Money Life with Chuck Jaffe

Veteran analyst Dan Zanger, chief technical officer at ChartPattern.com, says the market right now is showing swings and moves that are reminiscent of the Internet bubble days of 2000. While that doesn't mean the market is headed for the same result, he says it creates more challenges for traders and investors, in part because they are trying to read the market off of wild swings and fast reversals. "It's definitely a very bifurcated market," Zanger says in discussing the tech and artificial-intelligence companies compared with everything else. "It needs Prozac, that's for sure."
We go Off The News with Robert Farrington, founder of The College Investor, examining the new  student-loan repayment assistance plan and changes in student-loan lending limits, both of which go into effect on July 1. Farrington says these changes will help students and parents with the personal finances around college education, helping them focus on the value of the degree, noting that the loan limits are a "stop sign," where the government is suggesting that when someone takes on more debt, they are running much higher risk of not earning back the money they put into getting their degree. He notes that this is particularly important with master's degrees, where many grad students pay up for a diploma that doesn't repay their investment in the extra training.
With private credit being an increasingly popular part of investment strategies these days, John Cole Scott, president of CEF Advisors — the chairman of the Active Investment Company Alliance — attended the Private Credit Summit hosted this week in New York City by Dechert LLP, and came away with a sense that private-credit markets have not yet gotten to the overheated levels that could turn investor fears of a blow-up into a financial reality. Scott discusses how big business development companies passed "stress tests" designed to show if they would break under severe market conditions, how insurance companies making investments into private credit are raising underwriting standards and thereby reducing the risk in private credit markets and more.

Fritz Folts, chief investment strategist at 3EDGE Asset Management, says he has pulled back slightly on equity exposure but gone deeper into a diversified approach because the market has been crazy, driven by investors' fear of missing out, sky-high expectations and more, to the point where the key is to participate and not be wrong because you are taking chances on what amounts to a wild guess. If Folts had to guess, he'd expect the stock market to have a bumpy ride in the second half of the year, finishing roughly flat from current levels.
Michael Monaghan, founder and portfolio manager of the Founder ETFs makes his debut in the Market Call, talking about his firm's methodology, which focuses on companies where the original founder remains in the driver seat. Research shows that founder-led companies tend to outperform for several reasons, notably that the entrepreneurs behind them have a long-term vision and are not swayed by short-term market noise or pressured to produce a quarterly profit. Monaghan, who runs the Founders 100 ETF, discusses how founder-CEOs influence giants like Nvidia and Meta Platforms and how a portfolio of these stocks can expect more stable long-term performance. 
In the ETF of the Week segment, Todd Rosenbluth, head of research at VettaFi, focuses on a value fund from T. Rowe Price that just hit its third anniversary, gaining roughly 30 percent over the last 12 months

Liz Ann Sonders, chief investment strategist at Charles Schwab & Co., says that "there is so much short-attention-span money driving the market right now ... looking for the shiny new object," that investors want to diversify throughout artificial intelligence businesses, taking profits  and rebalancing especially when specific stocks go parabolic, to capture profits and avoid some of the volatility being created by enormous expectation levels. Sonders says that an "aggregate recession" remains "a ways away," but she notes that there have been rolling recessions, with services weaking currently, coming off a manufacturing decline earlier in the year. As a result, she suggests considering sectors that could be in line for pullbacks rather than expecting a credit crunch or a mistake by regulators to create a broad-based decline.
Justin Baer discusses his new book, "House of Fidelity: The Rise of the Johnson Dynasty and the Company That Changed American Investing," and digs into some of the details that turned the notoriously secretive and private company from a firm for Boston elites into a the investing powerhouse whose accounts and funds touch the lives of one in five American adults.
Niki Glen, Northwestern Mutual wealth management advisor discusses the latest data from Northwestern Mutual's 2026 Planning & Progress Study, which showed that true financial independence remains beyond the grasp of many Americans. One in five U.S. adults believes they will never achieve financial independence, which is borne out in survey results showing that more than 40 percent of adults — including a surprisingly high percentage of Baby Boomers, who are all at or beyond retirement age — continue to rely on their parents for financial support. More than half of Millennials (who range between 30 and 45 years old) were still dependent on financial help from their family.

George Bory, chief investment strategist for fixed income at Allspring Global Investments, says the market is "overshooting" in expecting considerable rate hikes soon. He thinks the central bank will be patient, and that the Kevin Warsh regime got off to its intended start last week by giving less guidance and accepting more volatility as a result. He suggests that investors should look to capture the current "uncertainty premium" that has been created by a wide dispersion of opinion — with some major players expecting rate hikes while others are calling for renewed cuts — and that will boost intermediate-term yields at least until the rate picture becomes clearer.
Tom McClellan, editor of The McClellan Market Report, says that the McClellan Oscillator — the indicator created by the family firm to measure market breadth — "is seeing dead nothing," hovering around the neutral level, suggesting that the market "is in pretty much of a doldrums." He expects to see a seasonal summer decline, especially in a midterm election year, but it's not happening yet, which is why McClellan says there's not likely to be much trend until late October. He sees "a boring market" for the rest of the year but expects 2027 to be strongly positive, barring mistakes from the Federal Reserve.
Author Igor Pejic discusses his new book, "Tech Money: A Guide to the New Game of Technology Investing," out today, noting the places where technology investing has changed and how different current times are from the last technology wave, the Internet boom, that drove the market into bubble times.

Julius de Kempenaer, senior technical analyst at StockCharts, says the stock market right now is "technology against the world," and he expects that it will turn and correct, but he's not willing to put his portfolio on the line and move early, because it would put him in the path of a speeding "freight train." de Kempenaer says he can "hear what the bears are saying," and doesn't necessarily disagree with them, but he says he needs to see more signs of weakness -- like the market starting to favor defensive sectors even as it is rising -- to suggest that a downturn is near.
Yalena Maleyev, senior economist at KPMG Economics – a member of the Outlook Survey Committee for the National Association for Business Economics – discusses the June 2026 NABE Outlook Survey, released today, which had the economists calling for lower and slower economic growth, higher inflation and a longer time before the Federal Reserve eases interest rates. The median expectation for personal consumption expenditures (PCE), the Fed's preferred inflation measure, rose to 3.6% for the fourth quarter. Despite those worrisome economic numbers, nearly two-thirds of the economists surveyed expect that the U.S. can forestall a recession until 2028 or later.
In "The Week That Is," Vijay Marolia, chief investment officer at Regal Point Capital, discusses Kevin Warsh's debut as the chairman of the Federal Reserve, which included a hawkish stance, no dot plot or forecasting help, and a terse public statement. He also discusses the news that Charles Schwab Corp. is planning to enter prediction markets, which he says could speed up both public acceptance and regulatory scrutiny of prediction markets, and he gives his take on why the housing affordability problem is worse right now than it generally gets credit for.
Plus, David Trainer, founder and president at New Constructs, puts the State Street S&P Kensho Final Frontiers ETF in the Danger Zone, noting that while the fund gets a five-star rating from Morningstar, it is filled with stocks "that are losing money hand over fist, all going after a very trendy topic ... which is hard to quantify," a condition that he says reminds him of the Internet bubble days.