Finance

FOR ALMOST 80 years, since America’s Bureau of Labour Statistics began splitting data by gender, at least one story has been true: women have been gaining on men. In 1948 just 32% of women were employed or seeking work, against 87% of their male peers. By the end of the 1990s, some 60% of women were in the workforce, alongside 75% of men. During the 2000s and 2010s, the gap continued to shrink, albeit because male employment was falling. Then the covid-19 pandemic pushed workers out—but women recovered faster, narrowing the gap between the sexes to just 10.1 percentage points by early 2025, the smallest on record. More

SIX MONTHS ago, as President Donald Trump announced a trade war of unprecedented ferocity, firms and investors braced for a slump. Movements in financial markets pointed to a recession. American consumers’ confidence nosedived. So did some real-time measures of economic growth. Yet today, even as America and China trade bitter barbs, there are fewer “Liberation Day” effects than expected. More

Barry Rosenstein, founder of JANA Partners.
Adam Jeffery | CNBC

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Cooper Companies Monday

The hedge fund, founded by Barry Rosenstein and known for pressuring companies to make changes that enhance shareholder value, also intends to urge Cooper to improve how it allocates capital in order to boost returns, said the Journal, which cited sources close to the matter.
CNBC reached out to Jana Partners for comment and didn’t immediately hear back.
Jana may encourage Cooper to consider merging its contact-lens business with rival Bausch + Lomb, the Journal reported.
Cooper recently cut its full-year revenue outlook in August, citing weaker demand in some markets. The stock is down nearly 22% this year.
— Click here to read the original WSJ story. More

China Shipping containers are seen at the port of Oakland as trade tensions continue over U.S. tariffs with China, in Oakland, California, on May 12, 2025.
Carlos Barria | Reuters

BEIJING — China’s economy likely slowed in the third quarter, with official data due Monday expected to confirm weaker growth, according to analysts polled by Reuters.
The analysts forecast gross domestic product growth rose 4.8% in the July-to-September period from a year ago, easing from 5.2% in the previous quarter.

Fixed-asset investment, which includes real estate, is likely to have expanded by only 0.1% in the first nine months of the year, according to analyst estimates.
Retail sales are expected to have slowed to 3% year on year in September, while industrial production likely eased to 5%.
Official data released for September so far have shown continued resilience in China’s exports despite tensions with the U.S.
The core consumer price index, which strips out food and energy, rose at its fastest pace since February 2024. But headline inflation missed expectations, falling 0.3% as deflationary pressures persisted. More

“I PROBABLY SHOULDN’T say this, but when you see one cockroach, there are probably more.” Jamie Dimon, boss of JPMorgan Chase, America’s biggest bank, offered a warning on October 14th that the recent blow-ups of Tricolor, an auto lender, and First Brands, a car-parts-maker, might not be the last problems faced by America’s credit market. More

The CBOE Volatility Index, otherwise known as the Wall Street’s fear gauge, is coming off its most volatile week since April.
For investors hesitant to ride out the recent wild swings, Invesco senior portfolio manager John Burrello sees income funds that employ options-based strategies as a sound game plan. His reasoning: They have more structural protection embedded in them.

“Options are not reliant on the correlations of stocks with another… asset class,” Burrello told CNBC’s “ETF Edge” this week. “They can have a more reliable form of downside protection, and also can offer income that’s not interest rate sensitive.”
Burrello, who serves on Invesco’s global asset allocation team, suggests that should serve as an advantage to investors due to the rate cutting cycle. Policymakers are expected to cut rates by a quarter point later this month, according to the consensus on Wall Street.
“Adding income without reliance on the Fed is becoming more and more important. I think that’s driving some growth in the space,” he noted.
Invesco’s income-generated funds include Invesco QQQ Income Advantage ETF, Invesco S&P 500 Equal Weight Income Advantage ETF and the Invesco MSCI EAFE Income Advantage ETF.
So far this year, the Invesco MSCI EAFE Income Advantage ETF has gained about 14%, while the firm’s QQQ Income Advantage ETF is up about 6%. They’re also up about two percent over the past week.

Meanwhile, the Invesco S&P 500 Equal Weight Advantage ETF is virtually flat for the year.

