Schwab U.S. Dividend Equity ETF (NYSEARCA:SCHD) and JPMorgan Equity Premium Income ETF (NYSEARCA:JEPI) both land in the same corner of an income portfolio, but they answer very different questions. SCHD pays a modest, growing qualified dividend sourced from company cash flow. JEPI pays a much larger monthly distribution sourced from option premium that fluctuates with market volatility. One is a compounding machine. The other is a yield pump. Mistaking them for substitutes is the most common error investors make here.

What Each Fund Is Actually Betting On

SCHD tracks the Dow Jones U.S. Dividend 100 Index, a rules-based screen that filters for cash-flow quality, return on equity, and consistent payout history. The top of the book reflects that: QUALCOMM at 6.74%, Texas Instruments at 5.90%, and UnitedHealth Group at 5.09% anchor a portfolio of mature cash generators in energy, staples, healthcare, and financials. The implicit bet is that durable free cash flow funds durable dividend growth, and that growth compounds into total return.

JEPI is actively managed and structurally different. JPMorgan runs a low-volatility U.S. large-cap sleeve, then layers equity-linked notes issued by banks such as Barclays, BNP Paribas, BofA Finance, and Goldman’s GS Finance Corp. to synthesize a covered-call overlay on the S&P 500. The equity sleeve is broad and flat: Eaton at 1.62%, Trane at 1.60%, Lam Research at 1.56%, and NVIDIA at 1.52% lead a diversified book. The bet is that harvested option premium delivers most of the return in choppy or sideways markets, at the cost of upside in strong rallies.

Where the Difference Shows Up

In the 2022 drawdown, SCHD finished the year down just 3.21% while the S&P 500 fell nearly 20%. JEPI held up even better, because rising volatility fattened its premium income and the low-vol tilt cushioned the equity leg. That was JEPI’s ideal environment.

The 2026 market has flipped the script. SCHD is up 26.62% year to date and 28.79% over the past year, while JEPI has returned 4.53% year to date and 7.96% over one year. Over five years the gap widens further: SCHD is up 61.23% against JEPI’s 41.83%. Covered-call ceilings cost real money when equities run.

Only One Actually Grows the Payout

The title question deserves a precise answer. SCHD’s quarterly payments are lumpy, and the 2024 sequence of 0.611, 0.8241, 0.7545, and 0.2645 reflects a special adjustment rather than a clean step-up. Judged by annual totals, however, SCHD has a long track record of rising payouts back to its 2011 inception.

JEPI is different by design. Its latest monthly distribution of $0.37142 sits well below the $0.54001 paid in June 2025 and the $0.62102 paid in July 2022. It reflects option premium falling as volatility compresses, by design. The payout is engineered to vary (if a steadier monthly check is the goal, we rounded up seven funds that pay every 30 days in a free report here: 7 Monthly Dividend Stocks).

Practical Comparison

Verdict

SCHD fits the investor building a compounding qualified-dividend base with a multi-decade horizon and taxable-account sensitivity. JEPI fits the retiree or income-first allocator who needs monthly cash flow now and accepts capped upside and ordinary-income tax treatment to get it. Owning both is defensible, but for one job each. What would flip the call toward JEPI is a return to a 2022-style regime of falling stocks and elevated volatility. In a trending bull market like 2026, SCHD wins on total return and keeps growing what it pays.

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You spent 30 years building the portfolio. Your adviser earned the fee while it grew. Now the paychecks stop, the withdrawals start, and that same 1% of assets under management is being charged against a balance that is actively shrinking. That is a different arrangement, even if the invoice looks identical. Before you sign the next quarterly statement, consider three funds that can handle the core allocation at a fraction of that cost: the iShares Core S&P Total U.S. Stock Market ETF (NYSEARCA:ITOT) for growth, the Schwab U.S. Dividend Equity ETF (NYSEARCA:SCHD) for income, and the PIMCO Enhanced Short Maturity Active ETF (NYSEARCA:MINT) for the cash you plan to spend soon.

Why Retirement Changes the Fee Math

A 1% wrap fee is commonly cited as the industry-standard rate, and it serves as a fair benchmark across the industry. During accumulation, you can rationalize it because the account is compounding around it. At retirement, the character flips. You are pulling money out, often on a 4% or 5% withdrawal schedule (a benchmark our free guide on why the 4% rule is broken spends a lot of time picking apart), and the adviser fee is now taking a meaningful bite of the income the portfolio was supposed to deliver to you. On a $1 million account, that is roughly $10,000 a year charged on capital you are also spending down. The three ETFs below cover the total-market equity sleeve, the dividend sleeve, and the short-term cash sleeve for a fraction of that number.

ITOT: One Ticker for the Entire U.S. Market

ITOT from BlackRock tracks the S&P Total Market Index, giving you large, mid, small, and micro-cap U.S. stocks in a single line item. The expense ratio is 0.03%, which means for every $1,000 invested, roughly 30 cents a year goes to the fund. That is what “almost nothing” actually looks like. Performance has been respectable through 2026, with the fund up 12.72% year-to-date and 18.3% over the trailing year. Over the past decade, the total return sits near 301.39%. It also pays a modest quarterly distribution, with a trailing 12-month payout of about $1.65 per share. Use it as the growth engine that keeps your 30-year horizon intact.

SCHD: Quality Dividends You Can Actually Live On

SCHD tracks the Dow Jones U.S. Dividend 100 Index, screening for companies with consistent payouts, healthy cash flow, and reasonable balance sheets. The fund is enormous, with net assets of roughly $111 billion as of September 10, 2026, so liquidity is not a concern. Top positions include Merck at 4.76% of the fund, Amgen at 4.70%, and Abbott Laboratories at 4.68%, alongside Coca-Cola, Chevron, Verizon, and Procter & Gamble. Distributions arrive quarterly, with the most recent payment of $0.2525 per share on June 29, 2026, and a trailing 12-month payout of $1.048. The fund is up 26.43% year-to-date. SCHD can serve as the income sleeve that helps cover recurring expenses without drawing down principal.

MINT: A Parking Spot for Money You Will Spend Soon

MINT is PIMCO’s actively managed ultra-short bond ETF, and it is where the next one to three years of withdrawals belong. The portfolio holds investment-grade corporate debt, bank paper, asset-backed securities, and short-term instruments, with total net assets around $17.6 billion. It pays monthly, which is exactly what a retiree wants for spending cadence. The most recent monthly distribution was $0.335 per share on September 3, 2026, with a trailing 12-month total of $4.164. That yield roughly tracks the short end of the Treasury curve, where 13-week bills were averaging 3.89% and 52-week bills 4.14% as of September 8, 2026, with the Fed funds upper bound at 3.75%. MINT takes slightly more credit and duration risk than a T-bill fund, so it functions as a short-duration income vehicle rather than a money-market equivalent, and for a spending reserve it works.

A Trade-Off Worth Naming

Firing the adviser is not automatically the right answer. If you face Roth conversion sequencing, a business sale, concentrated stock, estate work, or a spouse who genuinely will not manage the money alone, an adviser can pay for their fee many times over. The real move is often a flat-fee or hourly planner who delivers the same advice without the percentage. What you are firing is the 1% arrangement on assets you are now spending, while the concept of professional help remains valuable. If the plan is straightforward, ITOT, SCHD, and MINT let you keep the last percentage point for yourself, which, over a 25-year retirement, is real money in your account instead of someone else’s.

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PepsiCo (NASDAQ:PEP) and Coca-Cola (NYSE:KO) both posted Q2 2026 results this summer, and the gap between them is now impossible to ignore. Coke raised guidance on a 5% volume quarter. Pepsi reaffirmed and admitted North America is broken. The five-year chart says the rest.

Five Years of Divergence Tell the Story

Over the past five years, KO shares returned 84.09% while PEP returned just 3.08%. Year-to-date the split is 27.99% for Coke against -2.13% for Pepsi. That reflects the market pricing two very different operating stories.

What Actually Stalled at Pepsi

The problem is concentrated in North America. Pepsi Foods North America revenue fell 2% in Q2, and Pepsi Beverages North America operating margin dropped about 90 basis points. CEO Ramon Laguarta told analysts the U.S. consumer was worse than expected, that “higher gas prices” hurt impulse channels, and that planned price investments were delayed with some customers because of commercial issues. Core operating margin contracted 40 bps company-wide.

The structural issue is that Pepsi runs two businesses, and both are pressured at once. Salty snacks face affordability pushback. Beverages carry a heavier cost load than Coke’s concentrate-and-franchise model. Coke’s Q2 gross margin was 61.6%; Pepsi’s was 54.1%. That gap widens every time input costs move.

Coke Is Doing the Opposite of Struggling

Coca-Cola Zero Sugar volume grew 16% globally. Trademark Coca-Cola volume grew 5%, described by CEO Henrique Braun’s team as the strongest in 17 years outside COVID recovery. The FIFA World Cup activation ran across 180+ markets. Coke raised FY26 comparable EPS growth guidance to 9-10% and free cash flow to ~$12.4B. Pure-play beverages, asset-light, and executing.

Higher Yield Has Been the Consolation Prize

Pepsi’s 4.09% yield beats Coke’s 2.32%, and June brought a 54th consecutive annual increase. For holders sitting on a flat five-year price chart, the dividend is what has kept the position tolerable. It has not closed the total-return gap with KO, and it will not on its own.

What Would Actually Have to Change

I want to see three checkable things before I get constructive on PEP: PFNA volume back to positive with margin stable, PBNA operating margin recovering the 90 bps it gave up, and evidence that permissible and functional platforms like Poppi and Doritos Protein are scaling without cannibalizing core. Until then, Coke is the beverage stock and Pepsi is the turnaround, and turnarounds pay you to be patient. If you own PEP for the yield and the eventual U.S. fix, you need Laguarta’s second-half plan to actually land. If you want the compounder, KO has already shown you what that looks like.

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Dividend investors are drawn to a simple pitch: a 3% yield, a low fee, and the familiar Schwab brand. Holders of the Schwab U.S. Dividend Equity ETF (NYSEARCA:SCHD) who sank $300,000 into the fund ten years ago and reinvested every distribution ended August with roughly $1.03 million. That same money in a plain S&P 500 index would have grown to about $1.25 million. That is a gap of more than $216,000, and it did not show up on any monthly statement.

What You Are Actually Paying

Let’s start with the headline fee, because it is the smallest problem. SCHD maintains an expense ratio of 0.06%, or about $6 per year on every $10,000 invested. The Vanguard S&P 500 ETF (NYSEARCA:VOO) charges 0.03%, or roughly $3 per $10,000. On a $300,000 position, that fee delta compounds to a few thousand dollars over a decade. Annoying, but not a significant problem.

The real bill is opportunity cost. From the completed month-end window of August 31, 2016 through August 31, 2026, SCHD returned 244.45% on a dividend-reinvested basis. VOO returned 316.54% over the identical window. That is a spread of about 72 percentage points. On a $300,000 investment, the gap for a decade holder is close to $216,000. Chasing a 3.08% trailing yield results in a significant foregone total return.

Costs the Factsheet Does Not Highlight

SCHD tracks the Dow Jones U.S. Dividend 100 Index, which screens for consistent payers with strong balance sheets. That rule mechanically excludes most of the megacap growth names that carried the S&P 500 over the past decade. Look at what SCHD does hold: Merck at 4.76% of net assets, Amgen at 4.70%, Abbott Laboratories at 4.68%, Coca-Cola at 4.16%, Chevron at 4.01%, and Verizon at 3.96%. Energy, telecoms, healthcare, and consumer staples dominate SCHD’s holdings. NVIDIA, Microsoft, Apple, and Alphabet are absent or negligible. That composition is the source of the total-return gap.

Additionally, there is a second quiet cost showing up in the distribution data. The latest quarterly payout was $0.2525, down from $0.2569 the prior quarter.  The income the fund is marketed on is currently shrinking at a per-share level (a shrinking payout is one of the warning signs we cataloged in a free guide to dividend traps). Holders who bought SCHD as a bond substitute are getting less cash while also giving up some broad-market upside.

Cheaper Mirrors With Real Trade-Offs

If broad U.S. equity exposure is the goal, VOO at 0.03% has delivered stronger returns. That said, if a dividend tilt is non-negotiable, the Vanguard Dividend Appreciation ETF (NYSEARCA:VIG) and iShares Core Dividend Growth ETF (NYSEARCA:DGRO) screen for dividend growth rather than raw yield, which keeps more technology and quality-growth exposure in the basket. Yield is lower, but total-return history has been closer to the broad market. The trade-off is clear: less current cash, more participation in whatever is actually driving the index.

What This Means for You

SCHD serves a specific purpose and its fee is competitive. The right question is whether the roughly 3.08% trailing yield is worth a rules-based screen that has, over the last decade ending August 31, 2026, sat out the parts of the market that produced most of the gains. Look at your own statement, compare the ten-year adjusted return to a plain index fund, and decide whether the distribution yield adequately compensates for the total return the dividend screen excludes.

The post SCHD’s 3% Yield Hides a $216,000 Decade-Long Performance Gap Investors Miss appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

At the end of the day, roughly 3,500 shares, or about $210,000, will produce $2,400 a month from JEPQ at the fund’s current forward annualized distribution and share price. That is a small stake compared with the roughly $700,000 a traditional 4% dividend portfolio would demand for the same income. The appeal is real, but this plan has entry-point fragilities worth understanding before committing a retirement portfolio to one ticker.

JPMorgan Nasdaq Equity Premium Income ETF (NASDAQ:JEPQ) pays one of the highest distribution rates among large, liquid mainstream funds. The forward annualized figure sits at $8.1906 per share against a price near $60, a distribution rate close to 13.7%. Dividing the $28,800 income target by that per-share payout produces the 3,500-share figure; multiplying by the current price gives the roughly $210,000 capital requirement.

What You Actually Own

The fund holds a concentrated portfolio of the largest US growth companies and layers a covered-call options overlay on top, selling call options to collect premium passed through as monthly cash. Disclosed positions from the June 30, 2026 filing include NVIDIA at 6.6%, Apple at 5.7%, Micron at 5.5%, Alphabet at 5.0%, Microsoft at 3.8%, AMD at 3.8%, and Amazon at 3.6%, alongside Broadcom, Meta, and Tesla. A reader who thinks they bought an income fund has in fact bought megacap technology with an income overlay. When those names sell off, the fund does too.

Bank Notes Behind the Payment

The options exposure includes equity-linked notes, contracts issued by global banks that deliver the option-strategy return in packaged form. The disclosure names issuers including BNP Paribas, Citigroup, Royal Bank of Canada, Toronto-Dominion, and Goldman Sachs, each around 1% of assets. An equity-linked note is a bank promise, so the fund carries those institutions’ credit risk on top of stock market risk. If an issuing bank failed, that slice becomes an unsecured claim rather than a pile of shares. The risk is remote and deliberately spread across counterparties, but it is a genuinely different kind of risk than owning equities, and a retiree living on the check should know it exists.

Why the Monthly Check Swings

Monthly distributions swing widely. Recent payments range from $0.44612 in October 2025 to $0.70497 in August 2026, with September 2026 landing at $0.68255. The mechanism is straightforward: the strategy earns more when market volatility is elevated and less when markets are calm. That timing is inverted from what most retirees would prefer, because the largest checks arrive precisely when the underlying holdings are falling. Fixed monthly bills against this income will produce months of surplus and months of shortfall, and a cash buffer is not optional.

The forward annualized rate of $8.1906 sits above the trailing twelve-month total of $6.76379, because recent payments have run larger than those from a year ago. The forward figure is the right number for sizing a position today, but it is not a promise.

What the Yield Costs You

The options overlay caps part of the upside when the holdings rally hard. JEPQ still returned about 19% over the past year and 12% year to date, so real appreciation comes alongside the income. Over a long retirement, surrendering the top slice of Nasdaq growth is the true price of the paycheck. Distributions are largely ordinary income rather than qualified dividends, making a taxable account the least favorable home for this fund. It belongs in an IRA or similar wrapper. The operating record is shorter than most traditional dividend vehicles and has not been tested through a prolonged bear market with a retiree depending on the check. A one-ticker plan also means one strategy, one set of holdings, and no second sleeve to draw from in a bad month.

Bottom Line for a Single-Ticker Income Plan

A single-fund JEPQ plan works for a reader holding it inside a tax-advantaged account, with other assets available elsewhere, who treats the monthly amount as variable and understands they own concentrated growth equity with an income wrapper. It does not work for anyone whose entire retirement depends on this ticker or who needs the same deposit every month. The fund’s roughly $40.7 billion in net assets and its deep liquidity are genuine advantages. Sized realistically and housed correctly, $210,000 in JEPQ can generate $2,400 a month, but if you size it as if the check were fixed, it cannot.

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If you and your spouse are retired, both 65 or older, and sitting on a large traditional IRA or old 401(k), there is a quiet window where you can move money into a Roth and owe the IRS nothing. The standard deduction absorbs the tax bill entirely. This is the Roth conversion under the standard deduction strategy, and for a narrow slice of retirees it is the most valuable move available.

How Zero Federal Tax Is Possible

A Roth conversion is treated as ordinary income in the year you do it. The standard deduction is subtracted from your income before tax is calculated. If your other taxable income is near zero, you can convert an amount up to your deductible total, and the deduction absorbs the whole thing. You move money from an account taxed on every future withdrawal into one never federally taxed again, with no ticket price.

The decade of conversions and $0 annual federal bill illustrate the mechanism, not a fixed recipe. The deductible number moves every year with inflation, and so does the right conversion amount. Converting the same figure every year without recalculating is a mistake.

When the Window Opens and Closes

The window opens when the paycheck stops and closes when other income arrives: Social Security once claimed, a pension, or required minimum withdrawals. In between, taxable income can be genuinely near zero. For tax year 2026, the IRS set the standard deduction for a married couple filing jointly at $32,200, and taxpayers 65 or older get an additional amount. That extra layer is why an older couple can absorb a larger conversion than a younger one in the same situation.

What You Are Actually Buying

You avoid tax on the entire balance forever, not just future growth. Money left in the traditional account would be taxed as ordinary income whenever you withdraw it, at whatever rate applies then. Converted, it grows and is withdrawn with no further federal tax.

Three additional wins come with it. You shrink the balance, driving required withdrawals later. You remove that future income from the calculation that sets your Medicare premiums, which respond to your reported income on a two-year lag once enrolled. And you leave your heirs a Roth, which is simpler and cheaper to inherit than a traditional IRA with built-in tax.

The Discipline Required

Recalculate the conversion amount every year. The deductible total drifts up with inflation and your other income shifts. Convert too much and the excess spills into taxable territory. Convert too little and the unused room expires at year-end and never returns. You must complete the conversion in the calendar year, not merely request it. Pay any tax from outside the retirement account, though in this strategy there is no federal tax to pay.

What Breaks It

Social Security is the biggest threat. Once either spouse claims, a conversion can push more of the benefit into taxable territory, meaning the conversion raises your taxable income by more than the amount converted. The cleanest years are usually before either of you files.

