No matter what emotions you are experiencing, it’s healthy to share that experience and maybe to get another perspective. There is some common wisdom which circulates widely in times like these, “just don’t look.” That can certainly be good advice for the right kind of person, but it might not work for everyone. Sometimes having something to do can help us feel a sense of agency in turbulent times and alleviate some discomfort. With that in mind, I want to share with you my list of action items for periods of market volatility. Hopefully, you will find a tip or two to help you feel empowered.

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Market Outlook Spring 2025

In our outlook for 2025, we wrote about the following factors that we thought would impact investment returns this year: Artificial Intelligence Investments and Commercialization of AI Applications, Labor Market Conditions, Inflation, and Fiscal and Monetary Policy. We provide our latest thoughts on each of these topics in this update, after a quarter characterized by a lot of market-moving news and a corresponding increase in stock market volatility.

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Market Outlook Winter 2025

Our outlook for 2025 is based on the following factors that we believe are most likely to impact investment returns: Artificial Intelligence Investments and Commercialization of AI Applications, Labor Market Conditions, Inflation, and Fiscal and Monetary Policy.

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Market Outlook Fall 2024

The outcome of the Federal Reserve’s aggressive inflation-fighting campaign launched in 2022 is coming into sharper view. Inflation has declined from a peak of over 9% in mid-2022 to 2.5%, unemployment has increased by just a small percentage and remains near the low end of its range over the last 50 years, and theU.S. economy has continued to grow. When the Fed began its inflation fight back in 2022, few economists thought such an outcome was possible, but restoration of inflation back to about 2%, low unemployment and continued good economic growth is now very much the consensus forecast.

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Market Outlook Summer 2024

In our 2024 outlook that we distributed in January, we wrote about what we thought would be the most important factors hat would impact investments in 2024, including: (1) Will inflation continue to fall as expected towards theFed’s 2% target?(2) Will there be a recession?At the halfway point of 2024, we update our inflation and economic outlook based on new information and assumptions.

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Coming Up From Behind: What’s the Story With Small-Cap Stocks?

The S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite indexes tend to take up most of the oxygen in the room when talking about the stock market and that can leave other stories untold. So today, let’s peel back the onion and see what’s going on elsewhere in the stock market, ask why that might be happening, and whether that means anything going forward.

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Sowing Season

I write these articles once a month and my goal is to keep my readers informed. Those readers are, for the most part, clients, colleagues, and friends. That information is typically about the financial markets, about trends, about how I’m approaching a given topic, and about the big picture of finances. There is often a running theme of examining a claim or ill-defined story driven by headlines or sound bites and digging deeper. The market is an inherently noisy thing. There is always something new to grab our attention, always someone making a claim that this is the thing we really must heed. Really! It is worthwhile to examine those stories and claims and see what we can learn, but it’s also easy to get lost in the noise and become distracted from the places our attention really belongs.

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