‘Never go out of style’

According to Burrello, there’s a “very large tailwind” for options and defined outcome strategies could last for many years.
“The demand themes of income and defense against equity drawdowns should never go out of style,” Burrello said.  “Those are things that every portfolio likely needs at some point throughout someone’s life. They might want to reduce risk to equities. They also might want to add income that’s a diversifying source, and, again, not relying on interest rates.”
Burrello finds the option income space has attracted a lot of new product launches thay could make it challenging for investors to understand the differences.
His advice: Look for option income ETFs managed by institutional-grade options professionals, beware of unsustainable yields with potentially high fees.

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Thursday’s selloff among regional banks drew comparisons to the 2023 banking crisis that consumed Silicon Valley Bank and First Republic.
Zions and Western Alliance are suing a borrower over alleged loan frauds tied to non-depository financial institutions, or NDFIs.
NDFIs are a fast-growing category of loans made by non-bank financial firms but often funded by regional banks and global investment banks alike.

Big banks including JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs had just finished taking victory laps after a blockbuster quarter when concerns emerged from an obscure corner of Wall Street, sending a collective shiver through global finance.
Regional bank Zions late Wednesday disclosed a near total wipeout on $60 million in loans after finding “apparent misrepresentations” from the borrowers. The next day, peer Western Alliance said that it had sued the same borrower, a commercial real estate firm called the Cantor Group, for alleged fraud.

The result was a sudden and deep selloff among regional banks, drawing comparisons to the churn of the 2023 banking crisis that consumed Silicon Valley Bank and First Republic. This time around, investors are focused on a specific type of lending made by banks to non-depository financial institutions, or NDFIs, as the source of possible contagion.
“When you see one cockroach, there are probably more,” JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said this week. “Everyone should be forewarned on this one.”
Concerns over credit quality had been simmering for weeks after the September collapse of two U.S. auto-related companies. JPMorgan, the biggest U.S. bank by assets, this week reported a $170 million loss tied to one of them, the subprime auto lender Tricolor.
But it wasn’t until a third case of alleged fraud around loans made to NDFIs that investors were jolted into fearing the worst, according to Truist banking analyst Brian Foran.
“You now have had three situations where there was alleged fraud” involving NDFIs, Foran said.

Dimon’s comments “really resonated with people who were like, ‘Oh, man, the tide went out a little bit, and now we’re seeing who was lacking their swim trunks,” Foran said.

What are NDFIs?

The episode cast a spotlight on a fast-growing category of loans made by regional banks and global investment banks alike. Rules put into place after the 2008 financial crisis discouraged regulated banks from making many types of loans, from mortgages to subprime auto, leading to the rise of thousands of non-bank lenders.
Moving riskier activities outside of the regulated bank perimeter, where failures are backstopped by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, seemed like a good move.
But it turns out, banks are a major source of funding for non-bank lenders: commercial loans to NDFIs reached $1.14 trillion as of March, per the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
Bank loans made to non-bank financial firms were the single fastest-growing category, rising 26% annually since 2012, according to the St. Louis Fed.
“The surge in NDFI lending was really because all these different regulations added up to say there are a bunch of loans banks can’t do anymore, but if they lend to someone else who does them, that’s OK,” Foran said.
“We really don’t know much about these NDFI books,” Foran said. “People are saying, ‘I didn’t know it was so easy for a bank to think they had $50 million in collateral and find out they had zero.'”

‘Overreaction’ or early?

Part of what’s spooking investors is that, while some of the loan losses disclosed have been relatively small, they’ve been near total wipeouts, said KBW bank analyst Catherine Mealor.
“NDFI lending, because of the collateral involved, typically has a higher loss rate, and the losses can come very quickly and out of nowhere,” Mealor said. “It’s really hard to wrap your mind around these risks.”
Mealor said investors have been inundating her with questions around the level of NDFI exposures in her coverage universe, the analyst said. Firms including Western Alliance and Axos Financial are among those with the highest proportion of NDFI loans, according to an August research note from Janney Montgomery.
Still, regional banks are benefitting from an improving interest rate environment and rising mergers activity, which underpin valuations, Mealor said, adding she thinks this week’s stock selloff was an “overreaction.”
“You want to avoid companies that show up high in the screen for NDFI loans,” she said. “There are plenty of high-quality companies in the KRX that are trading at a massive discount.”
Correction: This article has been updated to remove an incorrect mention of losses at one of the regional banks tied to the alleged loan fraud. More

The classic 60/40 stock and bond portfolio has faced greater scrutiny in recent years with a breakdown in the way fixed-income performed historically as a stock market hedge for investors.
Inflation and government debt concerns are among recent factors driving demand for precious metals including gold and silver, and cryptocurrencies including bitcoin, to represent a greater share of a diversified portfolio.
The so-called “60-20-20” portfolio concept recommends investors consider moving half of the classic bond allocation to an alternative like gold or bitcoin.

