Why Stocks Can Rise When Interest Rates Rise

A claim comes up often on investing podcasts, usually in a year when yields climb and the stock market keeps climbing with them. Finance textbooks say that when interest rates go up, the present value of an asset goes down. Stocks have not gone down. So, the argument goes, the rule holds in theory and fails in the real world.

2026 has supplied the setup. The 10-year Treasury yield rose from 4.18% at the end of 2025 to 4.75% at the end of August, and the 10-year TIPS yield, the market’s real risk-free rate, rose from 1.93% to 2.44%. Over those same eight months the U.S. stock market returned 12.7%.¹² On September 16 the Federal Reserve raised its target range a quarter point to 3.75% to 4.00%,³ and by October 2 the 10-year yield stood at 5.28%.¹

Both halves of the podcast claim contain something true, and the conclusion still does not follow. The present-value rule is a statement about changing one input while holding the others fixed. A stock price on a given day reflects every input changing at once. Once you separate the two, the rule survives intact, and so does the observation behind the complaint: the direction of interest rates is a poor guide to the direction of the stock market.

What the present-value rule says

The value of a stock is the discounted value of the cash it is expected to pay its owners, in dividends and buybacks, forever:

Here $E[\mathit{CF}_t]$ is the cash shareholders expect to receive in year $t$, and $k$ is the discount rate: the risk-free rate $r_f$ plus an equity risk premium. In the simplest version, a company paying $10 a year with no growth, the sum collapses to cash flow divided by the discount rate. Discounted at 5%, it is worth $10 ÷ 0.05 = $200. Raise the discount rate to 6% and nothing else, and it is worth $10 ÷ 0.06 ≈ $167. That drop is arithmetic. No data set can contradict it, because it follows from the definition of present value.

Now suppose the discount rate rose to 6% because the economy improved, and the same news raised the expected payout from $10 to $13. The stock is worth $13 ÷ 0.06 ≈ $217. Rates went up and the price went up. The present-value rule has not failed: the higher discount rate still subtracted value, and higher expected cash flows added more.

In calculus terms, the textbook rule is a partial derivative: the change in price for a change in the discount rate, with expected cash flows held fixed. What you observe in the market is the total change, which adds up the effect of the discount rate, the effect of revised cash-flow expectations, and the effect of a changed risk premium. The partial derivative is always negative. The total change can have either sign.

The textbook rule is the first term, and its sign is fixed. The second term is negative when the risk premium rises and positive when it falls. The third, where $\mathit{CF}$ stands for the whole path of expected cash flows, is positive when the news raises expected earnings. A stock price falls on a rate increase only when the first two terms outweigh the third. The calculator below computes the three pieces exactly rather than through derivatives, but it splits the change the same way.

For stocks the discount rate itself has parts. A useful approximation is that the return investors require on stocks equals the risk-free rate plus an equity risk premium, the extra return demanded for bearing stock market risk. A Treasury yield can rise while the premium falls, and then the discount rate on stocks rises by less than the Treasury yield did, or not at all. Ang and Liu work through how to value cash flows when the risk-free rate, the risk premium, and the asset’s risk all vary over time, the general case that a single constant discount rate approximates.⁴

Which interest rate?

“Interest rates went up” can refer to at least four different numbers, and they do not move together.

• The federal funds rate is an overnight rate the Fed sets. Stocks are priced off decades of cash flow, so one night of borrowing cost matters only through what it signals about the path of future rates and the economy. See Does the Fed Really Set Interest Rates?
• The 10-year Treasury yield combines the expected path of short rates over the next decade with a term premium for holding a long bond. It can rise because the Fed is expected to hike, because inflation expectations rose, or because investors want more compensation for duration risk. The term premium guide splits the 10-year yield into those parts.
• The 10-year TIPS yield is the real risk-free rate: the return above inflation the Treasury pays on inflation-indexed debt. Company revenues and costs rise with the price level over time, so the real rate is the closer match to the discount rate on stocks.
• The equity discount rate is the real rate, plus expected inflation for nominal cash flows, plus the equity risk premium. Nobody observes it directly.

The distinction between nominal and real yields matters most. If nominal yields rise because expected inflation rose, nominal corporate earnings are expected to rise too, and the two effects partly offset. If real yields rise, there is no automatic offset in the cash flows. The Ten-Year Rose 392 Basis Points Since 2021 shows that nearly all of the rise in the 10-year yield since 2021 was a rise in the real yield, and works through what that does to the return stocks have to beat.

