The 2 big things markets are watching in the week ahead: jobs report and continued earnings season

(CNBC)

US joins Japan in engineering a rebound in the yen, strongest since early May (Bloomberg)

AI loan market sees investor pushback for first time in years; CoreWeave, Proofpoint among borrowers sweetening terms (Bloomberg)

Kospi caps 22% monthly loss, steepest since the global financial crisis, as angry investors vow not to buy Korean stocks (Bloomberg)

Turkey extends Iraq oil pipeline deal by one year, securing a supply route that bypasses the Strait of Hormuz (Bloomberg)

Exxon and Chevron warn elevated fuel prices will persist as war knocks out global refining capacity (Bloomberg)

Phoenix extends record-breaking heat streak as the West faces an elevated wildfire threat (Bloomberg)

SpaceX shares trade roughly 50% below their post-IPO high as capital rotates out of chip and AI

infrastructure names (CNBC)

UPS beats Q2 estimates on revenue and EPS, raises full-year guidance (CNBC)

Nasdaq 100 enters a technical correction as the chip rout deepens and the 10-year yield hits a near two-decade high (Bloomberg)

A divided Fed holds rates steady, with three committee members dissenting in favor of a hike (CNBC)

Microsoft shares post their biggest one-day gain since 2008 as Azure tops $100 billion in annual revenue for the first time (Bloomberg)

LPL just posted record Q2 earnings and its best recruiting quarter in almost two years, at the same time. Net income hit $379M, up 39% year over year, and the firm pulled in $25B in recruited assets, up 35%. CEO Richard Steinmeier says the Commonwealth integration is done and the firm is chasing bigger institutional deals next. (InvestmentNews, July 31)

Cetera just installed two new "Community Leader" executives over its RIA Network and Cetera Investors channels, pulled straight from Raymond James and Primerica. Recruiting investment is moving past just richer packages into dedicated leadership infrastructure built specifically around retention and growth. (WealthManagement.com)

A whistleblower complaint alleges Morgan Stanley's wealth unit pressured mortgage staff into approving risky home loans for wealthy clients, including fees that scaled with loan size and clients misrepresenting investment properties as owner-occupied. Morgan Stanley denies it, but the Fed and FinCEN are reportedly reviewing. This breaks the same week Morgan Stanley lost its Graystone Consulting team to Merrill (see Advisor Moves), and a compliance crack showing up the same week as a marquee departure is worth more attention than either story on its own. (InvestmentNews, July 30)

LPL's Chief of Corporate Strategy, Ilan Davidovici, is out after less than a year, announcing on LinkedIn he's stepping away from the industry entirely. He replaced Katelyn Shackleton in January, after she left for Mercer Advisors. Strategy-chief churn this fast, landing the same week as record earnings, isn't the kind of thing an earnings call tells you. (WealthManagement.com, July 30)

RBC Capital Markets settled FINRA anti-money-laundering charges for $275,000 over surveillance failures that ran from 2016 to 2023, seven years of alert thresholds set so loose that compliance teams learned to ignore them. Small fine, long runway for the gap to go uncorrected. (WealthManagement.com, July 29)

Cerulli projects advisor-owned alternative-investment AUM nearly doubling from $2.2T to $4.4T within five years, driven by interval funds, semiliquid wrappers, and partnerships between traditional managers and private capital. Alts access is quickly turning into table stakes, not a differentiator, which raises the bar for what a firm needs to offer a candidate who already expects it. (WealthManagement.com, July 30)

Merrill landed the week's biggest team: 14 people, including 6 advisors, out of Morgan Stanley's Graystone Consulting, bringing $13B in assets. The group is led by 35-year veteran Al Hammond and serves ultra-high-net-worth families and institutions out of Boston, one of the largest wirehouse-to-wirehouse transfers of the year. (WealthManagement.com, July 31)

UBS had one of the stranger weeks on record: it lost $2B combined (a $1.5B team to RBC's Focus Wealth Management in Palm Beach Gardens, a $500M team to Raymond James in New Jersey) and gained $1.3B the same week, a four-advisor team with over 100 combined years of experience that left Bank of America Private Bank for UBS in Tampa. Biggest net loser and a same-week winner, at once. (InvestmentNews, July 31; WealthManagement.com, July 27)

Raymond James pulled a $5.4B team away from Comerica (recently absorbed into Fifth Third Bank), led by three advisors with a combined 46 years of tenure, now operating under the name Capital Reserve Group in Newport Beach. (WealthManagement.com, July 30)

&Partners, the hybrid broker-dealer founded by ex-Wells Fargo Advisors president David Kowach, picked up a $1.8B Wells Fargo team in Mississippi, its fourth new practice in July alone. The firm is now at 121 practices and roughly $58B in assets. (WealthManagement.com, July 30)

Cresset added a $600M solo advisor in Santa Barbara, smaller than the week's other moves, but more evidence that multi-family offices are actively recruiting individual senior advisors now, not just teams. (WealthManagement.com, July 31)

Mercer Advisors and Compound Planning both went all-in on AI for family offices the same week, and it reads like the start of a real arms race in that specific niche. Mercer's new Aspen 2.0 platform runs on a knowledge-graph architecture across 450 lead advisors managing $110B+, while Compound Planning launched agents inside its AdvisorHQ platform that draft client communications and structure routine tasks for advisor approval. The interesting part isn't the AI, it's the target: family offices are exactly the kind of complex, many-service relationship where AI's near-term value is clearest. (WealthManagement.com / InvestmentNews, July 30)

A new compliance survey found 85% of RIA firms now name AI their top compliance priority for 2026, a 28-point jump from last year. But adoption is way ahead of governance: only 48% have formal policies for human review of AI output, and just 37% test AI-generated content before it reaches a client. That gap is exactly what regulators are positioned to find first. Next time a firm leans on "we're investing heavily in AI" as a pitch, ask whether governance kept pace with adoption. (InvestmentNews, July 29)

Bloomberg is acquiring Canoe Intelligence, a platform that automates private-markets data collection across 44,000+ funds. Private-markets data infrastructure is turning into consolidation territory, not just a category of point-solution startups. (WealthTech Today / Bloomberg, July 29)

Worthy AI says it can cut advisor tax-planning sessions from several hours down to 15-20 minutes, and it's already piloted at 300 Edward Jones associates and 15 RIAs. Tax planning has been slower to adopt AI than portfolio management or client communication, so a credible, already-piloted tool here is worth watching as a leading indicator. (InvestmentNews, July 30)