State tax is separate. Zero federal does not mean zero state. Some states tax retirement conversions that the federal return has sheltered. Check yours before submitting.

If you are in your early sixties and buying marketplace health insurance, subsidies phase out as income rises, and a conversion can cost far more in lost subsidy than it saves in tax. Medicare premiums react to income with a two-year lag, so a big conversion year shows up in your premium two years later. The five-year rule on converted amounts matters for anyone under the penalty-free age tapping that money early. Capital gains or dividends in a taxable account eat into the same deduction space, leaving less room for conversion.

Who Should Run This Play

A retired couple with a substantial tax-deferred balance, little or no current taxable income, Social Security not yet claimed or claimed modestly, no marketplace subsidy at stake, and enough cash outside retirement accounts to live on while converting. Skip it if your income already fills the deduction, or if funding your life during conversion years would force you to realize large gains in a brokerage account.

The strategy is real and free, bounded by a number the IRS republishes every year. Couples who capture it look that number up in January and size the conversion to fit (we sized up this quiet stretch between the last paycheck and the first RMD in a free guide to the Roth window if you want the full walkthrough).

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A 24-year-old stay-at-home mom named Liz called a national money show this week with an 11-month-old on her hip and three weeks to figure out where her family would live. Her husband told her the night before they were leaving their RV for a house next door at double their current payment, a house they could only afford by moving in with his brothers, one of whom had previously used her car and left her stuck with the toll bills.

The host’s response bypassed budgeting entirely: “All I hear is sadness”, followed by advice not to “move in with the crazies over there.” Co-host George Kamel told her to call a local women’s shelter for resources. That is when a personal-finance show stops running numbers and starts making crisis referrals.

A Verdict Before Any Spreadsheet

Dave Ramsey was right to refuse to solve this with a budget. When a household’s only “affordable” housing option requires cohabiting with people who have already caused documented financial harm, the problem is income and safety, well beyond line items. No allocation of $23 an hour against $1,500-a-month local apartments,500-a-month local apartments makes this arithmetic work.

A single full-time wage of $23 an hour produces roughly $3,900 a month gross before taxes, health premiums, and infant costs. Rent at $1,500 alone consumes a large share of take-home pay. Add utilities, gas, food, diapers, and any car payment, and there is no oxygen left for savings or a security deposit. The husband is accurately describing an income problem dressed up as a housing problem.

Average hourly earnings for all private-sector US workers were $37.75 in August 2026, per BLS series CES0500000003, roughly 64% more than the caller’s husband earns. A household whose sole earner is that far below the private-sector average, with an infant and no second income, is not one Excel session away from stability.

Why the Attorneys Got a Different Answer

Earlier in the same episode, Ramsey told two attorneys carrying nearly $900,000 in student loans that the fix was more work: “The hole that you’re in is 900. Your shovel is your income. You got a huge hole and a small shovel. I’m telling you, get a new shovel and the hole gets filled up a lot faster.” That advice only works when a shovel exists. Liz has none. She is a stay-at-home mom with a nursing baby, no paycheck, and an estrangement from her family in Kissimmee. “Increase your income” works for two lawyers with earning capacity, but it falls apart for someone whose next thirty days will be spent packing an RV.

One Variable Decides This Call

The variable is access to safe temporary shelter outside the brothers-in-law’s household, well beyond any question of budgeting skill or discipline. If that access exists, whether through a church, a shelter, a subsidized program, or a trusted relative, the family buys time to raise income before signing a lease that will crack under its own weight. If it does not, they either take the RV somewhere else or accept a household arrangement with people who have already proven they will cost them money.

Signing onto a double-payment lease with financially irresponsible co-signers exposes Liz to shared utility debt, damage claims, and collections in her name for bills she did not run up. A shelter or church-connected transitional program is temporary by design and does not attach to her credit. The FINRA Foundation’s 2024 National Financial Capability Study found the share of Americans spending more than their income hit an all-time high of 26%. Liz is not an outlier. She is the leading edge of that trend, with a baby in the picture.

Concrete Next Steps

1. Call 211, the United Way’s national referral line, before signing anything. It routes callers to local shelters, rental-assistance programs, and diaper banks by ZIP code.
2. Contact two or three local churches directly. Congregations often have discretionary benevolence funds that do not require formal-program paperwork.
3. Refuse to co-sign any lease with a household member who has an unpaid debt to you. A joint lease turns their default into your collections file.
4. Build even a small independent income stream this month through remote customer service, overnight caregiving, or weekend food delivery, so the next housing decision is made with options rather than under a three-week ultimatum.
5. Price the true cost of the “cheaper” option by writing down every dollar the brothers-in-law have already cost the household and adding it to their share of the new rent.

The post ‘All I Hear Is Sadness’: Ramsey to 24-Year-Old Mom Told to Move In With ‘the Crazies’ appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

A portfolio of roughly $1.7 million, split evenly between SCHD and JEPI, targets $7,700 a month in distributions using each fund’s current forward payout rate. Two tickers, one brokerage screen, nothing to rebalance beyond keeping the halves even. For a reader who finds a seven-holding portfolio intimidating, that simplicity is genuinely appealing, and it deserves to be said before the caveats begin.

Schwab U.S. Dividend Equity ETF (NYSEARCA:SCHD) holds established American companies screened for dividend quality, pays quarterly, and delivers most of its income as qualified dividends. JPMorgan Equity Premium Income ETF (NYSEARCA:JEPI) owns a diversified basket of large US equities layered with a covered-call overlay, meaning the manager sells call options on the portfolio to collect premium, and it pays monthly, largely as ordinary income. The Schwab fund supplies durability and favorable tax treatment while contributing the smaller share of the yield. The JPMorgan fund supplies most of the income and most of the risk. Equal dollar weights do not translate into equal contribution to the check.

What This Income Is Really Made Of

The single most useful figure to internalize is that both funds’ trailing-twelve-month payouts currently overstate what they are likely to distribute going forward. SCHD’s trailing total sits at $1.048 against a forward annualized distribution of $1.01. JEPI’s trailing total is $4.58338 against a forward figure of $4.45704. It is unusual for both halves to lean in the same direction, and anyone sizing this portfolio off the last year of payments will conclude they need less capital than they actually do. Use the forward rate.

The covered-call half deserves the most space. JEPI’s monthly distribution has run far above where it sits today. It paid $0.62102 in July 2022 and $0.54001 in June 2025, versus a September 2026 distribution of $0.37142. The mechanism is straightforward. Option premiums rise with implied volatility, the market’s expectation of future price swings, and volatility has come down from those earlier levels.

Nothing is broken, and no dividend was cut in the corporate sense. The fund earns less because the conditions that generated the fatter checks are absent. A retiree who built a budget on 2022’s payment would have watched income decline sharply through no fault of their own. Even now, the recent monthly range runs from $0.34443 to $0.44761 per share, so month-to-month steadiness is not on offer.

Surprisingly, SCHD is the calmer half. Its recent quarterly amounts of $0.2569 and $0.2525 show only modest variation, normal for an index fund whose payout tracks what its underlying companies paid that quarter. Older per-share figures are not comparable because of a 3-for-1 split effective October 11, 2024, so ignore any headline that treats the earlier, larger amounts as a cut.

Price Record Shows the Real Cost

Over the past year, SCHD rose 29% while JEPI gained 8%. That gap is exactly what a covered-call overlay is designed to produce, because the fund converts upside into current cash by selling calls, which caps how far the shares can run in a strong rally. JEPI still gained and still paid more income along the way, so this trade-off is deliberate. Over a multi-decade retirement, the pairing asks you to give up compounding on half the portfolio in exchange for a larger deposit today.

What the Pairing Gets Right, and Where It Falls Short

Together, a quarterly payer and a monthly payer produce a check in most months, and the two funds hold different mixes of companies, so the equity exposure is not identical. Tax character splits cleanly, which is a rare convenience. JEPI’s ordinary-income distributions belong in a tax-advantaged account, and SCHD’s qualified dividends are the natural taxable holding.

The limits matter. Both funds hold large American stocks, so a broad selloff drops both halves at once. This construction has no bonds and no cash, meaning a bad quarter forces you to accept a smaller distribution or sell shares at depressed prices. A monthly income target implies predictability this portfolio does not offer, and you need a cash buffer covering several months of expenses.

Verdict on Simplicity

Two funds are enough for an income this size for a saver who can tolerate the payment moving with the market and who keeps a separate cash reserve. The simplicity is real and worth it, and the price you pay is income variability and forgone growth, not fees. The single change worth making is putting the JPMorgan fund inside an IRA and leaving the Schwab fund in the taxable account.

The post The Simplest Way to Build $7,700 a Month in Dividend Income: Just Two Funds appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

People buy into an active-adult community as a couple. They tour the model home together, watch a foursome tee off, and picture the next decade of pickleball leagues and wine nights. The plan quietly assumes both will still be there and both will still be well. Neither assumption survives a long enough horizon. Widowhood, divorce, and mismatched longevity mean being alone in one of these places is not rare. Over enough years, it approaches the default, particularly for women. This article examines what that does to the money, and a mismatch buyers almost never price in.

The heart is a product confusion, and an age-restricted community sells maintenance-free living, and buyers hear taken-care-of living. Those are completely different things. The association mows the lawn and fixes the roof. It does not help anyone into the shower, drive anyone to dialysis, remember medications, or notice that the milk went bad two weeks ago.

A married couple papers over that gap for each other without seeing it, because a spouse is an unpaid caregiver, cook, driver, medication manager, and emergency contact. When the spouse is gone, every function has to be bought on the open market or done without, and the community provides none of them.

What Changes When One Person Is Gone

The carrying cost of the home does not care how many people live in it. Association dues, property tax, insurance, utility base charges, internet, streaming, and standing bills land at the same size on a smaller income. The income itself falls. A surviving spouse generally keeps the larger of two Social Security checks rather than both, and a pension may be reduced or stopped entirely depending on the survivor election chosen years earlier. The expense side stays flat, the income side drops, and both happen the same week.

The survivor benefit rules are their own puzzle, and couples routinely get the sequencing wrong (we walked through the widow-and-widower math, including when to switch from spousal to survivor, in a free guide here).

The tax picture worsens at the same time. The survivor moves from filing jointly to filing as a single taxpayer, which compresses brackets and shrinks the standard deduction. The same IRA withdrawal produces a bigger tax bill under a single return. Layer on the unpaid labor of the missing spouse, and it now has a price tag. Home care visits, meal delivery, housekeeping help, transportation, and small daily assists that were free are now line items with hourly rates.

Transportation is the one nobody sees coming. These communities are car-dependent by design, sited off a county road with a grocery run that assumes a working driver. The day driving stops, the resident is stranded inside a place built entirely around that assumption. Rideshare exists, until getting to the car in the rideshare is itself the problem.

What the Association Will Not Do

An active-adult community is not assisted living and not a continuing care retirement community. There is no nursing staff, no medical oversight, no escalation path when a resident’s needs outgrow independent living. The answer then is moving out. That often means a second move very late in life, at the worst possible moment, out of a home full of decades of belongings, into somewhere not chosen in advance because the choice got made under crisis. Moving costs money and health, and both bills come due at once.

Social Architecture in a Couples-Built Community

For a person alone, one of these communities can be genuinely better than aging in a suburban house on a quiet cul-de-sac. Neighbors are close, activities are organized, someone notices when a blind stays shut two mornings in a row. The flip side is that much of the social life is built around couples, and a resident who stops driving or stops showing up can become invisible inside a busy place surprisingly quickly. The community will not come find them.

Budgeting for What Actually Happens

Do the practical work while both people are healthy. Stress-test the household budget on one income after the survivor benefit drops, not the current one, and ask whether the place still carries. Review the pension survivor election now, because you can’t change it after the fact. Weigh walkability as a financial feature rather than a lifestyle preference, since a location where essentials are reachable without a car is worth real money later. Name a decision-maker and get the documents in place while both people can sign them.

Read the community’s rules on in-home aides, live-in help, and whether an adult child can move in, because age restrictions can foreclose exactly the arrangement a resident will later need. Think about where the next move goes before it is forced, because a crisis choice is always worse and always more expensive.

The mistake is assuming two healthy people will always be there. Budget for the single-person version from the start, choose a location that still works when the car keys go in a drawer, lock in the survivor election while the choice exists, and understand that maintenance-free was never the same word as cared-for.

The post Nobody Plans to Retire Alone in a 55+ Community. Here’s What It Costs When It Happens appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

On the September 9 episode of The Ramsey Show, a caller named Hazel admitted she has been slipping money to her three teenagers from a prior marriage, quietly, from her own account, because her husband of almost seven years refuses to help pay for their sports and school costs. Dave Ramsey did not reach for a spreadsheet. He told her: “You don’t have a combining money problem and you don’t have a who pays for what problem. You have a marriage problem.”

That verdict matters because the stakes go well beyond the $80 cleats or the $200 travel fee. This is a household with five kids, two toddlers, three teens, and separate accounts where one spouse hides outflows and the other hides retirement balances. Hazel told Ramsey she does not know what her husband holds in his 401(k) or Roth because he has always kept it separate. That is a planning blackout.

Ramsey’s Verdict Is Right, and the Math Backs Him

Ramsey is calling this correctly. The real damage from secret spending is that it makes joint financial planning impossible. Two people cannot compound wealth toward the same goal if they cannot see the same numbers. His prescription was blunt: full disclosure of 100% of the financial transactions and all the passwords to everything, plus a counselor. He also predicted, “It’s going to be okay.”

Here is why the mechanic matters more than the moral. Suppose Hazel is quietly sending $400 a month to cover her teenagers’ activities. That is $4,800 a year leaving the household with no partner visibility and no plan. Redirect a portion of that into a Roth IRA or a taxable brokerage and the opportunity cost gets loud fast. Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) has roughly doubled over the past five years and is up more than tenfold over ten. Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) returned 45% over five years and 564% over ten. Those figures are illustrative, showing what a familiar large-cap can do over a decade when dollars stay invested instead of vanishing into a secret Venmo trail.

The broader point is that every recurring dollar hidden from a spouse is a dollar that cannot be steered into a 529 for the toddlers, a Roth for retirement, or a joint emergency fund. Money you cannot talk about is money you cannot deploy.

One Variable Flips the Outcome

The single factor that decides whether kid support helps or hurts this family is transparency. Two scenarios make it obvious.

Scenario one: Hazel and her husband sit down, agree on a joint “kid support” line worth $500 a month covering all five children, and each contributes proportionally to income. The teens still get their cleats. The couple can now plan taxes, retirement contributions, and a college fund together. Nothing is hidden.

Scenario two: Hazel keeps sneaking the same $500. The teens still get their cleats. But every month the husband makes financial decisions on false information, resentment compounds, and the toddlers’ long-term planning is built on a fiction. Same dollars, opposite outcomes.

Ramsey has been telegraphing this collision for months. On June 29, 2026, he posted on X: “Marriage isn’t 50/50. Marriage is 100/100. If you’re married, ‘my money’ and ‘your money’ do not exist. It’s OUR money… Separate finances create division.” Hazel’s call is that post rendered in living color. Co-host Jade Warshaw added a useful reframe: the husband’s resistance may be less about the older kids and more about feeling unable to provide. That is a counseling problem.

What to Do This Week

1. Run a 90-day transaction review together. Pull every account, every card, every Venmo and Cash App. Print it. Sit at the table. No editorializing, just categorization. You cannot fix what neither spouse can see.
2. Create one joint “kid support” line item. Decide the number together, fund it from both incomes, and route every child expense through it. Secret spending ends the day the line exists.
3. Swap passwords for every retirement and brokerage account. Both spouses should know the balances in every 401(k), Roth, and taxable account. Ramsey calls this the legacy drawer.
4. Redirect any freed cash into a named account. A Roth IRA, a 529 for the toddlers, or a joint brokerage. Give the dollars a job before they drift back into secrecy.

The silence is the disease, not the dollars themselves. Fix the silence and the math takes care of itself.

The post ‘You Have a Marriage Problem’: Ramsey to Mom Secretly Paying for Her Own Teens appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

ChargePoint Holdings (NYSE:CHPT) stock is up 38% year to date (YTD) and trades at $9.18 midday Friday, putting the EV-charging name within striking distance of $10. ChargePoint stock is up 46% over the past month, which means the entire 2026 advance has arrived inside the last four weeks. That timing turns a routine year-to-date figure into a concentrated story about one stock’s recent bid.

The rally stands alone within ChargePoint’s closest listed peer group. Blink Charging (NASDAQ:BLNK) stock is down 18% YTD at $0.55, and EVgo (NASDAQ:EVGO) stock is down 53% YTD at $1.37. Nothing in the charging group confirms that the industry itself has turned, which puts the read squarely on ChargePoint rather than on the space around it.

The thematic and broad-market backdrop is friendlier, though not enough to explain the move. The Global X Autonomous & Electric Vehicles ETF (NASDAQ:DRIV) is up 17% YTD, weighted more toward the wider mobility complex than toward chargers themselves. The SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (NYSEARCA:SPY) is up 12% YTD, so ChargePoint has lapped both benchmarks by a wide margin this year.

A ChargePoint-Specific Repricing

The shape of the move matters as much as its size. ChargePoint stock’s past-month gain is larger than its full year-to-date gain, which places the entirety of 2026’s advance inside the last several weeks and leaves the earlier part of the year essentially flat. That marks a recent repricing after a long stretch of drift, and it happened without a matching bid in Blink Charging or EVgo shares to reinforce the move.

Because the peers are moving the other way, sector tailwinds can’t carry ChargePoint the rest of the distance to $10. Whatever pulled buyers into ChargePoint over the past month has to keep pulling them, on its own, for the next leg to hold. At a $9.18 share price, the gap to a double-digit handle is small in absolute terms, and momentum names can cover that distance in a few sessions or sit beneath it for months.

No Peer Cover Underneath

ChargePoint is the only one of the stocks discussed here that’s higher in 2026 so far. With EVgo lower by more than half on the year and Blink still down, ChargePoint has no peer group to lean on if sentiment cools around the charging trade. The setup here is a single-name story, without a rising tide underneath to defend ChargePoint’s numbers.

The thematic read from the Global X Autonomous & Electric Vehicles ETF reinforces that framing. That fund’s exposure runs across autonomy, batteries and automakers, so its gain reflects the broader mobility theme rather than a bid for chargers specifically. ChargePoint’s advance sits above that thematic return and well above the S&P 500 tracker, but without any of the confirmation an industry rally would provide.

What It Takes to Break $10

For ChargePoint stock to clear $10 and hold it, the past month’s buyers have to keep showing up. Continuation buying can push the stock through a round number in a session or two, and the pace of the recent bid shows the demand has been there of late. Without a supporting move in charging peers, though, ChargePoint has to sustain that bid unassisted for as long as the market cares about the level.

The reverse risk sits on the same page. A stock that has done all of its year’s work inside a single month can give it back quickly, and ChargePoint stock’s chart offers no visible peer floor below current levels if the recent bid fades. That trade-off is baked into every rally this concentrated.

