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1. Your Success Depends on One Thing: Who’s in Your Inner Circle?
Is Your Inner Circle Holding You Back? It’s time to start thinking about your personal board of directors. One of the most dangerous assumptions smart people make is that the people who helped build their life are automatically qualified to help guide the next version of it. They aren’t. That sounds harsh, but it’s true. The article “Who’s on Your Board?” from María Tomás-Keegan of BoldTimers makes an important point: We all need trusted people around us — advisors, encouragers, challengers, truth-tellers. A better version of your trusted inner circle: your personal board of directors. There’s a deeper truth sitting underneath the article that deserves more attention, however: Your board has a shelf life. The people who were right for your survival phase may be wrong for your reinvention phase. Most people never notice the transition happening, so they keep taking advice from people emotionally attached to an outdated version of them. That’s where stagnation begins. — Tom West
2. The Organic Growth Crisis in Wealth Management
Organic growth in wealth management has been fundamentally broken. For decades, the industry has built increasingly sophisticated systems to manage, optimize, and scale assets under management — yet comparatively little infrastructure has been built around the systematic acquisition of new client relationships. Documented by a wide cross-section of credible industry research and surveys, the result has been an industry with organic growth rates in the low single digits, typically up to 5% for RIAs. This leaves firms heavily dependent on referrals, legacy networks, and increasingly expensive lead-generation models. — Bill Hortz
3. The Great Market Disconnect of 2026: Why Stocks Are Surging While Investors Worry
When it comes to market reviews, typical look back periods are three months, or six months or a full year. At the risk of going rogue, we thought, as June kicks off, we would look back on the first five months of 2026, with a focus on what has hindered and helped risk assets during this rather remarkable year. The war in the Middle East has been the biggest macro event and headwind of 2026, and the biggest macro event since the COVID-19 pandemic, driving commodity prices, particularly oil, higher along with inflation and inflation expectations and driving consumer sentiment lower. We have also contended with the war of words between the White House and the then Jay Powell led Federal Reserve, uncertainty around trade policy, signs of distress in private credit and concerns AI was a capital spending and stock market bubble and an imminent disruptor of millions of white-collar jobs. Despite those headwinds, equity indices are up nicely in 2026, with the S&P 500 returning 11%, the Nasdaq 16.2%, the Russell 2000 18%, the MSCI EAFE Index 9.1% and the MSCI EM Index 25.4%. — Tom Holland
4. The New Rules of Active Investing in an AI-Driven Market
Equity investors are facing monumental questions about their allocation strategies in a new market regime. Market concentration has risen sharply, valuations have climbed to record highs in parts of the market and factor volatility has dominated returns. These dynamics have challenged many active strategies, particularly in US and global large cap equities, and have shaken confidence among asset owners. Yet, we think active management can help address these very challenges. Opportunities persist where dispersion is high, benchmarks are less concentrated and fundamental change is occurring beneath the surface. Even so, as technology and AI make information increasingly accessible, we believe active strategies must adapt their processes to deliver consistent relative performance. — Nelson Yu
5. Is It Still Okay to “T-Bill and Chill”?
Late April inflation data is running close to 4% year over year when you split the difference between the CPI and PPI. Measures can differ, but the takeaway is clear—for a variety of reasons, the US is headed on a path away from the Fed’s 2% goal. In a 4% price-increasing world, does earning ~3%–4% on cash or ultra short-term money make a lot of sense anymore? Probably not. Yet investors still hold $200 billion+ across a variety of ultra-short bond ETFs/MMs/T-bills/CDs, etc. They need income but also feel the pinch of inflation gnawing away at their buying power if they just park their reserves. Maybe it’s time to introduce a new alternative into “Cashland.” — Calamos
