The U.S. is seeing 30-year records on inflation, and whole generations of American’s have never seen inflation this high. Even worse inflation is even more elevated for healthcare services. Healthcare inflation is expected to be nearly 12% for the next two years according to HealthView Services. This could be a huge hole in retirement savings as a couple of retirees today can expect to spend over $85k on healthcare, those retiring in a decade over $160k and those in the next two decades just shy of $260k. Moreover, social security won’t be enough as the cost of living adjustment doesn’t track healthcare inflation or even standard inflation. Meaning healthcare costs will eat away at most of Social Security.

Finsum: HSAs are more valuable than ever given these ridiculous healthcare inflation costs.

There has been a serious increase in interest in annuities during the pandemic, but overall the product suffered as retirements got put on hold. Bond market disruption has increased that excitement and Legal and General, a British provider, is expecting a big turn around with the pandemic in the rear view. They have already seen a 5% uptick in since the onset of the pandemic. A full recovery is underway and retirement is back on the agenda for many investors, which makes annuities attractive again. Additionally data around savings rates and flows are trending positive for annuities as well.

Finsum: Annuities are just the better alternative for many retirees when the interest rates and inflation are in the position they are now.

There have been huge sectoral pains for tech, bio-tech, emerging market, and growth stocks in the last couple of weeks, but JPMorgan says it's time to turn bullish on these beta positions. Analyst Kolanovic said that these equity sectors are about to benefit because many of the geopolitical risk and macro pressures are about to ease. JPMorgan’s analyst believes that there will be little inflation and the US will avoid a recession. Biotech has been beat down since last August when the Nasdaq Biotech Index peaked; it is now at 75% of its previous high.

Finsum: The Fed projections could be bad for tech stocks as higher interest rates decrease the relative value of techs profits.

Model portfolios have been a surprisingly quick growing tool for the financial industry in the last year, and Morgan sStanley’s Wealth Management is capitalizing by adding a series of new model portfolios. These strategies will have hefty minimums of $750k to $1.5 million and are targeting tax and direct indexing strategies from the recently acquired Parametric. This was a key reason Morgan Stanley acquired Parametric last year to rapidly develop and deploy direct indexing strategies. Overall the portfolios have acquired $150 million in assets since their inception in January.

Finsum: Financial companies took a page out of tech companies playbook by just acquiring the companies that might align with them and allow the to quickly scale when it came to direct indexing.

February was a bad month for fixed income ETFs which saw $32.2 billion in outflows. This marks the third straight month in a row of outflows. However, fixed income wasn’t the only category suffering in February; many traditional funds like money markets and stock/mixed asset funds saw outflows as well. This is an overall bearish sentiment that is creeping across the market, and signals that investors are worried about future rate hikes for the Fed. However, alternative funds continue to be on a win streak as they had their strongest inflows in over a year and have 11 consecutive months of inflows.

Finsum: There is a stronger correlation with stocks and bonds than there was thirty years ago and many investors are turning away from bond funds in the face of volatility.