Buying a stock that has done its year’s work in a single month is its own discipline, and we put ten rules for chasing strength without blowing up the account in a free breakout guide: here.

What to Watch

Investors following ChargePoint can look for whether the past month’s buyers keep showing up in the next several sessions, since that’s the only visible source of demand carrying the stock right now. Position sizing on their exposure should reflect the fragility of a rally with no peer confirmation underneath. Momentum in CHPT stock can persist as long as the recent bid keeps absorbing supply near current levels.

The $10 mark is less than a dollar away for ChargePoint stock, and clearing it will depend on continuation buying more than on any change in the broader charging market. Blink Charging and EVgo aren’t setting up to help lift the whole space toward that level. ChargePoint has to take that step on its own, and the past month’s demand pattern is the single best tell for whether the stock can.

The post ChargePoint Stock Is Up 38% in 2026: What Will It Take to Break Through $10? appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

Shares of Deere & Company (NYSE:DE) and Caterpillar (NYSE:CAT) sit near the top of the industrial leaderboard this year, and both are adding to the gain again in Friday midday trading. Deere stock is up 47% year to date (YTD) to $680.98, and it’s up 0.5% on the session. Meanwhile, Caterpillar stock is up 44% YTD to $821.19, rising 2% Friday.

The rally has run well ahead of the industrial group behind them. Notably, the Industrial Select Sector SPDR ETF (NYSEARCA:XLI) is up 12% YTD. The SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (NYSEARCA:SPY) is also up 12% YTD, so the sector fund’s return is essentially matching the broad market rather than beating it.

That leaves Deere and Caterpillar shares out on their own. Each has produced roughly four times the industrial fund’s move, and the group they sit inside hasn’t done the lifting. The take-profits-or-hold debate for these two names really hinges on what a reader makes of that gap.

A Two-Name Rally Above the Sector

Paccar (NASDAQ:PCAR) is the control that clarifies what’s actually happened. Paccar stock is up 14% YTD to $123.38, close to the XLI industrials fund’s own return. Paccar makes heavy-duty trucks and sits in the same neighborhood as Deere and Caterpillar, yet it hasn’t come along for the ride.

With XLI’s move essentially tracking the S&P 500 fund’s rally, the rising-tide explanation runs out of room. Whatever has driven Deere and Caterpillar higher this year is specific to those two names, not a broader industrial re-rating. The move is narrow, and narrowness is the fact both the bull and bear cases have to work from.

Case for Taking Profits

The take-profits argument for Deere and Caterpillar rests on how concentrated the leadership has been. A gain two names produced without their sector behind them can unwind faster than one the whole group earned, because there’s no broader bid waiting to catch a rollover in either Deere or Caterpillar. If the story that lifted them cools, they fall alone.

The other piece is simple math on new money. After a year-to-date advance of this size in both names, the reward-to-risk on a fresh position in Deere or Caterpillar shares looks less attractive than it did in January, and today’s entry price already assumes a lot of the good news. Paying up at these levels leans harder on execution than it did earlier in the year.

Position sizing matters more than the directional call here. Investors sitting on full Deere or Caterpillar weightings after this run may want to check for whether their exposure has drifted well past their target and trim back toward it rather than exit outright (we wrote a free handbook on riding a big move and planning the exit, here). That preserves the original thesis without letting a single-name gain balloon into a single-name risk.

Case for Holding On

Neither stock has started giving the gain back, and that matters. Caterpillar stock is adding to the year’s advance again on Friday, and Deere stock is holding its ground rather than fading. Momentum that keeps grinding higher while the sector lags is unusual and typically reflects idiosyncratic strength that the broader group hasn’t fully priced.

For holders of Deere or Caterpillar shares, a major takeaway is that both names keep getting re-rated on their own merits, not as sector proxies. That’s the kind of setup where cutting winners early tends to cost more than staying with them, and neither name has flashed a real sell signal yet.

Momentum in these two names also tends to compound. Once Deere and Caterpillar shares have set up as year-to-date winners, benchmarked money often adds to what’s already working, and that flow can widen the gap before it narrows. Holders who trim purely on the size of the move can leave a lot of that late-cycle push behind.

What to Watch Next

The next real tell is whether Deere and Caterpillar shares can defend their leads if the industrials fund starts to catch up, since a rotation that lifts the XLI ETF without lifting the two leaders would be the first crack in the story. Buyers can watch for signs that Paccar stock begins closing the gap, which would signal the move is broadening rather than narrowing across the group.

Until then, the narrow-leadership question is the whole story for Deere and Caterpillar shares, and Friday’s price action isn’t fighting it. The choice between taking profits and holding on comes down to whether a reader treats that narrowness as a warning or a feature, and the answer decides how they size their positions from here.

The post Deere and Caterpillar Are Both Up Over 40% This Year: Take Profits or Hold On for the Ride? appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

Two retirees, same age, same $1.65 million balance, same seven holdings in identical weights. One will pay a Medicare premium surcharge stacked on top of a rising required withdrawal starting at 73. The other will not. Only the order they draw from, and the accounts those draws come from, separates the outcomes.

The seven positions are SPDR Portfolio S&P 500 High Dividend ETF (NYSEARCA:SPYD), Vanguard Dividend Appreciation ETF (NYSEARCA:VIG), Vanguard Tax-Exempt Bond ETF (NYSEARCA:VTEB), NEOS S&P 500 High Income ETF (NYSEARCA:SPYI), Ares Capital (NASDAQ:ARCC), iShares 0-3 Month Treasury Bond ETF (NYSEARCA:SGOV), and STAG Industrial (NYSE:STAG). Blended, they produce meaningful cash income on a $1.65 million base. The character of that income decides the tax bill.

What the Portfolio Actually Pays

Big names in the investor space, VIG and SPYD distribute mostly qualified dividends taxed at long-term capital-gains rates. SPYI passes through option premium from a covered-call overlay, and a portion of its distribution is often classified as return of capital, which reduces current-year taxable income and defers recognition until sale.

ARCC and STAG are the ordinary-income producers. Business development company distributions and REIT dividends are taxed at ordinary rates, though STAG’s REIT payout qualifies for the pass-through deduction. VTEB pays municipal interest exempt from federal tax. SGOV pays short T-bill interest, federally taxable and state-exempt. With 13-week bill yields near 4% and the fed funds upper bound at 3.75%, the Treasury sleeve is a real income source.

Municipal Bond Trap Most Retirees Miss

The income measure used to set Medicare Part B and Part D surcharges adds back tax-exempt municipal interest. VTEB interest escapes federal income tax, yet it counts in full toward the number that decides your Medicare premium two years later. A retiree who loaded up on munis to keep Medicare costs down didn’t solve that problem (we mapped the IRMAA brackets and other premium traps in a free Medicare guide here).

Two Plans, One Portfolio

The plan that triggers both: leave the traditional IRA untouched, spend from the taxable account, let the tax-deferred balance compound. Required minimum distributions kick in at 73 on a much larger number and stack ordinary income on top of the dividends and interest the portfolio already pays. That stacked total sets the Medicare surcharge two years out.

The plan that never triggers either: draw deliberately from the tax-deferred account during the low-income years between retirement and 73, spending it or converting to Roth. Keep ARCC and STAG inside tax-advantaged accounts so their ordinary-income distributions never appear on a return. Hold VIG and SPYD in the taxable account, where qualified rates apply. Manage each year’s total to the surcharge measure. The forced withdrawal later lands on a smaller balance, and the premium bump never arrives.

Where Each Holding Belongs

ARCC and STAG are the least tax-efficient names and belong in the IRA or 401(k). VIG and SPYD are natural taxable holdings because qualified dividends already get preferential treatment. VTEB’s federal exemption is wasted inside a tax-advantaged account. SGOV sits wherever the cash buffer needs to be.

A Candid Look at the Holdings

Withdrawal order cannot rescue weak positions. VTEB has moved under 1% over five years. ARCC is down roughly 3% over the past year while VIG returned 15% and SPYD 14%, so the BDC’s 9.8% yield is partly offset by price. SPYI has roughly 1,000 trading days of history. STAG yields 4.1% and just reported core FFO of $0.65 per diluted share, up 3% year over year.

Limits Worth Naming

The surcharge works in brackets, not a slope, so crossing a step by one dollar costs the same as crossing it by thousands. Required withdrawals can be redirected directly to charity in a way that keeps them off the return for readers who give anyway. Spending down the tax-deferred account early means paying tax sooner, which is a real cost. A surviving spouse eventually files under a less favorable structure, which strengthens the case for shrinking the deferred balance while both are alive. Nearly everything here except VTEB and SGOV moves with equity and credit conditions in overlapping ways.

Order decides the tax outcome, not the holdings themselves. The retiree who never thinks about order pays for it twice.

The post A $1.65 Million Portfolio, Two Withdrawal Plans: One Triggers IRMAA and RMD Taxes, One Never Does appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

Shares of Nike (NYSE:NKE) are up 0.96% in Friday afternoon and trading at $36.97, a small bid that barely dents a brutal year. Nike stock is down 40% year to date (YTD), and today’s uptick doesn’t answer the bigger question hanging over the name.

That question, dead money or due for a bounce, becomes more interesting once the peers are placed on the same chart. Taken by itself, a 40% drawdown in a Dow Jones component reads as a verdict on management. Placed inside the athletic category, Nike’s chart looks quite different.

Nike is cheap versus its own history at these levels, and the group it sits inside has kept selling anyway. Both are true at once, which is why the bounce and dead-money cases end up leaning on the same evidence.

Athletic Peers Tell a Nearly Identical Story

Checking in on Nike’s peers, On Holding (NYSE:ONON) stock is down 41% year to date to $27.52, an almost identical drawdown to Nike stock despite On’s much faster growth profile and premium brand positioning. Meanwhile, Lululemon Athletica (NASDAQ:LULU) stock is down 53% year to date to $98.61, an even deeper cut than Nike shares have absorbed.

Three athletic apparel and footwear names, three similar-sized holes in the chart. If the market were penalizing Nike alone for execution, On Holding stock wouldn’t be sitting on nearly the same year-to-date loss and Lululemon stock wouldn’t be down considerably more. The selling reads as broad and category-wide, and that reframes what Nike shareholders are actually looking at.

Nike stock’s drop within that group looks like a middle case. On Holding stock has fallen a hair more, Lululemon stock has fallen much more, and Nike sits between the two despite carrying the biggest brand and the most defensive balance sheet of the three. That positioning is what makes the bounce and dead money framings both defensible for Nike.

Damage Sits in the Category

The broader consumer complex sharpens the picture around Nike. The Consumer Discretionary Select Sector SPDR ETF (NYSEARCA:XLY) is down 5% in 2026 so far, a rounding error next to what athletic footwear and apparel have absorbed. For a bigger-picture context, the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (NYSEARCA:SPY) is up 12% year to date over the same stretch.

The consumer discretionary group is barely down and the broad U.S. market is comfortably higher, yet the athletic apparel and footwear names are in freefall. That’s a category being repriced, and it puts Nike’s drawdown into a different frame than a purely company-specific verdict would sit in.

Bounce Case Meets Dead Money Case

The bounce case for Nike rests on how far the category has already fallen. Nike is a Dow component trading near the low end of its recent range, the athletic footwear peer group has absorbed similar or worse punishment, and category-wide de-ratings tend to end once the last incremental seller finishes selling. If athletic apparel is closer to that floor than the year-to-date charts suggest, Nike is the largest, most liquid way for investors to express the view.

A dead-money case for Nike rests on the same evidence. On Holding’s growth story didn’t shield its stock, and Lululemon’s premium positioning didn’t shield its stock, so nothing in the peer group tells Nike shareholders that management alone can fix this problem. A continued category de-rate would take Nike shares with it regardless of what happens inside the Beaverton campus, and that leaves Nike range-bound even at these prices.

There is also a franchise discount worth flagging inside Nike’s chart. Nike carries a Dow-caliber brand, a global distribution footprint and category leadership at scale, and the shares trade as if none of that matters. That gap between franchise quality and price is where the bounce case draws its energy, even if the group hasn’t cooperated yet.

What to Watch Next

Nike’s next scheduled catalyst is the company’s investor day on November 16 and 17, which management has flagged as the venue for laying out the next phase of its growth strategy. Between now and then, the read on Nike stock is really a read on the group. Investors can watch for signs that On Holding and Lululemon shares are carving out lows of their own, because a stabilizing category is what a Nike bounce case ultimately depends on.

Nike shareholders sizing their exposure into that window may want to keep their allocation modest until the peer group shows that a floor is in place. Today’s 0.96% tick higher in Nike stock is a start, but a single session doesn’t reverse a 40% year. The November investor day, and the next set of peer earnings along the way, may settle whether this is a floor being built or another leg lower waiting to happen.

The post Nike Is Now Down 40% This Year. Is NKE Stock Dead Money or Due for a Bounce? appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

Investors have spent much of 2026 talking about a potential style rotation. Large-cap growth stocks are still positive year to date, but their leadership has weakened as small-cap and, increasingly, value stocks have taken over more of the market’s momentum.

One major beneficiary has been the Schwab U.S. Dividend Equity ETF (SCHD). The name says “dividend,” but I think that undersells what the ETF actually does. Its screening methodology provides multifaceted exposure to both quality and value factors, with dividends serving as the starting point rather than the entire strategy.

The results this year have been impressive. According to Testfolio’s backtesting tool, SCHD had generated a 28.99% cumulative return through Sept. 1. The SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY) returned 12.31% over the same period. That’s a performance gap of nearly 17 percentage points.

Importantly, SCHD accomplished this without owning a single Magnificent Seven stock. That’s a useful reminder of how quickly market leadership can change. For years, investors were rewarded for concentrating more heavily in the largest growth companies.

In 2026, a portfolio built around profitable, dividend-paying companies trading at more modest valuations has been rewarded instead. So let’s break down how SCHD selects those companies, where its portfolio differs most dramatically from the S&P 500, and which sector exposures have helped drive this year’s outperformance.

What Is SCHD?

SCHD tracks the Dow Jones U.S. Dividend 100 Index. The process begins by requiring eligible stocks to have at least 10 consecutive years of dividend payments. From there, the heavier lifting comes from a composite score based on four fundamental variables:

• Free cash flow to total debt: Measures how much cash a company generates relative to its debt burden. Higher free cash flow and lower leverage can provide more room to maintain dividends through difficult economic environments.
• Return on equity: Measures how effectively a company generates profits from shareholders’ equity. Higher return on equity can indicate a more profitable, capital-efficient business.
• Dividend yield: Measures annual dividends relative to the stock price. This gives SCHD its explicit income tilt while allowing the other quality screens to help avoid simply buying the highest-yielding stocks available.
• Five-year dividend growth rate: Rewards companies that have consistently increased their payouts rather than merely maintaining a high current yield.

The 100 highest-ranked stocks ultimately form the index. SCHD rebalances quarterly, but the more consequential event is its annual reconstitution, when companies can enter and exit based on the latest screening results. That can result in surprisingly high turnover for a passive dividend ETF. SCHD’s turnover recently stood at 48.88%. Fortunately, the ETF structure can use in-kind creations and redemptions to limit the realization and distribution of taxable capital gains, making that turnover less problematic for shareholders than it might be inside a traditional mutual fund.

The strategy is also remarkably inexpensive. SCHD charges a 0.06% expense ratio, considerably less than many brand-name factor ETFs attempting to provide similar quality or value exposure. You get a decent income boost as well. SCHD currently has a 3.15% 30-day SEC yield. Its methodology also excludes real estate investment trusts (REITs), whose distributions frequently contain income taxed at ordinary rates, helping SCHD maintain relatively favorable tax characteristics for a dividend strategy.

SCHD vs. the S&P 500

The most interesting thing about SCHD in 2026 is how little it resembles the market it has been beating. According to ETF Research Center, SCHD has just 8% overlap by weight with SPY, with 46 stocks appearing in both portfolios. And SCHD owns none of the Magnificent Seven companies that have driven so much of the S&P 500’s performance in recent years.

The sector allocations help explain the difference. SPY has approximately 28 percentage points more exposure to technology than SCHD. Meanwhile, SCHD has substantial allocations to areas including consumer staples at 14.9%, healthcare at 12.2%, and energy at 12.1%. Those sectors tend to contain mature businesses generating substantial free cash flow while trading at lower valuations than the largest technology and growth companies. That’s precisely the type of exposure that becomes valuable when market leadership rotates away from expensive growth.

It’s also why I wouldn’t dismiss dividend ETFs simply because total return ultimately matters more than yield. That’s absolutely true, but a dividend screen can serve a second purpose. When combined with profitability, leverage, and dividend-growth metrics, as SCHD does, it becomes a relatively inexpensive way of obtaining systematic exposure to quality and value. At 0.06% annually, SCHD provides that factor exposure for considerably less than many specialized smart-beta ETFs, while its 3.15% SEC yield provides some additional income along the way.

Whether this year’s rotation continues is impossible to know. Factor leadership can reverse quickly, and SCHD will inevitably experience periods when growth-heavy benchmarks outperform it again. But 2026 has provided a good example of why maintaining exposure to fundamentally different parts of the market can pay off.

The post This 0.06%-Fee Dividend ETF Is Beating the S&P 500 by 16% YTD Without Owning a Single Magnificent Seven Stock appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

Hollywood film editing bays just got a little more crowded. Jim Cramer’s September 1 warning that Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) was coming for Adobe (NASDAQ:ADBE)’s turf now has a case study behind it. In the early morning hours of September 11, 2026, Google Cloud and Avid announced that Gemini Enterprise is embedded directly into browser-based Avid Media Composer, the professional video editor that shares Hollywood’s post-production stack with Adobe Premiere. The development landed the day after Adobe reported Q3 earnings, beating though its shares fell anyway in this tough competitive environment, down 11.5% in a week, 27.8% over a year, and 61.6% over five years.

Cramer’s Adobe Thesis, in His Own Words

Cramer has been sounding the alarm on Adobe for months. On his June 16 show, he framed the stock as collateral damage in a broader AI displacement thesis: “Adobe’s been a house of pain, down more than 70% from its peak in 2021. In fact, it’s down more than 40% year to date. At these levels, the stock sells for just 8.5 times this midpoint of this year’s earnings forecast.”

He pinned the problem squarely on encroaching AI platforms: “Then, a couple of years ago we started hearing about all these new programs from the big AI platforms, programs that have gotten very good at writing custom software. Now this is really the root of the AI displacement thesis across the entire enterprise software edifice, and that includes Adobe.”

Gemini’s Scale Makes the Threat Credible

The Avid deal is part of a broader pattern. Google’s Q2 FY2026 report showed Google Cloud revenue of $24.77 billion, up 82% year over year, with Gemini adoption reaching enterprise saturation. Google’s chief executive Sundar Pichai told investors:

“Gemini models now process 22 billion API tokens per minute and the Gemini App has 950 million monthly active users.”

He added that “nearly 90% of the Fortune 100” now use Gemini Enterprise, the same product being welded into Avid’s timeline.

