These money and investing tips can help your portfolio sail through December

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Stock Market Looks Poised to Rally as Bond Yield Falls

Text size Michael Nagle/Bloomberg The worst may be over for the stock market. Key equity indexes continued their autumn rally, and there could be more gains before the end of the year, helped by conti...

Year-end rally? Bullish stock-market pattern set to collide with stagflation fears

The period between now and year-end marks a historically bullish final stretch of the year for U.S. stocks, particularly just before and after Christmas. The question for investors is whether favorabl...

Is the market bottom in? 5 reasons U.S. stocks could continue to suffer heading into next year.

With the S&P 500 holding above 4,000 and the CBOE Volatility Gauge, known as the “Vix” or Wall Street’s “fear gauge,” VIX, +0.74% having fallen to one of its lowest levels of the year, many invest...

Is the stock market open on Black Friday? Thanksgiving week trading hours for major assets.

It’s going to be a short week on Wall Street. U.S. stock exchanges will be closed for Thanksgiving Day on Thursday, Nov. 24, and will reopen the next day only for an abbreviated session on Black Frida...

2-year Treasury yield reaches one-week high as traders assess likelihood of more Fed rate hikes

Treasury yields jumped on Friday, sending the 2-year rate to a one-week high, after Boston Fed President Susan Collins put another aggressive 75-basis-point rate hike on the table for December’s polic...

Opinion: Bonds aren’t more attractive than stocks even as yields register a 15-year high

How much competition do stocks face from bonds? For the first time in years, investors are beginning to ask this question, given the dramatic rise in bond yields to a 15-year high. For nearly a decade...

Fed must keep raising rates until it is certain inflation has stopped climbing, Kashkari says

The Federal Reserve needs to keep raising interest rates until it is sure inflation has hit a ceiling, said Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari on Thursday. The central bank can’t be overly persua...

It’s Been a Rough Year for Stocks and Bonds. What to Do in 2023.

With more than a month to go, 2022 is all but certain to go down as an annus horribilis for both stocks and bonds. The crucial question for investors: What does that portend for the year ahead? The re...

Did Bullard undershoot? Stifel economists say fed funds rate may need to go to 8% or even 9%.

A day after a Federal Reserve official’s market-moving admission that interest rates may need to go to as high as 7%, analysts came up with an even more surprising conclusion: that 7% still won’t be h...

Opinion: Opinion: What Bullard got wrong about a 7% fed funds (and why he said it anyway)

An influential Federal Reserve official briefly spooked the stock SPX, -0.31% and bond TMUBMUSD10Y, 3.769% markets on Thursday by warning that the central bank may have to raise interest rates much fu...

This is the chart that rattled U.S. financial markets on Thursday

One chart is all it took to move financial markets on Thursday. That chart was presented by St. Louis Fed President James Bullard as part of a presentation in Louisville, Ky., and it shows where he se...

More trouble is brewing in the $24 trillion Treasury market: This time, it’s about central clearing

Efforts to reduce risks within the nearly $24 trillion U.S. Treasury market, the world’s deepest and most liquid securities market, are ironically creating angst among market players. The anxiety is c...

Carnival stock dives after private sale of $1 billion in convertible debt

Shares of Carnival Corp. pulled back sharply on heavy volume Wednesday, after the cruise operator took advantage of a recent big rally to commence a private offering of debt that can be converted into...

Opinion: The floodgates are open for grandparents to super-size college savings for grandkids

If you’re a grandparent looking to save the day by helping your grandchildren pay for college, take a second look at a tax-advantaged 529 college savings plan before the end of the year. Rule changes ...

Fed’s Waller says market has overreacted to consumer inflation data: ‘We’ve got a long, long way to go’

Federal Reserve Gov. Christopher Waller said Sunday that financial markets seem to have overreacted to the softer-than-expected October consumer price inflation data last week. “It was just one data p...

