Bond Market

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.

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.

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.