What Editors Actually Get

Avid surveyed 120 professional editors in Q2 2026 and found 79% already use AI in their workflows, with 87% saying the technology is most valuable when it frees up creative time. The integration delivers innovation like agentic editing via natural language prompts, semantic search that eliminates manual media logging, and connected newsroom-to-timeline workflows, attacking what the companies call the industry’s two biggest bottlenecks: media discovery and timeline organization.

Verdict for GOOGL Holders

Alphabet trades at a trailing P/E of 16.7 with a $4.15 trillion market cap and 2026 CapEx guidance of $175 billion to $185 billion aimed at exactly this kind of enterprise land grab. Avid’s post-production niche is small on its own. As a proof point that Google Cloud can push Gemini into vertical creative software that Adobe once controlled uncontested, it fits the pattern Cramer flagged. Google Cloud backlog already sits at over $460 billion, and Hollywood’s editing bays are the newest end users.

The post Cramer Warned Google Was Coming for Adobe, and Now Gemini Is Inside Hollywood’s Editing Software appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

AeroVironment (NASDAQ:AVAV) chairman and chief executive Wahid Nawabi went on CNBC this week with an arithmetic problem for defense investors. Drones being thrown at Western militaries and border installations cost roughly $150,000 apiece, according to Nawabi, while the interceptors historically used to knock them down cost millions of dollars per shot. His pitch is that AeroVironment’s LOCUST directed-energy laser, per Nawabi, brings that engagement cost down to less than $10 per shot.

That is a serious claim, and the U.S. Army evidently took it seriously enough to hand AeroVironment a $464 million Enduring High Energy Laser production award, described on the earnings call as “the first ever production contract for direct energy systems in U.S. military history.” And yet shares are down 40.47% over the past year. The disconnect is what this story is about.

Why $10-a-Shot Lasers Break the Drone Math

Ukraine made the cost asymmetry of modern air defense impossible to ignore. When an attacker can send waves of cheap drones and each defensive round costs orders of magnitude more, the defender runs out of money before the attacker runs out of drones.

A directed-energy weapon runs on electricity, so once the platform’s capital cost is amortized, the marginal engagement price collapses. Nawabi frames LOCUST as giving the warfighter “an essentially unlimited magazine.”

The demand backdrop supports him. The Pentagon’s FY2027 budget request earmarks $53.6 billion for drone dominance and counter-drone technologies, including $14.4 billion specifically for counter-unmanned systems development and deployment.

Nawabi told CNBC this is “a prolonged sustained demand profile” that will last at least a decade, and the top-line budget lines up with that view.

Fielded Hardware With an Operational Track Record

Directed energy has lived in the research budget for years. What changed in this cycle is that AeroVironment moved from prototype to fielded product.

Management said LOCUST systems are already operating at the southern border, where roughly 300 cartel drones have been shot down year to date, and the FAA has cleared the weapon to operate in national airspace. That track record unlocked the first international commercial order, a $52 million deal signed in the quarter.

The financials caught up too. First-quarter revenue was $480.49 million, adjusted EPS of $0.59 beat the $0.2479 consensus, and funded backlog hit a record $1.50 billion, up 37% year over year, per the company’s 8-K exhibit.

Nawabi even said on the call that LOCUST could become a “half a billion dollar plus a year franchise” within about a year.

Great Bookings, Broken Chart

The stock disagrees. AVAV trades at $147.07, down 24.97% in the last month alone and well below the analyst average target of $225.77.

Some of the pain is self-inflicted. The prior fiscal year included a $240.7 million goodwill impairment and a GAAP net loss of $265.122 million, driven by BlueHalo integration charges and the BADGER SCAR stop-work that vaporized roughly $1,493.2 million of unfunded backlog.

Estimate revisions tell the same story. The consensus EPS for the fiscal year ending April 2028 has been cut from $5.3838 90 days ago to $4.3910 today, with 9 down revisions in the past thirty days.

Meanwhile, insiders have been selling into the weakness. Nawabi himself sold 28,265 shares at $139.00 on June 29, 2026. That’s $3.9 million worth of AVAV stock.

What Investors Should Watch Next on AVAV

The thesis will be falsified or confirmed by three things: whether the half-billion-dollar LOCUST program that Nawabi cited converts into follow-on international orders, whether the Albuquerque expansion delivers the throughput management has promised, and whether Congress passes the FY2027 defense budget on time rather than dragging out a continuing resolution.

The unspoken risk Nawabi did not raise is program concentration. A single stop-work order already cost the company a $151.3 million impairment on SCAR, and nothing structurally prevents a similar surprise elsewhere in the portfolio.

At a forward P/E of 47x on 3.62x sales, the multiple still assumes execution. But with 86% revenue visibility to the guidance midpoint and a genuinely differentiated laser franchise, the risk-reward has improved as the price has come in.

The setup argues for patience: one more clean quarter of execution and confirmation that LOCUST orders are compounding internationally would go a long way toward validating the growth story Nawabi is telling before the current multiple looks defensible.

The post AeroVironment CEO: “$10-Per-Shot Laser Beats $150,000 Drones” — But Stock Keeps Falling appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

If you own a 401(k) and an IRA, you own two accounts that look identical and follow completely different rules about who gets the money when you die. One form is nearly impossible to change without your spouse’s signature. The other you can rewrite alone, online, in minutes. Almost nobody knows this until someone dies and the lawyers arrive.

Same Money, Two Different Rulebooks

A workplace retirement plan governed by federal private-plan law generally must pay a married participant’s balance to the surviving spouse. If you want anyone else to receive a dollar of it, your spouse must formally consent in writing, typically witnessed by a notary or plan representative. An IRA has no such requirement. You name whoever you want on the form, and that person collects, with no signature from your spouse.

Why Congress Wrote It This Way

The split exists because workplace plans sit under federal law written to protect participants and their spouses, built after surviving spouses were left with nothing when pensions were quietly signed away. Spousal consent was deliberate policy. IRAs sit outside that framework and are governed by the account agreement you signed with the custodian and by state law. The protection attaches to the account type itself, independent of marital status. Change the account, change the rules.

Rollovers Erase the Protection Silently

When you retire or change jobs and roll your workplace plan into an IRA, the single most common financial move in American retirement, the spousal consent protection does not come with the money. The balance moves. The protection evaporates. Nobody flags this at the time. The paperwork is clean.

A spouse who believed federal law guaranteed them the account may, in fact, be protected only by their partner’s continuing goodwill the moment the rollover completes. The account owner can log in the next morning, change the beneficiary to anyone, and never mention it. Same money. Entirely different legal reality, triggered by a routine rollover no one thought twice about.

Where Second Marriages Blow It Up

Picture a man who remarries later in life and wants his adult children from his first marriage to inherit his retirement savings. Inside the workplace plan, he cannot simply name them. His new spouse would have to sign a consent, and she may reasonably refuse. Inside an IRA, he can name the children alone, and she will never know until the funeral is over. Either outcome starts a fight. The account type decided the outcome before anyone in the family got a vote.

Other Ways This Quietly Breaks

A beneficiary form beats a will. Retirement accounts pass by designation, outside the will entirely, so a beautifully drafted estate plan naming your new heirs does nothing if the form still names an ex. A divorce decree does not automatically fix a stale designation. Divorce itself is another split: dividing a workplace plan generally requires a specific court order the plan will accept, while an IRA can typically be divided under the divorce agreement, and using the wrong instrument can create a taxable event.

Community property states change the IRA analysis, because a spouse may have a property interest in the account regardless of who is named. Custodian practice varies too. Some IRA agreements impose their own spousal requirements even when the law does not. And leaving no beneficiary at all is its own disaster, because the agreement’s default order takes over and it is almost never what anyone wanted.

An Afternoon of Forms Fixes Most of It

Pull up every retirement account you own and read the current designation instead of trusting your memory. Check the contingent beneficiary too. Redo the forms after every marriage, divorce, birth, and death. Treat the rollover as the moment protection changes, and decide deliberately, not by default.

If you are trying to route retirement assets around a spouse in a blended family, get a lawyer before you touch the form (we put the full beneficiary and titling checklist in a free estate guide here if you want a starting point). The rules differ by account. The rollover is the hinge. The fix costs nothing but an afternoon. This is general information for educational purposes only.

The post Your 401(k) Can’t Go to Anyone but Your Spouse Unless She Signs a Waiver in Front of a Notary. Your IRA Can Go to Anyone You Name With No Signature at All, and Second Marriages Are Where the Difference Blows Up appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

A 32-year-old who recently left tech for carpentry told Business Insider she visited seven construction sites in a week trying to land an apprenticeship. At the other end of the career ladder, experienced carpenters remain valuable enough that retirement does not always keep the phone from ringing. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) projects about 62,800 carpenter openings each year over the next decade, many created when workers retire or leave the occupation.

Now picture a 67-year-old union carpenter who already did exactly that. He hung up his tools, started Social Security and began collecting a building-trades pension. Then a former foreman calls. A remodel is behind schedule. Could he help for a few days? A few days becomes 40 hours in one month. Social Security does not care. His pension might.

Social Security and the Pension Run on Different Clocks

At 67, our carpenter has already passed full retirement age (FRA). The Social Security retirement earnings test is behind him. He can work 10 hours, 40 hours or full time without Social Security withholding benefits because of his wages. The annual earnings limit that applied before FRA no longer exists for him.

A multiemployer pension can operate very differently. Federal pension rules allow plans to suspend benefits when a retiree works at least 40 hours in a month in the same industry, the same trade or craft and the same geographic area covered by the plan. That framework shows up in actual carpenter plans.

The North Atlantic States Carpenters Pension Fund, for example, says some New England retirees can have benefits suspended for months in which they work at least 40 hours in disqualifying construction-industry employment. The exact age limits and definitions vary by plan, which is precisely what makes the trap easy to miss. Social Security is looking at his age. The pension may still be counting his hours.

One Busy Month Can Be Enough

The monthly clock is the part a retiree can easily overlook. Suppose he works eight hours one week, 16 the next and then stays on because the contractor still cannot fill the crew. He reaches 40 hours before the month ends. He may have earned only a modest paycheck. He may work almost nothing for the rest of the year. Neither necessarily rescues the pension payment if his plan treats that month as disqualifying employment. And discovering the problem later can make it worse.

Some plans can recover pension payments issued for months in which benefits should have been suspended. That is a very different calculation from Social Security, where a worker past FRA no longer has to pace his earnings at all.

The Trade Itself Can Follow Him Into Retirement

There is another nuance. Going to work for a different contractor does not necessarily solve the problem. For multiemployer plans, the federal test can reach work for another employer if the job is still in the same industry, trade or craft and geographic area. Some plan definitions can also capture supervisory work or self-employment that uses the retiree’s old trade skills. The retiree who thinks, “I’m only helping a friend,” may be answering a different question from the pension fund.

Before Picking Up the Tool Belt

For a retired tradesman considering a short return, three checks are worth making before the first shift:

1. Find the plan’s monthly hour threshold. Do not assume Social Security’s annual rules tell you anything about the pension.
2. Ask whether the specific job is prohibited employment. The employer, trade, location and duties can all affect the answer.
3. Get the determination in writing. Some carpenter funds specifically invite retirees to submit a proposed job description before taking the work.

There may be plenty of room in the labor market for an experienced carpenter to come back. The pension plan may give him considerably less room on the calendar.

The post Carpentry Has 62,800 Openings a Year. At 67, Social Security Lets Him Work, but 40 Hours Can Suspend His Pension. appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

Seagate Technology Holdings (NASDAQ:STX) stock is down 4% to $827.88 in Friday afternoon trading, giving back a slice of a run that has tripled the shares this year. The move arrives without a company announcement, a guidance change or an analyst rating action attached to it, which points to profit taking after an outsized advance. Seagate shares are up 201% year to date.

Meanwhile, SanDisk (NASDAQ:SNDK) stock is falling 3% to $1,635.85, also with no fresh release to explain the slide. SanDisk has climbed 29% over the past month, so Friday’s pullback lands on shares that had been on a sharp, unbroken advance.

Micron Technology (NASDAQ:MU) stock is holding its ground, up 0.2% to $979.17. The Roundhill Memory ETF (CBOE:DRAM) is up 1% in the same session. The SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (NYSEARCA:SPY) is up 1%, so the broader market is rising even as STX and SNDK fall.

Profit Takers Target Two Memory Stocks

A review across financial wires turned up no same-day company announcement, guidance revision, pricing item, regulatory decision or analyst rating change from Seagate that would justify a session move of this size. The same holds for SanDisk, which has no fresh release or research note attached to Friday’s slide. That absence of a trigger is itself the story, because a stock carrying a run this large can shed a few percentage points on any quiet day as holders lock in gains.

The Roundhill Memory ETF rising in the same session in which Seagate and SanDisk fall is the fact that settles what this is. The fund’s advance alongside those two declines points to name-level selling that looks like portfolio housekeeping on a quiet news day for both companies.

Why Micron Is Holding Up

Micron’s business is weighted toward the dynamic random access memory (DRAM) used in artificial intelligence servers, which is the corner of memory that has been bid up hardest as hyperscalers scale out AI training and inference. Seagate makes hard disk drives and SanDisk makes flash memory, so both sit on different rungs of the storage stack from Micron’s DRAM-heavy mix.

The steadiness in Micron stock while STX and SNDK drop provides a major clue for investors. If holders were rotating out of memory as a broad theme, Micron shares would be moving with the group. That the most AI-exposed name in the trio is holding says the selling in Seagate and SanDisk reflects their own runs, with the AI-memory trade still intact underneath.

What to Watch

For Seagate stock, the risk worth naming is that a stock up this much for the year has further to fall on any given day than the size of the news would suggest. The same holders who rode Seagate shares higher can trim without needing a headline to justify it. SanDisk stock carries the same shape at a shorter horizon, with a month-long advance close to a third that can give back a few percentage points on nothing more than sellers finding the exit together.

Investors sizing their exposure to Seagate and SanDisk shares may want to keep an eye on whether either name gives back more of its run before the closing bell, and whether the DRAM memory ETF’s advance holds up alongside those declines. Micron stock’s steadiness on a day of storage weakness is itself the read here, and position sizing on names carrying moves this size should stay conservative.

The post Storage Stocks Slide as Profit Taking Follows Big Run: Seagate Falls 4%, SanDisk Drops 3%, Micron Holds Flat appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

Adobe (NASDAQ:ADBE) just crossed a milestone most software companies will never touch. On the Q3 FY2026 earnings call, outgoing CEO Shantanu Narayen called reaching more than one billion monthly active users a “defining moment” for the business.

Revenue hit $6.76 billion, AI-first ARR grew more than 150% year over year, and management raised full-year guidance. Yet the stock is down 28.9% year to date. So can Adobe climb back to $300 in 2027? I think it can, and here is the math.

What’s Holding Adobe Back Right Now

The pain is fresh. Shares fell 12.92% in the past week and 5.64% in the past month, even with a headline earnings beat. The narrative is competitive rather than fundamental.

Bearish social chatter has coalesced around fears that generative image tools from OpenAI and others will erode Creative Cloud’s moat, and prediction sentiment flipped hard, sliding from a composite 63.13 on September 8 to 35.39 on September 9.

The one-year performance tells the same story: down 28.94%. With a beta of 1.417, Adobe amplifies broader tech volatility, and right now the market is punishing every dollar of AI-exposed revenue that could theoretically get commoditized. That is the setup. It is not pretty.

Wall Street Sees Modest Upside. I Think That Undersells It

The Street’s consensus price target is $277.02, with 4 strong buys, 8 buys, 23 holds, 4 sells, and 1 strong sell. Translation: analysts are hedging. Our internal model is more constructive, projecting a base case of $304.07 within a year, an upside of 22.2%, with a bull case of $335.23 and a bear case of $260.86. Confidence is rated high at 0.9.

My take: the 23 holds are lagging indicators. With quarterly earnings growth of 7.9% year over year and AI-first ARR compounding at triple-digit rates, the current analyst target implies almost no multiple recovery. That looks too cautious.

Path to $300 Per Share

Reaching $300 from today’s price of $248.83 would require a gain of 20.6%. That is meaningful, but far from heroic for a stock with this cash flow profile.

Now the multiple math. With forward EPS of $27.20, a price of $300 implies a forward P/E of 11x. Our base case of $304.07 already implies 11x, meaning $300 requires only minimal additional multiple expansion. That is remarkably modest for a business generating $2.438 billion in quarterly free cash flow.

What gets us there? Three catalysts. First, the FY2026 guidance raise to non-GAAP EPS of $24.45 to $24.50 extends a five-quarter EPS beat streak.

Second, incoming CEO Anil Chakravarthy said, “I see immense opportunity for Adobe to be the leader in agentic software for creativity, productivity, and customer experience.”

Third, aggressive buybacks: 9.5 million shares repurchased for $2.232 billion in Q3 alone. The main risk is that agentic AI competitors compress Creative Cloud pricing faster than freemium conversion can offset.

Where Adobe Trades Today vs Its Earnings Power

Adobe currently trades at roughly 9x forward earnings, an extraordinary discount for a software franchise with 62.9% return on equity and 35.3% operating margins. Shares sit deep inside the 52-week range of $190.12 to $370.86.

Long-term holders still enjoy a 10-year return of 148.04%, but the last five years have been rough, down 62.24%. That gap between operating quality and market valuation is precisely the setup that mean-reverts.

Is $300 Realistic? Here’s My Take

Getting to $300 requires a 20.6% gain and just a hair of multiple re-rating from current depressed levels. That is realistic.

Three things need to break right: Q4 FY2026 needs to deliver against the $6.80 to $6.85 billion revenue guide, Adobe MAX in November needs to demonstrate tangible agentic AI progress, and the CEO transition on December 1st needs to land cleanly.

What derails it? A visible enterprise cancellation wave tied to generative AI competition. Returns at this level shouldn’t be expected every year, but we’ve outlined the blueprint for how Adobe could reach $300 in 2027.

The post Price Prediction: Adobe Stock Could Hit $300 Sooner Than You Think appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

Ciena (NYSE:CIEN) stock is up 5% to $351.38 in early Friday afternoon trading, extending a rebound that’s now stretched across the full week. The move reverses the post-earnings selloff that followed Ciena’s September 3 fiscal third quarter release. Today’s advance has effectively closed the door on the initial negative reaction to the report and pushed the stock back through the level it held before the release.

The bid extends well beyond Ciena today. Arista (NYSE:ANET) stock is up 5% to $197.84, and Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO) stock is up 4% to $111.53. All three networking names are climbing by a multiple of the broader sector’s move, and each is doing so on the same session without individual company news to explain it.

The wider technology sector is trading much calmer than the networking group. The iShares U.S. Technology ETF (NYSEARCA:IYW) is up 1.5%, and the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (NYSEARCA:SPY) is up 1%. Buyers are giving an extra boost to certain networking equipment stock rather than massively sweeping technology and large-cap indexes as a whole.

Networking Equipment Leads a Narrow Bid

No company announcement, contract award, guidance revision or regulatory decision was published by Ciena this session to explain the same-day move. The pattern across Ciena, Arista and Cisco reads like money rotating into the transport and switching layer as a group rather than a single-name catalyst. Each of the three covers a distinct slice of that stack, and today’s session is treating them together in a way that hasn’t been true every week this quarter.

