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1. Using AI to Deliver High-Touch Wealth Management
Artificial intelligence is transforming wealth management. Much of the discussion has focused on which jobs AI will replace and how firms can become more efficient. I think that’s the wrong conversation. The better question is this: How can AI help firms deliver the high-touch client service that has always defined great wealth management? Recent studies suggest AI is reducing demand for traditional entry-level roles while increasing demand for employees with communication skills, judgment and empathy. I don’t disagree with those findings. But if AI takes over repetitive work, the goal shouldn’t simply be to reduce payroll. It should be to strengthen client relationships. — Blake Butler
2. It’s a Relative World: What Investors Get Wrong About Markets.
With All Due Respect To Madonna, We Are Living In A Relative World… Now, the headline assumes the reader is familiar with Madonna, at one point in time the biggest pop star in the world, and her hit song “Material World” – which Google just reminded me came out in 1984, which I remember listening to on the radio, which makes me feel, well, old(ish). But I digress, as the point of this week’s note is the relative world we live in when it comes to investing (while I do acknowledge any number of folks feel that we are living in a material world). — Tim Holland
3. Why Most Financial Advisors Don’t Stand Out — And Don’t Know It
After 15 years of helping financial advisors attract more and better referrals to ideal clients, I have identified four problems that come up again and again. I call them The Four Advisor Problems. And here’s the scary part: most advisors don’t even know they have them. — Andris Pone
4. AI Is Entering Its Most Dangerous Phase for Investors
Forecasting when the peak of an economic and market cycle will arrive is a very difficult business. Anticipating how it will end is slightly easier. For the past few years our stance on the AI boom has been consistent. We want to participate in the boom while continuously testing the assumptions embedded in prices. We do not know exactly when the top comes. Neither do you. But we have much stronger conviction about the risks that will shape the next phase. — Maxence Visseau
5. Finding Your Niche Using Client Trigger Events: A Guide for Financial Advisors
Most financial advisors say the same thing: "I don't have a niche. I serve high-net-worth families with complex planning needs." But you likely do have a niche. You may just be defining it the wrong way. A niche isn't a demographic like business owners or retirees. A niche is the specific moment that causes someone to seek financial guidance. We call these trigger events. Examples include selling a business, exercising RSUs, receiving an inheritance, going through a divorce, or stepping in to manage an aging parent's finances. — FMG
6. The Other Direction: How AI Could Become the Operating System for Quantum Computing
When NVIDIA announced Ising, a family of AI models designed specifically for quantum calibration and error decoding,1 it was easy to file the news under 'interesting research project.' In our view, it deserves to be thought of as a strategic declaration. The company that became the infrastructure layer of classical AI is methodically positioning itself as the infrastructure layer for quantum computing. That repositioning, more than any single qubit milestone, is what this piece is about. — Christopher Gannatti & Samuel Rines
7. Midterm Stock Market Pullbacks Have Often Led to Double-Digit Gains
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: it’s not the political party that matters, but the policies. Investors, I believe, are better served when they focus not on the partisan noise and headlines but the policies that bring about change. I bring this up because we’re a little over 80 days from another midterm election. The S&P 500 closed at an all-time high on Thursday and is up more than 13% for the year. But between now and November 3 sits the stretch of the calendar investors like least. So, I pulled up six decades of market data to see what that stretch has actually looked like. — Frank Holmes
8. Momentum Is Up 30% — And More Crowded Than the Dot-Com Bubble
Markets have spent much of 2026 on a tightrope. Corporate earnings have proven more resilient than expected, and profit margins have reached record levels, yet the rally remains mostly clustered in a band of data-center-linked stocks, and the quarter-end Shiller CAPE ratio for the S&P 500 Index is hovering above 40, just below the all-time high of 44 set during the dot-com peak. Staying invested has been rewarded; complacency has not. As we have written in prior quarters, the conditions that reward diversification and quality tend to build quietly before they matter. We believe those conditions are now in place. — Jim Madden, Tony Tursich and Beth Williamson
9. Your Clients Want to Refer You. They Just Forget. Here’s the Fix.
Your clients want to refer you. They just forget to. A simple newsletter fixes that, and it costs almost nothing. Every firm says they want more referrals. Almost none of them have a system for generating them. They wait. They hope a happy client mentions them at dinner. They cross their fingers that someone remembers their name when a friend asks, "Do you know a good advisor?" Hope isn’t a strategy. And the reason most firms don't get consistent referrals has nothing to do with the quality of their work. It has everything to do with staying top of mind. That's where a client newsletter comes in. Not the kind most firms send. The kind that actually works. — Patrick Di Cesare
10. Work Smarter, Not Harder: Time-Saving Strategies Elite Advisors Swear By
Every advisor knows the feeling: a full calendar, an inbox that never clears, and the work that actually moves the needle getting pushed to Friday afternoon. The irony of running a service business is that serving clients well can crowd out everything required to grow the firm that serves them. The problem is measurable. According to the J.D. Power 2023 U.S. Financial Advisor Satisfaction Study, nearly one-third of advisors say they don't have enough time to spend with clients. Those advisors spend, on average, 41% more time each month on administrative and compliance tasks than their peers who feel they have adequate client time. That's not a minor inefficiency. That's structural. The advisors who escape this trap aren't working longer hours. They're thinking differently about which hours matter. — Jeff Judge
11. New All-Time Highs Are Not a Bad Time to Invest
New highs feel like a risky moment to invest, and the instinct may be to wait for a pullback. However, history says the opposite. Since 1990, money invested at an all-time high has, on average, outpaced money invested on any day across each horizon measured: 13.9% vs. 12.4% over one year, 46.6% vs. 40.6% over three years, and 82.5% vs. 75.4% over five. — Lincoln Financial