This week on 7 Market Movers, Wealth Enhancement Director, Senior Investment Strategist Ayako Yoshioka discusses recent investment market performance:

• Markets remain choppy but broadly resilient, supported by solid U.S. and global economic growth, easing inflation, and steady labor and manufacturing data
• Investors are seeing heightened volatility at the individual‑stock level, even as market leadership broadens beyond Tech
• Treasury yields fluctuate amid mixed signals on inflation and demand for longer‑dated bonds

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TRANSCRIPT BELOW

Hello, and welcome to this week's 7 Market Movers video from Wealth Enhancement. My name is Aya Yoshioka, Portfolio Consulting Director and Senior Investment Strategist. And in these videos, we look to keep you informed of some of the headlines that grab both our attention as well as the overall markets. So let's get started. 

It's been another choppy week for markets, but what we've witnessed so far in 2026 is that overall economic growth remains pretty solid, both here in the U.S. as well as globally.

Inflation is gradually moving lower, and investors are repositioning exposures across equity markets and within equity markets. And you're seeing this play out at the individual stock level more so than at the index level.

From an economic data perspective, last Friday, we got a nice inflation read. Consumer Price Index data showed that inflation was up 2.4% year over year, a little less than the 2.5% that was expected and down from the 2.7% readout in the prior month.

On the labor front, we saw initial jobless claims this week. This is a weekly number that we get for people claiming unemployment for the first time. That was a little less than what economists had projected. About 200,000 people claimed unemployment this week vs. the 225,000 that was estimated.

On the manufacturing front, we saw Empire Manufacturing Index and industrial production data that continued to point to solid economic growth.

We'll also get a readout on fourth quarter 2025 GDP numbers. And although that's backward looking, that number is going to come out tomorrow, and it will show what kind of momentum that we had in the overall economy as we closed out 2025.

So with all this good news on the economic front, markets should be cheering. Right?

Well, after weeks of pressure, some of the AI-linked stocks in the Tech space stabilized and rebounded a little bit. While companies that are less likely to be disrupted by AI, a little bit more grounded in the physical realm versus the digital realm, continued to gain momentum.

International stocks have also performed well. European stocks rallied to a fresh record on Tuesday, and the stocks Europe 600 Index is now up over 6% in 2026.

As I mentioned before, we've seen a lot of this heightened volatility play out at the individual stock level. And one of the stats that we saw was that 30% of companies or stocks within the S&P 500 Index were up or down at least 20% over the last three months.

When you look back over the last 20 years of this data, typically only 15% of stocks within the S&P 500 Index are up or down by that much over that three-month timeframe.

Perhaps this is why it feels like markets are a lot more volatile than what the index numbers have been showing.

This week, we also saw the release of Fed minutes from the Fed meeting back in January. And policymakers remained pretty encouraged by the progress that we're making on inflation, but they weren't fully convinced that inflation risks are completely behind us. And some of this comes to the fact that a lot of companies have been talking about potentially passing through some of the the tariff increases that they absorbed initially over the last few months down to the consumer.

With that, Treasury yields moved around a little bit this week, and the two-year Treasury touched a low of 3.4% at the end of last week after we got that CPI readout.

The 10-year yield touched a low of 4.0%, but we also had a 20-year Treasury auction this week that was met with a little less demand than what people were expecting. And so yields backed up a little bit after that auction showed that there was a weaker demand for that 20-year Treasury.

Bottom line, the economy remains pretty solid both here in the U.S. as well as globally.

Markets have continued to broaden out, and this is beyond that concentrated Tech leadership that we witnessed over the last few years. And so this diversification should be viewed positively.

Thanks for listening, and we'll see you again next week.

This information is not intended as a recommendation. The opinions are subject to change at any time and no forecasts can be guaranteed. Investment decisions should always be made based on an investor's specific circumstances.

There is no guarantee that asset allocation or diversification will enhance overall returns, outperform a non-diversified portfolio, nor ensure a profit or protect against a loss. Investing involves risk, including possible loss of principal.

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