Ciena supplies the optical transport equipment that carries traffic between and inside data centers, Arista supplies the switching layer above it, and Cisco supplies networking equipment across both enterprise and service provider customers, the same infrastructure layer we mapped out in a free report on seven AI buildout suppliers that aren’t chipmakers. The gap between the group’s move and the sector fund’s move makes today look like a real rotation, since Ciena, Arista and Cisco are each running well ahead of IYW and SPY. That framing puts the day’s story on infrastructure demand rather than on any one company’s balance sheet.

What Separates Ciena From Arista and Cisco

What separates Ciena from Arista and Cisco right now is the week rather than the day. Ciena stock had the most ground to make up after its fiscal third quarter release, and Friday’s climb has taken the stock to a 10.7% gain since last Friday. Arista stock and Cisco stock are running nearly as hard today without a comparable setback behind them.

That difference shapes how the day reads for CIEN shareholders. The recovery has already carried Ciena stock past most of the ground it lost after the earnings release, and further upside from here would need buyers who haven’t chased the group yet or a fresh catalyst that draws in longer-duration capital. Ciena’s setup now reads as a decision point for anyone who sat out the initial bounce, since the easy part of the gap has already filled.

For Arista and Cisco, the story is simpler. Both stocks are climbing on the group bid without an earnings hangover to work through, so today’s move looks like fresh momentum rather than a recovery. The open question is whether the two can carry the group’s leadership if Ciena stock’s post-earnings gap finishes closing before Monday.

What to Watch Next

The key tell into Friday’s close is whether Ciena, Arista and Cisco shares all hold their gains into the bell. A firm close across the three would frame the narrow networking bid as a genuine rotation rather than an intraday burst. A softer finish for Arista or Cisco could pull Ciena stock’s rebound back before next week begins.

Traders can watch for whether the group’s leadership carries into next week’s action or fades once Ciena’s earnings gap fully closes. Your networking-stock exposure could stay measured until that leadership holds through a second session at the same intensity, since two consecutive sessions of outsized moves would carry a different weight than a single afternoon.

For now, Ciena stock remains the swing name in this group. The stock has both the freshest scar and the strongest week behind it, so its behavior over the next few sessions may set the tone for how the rotation is priced across Arista and Cisco. Arista stock and Cisco stock can follow the leadership, and their charts look cleaner, though CIEN is the one carrying the recovery story into next week and the one in which the risk-and-reward gap looks widest.

The post Ciena Climbs 5% as Post-Earnings Selloff Reverses; Arista Networks Rises 5%, Cisco Jumps 4% appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

Affirm Holdings (NASDAQ:AFRM) stock is up 5% to $71.14 midday Friday, clawing back some of the ground lost earlier in the week. The buy now, pay later lender is rebounding without a fresh company-specific announcement to explain the move. That combination, a sharp intraday advance with no visible catalyst, usually points at technical positioning rather than a change in the underlying story on Affirm.

Peer names are participating, though only modestly. Klarna (NYSE:KLAR) stock is up 1% to $13.95, and PayPal Holdings (NASDAQ:PYPL) stock is up 1% to $53.92. Affirm stock is running roughly five times as hot as either comparable in the same session, a dispersion that shifts attention from a category rerating to a single-name story.

The broader backdrop is calm and constructive. The SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (NYSEARCA:SPY) is up 1%, keeping the index-level tone neutral through midday. The ARK Blockchain & Fintech Innovation ETF (CBOE:ARKF) is up 1%, and that fintech fund is tracking the broad market rather than leading it, which lines up with the muted peer moves in Klarna and PayPal.

No Same-Day Catalyst Behind the Move

Affirm hasn’t published a company release, regulatory filing, partnership announcement or earnings update on Friday that accounts for the pop. A wire scan across financial news sources turned up no same-day item tied specifically to Affirm. Absent a fresh headline, the most credible read is that Friday’s trading in Affirm is unwinding an oversold condition built up earlier in the week, when the shares drifted lower for several sessions without a public trigger.

The most recent Wall Street action affecting Affirm was BMO Capital Markets reiterating an Outperform rating on Affirm on Wednesday, citing a healthy funding outlook. That reiteration didn’t stop the midweek slide in Affirm shares, which is part of why Friday’s snap-back is drawing attention. When an existing bullish call fails to prevent a selloff, a subsequent rebound often reflects short covering or opportunistic buying by desks that view the earlier drawdown as excessive, rather than a new fundamental thesis on Affirm’s trajectory.

Klarna and PayPal Lag the Move

Klarna and PayPal are Affirm’s closest listed buy now, pay later comparables, and both are rising far less than Affirm in the same session. A genuine repricing of the buy now, pay later category would show up more evenly across Klarna and PayPal, with both names posting comparable percentage moves. The dispersion instead points at something Affirm-specific rather than a category rerating.

The fintech-sector backdrop reinforces that read on Affirm. The ARK Blockchain & Fintech Innovation ETF holds Klarna alongside other digital-payments and crypto-adjacent names, and its Friday move roughly matches the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust. When a themed fund tracks the broad market rather than leading it, the day’s story usually sits inside a single name.

That peer contrast also cuts against a rate-driven or macro-driven explanation for Affirm’s move. Interest-rate expectations, credit-cycle sentiment and consumer-spending fears would ordinarily hit Klarna and PayPal alongside Affirm, and none of the three would decouple in the way Friday’s session shows. That leaves an Affirm-specific technical unwind as the most consistent interpretation of the intraday setup.

What to Watch Next

The week’s shape matters more than any single session for Affirm stock. Friday’s advance still leaves Affirm shares below where they started the week, so the rebound reads as a partial recovery rather than a breakout, and a durable turn would need more than one strong session to confirm it. The useful question for Affirm is whether new buyers are stepping in at a lower price or whether the midweek sellers are simply finished, and each answer implies a different setup into next week.

Affirm’s fundamentals haven’t been reset by anything the company put out on Friday, which means the trading action is best understood as inventory-driven rather than information-driven. That distinction matters for anyone holding Affirm through the weekend. An information-driven move typically extends; an inventory-driven move often gives back a portion of the gain over the next several sessions as flows normalize.

Investors sizing their exposure to Affirm stock can watch for whether the intraday gain holds into the close, since a fade in the final hour would suggest the rebound is thinner than the current price action implies. If Klarna stock and PayPal stock accelerate late in the session, the story shifts toward a sector-wide bid; if they stay muted, Affirm remains the day’s odd name out. Any adjustments to one’s Affirm share exposure should stay measured until the next earnings release or analyst update supplies fresh fundamental information to price against.

The post Affirm Rallies 5% as Midweek Selloff Unwinds; Klarna and PayPal Tick Up appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

2026 has reignited the IPO pipeline. Morningstar’s chief global markets editor Tom Lauricella told listeners this month that the coming Anthropic IPO will “likely be the largest IPO ever, surpassing SpaceX which is currently the largest IPO by a wide margin.” He also warned that these deals become “must own stocks for a lot of institutional investors” even with “brand new business models” and unproven monetization. The two public companies with the most direct exposure to Anthropic’s outcome are familiar names: Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) and Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN).

SpaceX Is the Cautionary Data Point

SpaceX (NASDAQ:SPCX) opened at roughly $150 on June 12 and spiked to $225.64 four days later. As of this morning, SPCX traded at $147.64, down 8.27% from its first-day close of $160.95 and well below its peak. The round trip took about three months. That is the “must-own” template Anthropic is walking into.

Why GOOGL and AMZN Are the Cleanest Proxies

Anthropic’s mark-to-market has already reshaped both companies’ income statements. Amazon disclosed that Q2 FY2026 “net income includes non-operating pre-tax other income of $53.4 billion, primarily from investments in Anthropic”, pushing reported net income to $62.65B, up 244.9% YoY. Alphabet reported Q2 net income of $112.11 billion, inflated by a $99.03 billion equity securities gain tied largely to the Anthropic markup.

The operating linkage is just as tight. Amazon built Project Rainier with more than 500,000 AWS Trainium2 AI chips for Claude training, and Anthropic has committed to up to 5 GW of current and future Trainium capacity. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told analysts that Anthropic and OpenAI are “the two leading AI labs in the world,” making “multi-year, multi-gigawatt commitments to Trainium”. Google Cloud, meanwhile, accelerated to 82% growth at $24.77B in Q2, with Anthropic as a marquee customer.

Must-Own Means Passive Money at Any Price

Alphabet has raised roughly $70B in combined equity and debt to fund AI capex, suspended buybacks, and posted negative free cash flow of -$5.86B in Q2 2026. Amazon guided to ~$200 billion in capex in 2026. Lauricella cautions that as AI issuers pile in, semiconductors alone now sit near 16% of the US stock market, and value indexes have subtly drifted to roughly 20% technology stocks.

Invesco QQQ (NASDAQ:QQQ) currently holds 4.02% in Amazon and combined Alphabet share classes near 6.29%. A must-own Anthropic listing at any price would tilt that concentration further, while GOOGL and AMZN holders own the setup twice: once through the stake gains, and again through index exposure. Riding the mania is fine if you time the exit, which is the whole point of our free bubble survivor’s handbook.

The post ‘The Largest IPO Ever, Surpassing SpaceX’: Anthropic Is Up Next appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

Palantir (NASDAQ:PLTR) spent this week making a specific argument about who owns the AI work that matters most. At its AIPCon customer conference, the company expanded its partnership with NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) to pair its enterprise data platform with Nvidia’s customizable Nemotron open models, aimed at supply chains across manufacturing, agriculture, pharmaceuticals, retail and government. Nvidia intends to deploy the combined technology inside its own operations.

What Palantir is selling is a way to run models inside the customer’s environment, with the customer keeping the weights and the data. The pitch targets buyers who cannot route sensitive information through a closed consumer service, whether because of regulation, contract terms, or internal policy.

Nvidia Deal Puts Software on Top of the Hardware

An ontology is a structured map of a company’s data so software agents know what a “customer,” “shipment,” or “invoice” actually means inside that business. An open model is one whose weights the customer can download, host, and modify rather than accessing it only through an external API.

Nvidia’s Q3 FY2026 release stated it “Teamed with Palantir Technologies to build first-of-its-kind integrated technology stack for operational AI.” Because Nvidia partners with essentially every major AI lab, a workload-specific callout carries weight.

CEO Alex Karp told investors that “the models actually fine-tuned by us in our enterprise on an NVIDIA stack outperform frontier models” and that customers “own the weights. You own the alpha. You own everything.”

Sovereign AI, Explained Without Jargon

In Palantir’s framing, sovereign AI means the customer keeps the weights, the compute location, and the data. OpenAI can technically serve many of these workloads; the barrier is security policy, governance requirements, and buyer preference.

Karp made the positioning explicit: “Demand for AI sovereignty has now been unleashed. And Palantir is the only company that has demonstrated it can transform tokens into actual economic value.”

Q2 U.S. commercial revenue grew 149% year-over-year to $764 million, and the Rule of 40 reached 155%. Full-year 2026 revenue is guided to $8.150 to $8.158 billion.

Premium Valuation, Real Question

Palantir trades at a P/E of roughly 235x against a market capitalization near $381.6 billion. Shares are down 6.69% year to date, though up 531.13% over five years.

The bull case is that regulated industries and defense buyers have governance requirements a closed consumer-facing provider cannot easily satisfy, and Nvidia gains a software position that makes its hardware harder to displace.

The counterargument matters too. Most enterprises prefer convenience, and operating customized models requires staff, tooling, and ongoing maintenance that many buyers would rather outsource. That limits the addressable pool to organizations willing to pay for control.

Is PLTR Stock a Buy?

Palantir has built a genuine niche in operational AI, and the Nvidia partnership strengthens its position in supply chains and government. The valuation prices in near-flawless execution against open-model competitors and closed providers building enterprise features, and one guidance miss would sharply reset expectations

PLTR stock remains a hold at best for me, especially considering the parabolic phase is behind us, and the upside potential from here isn’t that attractive, especially compared to AI hardware stocks. AI on the software side remains less attractive, and you’ll have to wait for Anthropic and OpenAI to IPO to perhaps change that.

The post Palantir Wants the AI Work OpenAI Cannot Touch. Nvidia Just Helped It Make the Pitch. appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

Apple just delivered its strongest June quarter ever, posting $109.42 billion in revenue with double-digit growth across iPhone, Mac, and Services. Yet Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) is up a healthy 20.45% year to date, and the ten-year chart tells an even louder story: a 1,254.49% gain that turned every $1,000 into more than $13,000.

So here is the question I want to answer plainly. Can AAPL reach $450 per share by the end of 2027?

What’s Holding Apple Back Right Now

The stock has done well, but the near term is choppy. Shares are down 0.5% over the past week even after a 7.1% one-month move. The overhang is real. On the Q3 call, Tim Cook described current DRAM conditions as “a 100-year flood on the memory pricing with exponential increases in memory prices”, and Apple guided September-quarter gross margin to 47% to 48%, down from 50.1% in Q3.

Management also warned that supply constraints will increase significantly and hit iPhone, Mac, and iPad. Add tariff overhang, foreign exchange, and App Store litigation, and you can see why a beta of 1.085 stock has not run away from its $344.27 52-week high.

Wall Street Sees 0.8% Downside. Our Model Says 11.2% Upside

Consensus is oddly cautious. The analyst target price is $323.86, which actually sits below today’s $326.57. The rating split is 6 strong buy, 19 buy, 14 hold, 3 sell, and 2 strong sell, with 57% bullish. Our own model puts the base case at $363.13, an 11.2% upside with high confidence of 0.9, and a bull scenario of $379.46.

I think the sell side is anchored on memory pain and missing the earnings acceleration. Quarterly earnings growth of 28.7% year over year is not the profile of a stock that deserves a target below spot.

Path to $450 Per Share

Reaching $450 from today’s price of $326.57 would require a gain of 37.8%. With forward EPS of $9.86, a price of $450 implies a forward P/E of 46x. Our base case of $363.13 already implies 37x, meaning the bold target requires roughly 8x of additional multiple expansion.

That is a lot. But here is the case. Apple’s 247Factor adjustment of 1.128 is powered by strong earnings acceleration and a sector multiplier of 1.15. EPS should compress that 46x quickly if fiscal 2027 consensus of $9.57 continues to grind higher on Siri AI monetization.

Cook told investors “There are enormous opportunities for Apple moving forward in AI”, and he flagged “I truly have never been more optimistic”.

iPhone 17 demand is exceeding Apple’s own expectations, Services just posted $30.74 billion, and 1.5 billion paid subscriptions compound quietly. The primary risk is that memory pricing lingers into calendar 2027 and crimps margins longer than the Street expects.

Where Apple Trades Today vs Its Earnings Power

At $326.57, Apple trades at roughly 33x forward EPS of $9.86, versus a trailing P/E of 36. That looks reasonable against 28.7% quarterly earnings growth and a 32.6% operating margin.

Shares sit only 6% off the $344.27 52-week high and well above the $228.18 low. Given a 1,254.49% ten-year return and Services still compounding, the valuation is defensible for a stretch case.

Is $450 Realistic? My Verdict

Getting to $450 from $326.57 requires a gain of 37.8%. That is a stretch.

Three things need to break right: Siri AI must translate into a real Services upgrade cycle, iPhone 17 and 18 momentum must carry through fiscal 2027, and memory pricing must normalize by mid-2027 so gross margin rebuilds toward 50%.

What derails it is a prolonged DRAM squeeze that resets the earnings ramp. Returns at this level shouldn’t be expected every year, but we’ve outlined the blueprint for how Apple could reach $450 in 2027.

The post Apple Stock Has Returned Nearly 1,200% in 10 Years. How High Can AAPL Go From Here? appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

2,107% in One Year

SanDisk (NASDAQ:SNDK) is up 2,107% over the past year, a run so extreme that it caught Morningstar’s chief global markets editor Tom Lauricella’s attention. He says it has done something no memory-chip cycle was supposed to do: reclassify the two largest companies in the S&P 500 as discount trades. “Apple and Microsoft look like value stocks just because of where they are in the rankings,” Lauricella said, describing how the AI storage buildout is bending index construction around a single flash-memory supplier.

The anchor figure is a one-year total-return calculation cited in the Morningstar framing. Fuse-aggregated pricing shows a closely related reading: a 2,107.79% one-year change from $73.92 on Sept. 10, 2025, to $1,632.11 on Sept. 11, 2026.

What It Means Operationally

Fundamentals are doing the heavy lifting alongside any multiple expansion. SanDisk’s fiscal Q4 report on Aug. 5, 2026 showed revenue of $8.96B, up 371.6% YoY, and non-GAAP EPS of $39.25 versus a $33.28 consensus, the fifth consecutive beat. GAAP gross margin reached 84.6%, up 58.4 percentage points year over year, and operating income of $7.037B came off a base so small that the year-over-year change registered 38,994%.

The Datacenter segment is where the AI narrative earns its keep. Datacenter revenue was $2.977B in Q4 and full-year segment revenue rose 437%. Management said sequential growth was roughly one-third volume and two-thirds pricing, and that the pipeline includes five additional New Business Model agreements since the April call, featuring three new customers alongside a pair of expansions. SanDisk is a cash cow: free cash flow was $7.083B in the quarter and $11.494B for fiscal 2026.

Market Reaction and Peer Scoreboard

SanDisk closed the most recent session with a one-day move of -2.98%, but it is up 28.4% over the past month and 587.9% YTD. That performance is what forces the value-index math. Over the same 12 months, Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) is up 0.18%, Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) is up 47.05%, NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) is up 24.84%, Western Digital (NASDAQ:WDC) is up 377.84%, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (NYSE:TSM) is up 67.18%.

According to Lauricella’s team, that scoreboard is why value indexes have moved from 11% technology at end-2024 to roughly 20% technology currently. Amazon now boasts the largest holding in the Russell Large Value Index at 6%. The retirement investor who owns a “value” ETF as a defensive sleeve is holding more AI-cycle exposure than the label suggests.

Bull Case

The fundamentals behind the price line are doing real work. SanDisk’s full fiscal 2026 revenue was $20.248B, up 175.3%, with non-GAAP EPS of $70.88 and net income of $11.433B. Guidance points higher: Q1 FY27 revenue of $10.30B to $10.80B, non-GAAP EPS of $44.00 to $46.00, and GAAP gross margin of 83.0% to 84.9%. Forward analyst estimates have been moving up, with the fiscal 2027 average EPS estimate rising to 214.10 from 175.38 90 days ago, and 12 upward EPS revisions versus seven downward over the trailing 30 days.

Capital return is scaled to match. The board approved an additional $14B buyback, bringing remaining authorization to $15.5B on a market capitalization of $239.4 billion. Balance-sheet leverage is negligible at debt-to-equity of 0.025, and the forward P/E sits at 8 against an analyst target of $2,125.09. Peer Western Digital guided Q1 FY27 revenue to roughly $4.1B, up 42% to 49% year over year, corroborating the storage-cycle strength that SanDisk is monetizing on the flash side.