Why rates rose determines what stocks do

A rise in the 10-year yield is an outcome. The same outcome can come from different news, and each kind of news moves the other inputs in a different direction. The table describes typical directions, not rules that hold in every episode.

Seen this way, “stocks rose despite rising rates” is often the wrong description. In a growth surprise, stocks and yields rise because of the same news. The calculator below lets you build each row and see the pieces add up.

At the calculator’s default inputs (a 5% risk-free rate, a 3.5% risk premium, 6% cash-flow growth for ten years and 4.5% after), a 1-point rise in the risk-free rate with nothing else changing cuts value by about 20%. In the growth-surprise preset, the same model shows value up about 11% even though the risk-free rate rose 0.75 points, because higher expected cash flows and a lower risk premium outweigh the rate effect. In the inflation-shock and tightening presets, value falls about 22% in both. These are outputs of one stylized model at inputs chosen for illustration, and the sizes move a lot with the starting assumptions.

The 20% figure is also a clue. If a 1-point rise in the discount rate alone did that to stock prices, every 1-point move in Treasury yields would come with a crash. It does not. In calendar years when the 10-year yield rose by more than a full point, the stock market has returned anywhere from about −20% (2022) to +35% (2013).² The other terms usually move at the same time.

Evidence from Fed announcements

Correlations between rates and stocks cannot separate cause from effect, because rates and stocks both respond to the same economic news. The cleanest evidence comes from the minutes around Federal Reserve announcements, when the main news is the Fed’s decision.

Kenneth Kuttner used fed funds futures prices to split each Fed rate change into the part markets already expected and the surprise. Treasury yields reacted strongly to the surprise and barely to the expected part.⁵ So “the Fed raised rates and stocks went up” says little about cause and effect: a widely expected hike was in prices weeks earlier.

Ben Bernanke and Kuttner applied the same split to stocks. They found that “a hypothetical unanticipated 25-basis-point cut in the federal funds rate target is associated with about a one percent increase in broad stock indexes.”⁶ When they traced where the price change came from, most of it was a change in the expected excess return on stocks, the risk premium, and some was revised expectations of future dividends. Very little was due to changes in expected real interest rates. A pure policy surprise does move stocks the way the textbook predicts, but mostly through the risk premium.

Marek Jarociński and Peter Karadi looked at how rates and stocks moved together in the half hour around each announcement. If a tightening surprise were the only news, rates should rise and stocks should fall. In their working-paper version, about a third of FOMC announcements from 1990 to 2016 had rates and stocks moving in the same direction instead.⁷ Their interpretation: “a surprise policy tightening raises interest rates and reduces stock prices, while the complementary positive central bank information shock raises both.”⁸ When the Fed hikes because it sees a stronger economy than markets did, investors update their growth forecasts along with their rate forecasts.

Michael Bauer and Eric Swanson dispute that interpretation. They argue the same-direction moves are better explained by a “Fed response to news” channel: the Fed and private forecasters both react to public economic data, so the announcement looks like it revealed good news when it mostly confirmed news markets already had. Their stock market evidence lines up with the standard prediction, with stocks moving opposite to the policy surprise.⁹ The two papers disagree about why a third of announcements look the way they do. They agree that a pure, unexpected tightening lowers stock prices, and that a rise in rates alone does not tell you which kind of news arrived.

Longer yields respond to more than the Fed. Refet Gürkaynak, Brian Sack and Eric Swanson found that forward rates far out on the yield curve move substantially on macroeconomic data releases and policy announcements, which they read as shifting long-run inflation expectations.¹⁰ A 10-year yield is partly a running verdict on the economy, so it would be strange if it moved independently of corporate profit forecasts.

What 64 years of data show

To see the unconditional relationship, we paired each month’s U.S. stock market total return from the Kenneth French Data Library with that month’s change in the 10-year Treasury yield from FRED, February 1962 to 2026-08.²¹ This is a correlation, not a causal estimate. It mixes every kind of rate move in the table above.

Source: Summitward calculation from the Kenneth French Data Library (Mkt-RF plus RF) and FRED DGS10 month-end yields. Months with no change in the yield are excluded from both averages.

