13 Investment Must Reads for This Week (Aug. 18, 2026)

13 Investment Must Reads for This Week (Aug. 18, 2026)

Tue, August 18, 2026 at 7:36 PM GMT+3 4 min read

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1. Schwab on the Hunt for Long-Short Strategies Director "Charles Schwab has recently been on the search for a director to lead the firm's long-short separately managed account initiative, someone responsible for building a team focused specifically on long-short SMAs and creating companywide coordination for the business, according to a job posting. Schwab did not respond to questions, including if the position has been filled." (The Daily Upside)

2. Morgan Stanley Bolsters UMA Offerings as Advisory Assets Soar "Morgan Stanley has expanded the fund options on its Select UMA Program to provide a wider set of investment choices as its investment advisory platform exceeds $3 trillion in assets under management... Amid that momentum, the firm has added tender offer funds and interval funds to the closed-end mutual funds offered in the Select UMA Program, according to a Form ADV disclosure." (FundFire)

3. U.S. ETF Investors at Odds: Chasing Returns or Playing the Long Game? "All investors seek positive returns, but their time horizons and strategies are dramatically different. The longest-term investors rely on research that points to the odds-on play of buying and holding broad-based, cap-weighted stock and bond ETFs. Other investors extrapolate recent performance with hopes to continue riding a wave." (ETF.com)

4. Wealth Management Has a $3 Trillion Problem: Investors Are Keeping Too Much Cash "The risk, they argue, is that the yield on cash won't keep pace with inflation. Money-market yields are currently right about at the rate of inflation. Many advisers are pitching alternatives, including corporate bonds, municipal bonds and more exotic offerings such as buffer exchange-traded funds and private credit." (WSJ)

5. What Doubters Get Wrong About the 60/40 Portfolio "The objective of diversification isn't to avoid periodic losses. Those are an unavoidable part of investing. The real goal is to reduce the severity of those short-term losses so investors can remain committed to their long-term plan through difficult markets." (Morningstar)

6. How Covered Call ETFs Evolved Through the Years "Newer strategies have become more selective about how much of the portfolio they overwrite, where they set strike prices, which underlying assets they use, and how they manage the tax consequences of their options income. The category has also expanded far beyond the S&P 500 into bonds, commodities, cryptocurrencies, international equities, and even individual stocks." (ETF Central)

7. Buffer ETFs Have Paid Off, but Investors Should Know Their Limits "Encouragingly, buffer ETFs appear to have worked as advertised, delivering on the terms that define the outcome range. What's more, investors have utilized them in the intended way, capturing the ETFs' full total returns and then some by adhering to the outcome periods and maybe thanks to a dollop of luck as well." (Morningstar)

8. Wall Street Wants to Turn Every NHL Team Into an ETF "Every fund would hold futures contracts tied to a CME FutureSports Performance Index built for that one team. The indexes, which the CME announced just three days earlier, are calculated by an independent administrator called FutureSports and are based on official real-time NHL data." (ETF.com)

9. Only Carlyle, Pimco Shine in Two Dozen Morningstar Semi-Liquid Ratings "The result reflects tougher criteria the research and analytics provider has set for registered alts funds – weighting their higher fees, and in some cases their short track records, as a negative, which has dragged on big-selling products from managers such as Blackstone and BlackRock's HPS Investment Partners." (FundFire)

10. Clients Are Craving Income. Here's How Advisors Are Delivering "Historically, investors looking to generate income were largely limited to bonds, especially prior to the financial crisis when interest rates were higher. Now, advisors can put their clients' eggs in far more baskets by accessing private credit or using products like covered call or dividend exchange-traded funds to juice a little extra yield." (The Daily Upside)

11. Private credit under strain as troubled loans swell "The value of troubled loans held by some of the biggest private debt investors has reached levels last seen in 2017, when the industry was dealing with a hangover from an oil price crash, an FT analysis of figures from fixed-income data provider Solve has found." (Financial Times)

12. BREIT Exits Self-Storage As It Invests Billions Into Data Centers "The REIT has offloaded its last 79 self-storage assets, it announced in its second-quarter earnings report earlier this month. The sale brought in $852.3M in net proceeds and a net gain of $177.3M…. BREIT doubled down on its data center segment during Q2, spending $3.3B in development through QTS." (Bisnow)

13. A Breakdown of the Financial Advice That's Flying All Over TikTok "To give a taste of the financial advice one might encounter on TikTok, we scraped the social-media app for accounts that had tagged their videos with one of a handful of widely used money hashtags, including #investing and #personalfinance on July 13. We reviewed nearly 50 hours of content across 212 accounts that offered money advice." (WSJ)