Bottom Line

The 2,107% performance is a symptom of two forces stacking on each other: NAND pricing that has snapped back, and Datacenter demand tied to AI infrastructure that is running at triple-digit growth. For long-term investors, the metric is a prompt to examine what they actually own in supposedly boring index products rather than a chart-chasing cue.

The next dated catalyst in the provided data is corporate rather than operational: S&P Dow Jones Indices announced on Sept. 4, 2026 that SanDisk is among companies joining major S&P benchmarks, which will pull passive flows into a stock already trading at $1,632.11. When the biggest one-year winner in memory redraws the map of what counts as growth and what counts as value, chances are the label on the sleeve of your portfolio is not the risk you signed up for.

The post ‘Apple and Microsoft Look Like Value Stocks’: Morningstar on SanDisk’s 2,107% Year appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) held its September 9 product event, and by the next session, the stock closed at $326.57, up 3.56% from $315.34. That single session pushed market capitalization to roughly $4.77 trillion, following the debut of the iPhone Duo, the company’s first foldable.

Investors treated the unveil as validation of a premium reset. Wall Street was buying an idea, because a company this size does not add hundreds of billions of dollars in a day unless traders believe a new product line can move a needle that starts at more than $400 billion in annual revenue.

The question worth asking is whether the enthusiasm holds up when you compare what the market added to what a foldable can plausibly earn. That is the story below.

One Session, One Verdict on the Duo

The one-day pop is the anchor here. Apple’s shares moved 3.56% on September 10, 2026, the first full trading session after the launch. On a base that started the day near $315.34, that is a change in market value measured in hundreds of billions of dollars, not a rounding error.

The move needs a caveat before it does any work in your thinking. A company that trades at a 43 price-to-earnings multiple with a $4.77 trillion market cap moves on several forces at once, including index flows, macro headlines, and options positioning tied to the event itself. Attributing the whole session to the Duo overstates the case.

Market capitalization represents the aggregate price investors are willing to pay right now for future cash flows, and that price can retreat as quickly as it climbed. The seven-day sentiment change of -10.95 in the composite reading suggests some of the enthusiasm was already cooling before the launch even hit shelves.

Still, the direction of the move matters. Investors treated the Duo as the start of a new premium tier inside a lineup that just delivered a June quarter record for iPhone.

What the Move Tells You About the Business

Apple entered the launch in the strongest operating shape in years. Fiscal Q3 2026 revenue came in at $109.42 billion, up 16.36% year over year, with net income of $29.79 billion, up 27.12%. Diluted EPS reached $2.02, up 29%, and was the ninth straight quarterly beat.

iPhone revenue alone was $54.3 billion, up 22%, and Mac climbed 29% to $8.6 billion. Services set another June quarter record at $30.7 billion, up 12%. The installed base of active devices reached an all-time high across every major category and geography.

Those numbers are the reason the Duo lands with more weight than a typical accessory launch. Apple is layering a foldable onto a lineup already growing double digits and onto a base that surpassed 2.5 billion active devices earlier in the fiscal year. Even a small conversion rate among heavy upgraders would drive meaningful average selling price expansion.

Retail sales from a foldable, however you model unit volume, are not Apple’s profit. They flow through cost of goods, marketing, and a supply chain the company itself described as constrained. Management was blunt: supply issues stem from demand exceeding forecast, and constraints are expected to worsen sequentially in the September quarter.

Market Reaction and Where It Sits Now

The one-day rally is only part of the story. Year to date, Apple is up 20.45%, moving from $271.12 at the close of 2025 to $326.57 on September 10. Over the trailing year, the stock has gained 44.53%.

The prediction-market crowd is calmer than the stock action. Polymarket’s September 2026 pricing showed $320 as the highest-probability level at 0.73, with the week-of contract clustering around $328. That is not market pricing in a runaway leg from here.

Reddit’s tone mirrored that skepticism. The most-discussed thread asked directly whether a $2,500 foldable iPhone is enough to move the stock, and its aggregate sentiment score sat at 48, categorized as neutral. Individual investors have not fully bought the story yet.

The Bull Case for Apple

The bull case requires the Duo to pull the top of Apple’s premium ladder higher while iPhone, Mac, and Services keep compounding. So far, that is exactly what is happening.

Start with the operating baseline. Apple returned $33 billion to shareholders in the June quarter alone, including $25.8 billion in buybacks, and raised the dividend to $0.27 per share with a payment date of August 13, 2026. In the first nine months of fiscal 2026, buybacks totaled $62.094 billion.

Guidance for the September quarter calls for revenue growth of 9% to 11% and gross margin of 47% to 48%, even as memory costs climb and supply constraints tighten. The company also announced a Broadcom agreement expected to exceed $30 billion, part of a broader $600 billion U.S. investment commitment over four years.

The restraint is real and worth naming plainly. Foldables still represent less than 3% of the global smartphone market, and analysts left the launch without a clear picture of whether the Duo targets work, entertainment, or status-conscious early adopters. If Apple cannot convert the halo into upgrades across the standard iPhone line, the Duo becomes a one-cycle novelty rather than a durable tier.

Apple screens favorably here, with valuation in view. With the mega-cap hardware peer set, the combination of double-digit revenue growth, expanding services mix, and an aggressive capital-return program is uncommon. Analyst coverage tilts positive with 19 buy and 6 strong buy ratings against 3 sell and 2 strong sell calls, and the mean analyst target sits at $323.86, essentially at the current quote.

The straightforward read is that near-term upside from here depends on whether Duo demand, Siri AI adoption, and the standard iPhone 17 cycle keep the top line moving faster than the analyst community currently expects. Based on the June quarter and the guided September range, that outcome is more likely than not, and the long-term case remains intact.

The post Apple’s $164 Billion Rally Hinges on iPhone Duo Adoption Among 6 Million Premium Buyers appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

Shares of AMC Entertainment (NYSE:AMC) are up 5% to $2.47 midday Friday after Robinhood Markets (NASDAQ:HOOD) co-founder and CEO Vlad Tenev signaled openness to defusing a public feud with AMC CEO Adam Aron over the tokenized shares that track the theater chain. AMC stock is now up 58% year to date (YTD), a run that dwarfs the 12% gain in the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (NYSEARCA:SPY), which is up 1% today. The size of today’s AMC share-price pop is notable because nothing in the underlying dispute has actually been resolved.

Robinhood stock is doing almost nothing on the same set of headlines, down 0.4% to $112.85. That divergence sits at the heart of today’s story: AMC trades on attention and headline flow, while Robinhood is being priced on its operating numbers and its capital-markets ambitions. The two companies have been on opposite sides of a very public argument for weeks, and today’s price action reads as a meme setup rather than a business event.

Tokenization Truce Signal Powers the Spike

The catalyst is a shift in tone rather than substance. Speaking at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia and Tech Conference this week, Tenev said, “I’m open to it, you know, I love debates. I’m open to many things,” when pressed on the public spat with Aron over Robinhood’s stock tokens that mirror AMC shares. Tenev also called tokenization the future of modern finance and left the door open to what he described as hugging it out with Aron, and investors seized on the friendlier framing because Aron’s original attacks had been the loudest voice in the dispute all year.

It’s the softest thing anyone on the Robinhood side has said since Aron branded the tokenization of AMC shares “contemptible” and demanded a cease-and-desist backed by legal threats. Even so, AMC has extracted no concession. Tenev repeated that Robinhood’s debt-backed derivatives don’t require permission from AMC or any underlying issuer, so the product mechanics aren’t going anywhere and the tokens will keep trading regardless of Aron’s objections.

Coinbase Rallies, Cinemark Sits Out

Coinbase Global (NASDAQ:COIN) is another name catching a tokenization bid, with Coinbase stock up 3% to $177.20. Coinbase’s Base chain and its push into tokenized real-world assets slot into any session where the market reassesses the political temperature around on-chain equities, and a Robinhood truce narrative helps every issuer selling access to that theme. Coinbase’s own Everything Exchange framing puts tokenized equities, prediction markets and stablecoins under one strategy, which is exactly what today’s rotation is chasing.

The tell for the AMC narrative sits with Cinemark Holdings (NYSE:CNK). Cinemark stock is down 0.2% to $35.08, with no crypto exposure, no dispute with Robinhood, and no reason to move on today’s news. Cinemark stock going nowhere while AMC stock jumps confirms that this is a tokenization move rather than a box-office story, and it neutralizes any argument that a bullish theatrical read is doing the work here.

Robinhood stock, meanwhile, appears to be treading water. Robinhood posted August operating metrics this week that showed growth across funded customers, platform assets and trading volumes, and the company took its first formal initial public offering (IPO) underwriting slot on smart ring maker Oura’s registration filing. Tenev told investors of the underwriting business, “We intend to be disruptive in the space,” and Robinhood stock still hasn’t responded to any of it. For a name that has been under pressure this month, the failure to react to solid business news is a bigger tell than any Aron headline.

What to Watch

For AMC, the next anticipated cue is whether Aron matches Tenev’s conciliatory tone or doubles down on the cease-and-desist demand. An escalation from Aron could pull AMC stock back toward where it started the week, and a public detente could extend today’s move into next week’s session. Either way, AMC stock’s rally rests on the fact that its own CEO’s target said something softer, which is a thin foundation for a move of this size.

Robinhood stock’s setup looks different. Investors can watch for whether HOOD stock reconnects with the company’s improving August data and its new seat in the Oura IPO syndicate, or whether the stock keeps ignoring the numbers entirely.

Position sizing in AMC stock should reflect that today’s rally rests on tone rather than a business change, and investors may want to keep their AMC exposure appropriately small on a name that continues to trade on attention rather than operating results (we wrote a free playbook on speculating with just 5% of a portfolio, with the sizing and exit rules, here).

The post AMC Gains 5% on Tokenization Truce Signal, Robinhood Barely Budges; Cinemark Treads Water appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

If you own a rental property and earn solid income, every dollar of rent gets taxed at your highest rate. Your adult grandchildren earn far less, and the same rent on their returns would be taxed at a much lower rate. Split one property among a few of them and the income spreads across several separate low brackets instead of stacking onto one high one. Identical income, taxed at different rates depending on whose return it lands on.

This piece walks through what happens when a grandparent tries it, why the headline arithmetic is only half the story, and why, for many families, the smart move is the opposite. The figures used are illustrative, not personalized advice.

How an In-Life Property Transfer Works

The grandparent deeds the property to the grandchildren while alive, usually as a gift, sometimes directly into shared ownership and sometimes into an entity that holds title. Once the deed changes hands, the rent belongs to the new owners and gets reported on their returns, at their rates. Because the recipients here are adults well past the age where a child’s investment income is taxed at a parent’s rate, the income is taxed at their own brackets. Try this with young kids, and the kiddie tax rules pull the income back up to the parent’s rate, which is why the recipients’ age matters so much.

A gift of property worth more than the annual exclusion requires a gift tax return. That does not automatically mean tax is owed. Gifts above the exclusion generally draw first on a lifetime allowance, and most families never reach the ceiling. The mechanics of filing require professional help.

Why the Basis Reset You Give Up Usually Wins

Property given away during life generally carries the giver’s original cost basis to the recipient. Property inherited at death generally gets its basis reset to the value at that time, which can erase decades of appreciation for tax purposes. The family is choosing between saving tax on the rent every year and forfeiting a potentially enormous basis reset on the eventual sale.

The income shift is modest and recurring: a slice of rent taxed at a lower rate, year after year. The lost step-up is a single large amount that shows up whenever the property is sold, and for a rental held for decades in an appreciating market it can be huge. In many families, that one number swamps every year of rent savings put together. That calculation decides whether the strategy is smart, and it turns on the property’s cost basis, its current market value, and whether the grandchildren actually plan to sell.

A long-held rental has been depreciated year after year, which pushes basis down further and creates depreciation recapture on sale. That recapture travels with the asset when the property is gifted. A grandchild who eventually sells inherits both the shrunken basis and the recapture exposure their grandparent built up.

Control, Creditors, and Complications You Cannot Undo

Once you sign the deed, you lose control, which means that the grandchildren can sell, mortgage, refuse to maintain, or fight with each other about the property. Shared ownership among several young adults is a structural conflict waiting to happen, and any one of them can usually force a sale. Their creditors and their marriages now reach the asset too.

The grandparent may also need the asset later. Giving away property below market value can affect eligibility for state-administered long-term care assistance under look-back rules, and it removes something they might have needed to sell for their own care. The grandchildren’s own tax lives get more complicated as well. Rental income can push them into higher brackets, reduce income-based student loan help, cut health insurance subsidies, and force them to deal with depreciation schedules and a materially harder return.

If the rent is redirected without real ownership transferring, the shift does not work. Income follows the property, and arrangements that try to move the cash while keeping control tend to fail on audit.

Who Should Actually Consider Doing This

The families this fits are narrow. The property should have relatively low appreciation compared with its value, so the surrendered step-up is small. The grandparent should be confident they will never need the asset. The recipients should be capable adults who genuinely want the responsibility. The estate should be large enough that moving assets out has independent planning value. A family holding a highly appreciated, long-depreciated rental usually should do the opposite: hold it until death for the basis reset and help the grandchildren in other ways in the meantime (the titling, beneficiary, and trust decisions that make that hand-off clean are all in our free estate checklist: Die With a Plan).

The income shift is real, and the rent taxed at 12% on three separate returns is genuinely lighter than the same rent taxed at 35% on one. The basis cost is usually higher. The answer turns on the property’s appreciation, not on the appeal of the idea, which grandparents might want or need to reverse later.

The post Instead of Leaving the Rental House to the Grandkids, They Deeded It to Them at 25. The $30,000 of Rent Now Lands in Three 12% Brackets Instead of Grandpa’s 35% appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

Anthropic and OpenAI plan to go public sometime in the next year. Their valuations have been pegged at $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion. This is based on two things. The first is that each has the most advanced AI models in the world, and by wide margins. The other is that revenue is growing at a mind-boggling rate. A recent analysis of Anthropic’s revenue run rate for this year put it at $65 billion. That would be as much as seven times 2025 revenue.

If the impression grows that China’s AI models are nearly as good as, if not as good as, American models, OpenAI and Anthropic’s valuations could be badly crippled.  There is also concern that AI data centers will cost hundreds of billions of dollars. Whether this pays off depends on major AI technology advantages and revenue’s ability to support the need for capital. If any of these assumptions are badly undermined, the AI funding pace will look more like the dot-com bubble, and IPO values will be badly damaged.

There is considerable concern that Chinese AI progress has moved fast enough that US advances have not kept pace in efficiency and overall results, particularly for business, government, and the military. The anxiety falls into several categories. One is that China has stolen intellectual property from Anthropic and OpenAI. The same concern applies to several major American public companies, including Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT).

Another is that enterprise users will move to China’s open-source and open-weight models. The cost per token can be less than 50% of proprietary products from some US companies. CNBC reports, “Chinese-built AI models are gaining traction among U.S. companies as they narrow the performance gap with leading American rivals while remaining significantly cheaper to use.” Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang recently said that these models should not be pushed out of the US. He added that these Chinese models are “excellent.”

US politicians have moved to block the use of Chinese technology like DeepSeek or Kimi. They have voiced concern that these can be used to “spy” on US technology. A related issue is that the Chinese government has supported AI development, while in the US, capital comes from private companies and financial firms.

Another concrete issue is the backlash against data centers in the US. Bloomberg has reported that the number blocked so far is huge. “Delays to data-center projects would likely result in cuts to forecasts for US gas demand, which is expected to climb as new power plants are built to provide electricity for the artificial-intelligence boom,” the news service reports. The Chinese central government has much more control over land use and where data centers are built.

Another advantage Chinese data centers have is access to electricity. China can supply about twice the electricity the US can. The aging American grid and lack of ready energy to power the rising need for electricity mean some data centers will be delayed.

The final large advantage China has is its ability to steal US IP. This often happens through a technique called “model distillation.” Reuters reports, “Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using output from larger, more expensive ones as part ​of an effort to lower the costs of training a new AI tool.”

Current investors need Anthropic and OpenAI values to be at or above $1.5 trillion. Public investors also need to believe those figures to support these valuations.

The post China Could Absolutely Cripple Anthropic And OpenAI IPOs appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

Tesla enters the fall of 2026 in an unusual spot for a mega-cap: the operating business is investing heavily, cash flow just turned negative, and yet the forward narrative around Robotaxi, Optimus, and FSD monetization has arguably never been more concrete. Our Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) model puts a modest premium on the shares here, with the biggest catalyst likely still ahead.

The 24/7 Wall St. price target for Tesla is $389.27 over the next 12 months, implying upside of 7.07% from a recent price of $363.56. Our recommendation is buy, with high model confidence at 90%. Forward optionality is sufficient to justify a long bias, though near-term earnings power remains too thin to chase aggressively.

Where Tesla Sits Right Now

Tesla is down 19.16% year to date but has recovered 9.24% over the past month, even as shares slipped 3.4% in the last week. The stock trades well off the 52-week high of $498.83.

Q2 FY2026 delivered record deliveries of 480,126 vehicles and revenue of $28.24 billion, topping expectations by 7.10%. However, non-GAAP EPS of $0.33 came in missing expectations by 38.51% as operating margin compressed to 1.4%. That backdrop is what Barron’s flagged this week in noting shares are drifting while the Cybercab debate rages.

Why Bulls See a Breakout Ahead

The bull case hinges on AI monetization. FSD paid customers reached nearly 1.5 million globally, and roughly 55% of North American deliveries now attach FSD. Robotaxi has driven more than 380,000 miles across six cities with zero notable incidents, and unsupervised miles are growing more than 10% a week.

Optimus is being scaled to an aspirational 10 million units a year at Gen 4, and energy storage deployed 13.5 GWh in Q2, up 41% YoY. Our bull case scenario models Tesla at $465.53 in 12 months if these curves compound.

What Could Go Wrong

The bear case is straightforward: valuation. Tesla trades at a trailing P/E of 344 and a forward P/E of 154. Free cash flow flipped to negative $1.09 billion in Q2 as capex more than doubled. Prediction markets are skeptical of the near-term Robotaxi story: Polymarket puts California launch by year-end at just 18% Yes.

Counterfactually, bulls note the margin compression reflects investment in more than $25 billion of productive capex for CyberCab, Optimus, and semiconductor capacity rather than any demand-side softness. Our bear scenario points to $351.72.

How Tesla Compares to GM and Ford

General Motors (NYSE:GM) is the profitability contrast. GM trades at a P/E of 29 with Q2 2026 adjusted EPS of $3.57 and raised full-year EBIT guidance of $14 billion to $16 billion. That is a fully-priced legacy franchise generating real cash, while Tesla is being valued on AI optionality.

Ford (NYSE:F) is the software-services parallel. Ford Pro paid subscribers hit 879,000, growing 30% year-over-year, which is a useful sanity check on Tesla’s FSD subscription ramp.