6. Are You Losing Your Next-Gen Advisors Before They Ever Reach Their Potential?
Your Next Generation Advisors Is Leaving — Here's Why. In Episode 362 of the Magellan Network Show, Coach Joe Lukacs tackles one of the most pressing and costly challenges facing financial advisory firms today: the development and retention of G2 (next generation) advisors. With a 72% failure rate over five years and $600K-$1M in losses for every advisor who washes out, this isn't just an HR problem. It's a strategic crisis. Add in the $124 trillion great wealth transfer, and the fact that 90% of heirs don't work with their parents' advisor, and the stakes couldn't be higher. — Joseph Lukacs
7. The #1 Reason Ideal Clients Choose Another Advisor
“Poor positioning of yourself and what you can achieve for your ideal clients is the number one reason for ideal business opportunities not coming to you….” Many professionals experience the frustration of good clients doing good business elsewhere, or ideal prospective clients not being referred and ultimately doing their business elsewhere, and there is probably nothing more frustrating than those experiences to a professional with genuine expertise. — Tony Vidler
8. Why the Wealthy Never Invest Like Retail Investors
Robert Frank, CNBC and Addepar just gave everyone a rare look inside how family offices actually allocate capital. Check it out here - Robert Frank, CNBC and Addepar Family Office Allocations. I think the biggest takeaway is simple: The wealthy are not building portfolios from the same boring combo meal most retail investors get served.You know the one... A little U.S. large cap. A little international. Some bonds. Maybe a “tactical” sleeve that somehow still owns the same seven stocks as everything else. Then we call it diversification, slap a pie chart on it, and pretend the job is done. But the family office portfolio looks very different. According to Addepar’s Q1 2026 family office data, average family office portfolios were roughly split between 51% public markets and 49% alternatives. Public equities were still the largest single category at 33.9%, but alternatives were not some tiny side dish. Private companies alone represented 15.8% of the average portfolio. Cash was 9.5%. Fixed income was 8.1%. (Addepar) — Brad Zapp
9. Forget Nvidia? Why Micron Just Became AI’s Hottest Stock
The big bottleneck in the first phase of the artificial intelligence (AI) boom was GPUs. It launched Nvidia stock up +1,200%. Now, the big bottleneck is memory. Under the hood, AI depends on two very different kinds of chips: Logic chips, like Nvidia’s GPUs, that do the thinking. And memory chips that store and feed the data those GPUs need. Every AI task... asking ChatGPT a question, generating an image, summarizing a document... boils down to two things happening at extreme speed. A logic chip performing massive amounts of math. And that chip constantly pulling data from memory, then sending results back. Chris says a useful way to think about this is a kitchen. The GPU is the chef. Memory is the pantry. If the pantry is across the building, the chef wastes most of his time running back and forth for ingredients. But if the pantry sits right next to the stove, cooking speeds up dramatically. According to Chris and Stephen, that’s exactly the problem AI faces today. — Chris Reilly
10. The AI Bubble Warning Wall Street Doesn’t Want to Hear
We thought we were done with our recent stream on crude oil prices, consumer confidence, and their impact on bond yields, but the graph below and analysis from a client of ours is a great encore to the recent commentaries (LINK LINK). Our first commentary stated: “While we understand the fear, the reality is that the market is not pricing in future inflation in line with the market reaction. The extra yield, known as the term premium, will likely normalize when oil prices fall and inflation expectations cool.” We presume many people read it and asked, ‘when?’ To guide us, the graph and table show the three most pronounced surges in oil prices over the last 40 years. The momentum in the two prior surges was literally off the charts, as measured by the difference between the 50- and 200-day moving averages of oil prices. The moving average differential is shown in blue and red. Today, the 50-day moving average of crude oil is $27.01 above its 200-day moving average, the largest gap since 1984. — Michael Lebowitz
11. The Bartender: An Essential Friend for a Financial Advisor
Many advisors know the easiest way to insert yourself into the local HNW community is to frequent the same places they visit. Ending the day at a bar frequented by engineers or lawyers will likely find you surrounded by those professions. Another actor or stage who can help you is the person behind the bar. That’s the bartender. A financial advisor in New York realized plenty of major American firms have their corporate headquarters in Midtown Manhattan. Executives fly into town for meetings. They stay at local hotels and visit expense account restaurants. How could he capitalize on this opportunity? — Bryce Sanders