NIO, XPeng, Li Auto Shares Shake Off Weak Sales Data. The Outlook Seems Bright.

Text size A Nio car. Chinese new-car sales fell in January. Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images Chinese new-car sales fell in January. But the shares of Chinese electric-vehicle makers  NIO , Xpeng , ...

Inflation, Interest-Rate Jitters, and Putin Are Brewing a Fierce Storm for the Stock Market

Text size A Ukrainian soldier in the Kharkiv region near the Russian border. Will Putin pull the trigger on an invasion? Sergey Bobok/AFP/Getty Images We were waist deep in the Big Muddy, and the big ...

6 Stocks for a 2022 of Higher Interest Rates and Slower Earnings Growth

Don’t let inflation fears dominate your investment thoughts. Save time to worry about earnings growth, too. Below, some statistical bellyaching and portfolio defeatism, plus one Wall Street bank’s top...

Inflation’s on fire, and the Fed’s poised to act. Here’s how markets and the economy have reacted to the first hike in a cycle.

After Thursday’s shocking inflation reading showing year-over-year consumer price growth of 7.5%, an interest-rate hike could come quite literally at any time, though the most likely timing would be t...

Weekend reads: Inflation fear and opportunities for investors

U.S. consumer price inflation rose to a 40-year high of 7.5% in January. That pace is running way ahead of wage growth, and the official figures can mask even more pain, depending on a family’s circum...

How Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities can help your retirement savings weather 7.5% inflation

That’s not good news for retirement savers. And some might consider the stock market to be a bit frothy these days. So, it might make sense to invest a portion of your retirement nest egg conservative...

Inflation has knocked back the market. Here are the key S&P 500 and tech stock levels one strategist fears.

Investors are still trying to come to grips with that double whammy of nosebleed consumer prices and 100-basis-point increase talk from St. Louis Federal Reserve President James Bullard. Read: Oil is ...

4 Stocks That Could Thrive During Inflation

Text size Caterpillar is lucky to have customers flush with cash from rising commodity prices. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images Inflation is hot—and that’s cooling off plenty of companies’ earnings. But n...

The Tax Advantages of Series I Savings Bonds

At first glance, a stodgy, government-guaranteed investment may not seem like the most thrilling investment idea. But for many investors that’s exactly what U.S. Treasury Series “I” savings bonds are ...

Inflation is at a 40-year high. 10 tips from the pros on how to invest and save

Inflation is high. Here’s what money pros say to do about that. Getty Images/iStockphoto On Thursday, the Labor Department released the latest consumer price index data, which revealed that the rate o...

Why hedge-fund manager Doug Kass says his bearish case is now stronger and dip buyers should bide their time

For equity dip buyers still waiting in the wings, hedge-fund manager Doug Kass suggests holding fire for now as better bargains, and unfortunately worse times, are ahead. “It is my view that the odds ...

Inflation Is Surging. Here Are Some Portfolio Changes to Consider.

Market sentiment changes awfully fast these days. Rising concerns about the impact of interest-rate hikes pushed the S&P 500 down more than 5% in January (with the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Inde...

‘I don’t know if it’s worth dealing with tenants’: Should I convert my home into a rental, or sell it?

I have enough money to put down on a second home — I need a slightly bigger place and another bedroom. I currently live in Portland, Ore., but I am planning to move outside of Portland. However, I’m c...

Bitcoin’s Price Isn’t Done Falling. How It Could Drop to $10,000.

Text size Stifel’s top equity strategist thinks Bitcoin prices could sink to $10,000. Dreamstime.com The bull case for Bitcoin is that it powers up to $100,000, from recent prices around $43,000...

Tesla Finally Gets a Mention as Biden Talks Up Electric Vehicles

Text size President Joe Biden spoke in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday. Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images President Joe Biden just publicly said the T-word— Tesla —seeming to extend an olive branch to ...

‘If you’re a wage earner you’re going to fall behind’: Ex-Fed insider warns of ‘difficult few years’ due to inflation

Former Federal Reserve insider Thomas Hoenig thinks the U.S. faces a painful reckoning because of high inflation. Hoenig was a lone dissenter eight times in 2010, when the Fed voted to pursue a then-n...

