Crossmark's Fernandez: The piper's bill is coming due next year

Victoria Fernandez, chief market strategist at Crossmark Global Investments, says investors will have to pay the piper for the market's last two years of out-sized gains, and she thinks the music will start playing early in 2025. While she thinks the market will avoid a big recession and/or market crash — and in fact thinks the market will rebound quickly around the mid-year mark — she thinks earnings will slow, incomes may fall and the consumer will start to cut back after the holiday season, which will contribute to that period where the market cools. Plus, investors flooded into certificates of deposit as interest rates were spiking in 2022 and '23, and now those CDs are coming due and monies reinvested just as a rate-cutting cycle has started; John Blizzard, chief executive officer of CD Valet, discusses how CD investors should shop around and think about maturities, as they pursue the best deals still available for their safest assets. In The NAVigator, John Cole Scott, president of Closed-End Fund Advisors and chairman of the Active Investment Company Alliance, discusses interval funds and digs into the data on four funds that put a unique spin on the structure to create interesting alternative opportunities for investors now.