The traditional 60/40 portfolio has been under attack for years, and the recent hot trades in precious metals and cryptocurrencies are leading it to lose a little more of its prominence. Multiple strategists and investors are pivoting toward a 60/20/20 market portfolio: with the 60% in stocks unchanged, but fixed income losing half of its former hold over investor money, and 20% carved out for alternatives like gold and bitcoin.
Stocks and bonds are moving in the same direction too often, they say, while inflation, geopolitical risk, and government spending and high debt loads mean bonds no longer offer the protection they once did. “We are seeing greater adoption of non-equity, non fixed-income products,” Todd Rosenbluth, head of research at VettaFi, told CNBC.

In this new approach to structuring market exposure, gold is not a hedge on the margins of a portfolio, but one of its core holdings. Gold recently reached a record high above $4,300. Gold is up over 60% since the beginning of the year, which is backed by central bank demand, de-dollarization, and geopolitical tensions, and what has been called “the debasement trade.”
“What’s really happening now is a shift into the acceptance of gold,” Steve Schoffstall, director of ETF product management at precious metals and critical materials investing company Sprott, said on CNBC’s “ETF Edge” earlier this week. Typically, he said, it’s been viewed as a “fringe” allocation tool, “but what we’re really staring to see now is more prominent economists suggest shifting from 60-40 to something closer to 60-20-20,” he added.
But Schoffstall also said that for “most people, we feel they are probably well positioned if they have a 5%-15% allocation to physical gold.”
Gold ETFs have skyrocketed in performance and investor appeal, with the SPDR Gold Shares (GLD) and iShares Gold Trust (IAU) up around 11% this month, but the flood of investor assets into gold funds extends back to earlier this year. Gold ETFs posted their largest monthly inflows ever in September, according to the World Gold Council, with close to $11 billion in the month. SPDR Gold Shares took in over $4 billion alone last month, and mid-October, has amassed another $1.3 billion from investors, according to ETFAction.com. Sprott says the total assets moved by investors into gold funds this year has surpassed $38 billion.

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Performance of the SPDR Gold Shares ETF and iShares Bitcoin Trust in 2025.

Some investors are allocating to cryptocurrency, specifically bitcoin, with a similar 20% approach. Some financial advisors have gone beyond even that level, saying up to 40% in cryptocurrency is defensible as an investing approach.

Bitcoin reached a record high of $126,000 on Oct. 6 and has seen a flood of new money this month, with iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF (IBIT) taking in close to $1 billion in a single day, and over $4 billion at the mid-month October mark.
Rosenbluth said the alternatives bucket is no longer a single bet, but a mix of commodities, crypto, and private credit that are all packaged in ETFs, but investors do need to understand the bets have significant differences. “Gold is more risk off … cryptocurrency is more risk on,” Rosenbluth said.
Silver has also gained more attention among investors, and unlike gold, silver is a play on multiple global economic trends, including industrial demand, electrification, and automation. Prices recently climbed to a record high of $53.59 per ounce and some analysts expect it to trend much higher. “Silver is very vast in its uses about 10,000 uses,” Schoffstall said.
Rosenbluth warns amid the current record run for precious metals and crypto that this should not be about investors chasing the highest return in the short-term. While this has been a period of time when these alternatives increased overall portfolio returns, there’s no guarantee that will always be the case. The primary reason to restructure a portfolio with hedges, Rosenbluth said, is to add levers that operate differently during periods of ups and downs in the stock and bond markets, and that can help to smooth out returns over time.
This week was a good example of how these assets, considered popular hedges, can have very different market dynamics. After hitting its record above $126,000 earlier this month, bitcoin has sold off sharply, with a weekly loss of over 8%, as of Friday morning, while gold and silver have continued to move up and remain on pace for weekly gains. Private credit, meanwhile, which has ballooned in recent years but also sparked fears it might be brewing a bubble, became a major concern of the market over the past week since the surprise bankruptcy of auto parts company First Brands. More