John Hancock's Miskin says IPO boom could be a sign of a bubbly market

Matthew Miskin, co-chief investment strategist at John Hancock Investment Management, says that the current stock market has been driven to record highs on the back of strong earnings that have overpowered economic concerns, but he notes that the stock market bubble that inflated during the Internet boom of the late 1990s grew on the backs of companies with no real earnings. As a result, with IPOs like SpaceX dominating the headlines, Miskin is preaching caution, noting that these attention-grabbing stocks are coming public without profits. Miskin says that's a rising risk, but that inflation is less of a risk than it was just a few months ago, and he believes there may be pockets of downturn or slowdown, but that should push investors to diversify, rather than to overhaul a portfolio or back away from equities.

Todd Rosenbluth, head of research at VettaFi, looks at a free-cash flow factor fund that has a stellar track record and that will celebrate its third birthday next week for his ETF of the Week. The birthday is important because it makes the fund eligible for ratings that will signal its stellar performance even more strongly to investors.

Ken Burdon, partner in the registered fund practice at Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett, discusses a recent Supreme Court ruling that's a game-changer for activist investors in closed-end funds.  Critics of activism have long held that professional arbitrageurs used federal courts to pressure closed-end funds into deals that benefit activists' at the expense of the long-term objectives of ordinary shareholders. Burdon says the decision  doesn't stop the activists from pursuing cases but removes a key path that activists took to pursue their actions much more quickly and easily.