Over the full sample, stocks did worse in months when the 10-year yield rose: 0.55% on average against 1.36% when it fell, with a correlation of -0.13. From 1962 through 2001 the pattern was stronger. The two decades from 2002 through 2021 reversed it: rising-yield months averaged 1.63% and falling-yield months 0.17%. Since 2022 the older pattern is back, at -0.51% against 2.68%.

Anyone who formed their view of rates and stocks between 2002 and 2021 saw yields and stocks rise together month after month. In that period inflation was low and stable, so most yield moves carried news about growth: good news lifted both, and recessions sent both down. The 2010s were the extreme, with a correlation of 0.49. The podcast intuition comes from a real regime, one that lasted twenty years and then ended.

Academic work explains the switch through the inflation regime. John Campbell, Carolin Pflueger and Luis Viceira model bond and stock risk in terms of how inflation moves with the business cycle. Estimating their model separately for 1979 to 2001 and 2001 to 2011, they write that it “explains why the exposure of US Treasury bonds to the stock market changed from positive to negative,” driven by “a change in the comovement between inflation and the output gap.”¹¹ When inflation rises in booms, as in the 1970s and since 2021, yields go up on bad news for stocks. When inflation is quiet and growth news dominates, yields go up on good news. Researchers at the Bank for International Settlements found that “the correlation between US equity and government bond returns switched sign in mid-2021,” at the point when the coefficient on inflation surprises turned positive.¹²

Real yields tell a cleaner story. Using the 10-year TIPS yield from 2016 through 2026-08, months when the real yield rose averaged a -0.27% stock return, against 2.59% when it fell, a correlation of -0.47. From 2003 to 2015 the real-yield relationship was close to zero (-0.04). Real-rate shocks are the kind the textbook rule describes best, and recently they have hurt.

Calendar years show a much weaker pattern. From 1963 through 2025 the 10-year yield rose in 33 years, and the U.S. stock market finished up in 24 of them. It fell in 29 years, and stocks finished up in 24 of those. Average annual returns were 11.7% in rising-yield years and 12.5% in falling-yield years.²¹ Over a full year, whatever moved yields usually mattered less to stocks than earnings growth did.

Five episodes

Sources: FRED DGS10 and DFII10 daily yields on the last trading day before each window and on its last day (for 2013, May 2 to December 31); U.S. market total return from the Kenneth French Data Library, compounded over the calendar months in each window. The 2004 to 2006 window covers the Fed’s move from a 1% to a 5.25% funds rate target.

The episodes line up with the table of causes. In 2013 and 2024, yields rose alongside an expanding economy, and stocks did well. In the 2004 to 2006 cycle, the Fed raised its target by more than four points while the 10-year yield rose about half a point; markets had expected most of the hikes. In 2022 both nominal and real yields jumped more than two points on an inflation shock and stocks fell about a fifth. Fed economists studying dividend futures that year concluded that “the declines in equity prices since the beginning of the year have been mostly driven by a revaluation of far-dated cash flows through a higher discount rate as opposed to changes in cash-flow expectations.”¹³ That is the present-value rule, observed directly.

What finance researchers mean by the discount rate

One more source of confusion: academic finance treats discount rates as central to stock prices, yet the monthly correlation with Treasury yields is weak. The two statements fit together because in the research literature the discount rate means the expected return on stocks, and most of its variation comes from the risk premium.

John Campbell and Robert Shiller’s log-linear present-value identity connects a stock’s dividend yield to future dividend growth and future returns.¹⁴¹⁵ Campbell and John Ammer used it to split postwar U.S. stock and bond returns into news about dividends, inflation, real interest rates and future excess returns. Excess stock returns were driven largely by news about future excess stock returns, and changes in real interest rates had little effect on stock or 10-year bond returns.¹⁶ John Cochrane’s 2011 presidential address to the American Finance Association put the result in one line: “Dividend yields forecast returns, not dividend growth.”¹⁷

So the discount rate on stocks moves a great deal, and most of that movement is a change in how much compensation investors demand for risk, which Treasury yields only partly capture.

