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This week’s highlights:
Stocks kicked off the fourth quarter by pushing to yet another record high, this time led by healthcare, a sector that’s struggled in 2025.
Before we look ahead to the final three months of 2025 and beyond, we’ve got our third-quarter wrap-ups to catch you up on the biggest trends. For a high-level view, Sarah Hansen pulls together 13 charts on the quarter’s tech-driven stock market, along with a look at bonds and other markets.
We then look under the hood at the stocks that drove the quarter’s 8% market rise. First up, we have Bella Albrecht’s dive into the stocks that led this rally. It turns out the quarter featured a bit of a Mag Seven throwback party, with Apple, Alphabet, and Nvidia leading the charge. Check out the other key stocks behind the gains here.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock or taken a Luddite-style pledge, it won’t come as a surprise that artificial-intelligence-related names were big winners. Frank Lee looks at the performance of AI stocks in the third quarter, highlighting the big winners and losers (yes, some went down).
We’ve also got our usual quarterly screens for the top-performing dividend stocks and the overall best- and worst-performing stocks.
From here, we look ahead. Front and center is the US government shutdown, which, among other things, means we aren’t writing about the September jobs report today. Another casualty is the red-hot IPO market.
But those are just small ripples. What kind of impact might the shutdown have on the US economy? Morningstar senior economist Preston Caldwell offers his outlook.
Additionally, Ivanna Hampton chatted with Sarah Hansen about the key factors that will drive the market in the fourth quarter. They cover a lot of ground, from inflation to AI to budget battles. Check out the video.
Lastly, John Rekenthaler is back for another great out-of-retirement column. He digs into the data to see where in the United States the country’s decades-long stock market exceptionalism hails from. It’s a great read, even if, as a dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker, it hurts to learn the answer is 3,000 miles away.
Join us next week for our full slate of fourth-quarter stock market outlooks, including our top sector picks and a deep dive into the AI/utilities stock connection.
As always, be sure to visit our Markets page for our latest coverage and live stock market updates, along with our full weekly calendar of key upcoming data and events.