Buy the dip? Why the stock market’s bounce off January lows may prove premature

A big stock-market bounce after an ugly January might reflect misplaced confidence in a previously tried-and-true trading strategy, a Wall Street analyst warned on Monday. “After a tough markdown of s...

Inflation and the Fed: Why Wall Street Is Misdiagnosing Pandemic Economics

About the authors: Larry Hatheway and Alex Friedman are the co-founders of Jackson Hole Economics, and the former chief economist and chief investment officer, respectively, of UBS. The Federal Reserv...

Opinion: Should you add residential real estate to your retirement portfolio?

Is there a way to invest in residential real estate as an asset class? It’s a timely question since, as I pointed out last week, residential real estate can play an important role in reducing the prob...

The next ‘pain trade’ could be on the horizon as investors crowd into bets pegged to Fed monetary policy

Investors may be set up for the next so-called “pain” trade, with market participants increasingly coalescing around expectations that Federal Reserve needs to act aggressively to combat persistent U....

Tax season: does the IRS know if you trade crypto? Is your NFT sale or mining income taxable?

Hello! Welcome back to Distributed Ledger, our weekly crypto newsletter that reaches your inbox every Thursday. I’m Frances Yue, crypto reporter at MarketWatch. It is tax season in the U.S., and I’ll ...

‘This is not 1980’: What investors are watching as next U.S. inflation reading looms

Investors next week will be closely watching for the latest reading on U.S. inflation, which has been running hot against the backdrop of a volatile stock market in 2022. “Inflation will be the data p...

Cryptos Could Be a ‘Speculative Mania,’ Economist Eswar Prasad Says

Discussions with central bankers at a conference a couple of years ago prompted economist Eswar Prasad to start writing what he anticipated would be a slim volume on how digital currencies could affec...

The Jobs Report Reveals a Booming Labor Market. Here’s Where Interest Rates Are Headed.

Text size President Joe Biden speaking about the January jobs report. Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images Good news for Main Street, not so good news for Wall Street. Once again, a booming labor market is like...

Why is bitcoin rallying 10% Friday? Crypto clambers to perch above $40,000 following jobs report.

Bitcoin was in rally mode on Friday, ascending to a two-week high above $40,000. More specifically, the cryptocurrency BTCUSD, +2.41% was trading at around $40,245 on Friday with a nearly 10% gain ove...

Forget About Inflation. Contrarians Expect a Recession and a Drop in Bond Yields.

“Something that everyone knows isn’t worth knowing,” as the famed financier Bernard Baruch once observed. And so I was reminded by a long discourse in the New York Times this past week on why bond yie...

‘No, no, no, no, no!’ My wife and I are close to retirement, but we want to buy a house. Should I empty my 401(k) for the down payment?

Dear MarketWatch, My wife and I have been renting for many years, and we think it’s time to buy our first house. We live in Westchester County, N.Y., and we are looking for a home in the $450,000 to $...

California, Florida, and Inflation Are Sinking Solar

Text size Ethan Miller/Getty Images The solar power industry is destined to grow many times over in the coming decades, and several companies will undoubtedly become behemoths. But the current picture...

Opinion: These 2 numbers sum up why the housing market won’t get back to normal for a long time

Last week I got a letter in the mail. Like you, I’m surprised this still exists as a practice but desperate times call for desperate measures: Courtesy Ben Carlson Now I would like to think our house ...

Opinion: Biden borrows too much, while America’s economy hollows out

It’s easy to be distracted by Russia’s provocations in Ukraine and the Federal Reserve’s new war on inflation but as the economy recovers from the delta and omicron variants, difficult post-pandemic c...

Bears beware. Past corrections for the S&P 500 are only 15% on average, outside of recessions

Even after a rough January for Wall Street, it might take the U.S. economy slipping into a recession before the S&P 500 index risks entering a bear market, according to Oxford Economics. “Equities...

Opinion: The Fed is determined to stop wages from rising

AUSTIN, Texas (Project Syndicate)—Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell has now committed to putting monetary policy on a course of rising interest rates, which could boost the short-term rate (on feder...