Growth stocks and equity duration

Bond investors measure rate sensitivity with duration. Patricia Dechow, Richard Sloan and Mark Soliman built the stock version, implied equity duration, from forecast cash flows. Companies whose value rests on cash flows far in the future have longer duration, and they found the book-to-market ratio works as a rough proxy for it: growth stocks tend to be long-duration, value stocks shorter.¹⁸

The constant-growth (Gordon) version of the present-value formula shows why. If cash flows grow at a steady rate $g$ forever,

The sensitivity of price to the discount rate equals the price divided by next year’s cash payout, which in this model is also $1/(k-g)$. A stock paying out 2% of its price has $k-g$ of 2%; a 1-point rise in the discount rate, with growth unchanged, takes that to 3% and cuts the price by a third. A stock paying out 5% goes from 5% to 6% and loses a sixth. Higher valuations mean longer duration. The model assumes growth is constant forever and nothing else changes, which is why its rate sensitivity is far larger than the moves stocks usually make when yields change. The calculator shows the same effect: lower the gap between the discount rate and long-run growth, which is what a high valuation implies, and the all-else-equal rate effect gets larger.

The concept is sound. Turning it into a trade, selling growth and buying value when yields rise, requires knowing which row of the cause table you are in. A rise in yields driven by a productivity boom can raise long-dated cash-flow expectations most of all, and long-duration stocks gain the most from that. The growth stocks guide covers the separate question of whether growth stocks earn higher returns.

The Fed Model, and why nominal and real yields matter

The popular “Fed Model” compares the stock market’s earnings yield (earnings divided by price) with the 10-year Treasury yield and calls stocks cheap when the earnings yield is higher. Cliff Asness tested it in 2003. His objection is that “the comparison of E/P to Y is erroneous as it compares a real number (P/E) to a nominal one (Y).” Corporate earnings grow with inflation; a bond’s coupon does not. He found the model describes how investors have set P/E ratios but fails as a forecast: “Investors forecasting future long-term stock returns would do much better relying on simple P/E” than on the Fed Model.¹⁹

Franco Modigliani and Richard Cohn argued in 1979 that investors undervalued stocks during high inflation by discounting real earnings at nominal rates.²⁰ Campbell and Tuomo Vuolteenaho tested that idea 25 years later and reported that “the level of inflation explains almost 80% of the time-series variation in stock-market mispricing.”²¹ If investors make that mistake, nominal yields will appear to drive stock valuations more than they rationally should. If you want a yield comparison, use a real one: the excess CAPE yield in Do Stock Valuations Still Matter? compares the cyclically adjusted earnings yield with the 10-year TIPS yield.

When the rate worry is right

None of this means investors can ignore rates. The textbook effect is always present and sometimes it dominates:

• Real-rate shocks. When TIPS yields jump without better growth news behind them, as in 2022, there is no offsetting cash-flow effect. Since 2016, rising real yields have come with below-zero average monthly stock returns in our data.
• Inflation-driven regimes. When inflation is the main macro risk, stocks and bonds fall together on bad inflation news, which also removes the diversification a 60/40 portfolio counts on. The bonds as diversifiers guide covers that regime.
• High starting valuations. The calculator’s rate effect grows as the discount rate approaches long-run growth. A richly priced market has more to lose from the same increase in the real rate.
• Long horizons. Over a decade, a higher real yield means bonds and TIPS offer more, which raises the hurdle stocks have to clear. That changes the expected-return comparison even if it predicts nothing about next month.

What this means for index investors

If a rise in yields does not tell you whether the market got good growth news, bad inflation news, a Fed surprise or a term-premium shift, it cannot tell you whether to sell. And if the move was expected, it was in prices before you heard about it. Selling a total market fund because rates are rising, waiting in cash for higher rates to finally hit stocks, or rotating from growth to value on a rate forecast all depend on information the yield alone does not carry. The macro forecasts guide covers the broader record of trading on economic forecasts.

Rates do change several decisions mechanically, and those are worth acting on:

• The safe asset pays more. With the 10-year TIPS yield at 2.92% on October 2, 2026,¹ a real return that was negative in 2021 is now available without stock risk, which is most useful for money that will fund spending in the next decade. See the hurdle rate guide and the TIPS ladder guide.
• Debt costs more to carry. Higher rates change the math on paying down variable-rate or new debt versus investing.
• Annuity and pension payouts improve. Insurers price income annuities off bond yields.
• Bond fund prices fall first and yield more later. A fixed coupon bond has fixed cash flows, so for bonds the present-value rule holds almost one-for-one. That is the case where the rule predicts prices well.

