Guide to the Markets
J.P. Morgan Asset Management's quarterly chartbook of about 70 slides on equities, the economy, rates, credit, global markets and alternatives. It is the fastest way to get the current market picture onto one desk.
Free to read
The Guide to the Markets is the chartbook every financial advisor and junior analyst seems to have open. David Kelly's Market Insights strategy team rebuilds it each quarter: the 4Q 2026 U.S. edition runs 71 slides with data as of September 30, 2026, and regional editions are produced from offices in London, Hong Kong and elsewhere.
The structure barely changes, which is the point. It opens with the S&P 500 at past peaks and troughs, then covers valuation measures, index concentration, earnings drivers, GDP, the labor market, inflation, the Fed and the yield curve, credit, international equities and private markets. It closes with the investing-principles slides that get borrowed into pitch books everywhere: annual returns against intra-year declines, asset-class returns by year, and time diversification.
Use it as a reference rather than a forecast. Read one section a week until you can talk through each chart without notes, and pull the current edition before any meeting where someone will ask where the market stands. The page is aimed at financial professionals, but the full U.S. PDF downloads without a login.
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Guide to the Markets, U.S. edition (current PDF)
The full deck in one file; start with the S&P 500 inflection-points slide and the annual returns and intra-year declines chart.