Five Charts Worth Your Attention Right Now

Every so often I like to step back from the day-to-day noise and share a few data points that put the current environment in perspective. Here are five worth knowing about.

Corporate earnings keep climbing. Analysts expect company profits to grow substantially again this year — a big reason the market has held up despite plenty of scary headlines along the way.

Tariff policy has stabilized. After a volatile stretch, effective tariff rates have settled into a more predictable range, giving businesses a clearer runway to plan.

IPOs remain a buyer-beware category. A recent high-profile IPO surged out of the gate, then fell well below its offering price within weeks — a good reminder of why we generally avoid newly public companies, where price discovery is still messy and unpredictable.

The “magnificent few” aren’t always magnificent. In the first half of this year, a handful of the market’s most popular mega-cap stocks collectively added almost nothing to returns — while the other 493 companies in the S&P 500 did the heavy lifting. This is precisely why we don’t concentrate a portfolio in whatever’s currently popular.

Inflation and rate expectations keep shifting. After entering the year expecting rate cuts, markets have flipped to pricing in the possibility of a hike, as the Fed keeps its focus on price stability.

The thread running through all five: the environment is rarely all good or all bad at the same time, and it changes constantly. That’s exactly why we build portfolios designed to hold up across a wide range of outcomes rather than ones that depend on correctly guessing which of these storylines wins.

As always, if any of this raises questions about your own plan, I’m just a call or email away.