What Summitward recommends

Keep the present-value rule and drop the forecast built on top of it. A higher discount rate lowers the value of any cash-flow stream, all else equal, and a quick look at the news will rarely tell you whether all else was equal. Size the stock allocation to your plan and tolerance for loss, and treat a rise in yields as a change in what bonds, TIPS and cash now offer. If real yields rise enough to fund your near-term spending at a decent real return, that is a reason to lock some of it in, whatever stocks do next.

Key Takeaways

• Higher discount rates lower present value with cash flows held fixed. The rule is arithmetic and does not fail in practice.
• Observed stock prices reflect every input changing at once. Growth news, inflation, the risk premium and the rate move together, and why yields rose decides the sign.
• From February 1962 to 2026-08, U.S. stocks averaged 0.55% a month when the 10-year yield rose and 1.36% when it fell. The relationship reversed from 2002 through 2021 and has been negative again since 2022.
• Real-yield shocks are the clearest negative case. In 2022, nominal and real 10-year yields both rose more than two points and the U.S. market fell 19.9%.
• Unexpected Fed tightening lowers stock prices. Bernanke and Kuttner estimated about 1% per surprise quarter point, mostly through the risk premium.
• Rates are a weak timing signal and a strong planning input. Use them for bond, TIPS, debt and annuity decisions.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do rising interest rates hurt stocks?

Holding expected earnings and the risk premium fixed, yes. In practice it depends on why rates rose. From 1962 to 2026-08, months with rising 10-year yields had lower average stock returns, but from 2002 through 2021 the reverse held, and in most calendar years when yields rose stocks still finished higher.

Why did stocks go up in 2026 while yields rose?

From January through August 2026 the U.S. market returned 12.7% while the 10-year yield rose 0.57 points and the TIPS yield 0.51 points. The present-value rule says the higher rates subtracted value; the price rose because something else, such as earnings expectations or the risk premium, added more. Market data alone cannot say which.

Is the present-value formula wrong for stocks?

No. It is the definition of what a stock is worth. The error is treating one input, the risk-free rate, as if it were the only input that changes.

Does a Fed rate hike make stocks fall?

An unexpected hike tends to lower stock prices on the day. An expected hike is already in prices. During the 2004 to 2006 cycle the Fed raised its target from 1% to 5.25% and the U.S. market returned 18% over those two years.

Are growth stocks more sensitive to interest rates?

All else equal, yes, because more of their value comes from distant cash flows. That makes them more sensitive to real-rate shocks, but it does not make “sell growth when yields rise” a reliable rule, because growth news that lifts yields can lift long-dated cash flows too.

Should I compare the stock earnings yield to the 10-year Treasury yield?

Comparing it to the nominal Treasury yield mixes a real quantity with a nominal one. Asness found that comparison fails to forecast long-run returns. A comparison with the TIPS yield is more defensible.

Related Guides

• Stock Valuation for DIY Investors for the discounted cash-flow model this guide builds on.
• Do Stock Valuations Still Matter? for CAPE and the excess CAPE yield.
• The Ten-Year Rose 392 Basis Points Since 2021. The Real Yield Rose 395. for the real and inflation parts of the 2021 to 2026 rise.
• How Much of a Ten-Year Treasury Yield Is Risk Compensation? for what moves long yields.
• Are Bonds Still Good Diversifiers? for the stock-bond correlation regimes.
• Do Higher Interest Rates Cause Inflation? for the September 2026 hike and the evidence on what tightening does.
• The Stock Market Is Not the Economy for why market returns and economic headlines diverge.