Opinion: Pain and losses in crypto will clear out the losers and strengthen the case for bitcoin

Cryptocurrency is a mess right now. And rightly so. I wrote about buying bitcoin for MarketWatch in 2013 when it was trading for $100, but I’ve spent the past year or so warning that most newer crypto...

How to get a guaranteed retirement spending rate of 4.3%

Stop the presses! The 4% spending rule may be alive after all—at least for now. I’m referring to the famous research from William Bengen in 1994 that focused on how much a retiree could withdraw from ...

Investors may be whistling past the graveyard of a recession with latest rally in stocks

Investors feeling giddy about last week’s sharp rally for stocks might want to give a listen to Tom Waits’ song, “Whistlin’ Past the Graveyard” from 1978, to sober up for the dangers that still lurk a...

Brokered CDs pay more than traditional CDs — should you buy them now?

When market volatility and inflation persist, retirees or those who are near retirement might be wondering where to put their money now. There are a variety of alternatives with a range of risks, so t...

‘We’ve seen this before,” warns BofA. Why inflation could take until 2024 to fall to 3% and weigh on stocks.

U.S. stocks roared higher Thursday after October’s consumer-price index showed inflation rising at a less aggressive annual pace than expected, spurring hopes that the Federal Reserve’s inflation flig...

2-year Treasury yield pulls back from 15-year high after October jobs data

U.S. Treasury yields saw a mixed finish Friday, with the yield on the 2-year note rising edging down a day after ending at a more-than-150-year high as investors assessed a stronger-than-expected Octo...

Credit carnage spurs bargains on bonds tied to $16 trillion pile of U.S. household debt

Big bargains have made a roaring comeback on bonds tied to the $16.2 trillion pile of U.S. consumer debt. Higher borrowing costs, tighter credit conditions and sharp losses have been defining forces o...

Fed warns of ‘low’ market liquidity in $24 trillion Treasury market, in latest financial stability report

The Federal Reserve on Friday confirmed what many investors were saying for some time: the $24 trillion Treasury market has been experiencing low levels of market liquidity in recent months. The centr...

Traders are loading up on bets against the stock market — and this time, it’s not a contrarian signal, says Citi

Markets continue to absorb the reverberations from this week’s Federal Reserve policy decision. The S&P 500 SPX has given up a chunk of its latest rally after Chair Jerome Powell suggested it was ...

What’s next for markets after Fed’s 4th straight jumbo rate hike

What’s next for markets now that the Federal Reserve has delivered its fourth and possibly final jumbo rate increase of 75 basis points? Well, a lot, actually. A sometimes tumultuous third-quarter ear...

Fed approves another jumbo interest-rate hike but also signals go-slower strategy

The Federal Reserve on Wednesday approved the fourth straight jumbo increase in a key U.S. interest rate and signaled rates are likely to go higher than previously forecast. Yet the central bank also ...

U.S. Treasury sweetens the pot on I-bonds by adding a fixed rate

After record-breaking sales of I-bonds in October, the U.S. Treasury is dangling another good deal in front of savers for the next six months.  Starting Nov. 2, when I-bonds will be available again af...

20 dividend stocks that may be safest if the Federal Reserve causes a recession

Investors cheered when a report last week showed the economy expanded in the third quarter after back-to-back contractions. But it’s too early to get excited, because the Federal Reserve hasn’t given ...

Why China’s party congress left investors feeling gloomy

Financial-market investors were craving economic policy guidance from the China’s Communist Party Congress, but when the ruling party wrapped up its twice-a-decade political gathering on Saturday to t...

Why retirement calculators fail the people who need them most — and what to do about it

Or were you so overwhelmed by the steps and questions that you only increased the amount you were saving by a little bit — or not at all? If you fall into the latter category, don’t feel bad. A new st...

Municipal Bonds Are Offering the Yields You’re Looking For. Here’s Where to Look.

A historic rout in the bond market this year has resulted in the highest yields on municipal bonds in 15 years—and what looks like an excellent buying opportunity. At midweek, the muni market, as meas...