Stock market's been good. The job market is a different story. I'm David Brancaccio in Los Angeles. We have just entered autumn here with the S&P 500 stock index up more than 15% for the year so far, up 3% in a month. The NASDAQ is up 17% in 2025. After the Federal Reserve cut interest rates slightly last week, a key index of smaller companies, the Russell 2000, hit a record first time in four years for that high.

Trees don't grow to the sky, they say in investing and what goes up goes down. We know this. And there's still a lot of uncertainty for investors, including tariff policy. Marketplace's Mitchell Hartman reports.

It's economic fundamentals that are now driving stocks higher, says Scott Wren at the Wells Fargo Investment Institute.

The market doesn't think there's going to be a recession. GDP estimates are going up.

Earnings estimates have gone up.

For small cap stocks in particular, it's a welcome moment in the sun, says Jed Ellerbrook

at Argent Capital Management.

For the last decade, U.S. large cap stocks have beaten U.S. small cap stocks by quite a bit.

He says the Fed's starting to lower interest rates will be especially

helpful for smaller companies because they tend to have more debt. Bull markets can end with

everyone piling in, stocks getting overvalued, and investors getting burned. But Wells Fargo's

Scott Wren doesn't see much risk of that so far. You know, our clients still have considerable amount of cash in their accounts that they're

not selling stocks, but they're not jumping in either.

The mood does not seem euphoric.

Sam Stoval is chief investment strategist at CFRA research.

I think that's a good sign.

There's not too much expectations that share prices will continue to set new highs.

And as a result, he says they probably will.

I'm Mitchell Hartman for Marketplace. For 30 years, we've watched those Ask Your Doctor ads that depict rapturous, sunlit, flower-blooming happiness if you take the medicine being marketed on TV.

True, many also end in a short string of terrible things that might happen if you take the drug, but the visuals tell a different story.

The Trump administration, with Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert Kennedy Jr. in charge is pushing for

curbs. New York Times correspondent, Christina Jewett, is closely following this. Welcome.

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