Sources

1. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, FRED series DGS10 (10-year Treasury constant maturity) and DFII10 (10-year TIPS constant maturity), daily, retrieved October 5, 2026. DGS10, DFII10
2. Kenneth R. French Data Library, Fama/French 3 Factors (monthly), U.S. market total return computed as Mkt-RF plus RF, through August 2026. Tuck School of Business
3. Federal Open Market Committee, statement of September 16, 2026. federalreserve.gov
4. Andrew Ang and Jun Liu, “How to Discount Cashflows with Time-Varying Expected Returns,” Journal of Finance 59(6), 2004, pp. 2745–2783. doi:10.1111/j.1540-6261.2004.00715.x
5. Kenneth N. Kuttner, “Monetary Policy Surprises and Interest Rates: Evidence from the Fed Funds Futures Market,” Journal of Monetary Economics 47(3), 2001, pp. 523–544. doi:10.1016/S0304-3932(01)00055-1
6. Ben S. Bernanke and Kenneth N. Kuttner, “What Explains the Stock Market’s Reaction to Federal Reserve Policy?” Journal of Finance 60(3), 2005, pp. 1221–1257. Working-paper version: Federal Reserve FEDS 2004-16. federalreserve.gov (PDF)
7. Marek Jarociński and Peter Karadi, “Deconstructing Monetary Policy Surprises: The Role of Information Shocks,” ECB Working Paper 2133, 2018. Source of the share of FOMC announcements with same-direction rate and stock moves. ecb.europa.eu (PDF)
8. Marek Jarociński and Peter Karadi, “Deconstructing Monetary Policy Surprises—The Role of Information Shocks,” American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics 12(2), 2020, pp. 1–43. doi:10.1257/mac.20180090
9. Michael D. Bauer and Eric T. Swanson, “An Alternative Explanation for the ‘Fed Information Effect’,” American Economic Review 113(3), 2023, pp. 664–700. author PDF
10. Refet S. Gürkaynak, Brian Sack and Eric Swanson, “The Sensitivity of Long-Term Interest Rates to Economic News: Evidence and Implications for Macroeconomic Models,” American Economic Review 95(1), 2005, pp. 425–436. doi:10.1257/0002828053828446
11. John Y. Campbell, Carolin Pflueger and Luis M. Viceira, “Macroeconomic Drivers of Bond and Equity Risks,” Journal of Political Economy 128(8), 2020, pp. 3148–3185. NBER w20070
12. Marco Lombardi and Vladyslav Sushko, “The correlation of equity and bond returns,” box in BIS Quarterly Review, December 2023. bis.org
13. Markus Ibert, Ben Knox and Francisco Vazquez-Grande, “Are Stocks Pricing in Recession Risks? Evidence from Dividend Futures,” FEDS Notes, August 18, 2022. federalreserve.gov
14. John Y. Campbell and Robert J. Shiller, “The Dividend-Price Ratio and Expectations of Future Dividends and Discount Factors,” Review of Financial Studies 1(3), 1988, pp. 195–228. doi:10.1093/rfs/1.3.195
15. John Y. Campbell and Robert J. Shiller, “Stock Prices, Earnings, and Expected Dividends,” Journal of Finance 43(3), 1988, pp. 661–676. doi:10.1111/j.1540-6261.1988.tb04598.x
16. John Y. Campbell and John Ammer, “What Moves the Stock and Bond Markets? A Variance Decomposition for Long-Term Asset Returns,” Journal of Finance 48(1), 1993, pp. 3–37. NBER w3760
17. John H. Cochrane, “Presidential Address: Discount Rates,” Journal of Finance 66(4), 2011, pp. 1047–1108. NBER w16972
18. Patricia M. Dechow, Richard G. Sloan and Mark T. Soliman, “Implied Equity Duration: A New Measure of Equity Risk,” Review of Accounting Studies 9(2–3), 2004, pp. 197–228. doi:10.1023/B:RAST.0000028186.44328.3f
19. Clifford S. Asness, “Fight the Fed Model,” Journal of Portfolio Management 30(1), 2003, pp. 11–24. aqr.com (PDF)
20. Franco Modigliani and Richard A. Cohn, “Inflation, Rational Valuation and the Market,” Financial Analysts Journal 35(2), 1979, pp. 24–44. doi:10.2469/faj.v35.n2.24
21. John Y. Campbell and Tuomo Vuolteenaho, “Inflation Illusion and Stock Prices,” American Economic Review 94(2), 2004, pp. 19–23. NBER w10263

Author disclosure

I hold equities and Treasury inflation-protected securities in my own accounts. The rate and return figures were computed on October 5, 2026 from the Kenneth French and FRED data cited above with the script scripts/rates_vs_stocks.py; the U.S. market series is the CRSP value-weighted market, which differs slightly from the S&P 500. Yield levels quoted for 2026 will be stale within weeks. Nothing here is investment advice.