Ford’s negative reported P/E and Model e losses of $777 million in Q1 underscore how hard EV profitability is, and by extension how valuable Tesla’s automotive gross margin remains. The peer set makes our target look reasonable: rich versus Detroit’s cash flows, but justified if Tesla’s software and autonomy layers scale as guided.

Tesla Price Prediction 2026-2030

My verdict: Buy, target $389.27, 90% confidence. The key factor tipping the scale is the FSD attach rate and Robotaxi mileage curve, both of which are inflecting.

The setup gets more constructive if Q3 shows continued FSD subscription growth and any measurable Robotaxi revenue disclosure. It weakens if operating margin compresses further without visible AI monetization by year-end.

These projections assume Tesla continues executing on its autonomy and manufacturing roadmap. Significant upside or downside could result from Robotaxi commercialization pace, Optimus production ramp, or a broader consumer EV demand shift.

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Grab (NASDAQ:GRAB) and Uber (NYSE:UBER) both dropped Q2 2026 results in early August. Uber posted $58.02 billion in Gross Bookings and record cash generation. Grab paired 21.73% revenue growth with a Superbank consolidation that reshaped its financial services arm. The setup invites a real question: which platform actually has more room to run from here?

Southeast Asia Compounds While Uber Absorbs Model Changes

Grab’s quarter was carried by product breadth. Deliveries revenue reached $531 million (+21%), Mobility $331 million (+12%), and Financial Services $134 million (+59%). GrabMart users grew 42% year over year, and management said groceries now expand 1.7 times faster than food delivery. Adjusted EBITDA jumped 54%, with Anthony Tan noting it grew “more than twice our revenue growth rate.”

Uber’s headline number looked softer. Reported revenue rose 12.17%, dented by a roughly 8 percentage-point optical hit from business model changes. Mobility revenue crawled up 1%, and reported mobility revenue margin fell nearly 500 basis points. Delivery is the bright spot at $5.245 billion (+28%), but the ride business is clearly maturing.

Small Cap Story Vs. Capital-Heavy Empire

Scale cuts both ways. Uber sits at a ~$148.17B market cap, funding $10 billion in AV investments and roughly $4 billion deployed toward Delivery Hero shares in Q2 alone. That’s serious execution risk stacked on a mature growth curve. Grab, at ~$11.96B, is spending on things that already print cash: Superbank hit 7.4 million customers, and Stash brought more than $5 billion in assets under management into the ecosystem.

Skeptics will point to the $307 million one-time gain from remeasuring Superbank. Fair. But strip that out and adjusted EBITDA still expanded meaningfully, and the fintech loan book scaled to $2.3B (+197% YoY) with management guiding above $3 billion by year end.

What Will Decide the Next Six Months

Analyst revisions tell the story. Grab’s FY2026 EPS estimate moved from $0.0836 thirty days ago to $0.1338. Uber’s revisions are also up but off a much higher base. Grab shares are down 39.68% year to date, while Uber has slipped 11.22%. Fintech profitability in H2 2026 is the catalyst worth tracking.

Why I Lean Toward Grab for Asymmetric Upside

Grab looks more compelling here on a risk-reward basis. The valuation reset feels overdone, the fintech flywheel is finally turning, and management is buying back stock aggressively into weakness. Uber remains the stronger business today. Still, at 15 P/E with heavy AV and Delivery Hero commitments ahead, its cleaner earnings come with a fatter price tag. Grab’s messier earnings report hides a cleaner setup for patient investors willing to accept quarter-to-quarter volatility.

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Marvell Technology (NASDAQ:MRVL) stock is up 5% to $237.69 midday Friday after Piper Sandler kicked off its coverage with a bullish setup. It caps a strong recent stretch for Marvell shares. That initiation is doing the heavy lifting on today’s move for Marvell.

Broadcom (NASDAQ:AVGO) stock is up 1% to $364.83 alongside the broader AI semi bid supporting Marvell. Meanwhile, NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) stock is holding steady, up 0.4% to $219.26. Both are supplying peer confirmation for Marvell rather than leading the move.

The sector move is to the upside but measured. The iShares Semiconductor ETF (NASDAQ:SOXX) is up 2% at midday. Moreover, the Invesco QQQ Trust (NASDAQ:QQQ) is up 1%, so Marvell is outpacing both the semiconductor group and the broad technology complex.

Piper Sandler Starts Marvell With a Bullish Setup

Piper Sandler analyst David O’Connor initiated Marvell stock with a $270 price target, pointing to the company’s expanding role in artificial intelligence data centers and custom compute. O’Connor flagged Marvell’s positions in digital signal processors (DSPs), custom connectivity, and long-standing relationships with large cloud providers as the platform for future demand in custom AI hardware and co-packaged optics.

The larger prize, per O’Connor, may sit in Marvell supplying custom accelerator solutions to hyperscalers building their own graphics processing unit (GPU) alternatives. That framing lines up with the custom silicon acceleration Marvell management has flagged for the second half of fiscal 2027, and it puts a fresh sell-side stamp on the same thesis powering the recent rally in Marvell shares.

Piper Sandler’s call also highlights co-packaged optics as an emerging opportunity for Marvell. That corner of the AI infrastructure stack is one where Marvell already ships optical DSP technology and where the timing of hyperscaler adoption remains a key variable. Today’s initiation gives that debate a fresh anchor for Marvell bulls.

Coverage matters here because Piper Sandler is starting Marvell fresh rather than lifting an existing rating, which brings a new set of institutional clients into the name. That kind of debut tends to draw incremental flows over a period of days rather than a single session, especially into an event-heavy calendar for Marvell.

Marvell’s Switzerland Pitch and Its Limits

Chairman and CEO Matt Murphy, speaking with CNBC’s Jim Cramer this week, described Marvell as working across every GPU and accelerator platform in the market. Murphy said, “We are basically the Switzerland of this entire market right now. We work with everybody,” adding that Marvell partners with all four major U.S. hyperscalers on custom silicon and holds a significant position in optical connectivity.

Murphy expects more than $15 billion of Marvell’s projected revenue next year to come from data centers, a category that stood at a small fraction of that size only a few years ago. The scale of that shift is why the AI narrative around Marvell has hardened, and why Piper Sandler’s target is anchored to data center rather than legacy end markets.

For Marvell, the neutrality also carries risk. Broadcom holds many of the incumbent custom silicon relationships Marvell wants, and being everyone’s partner still forces Marvell to fight for share deal by deal. That competitive overhang is one reason Marvell shares have historically traded with high beta to AI capex sentiment.

What to Watch

Marvell’s next scheduled catalyst is its October 6 investor day, where Murphy plans to present a new multi-year roadmap. That’s the checkpoint where the data center trajectory either supports Piper Sandler’s constructive setup for Marvell or falls short of it.

Between now and then, Marvell stock is likely to trade on broader AI capex signals and any peer commentary out of Broadcom and NVIDIA (we rounded up seven suppliers powering that buildout, from power to cooling, in a free report). Investors sizing new exposure to Marvell may want to keep an eye on whether the stock holds its recent breakout ahead of the October event, and should size their positions to the volatility a post-run initiation tends to invite.

The Marvell stock setup into October is a rare one for a semis name. A fresh Street initiation, an already-hot stock, and a scheduled roadmap event all sit inside a four-week window. For MRVL shareholders, the next few sessions may matter more for setting a range than for confirming a direction.

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Shares of TeraWulf (NASDAQ:WULF) are up 7% to $17.33 in Friday midday trading, leading a broad rebound across the Bitcoin (CRYPTO:BTC) miner complex after a soft prior session. Also higher, Applied Digital (NASDAQ:APLD) stock is climbing 4% to $26.74. Meanwhile, IREN (NASDAQ:IREN) stock is up only 0.89% to $44.03, a relative laggard as its peers snap back.

The CoinShares Valkyrie Bitcoin Miners ETF (NASDAQ:WGMI) is up 5% in this session, serving as the cleanest sector proxy for the group. Meanwhile, the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (NYSEARCA:SPY) is up 1% for context, so the miner complex is outpacing the broad market by a wide margin. That relative-strength gap matters, because it separates sector flow from a generic risk-on day.

All three miner-to-AI operators declined in Thursday’s session, a move attributed at the time to profit taking after a strong run rather than to company-specific news. Friday’s session reverses that decline for TeraWulf and Applied Digital, though IREN isn’t fully joining the recovery. That split is where the story lives.

Miner Selloff Reverses Without a Fresh Catalyst

No company announcement, contract award, regulatory decision or analyst action was published by TeraWulf on Friday that accounts for this session’s move in TeraWulf stock. A decline attributed to profit taking is the kind that can reverse without news, since nothing was broken on the way down and nothing had to be fixed for the bounce. The sector fund’s leadership over the broad benchmark supports that reading cleanly.

What’s playing out in TeraWulf is a group bid finding its way back to the miner complex after a brief shakeout, distinct from any single-operator re-rating. The WGMI move, running well ahead of SPY, points to sector-specific flow rather than beta to the wider market. As the highest-beta name in the trio, TeraWulf is naturally leading the reversal on the upside just as it led on the way down.

IREN Sits Out the Rally

IREN’s near-flat session is the tell here. Its gain sits well below both the WGMI ETF’s move and the rallies in TeraWulf and Applied Digital, and that suggests today’s rebound is flows-driven rather than a repricing of the AI hosting thesis the three names share. IREN stock has already run hard on its own storyline, so it looks disconnected from the oversold-bounce trade lifting its peers.

For anyone tracking the group, IREN’s relative flatness is a useful data point in its own right. It implies today’s miner bid is mechanical rather than thematic, and that IREN’s next move likely traces its own catalysts rather than the sector’s. That’s a nuance worth carrying into next week when comparing the three names side by side.

What to Watch

TeraWulf’s day is shaping up as a two-session round trip on no news, which leaves the TeraWulf position where it started this week, with the 51% year-to-date (YTD) gain still doing the work. That YTD frame matters more than any single Friday tick for anyone sizing exposure to the miner-to-AI infrastructure pivot theme.

The forward-looking question is whether Friday’s bid in TeraWulf holds into the close, and whether IREN begins to close its gap with the other two operators in the next session. Investors can watch for signs that WGMI extends its lead over SPY, which would confirm the miner-flow rotation has more room to run (the power and infrastructure side of the AI buildout is the subject of a free report we put together on seven suppliers behind the data-center boom, here). For now, TeraWulf’s bounce reads as a technical repair, and investors should size their exposure to the group’s volatility accordingly.

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Altrata’s Billionaire Census 2026, the 13th edition of the report and drawing on the firm’s global wealth database through 2025, puts a number on the great handoff at the top of the wealth pyramid: almost 5,000 spouses and adult children will inherit a sizeable share of the $6.6tn of billionaire wealth that will be passed on over the next decade. That is the projection: a ten-year forward estimate of family transfers from a population that, according to the same report, now numbers fewer than 4,000 individuals holding in excess of $15tn in collective net worth.

What the $6.6 Trillion Figure Actually Measures

The transfer estimate covers direct heirs only: 3,620 adult children currently above 18 years of age and 1,370 spouses. Minor children, extended family, foundations, and non-family beneficiaries are not in the count. Altrata also flags that these transfers will rarely take the form of cash. In its words, beneficiaries will likely receive a combination of shares in listed companies, private businesses, investment portfolios and real estate rather than simply cash deposits. That composition matters, because it dictates whether the capital stays concentrated inside operating businesses or gets liquidated into public markets.

The demographic profile of the recipients is older than the headline “next-gen wealth” framing suggests. The current average age of expected adult child heirs is 48, and that of spouses is 66. Gen X dominates the inheritance queue, ahead of millennials and Gen Z. And the succession pipeline is already partially staffed: 23% of expected adult child heirs currently work alongside their billionaire parent in some capacity in the primary family business. Women are set to receive a disproportionate share of the spousal inheritance, comprising 90% of spouses in line to receive family wealth, and Altrata expects heiresses to make up a large share of the beneficiary pool through 2035.

Trend Line and What Is Feeding the Pipeline

The 2026 edition arrives after another expansion year at the top. The US billionaire population rose 11.5% in 2025 to 1,265 billionaires, China’s population grew 13%, and Germany posted the fastest gain among the top 15 countries at 20%. The base of transferable wealth is growing faster than the heir pool, which is why the ten-year projection carries the weight it does. Altrata still finds that 62% of the global billionaire class is self-made, with only 8% fully inheriting their wealth. Those ratios shift as the founder generation ages: the average billionaire is now 71 years old, with almost half older than 70.

Why This Matters if You Are Not on the List

Scale first. The $6.6 trillion projection covers a ten-year window and represents a claim on productive assets that dwarfs most reference points in the household economy. For context, US personal saving ran at an annualized $652.4 billion in the second quarter of 2026, with the household savings rate at 2.8%, and M2 money supply stood at $23.22 trillion as of July 2026. The transfer figure is a claim on ownership, not liquidity, but the ownership is heavily tilted toward the same public equities, private companies, and real estate that everyone else’s 401(k) and home equity are exposed to.

Second, redeployment risk. Altrata notes that succession planning will decide whether such ownership remains concentrated within the family structure or is diluted through sales, IPOs and diversification. That is a direct signal for public-market investors. A wave of family-office selling into secondaries, a wave of founder-owned businesses going public to solve estate-tax problems, or a wave of philanthropic transfers into large donor-advised funds each pushes capital and float in very different directions. Sectors flagged as multi-generational, including manufacturing, consumer goods, retail, real estate, and financial services, are the likely venues. The estate mechanics behind these decisions are their own discipline, and we mapped the wills, trusts, beneficiary forms, and titling that determine whether wealth reaches family or lawyers in a free estate checklist.

The number to hold onto is Altrata’s, exactly as printed: $6.6tn over the next decade, to roughly 5,000 heirs. Gen X inherits first, spouses skew older, and roughly a quarter of the next generation is already inside the family business. The question that decides the market impact is how much stays put.

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Broadcom (NASDAQ:AVGO) and AMD (NASDAQ:AMD) just delivered blockbuster quarters that put both squarely in the NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) conversation. Broadcom’s Q3 FY2026 report on September 2 showed AI silicon exploding. AMD’s Q2 FY2026 earnings report on August 4 revealed a data center business finally scaling. Two playbooks. One target: Nvidia’s grip on AI compute.

Custom Silicon Carries Broadcom. Instinct Carries AMD.

Broadcom’s AI semiconductor revenue hit $16.7 billion, up 221% year over year and 54% sequentially. CEO Hock Tan said “when you co-develop a chip that is optimized for your particular LLM workloads, you will outperform any GPU”. That confidence sits behind a guide for Q4 AI revenue of roughly $21.7 billion, up 236%, with fiscal 2027 AI revenue projected at approximately $115 billion. Six hyperscale customers, including Google, OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic, anchor the story.

AMD’s Data Center segment reached $6.72 billion, up 107% YoY, powered by MI350 shipments and record EPYC sales. Lisa Su called it an “excellent quarter, with record revenue and profitability”. The new Helios rack platform, pairing MI450 GPUs with EPYC Venice CPUs and Pensando networking, is “tracking ahead of our initial forecasts”. Anthropic committed to up to 2 GW of MI450 Series. Microsoft is expanding Azure deployments.

Concentrated Bet vs. Open Ecosystem

Broadcom is betting that a small handful of frontier labs will consume most AI compute, and that co-designed silicon beats general-purpose GPUs on cost and power. Tan claims custom accelerators can run at “less than half the cost” of a GPU. AMD is playing the opposite side: an open, merchant model where Rackham now runs more than 3 million models out of the box, and Helios delivers “up to 30% more tokens per dollar than the competition”.

Valuation reflects the divergence. Broadcom trades at a forward P/E of 20. AMD sits at a forward P/E of 32, with a trailing multiple near 128. AMD is priced for a much steeper ramp.

Supply, Not Demand, Decides 2027

Both CEOs flagged the same choke points: HBM, substrates, packaging, and data center power. Broadcom said demand “exceeds this outlook”. AMD said it has supply to “more than meet the guidance”. I will be watching MI450 yields as Helios ramps, and whether Broadcom’s OpenAI Jalapeno program actually hits its 1.3 gigawatt target in 2027.

Why I Lean Broadcom for the Nvidia Fight

For me, Broadcom is the more credible Nvidia disruptor today. The customer commitments are locked, the networking moat is real, and the 46% free cash flow margin gives it firepower few semis can match. AMD is the higher-upside pick if you believe merchant GPUs plus an open software stack can pry share from CUDA. If AMD’s 2027 consensus EPS of $15.45 proves conservative, the stock likely rewards patience. I would consider both, and we reverse-engineered what the earliest Nvidia-style winners had in common in a free playbook here. But if I could only own one for the “Nvidia killer” thesis, I would take the picks-and-shovels business with signed hyperscale contracts.

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Oracle (NYSE:ORCL) just delivered one of the most consequential AI cloud quarters on record, and I think the market is still digesting what it means. Our 24/7 Wall St. price target for Oracle is $229.25, implying 49.67% upside from the current $153.17 share price.

Our recommendation is buy, and the model’s confidence is 90%. Oracle looks like an unexpected AI winner because the RPO backlog and OCI utilization data now support a step-change in earnings power through 2030.

24/7 Wall St. Price Target Summary

A Blowout Quarter Buried Under a Selloff

Oracle is down 20.77% year to date and 52.89% over the past year, sitting far below its $325.79 52-week high. Yet the fundamentals accelerated.

In Q1 FY2027, revenue rose 29.61% to $19.34 billion, adjusted EPS came in at $1.92, and cloud infrastructure revenue exploded 121%. Remaining performance obligations reached $664 billion, and Oracle booked more than $30 billion in new AI contracts in a single quarter. Management raised FY2027 revenue guidance to at least $90 billion and reiterated a $8.10 non-GAAP EPS target.

Why Bulls See a Breakout Ahead

The bull case rests on RPO conversion. Management now expects roughly half of RPO to convert to revenue over the next 36 months, GPU utilization is running at 97.9%, and renewals are pricing at a 20% premium.

Multicloud database revenue grew 353% year over year, and OCI now interconnects with every major hyperscaler. Analyst distribution skews heavily positive with 8 strong buys and 28 buys, versus just 1 sell. In our bull scenario, ORCL reaches $334.89 within 12 months, a 118.64% return.

What Could Go Wrong

Free cash flow was negative $5.4 billion in Q1, following negative $23.7 billion for FY2026, with FY2027 CapEx guided to $90 to $95 billion. Bulls would counter that CFO Hilary Maxson said each project is “by nature a strong free cash flow generating project” once it ramps, targeting 100% conversion to post-tax EBITDA.

Software license revenue is also shrinking 15% as customers migrate, and concentration in a handful of hyperscale AI contracts is real. Our bear scenario still lands at $191.39, roughly 24.95% above today.

How Oracle Compares to Microsoft and Amazon

Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) is the cleanest cloud comp, with Azure surpassing $100 billion in full-year revenue and commercial RPO of $678 billion, remarkably close to Oracle’s $664 billion backlog on a fraction of Oracle’s revenue base. Microsoft trades at a P/E of 27, effectively identical to Oracle’s 28, yet Oracle’s cloud is growing far faster.

Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) is the AWS benchmark, growing 37% in Q2 with plans for roughly $200 billion in 2026 CapEx. Amazon trades at a P/E of 35. Against both, Oracle’s forward P/E of 20 makes our 24/7 Wall St. price target look conservative.

Oracle Price Prediction 2026-2030

The 24/7 Wall St. price target of $229.25 with a buy rating and 90% confidence reflects a business whose RPO now dwarfs its trailing revenue. The tipping factor is GPU utilization at 97.9% with renewal pricing running 20% higher.

The setup favors investors who can tolerate near-term free cash flow volatility while the CapEx cycle plays out. The thesis weakens if the $664 billion backlog converts far more slowly than management guides.

These projections assume Oracle continues converting its RPO backlog on schedule and holds datacenter execution timelines.

Significant upside or downside could come from GPU supply constraints, hyperscaler competition, or how quickly free cash flow inflects positive after the current investment cycle. Oracle is one face of the AI buildout, and we profiled seven other suppliers powering data centers, from power to cooling, in a free report you can grab here.

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You don’t often see a trillion-dollar chipmaker shed tens of billions of dollars in market capitalization on a day when the shortage driving its earnings worsens. That is what happened to Micron Technology (NASDAQ:MU) on Thursday.

The stock closed at $977.41, down 4.9% in the session. On the same day, Chinese AI chipmakers are raising prices on forthcoming Huawei and Cambricon accelerators because high-bandwidth memory has become prohibitively scarce and expensive in the grey channel there.

Those Chinese price signals do not translate cleanly into Micron revenue, because export restrictions distort that channel. They speak to global memory tightness rather than to sales into China. Micron is one of three companies that dominate advanced high-bandwidth memory production, alongside SK Hynix and Samsung, so scarcity in that market accrues mechanically to those three balance sheets.

Fifty-Seven Billion Gone in a Session

Micron’s fiscal Q3 2026 revenue came in at $41.46 billion, beating the $35.25 billion consensus by 17.60% and rising 345.7% year over year. Non-GAAP EPS of $25.11 beat the $20.28 consensus by 23.79%, the seventh consecutive EPS beat.

GAAP gross margin ran at 84.6%, with non-GAAP at 84.9%. Operating income of $33.32 billion rose 1,436% year over year. Free cash flow was $18.30 billion on capex of $7.83 billion.

Guidance for fiscal Q4 calls for revenue of $50 billion plus or minus $1 billion, non-GAAP EPS of $31 plus or minus $1, and gross margin of approximately 86%. It is the highest revenue outlook the company has ever issued.

CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said DRAM and NAND demand keeps outrunning supply and management does not yet have “line of sight as to when memory supply will be able to catch up with increasing demand”. That is the operating context the market discounted this week.

What The Contract Book Says

Micron has signed 16 Strategic Customer Agreements, typically five-year take-or-pay contracts, covering roughly 20% of DRAM volume and a third of NAND volume over the agreement period. Fourteen of the sixteen carry a minimum-price commitment worth about $100 billion cumulatively.

Micron is collecting roughly $18 billion in cash deposits and $4 billion in letters of credit against those obligations. Management described the deposits as separate binding commitments held during performance of the agreements.

HBM4 12-high volume ramp is tracking twice as fast as HBM3E 12-high, with over $1 billion in HBM4 revenue already shipped. Management expects tight supply-demand conditions to “persist beyond calendar 2027”, with only gradual improvement in 2028.

That is a pricing regime. The contract book converts it into visible revenue.

Market Reaction

Over the past week, the stock is up 2.01%, over the past month up 12.54%, and year to date up 242.67%. One-year performance is 599.28%.

The post-earnings reversal after fiscal Q3 was severe. The day-of move was +15.74%, but the one-week change was -19.61% and the thirty-day change was -32.39%. Over the same thirty days, SPY returned 0.89%, and Invesco QQQ Trust (NYSEARCA:QQQ) returned -5.71%.

All 8 recorded earnings periods in the reaction history were beats, with an average one-week change of -3.44%. The Q3 26 one-week and thirty-day drawdowns are the largest in that record.

An Intel (NASDAQ:INTC)-backed start-up entering the memory-chip market also added a competitive overhang to the session.

Bull Case

Hear the bear case first, because it has teeth. Memory has always been cyclical; the supply that cures a shortage is usually already being built, and the ten-year Treasury sits at 4.83%, the high of the supplied one-year series.

WTI crude is at $100 a barrel as of this writing, keeping the rate-shock scenario alive for growth semis. A stock up 242.67% year to date has priced in a great deal of good news.

The bull case still wins on the evidence. Q4 guidance of $50 billion in revenue at an 86% gross margin describes a business selling into a worsening shortage while locking customers into multi-year minimums. Forward PE sits at 6x against a trailing PE of 23x, with an analyst target price of $1,513.11 and 9 strong buys plus 35 buys versus 4 holds and 0 sells.

Bottom Line

The Chinese HBM price signal, the Q4 guide and the contract book all point in the same direction, even as the stock moves the other way. If you own Micron for the AI memory cycle, this session is noise against a lengthening shortage (the power, cooling, and networking suppliers riding the same buildout are the subject of a free report we put together here).

The forward catalyst worth watching is capital returns. Management said it intends to increase them from December 9, 2026, the second anniversary of the definitive CHIPS agreements, and said that “over time, we expect to return 100% of our excess cash to shareholders”.

A trillion-dollar memory maker selling into a shortage it cannot fully supply is a rare setup. The market gave a cheaper entry into an intact thesis.

Is MU Stock a Buy?

Micron looks attractive for long-term holders who can tolerate the volatility. The valuation looks demanding on trailing metrics and cheap on forward earnings; the shortage is intensifying, and the Strategic Customer Agreements give the next several years unusual revenue visibility for a memory maker.

SK Hynix (NASDAQ:SKHY) and Samsung compete for the same HBM demand, but the three-supplier structure benefits Micron directly, and it remains the only U.S.-based memory manufacturer. The real risk is macro. If the ten-year keeps climbing from 4.83% and WTI stays above $90, multiples in growth semis will compress regardless of fundamentals.

On balance, the fundamentals outweigh the macro overhang, and the stock has already done part of the work of resetting the entry. Verdict: Buy.

The post Wall Street Just Erased $57 Billion From Micron. The Shortage Behind Its Boom Is Getting Worse. appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

Every few weeks, someone in a personal finance forum will undoubtedly make the same comment someone else made the week before: they plan to retire in Florida, but a friend who made the move calls to say they are leaving. The reason is the annual cost of keeping the house, rather than weather or politics. The claim you see in headlines that insurance is eating everyone alive is also true, but somewhat incomplete, as retirees who left describe the insurance bill as the first envelope they opened, not the last.

A Tax Advantage That Remains

Florida still has no state income tax. Florida ranks fourth overall in the 2025 State Tax Competitiveness Index and ties for the best possible rank on the individual income tax. For a retiree drawing large sums from taxable accounts or realizing a business sale, this advantage is worth serious money every year for the rest of their life.

What changed is everything stacked on top of it. Florida recovers revenue through property insurance, property taxes, association dues, and a cost of living now measurably above the national average. Florida’s regional price parity sits above the national benchmark of 100, meaning the informal assumption that Florida is cheap no longer holds in desirable areas. For a specific retiree profile, the tax savings are now smaller than what replaced them.

Why Insurance Is Only the Trigger

A peninsula in a warming hurricane basin is expensive to insure. Reinsurance costs flow through to homeowners, private carriers have pulled back, and the state-backed insurer of last resort has absorbed more of the market than intended. Standard policies often exclude windstorm and flood, so the true annual carrying cost is scattered across separate bills. Availability became as much of a problem as price. A house that cannot be insured cannot easily be sold or mortgaged.

The hurricane deductible is misunderstood in a way that matters. It is usually stated as a share of the insured value rather than a flat dollar figure, meaning out-of-pocket exposure in a storm is denominated in a fraction of the house, not a fraction of the claim. A retiree reading their policy carefully after a landfall tends to have a very bad afternoon.

Condo Assessments and Unsellable Units

The bill that broke most retirees was the condominium special assessment. After the structural collapse that prompted state reforms, older buildings became subject to mandatory structural inspections and requirements that associations fund reserves deferred for decades. The result is a wave of one-time assessments that can be very large, plus monthly dues increases that do not go back down. Retirees own a disproportionate share of older coastal condominium stock and live on fixed income that cannot absorb a surprise capital call. Buyers vanish from buildings facing known assessments, trapping owners who wanted to leave. They can’t sell without accepting a price that makes the assessment moot.

Property Tax, Utilities, and Healthcare Access

Property tax is the next quiet compounder. Florida’s homestead system caps annual assessment increases for long-time owners but punishes the retiree who bought last year. Two identical houses on the same street can carry very different tax bills. A recent arrival is on the wrong side of the gap.

Housing prices rose sharply in desirable metros and have stayed elevated. The Case-Shiller national index reached 336.7 in its most recent reading, near the top of its trailing year range. Utility bills run high because cooling runs almost year-round. Healthcare access has become a genuine quality-of-life cost. A large retiree population competes for the same specialists, and waits for a cardiologist or orthopedist are measured in months.

Who Should Still Choose Florida

The absence of state income tax matters more the higher a retiree’s income is. For someone with large withdrawals, a sizable pension, or a lump sum event, the annual savings can still overwhelm added costs by a wide margin. Renters sidestep the insurance and assessment problem entirely. Owners in newer inland construction pay a fraction of what coastal condominium owners pay. Anyone who values the climate enough to pay for it is making a defensible trade.

Where They Went

Retirees who left did not all go to the same place. Some traded for another no-income-tax state with lower catastrophe exposure. Tennessee’s cost-of-living index sits well below Florida’s, and Texas is lower as well. Others accepted a modest state income tax in exchange for far cheaper insurance and housing and concluded they came out ahead on total annual cost. A meaningful group moved inland within Florida, out of the wind zone and older condominium stock. The common thread is that movers compared the full annual cost of staying against the full annual cost of going, rather than comparing tax rates in isolation.

Insurance was the visible number. The invisible ones were the special assessments, the reset property tax base, and the slow creep of a cost of living that no longer subsidizes the retiree the way it once did. The people who did the full arithmetic are the ones who left.

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Tax Cost Hiding in Your Dividend Statement

Hold a portfolio of high-yield dividend stocks in a taxable brokerage account at the 24% federal bracket, and every $1,000 of dividend income you collect quietly ships $240 to the IRS. On a $100,000 income-oriented sleeve yielding in the mid-single digits, that drag is a quantifiable line item, and for ordinary-dividend payers like BDCs and REITs, it is often larger than investors realize because those distributions do not qualify for preferential dividend rates. The 24% federal bracket currently applies to single-filer taxable income from $103,351 to $197,300, which is exactly where many dual-income households land.

Safety Check Before the Income Math

On the six names in this comparison, the recent coverage read is fairly constructive. Ares Capital (NASDAQ:ARCC) reported Q2 2026 core earnings of 47 cents per share and management noted “over the last 12 months, core earnings have exceeded our regular dividend”, with roughly $988 million, or $1.38 per share, of estimated taxable income spillover as a cushion. Main Street Capital (NYSE:MAIN) posted Q2 2026 DNII before taxes of $1.08 per share and declared its 20th consecutive quarterly supplemental dividend of $0.30. Realty Income (NYSE:O) delivered its 115th consecutive quarterly dividend increase. Altria (NYSE:MO) returned nearly $3.9 billion to shareholders in the first half of 2026. Verizon (NYSE:VZ) and Pfizer (NYSE:PFE) both raised their most recent quarterly payouts.

Yields Powering the $100,000 Portfolio

Using an equal-weight $100,000 allocation across the six names, live yields anchor the income math:

Blended, the six-name basket produces a portfolio yield of roughly 6.4%. On $100,000, that is approximately $6,400 in annual gross dividend income.

Roth Versus Taxable: The Dollar Delta at 24%

Two accounts, identical holdings. Inside a Roth, the $6,400 arrives untaxed. In a taxable account at the 24% bracket, three of the six positions (ARCC, MAIN, and O) throw off ordinary or non-qualified distributions taxed at the full marginal rate, while VZ, MO, and PFE qualify for preferential rates. Treating the blended pool at the ordinary rate for a conservative read, the tax cost is roughly $1,536, leaving about $4,864 net. The Roth advantage is approximately $1,536 per year, or roughly $15,360 across ten years before any reinvestment effect.

Bracket Multiplier: Same Portfolio, Different Damage

The higher the bracket, the more punishing taxable placement becomes on ordinary-dividend names like ARCC and MAIN. At 37%, more than a third of every BDC distribution is skimmed off the top.

Compounding Cost Most Investors Miss

The annual delta is only the first layer. Reinvest the Roth-preserved $1,536 back into the same 6.4% blended yield, and after ten years the recovered income and its reinvested offspring approach roughly $20,000 to $21,000 of extra lifetime cash flow. Stretch to twenty years and the figure roughly doubles. This represents the permanent cost of paying taxes on distributions that could have compounded untouched. For context, the 10-year Treasury yield sat at 4.83% on September 9, 2026, meaning the after-tax edge from Roth placement on this basket is the difference between beating and trailing a risk-free benchmark.

What to Do Before Your Next Contribution

• If ARCC, MAIN, or O currently sit in a taxable account, calculate the annual tax cost at your bracket before your next filing. Ordinary-dividend payers are the first names that belong inside a Roth.
• Run the Roth conversion math on the highest-yielding positions specifically, not on your account as a whole. The conversion cost is often outweighed by the multi-decade income delta on BDCs and REITs.
• When adding to income exposure, place new BDC and REIT purchases inside the Roth first, and reserve taxable-account capacity for VZ, MO, and PFE, whose qualified dividends carry a lighter tax profile.

For a taxable investor at 24% or above holding this exact income mix, moving the ordinary-dividend sleeve into a Roth is worth roughly $1,500 a year today and materially more over a full retirement horizon. That is the real price tag on account choice. The low-tax years between your last paycheck and your first RMD are also when converting BDC and REIT positions into a Roth is cheapest, a window we sized up in a free Roth report.

The post The Dividend Stocks That Generate $6,400 Tax-Free Inside a Roth (And What They Cost You in a Taxable Account) appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

For a year, the bear case on Oracle (NYSE:ORCL) was easy to state. A single blockbuster contract with OpenAI was doing most of the work behind the backlog, and if that customer wobbled, the whole AI thesis wobbled with it.

Wednesday’s fiscal first quarter report weakened that argument. Oracle booked more than $30 billion in new AI cloud contracts in the quarter alone, with management saying the non-OpenAI backlog more than doubled over the past year. The stock still closed at $153.17, down 20.77% year to date. So the real question is whether broader demand and customer financing have made ORCL safe enough to own after that decline.

Backlog Is Broader, but Conversion Is the Test

Remaining performance obligations reached $664 billion, up $209 billion year over year, and cloud infrastructure revenue grew 121% to $7.388 billion. Total revenue rose 29.6% to $19.345 billion, beating consensus.

The report showed strong AI demand, which tempered cash-burn fears. The bookings now span a broader customer set. Before this report, OpenAI had a much larger share of Oracle’s RPO.

Management expects roughly half of RPO to convert into sales within its stated window. That is Oracle’s expectation, not a schedule, and contracted work still carries timing, credit, and cancellation risk.

OpenAI dependence has been diluted while remaining material, and a stumble at Abilene, where 131,000 GPUs were delivered in Q1, would still hurt.

Cash Burn Is Real, the Rebuttal Is Credible

Capex hit $28.499 billion, free cash flow was negative $5.396 billion, and interest expense reached $1.438 billion in the quarter. Long-term debt sits at $122.342 billion.

Oracle’s rebuttal is that customers are funding much of the buildout. Clay Magouyrk said the new contracts came in “via prepay or bring your own hardware or similar mechanic”, adding:

“I didn’t say, and I don’t think myself nor Hilary said that it doesn’t require additional CapEx. We said it doesn’t require additional cash from Oracle.”

That is convincing on the margin. It is not a guarantee, because Oracle still expects fiscal 2027 and 2028 to be peak capex years, with full-year capex guided to $90 billion to $95 billion.

Margins, Valuation, and What You Are Paying For

Infrastructure carries lower gross margin than software. Utilization was 97.9%, and renewed GPU capacity was priced at a 20% premium, supporting the operating-margin story CFO Hilary Maxson emphasized.

On guidance of $8.10 non-GAAP EPS for fiscal 2027, ORCL trades near 19 times forward earnings, below its 27x trailing and against an analyst target of $241.43.

Is ORCL Stock a Buy?

The bearish premise that Oracle is one customer away from a broken story is weaker than it was a quarter ago. The bookings are broader, customers are pre-funding capacity, and the multiple has compressed while the backlog has grown.

The risks I take seriously are conversion timing, rising interest expense, and margin compression during the ramp. None are disqualifying at this price, though investors should weigh conversion cadence and capex intensity before adding exposure. ORCL stock remains a Hold for me.

The post Oracle Weakens Bear Case With Broader AI Customer Base and $664 Billion Backlog appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

My agentic AI dollars keep landing on the same ticker, and I have stopped pretending it will be anything else. Every payday I add a little more Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) to the account, and the case for doing it again next month keeps getting stronger.

Microsoft is selling agents into the software my employer already runs, on the cloud my employer already trusts, powered by a model lab it partly owns. That is a distribution advantage no other hyperscaler has assembled in one place, and the receipts show up in every recent earnings report.

Three Numbers That Keep Me Buying

Start with adoption. Microsoft 365 Copilot passed 30 million paid seats in fiscal Q4 2026, and the customer list reads like a directory of the global economy. NHS England is rolling Copilot out to 505,000 clinicians and staff, EY deployed E7 to 400,000 employees, KPMG is expanding across more than 276,000 professionals, and HSBC committed to 200,000 seats. Enterprise deployments to the majority of information workers grew nearly 75% quarter over quarter. Once Copilot is inside Outlook and Teams, ripping it out is a bigger project than adopting it was.

Then the backlog. Commercial remaining performance obligations reached $678 billion, up 84% year over year. Even stripping out the OpenAI relationship, RPO grew 25%, and nearly 90% of full-year Microsoft Cloud revenue came from customers outside frontier model companies. That represents contracted work already sitting on the books. For a retirement-focused portfolio, visibility like that matters.

Third, the cloud engine. Azure crossed $100 billion in annual revenue and grew 43% year over year in Q4, while management guided to approximately 45% constant-currency Azure growth for the next quarter. Beneath it sits an AI business already running at a $37 billion annualized run rate, up 123% year over year. Wrap all of that in a 46.78% operating margin, a 34.04% return on equity, and a 0.29 debt-to-equity ratio, and you have the balance sheet to fund the next leg without borrowing recklessly.

Why Not the Obvious Alternatives

I looked hard at Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) and Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN). Both are excellent companies. Microsoft, however, uniquely sits inside the productivity software the Fortune 500 opens every morning. Microsoft’s roughly 27% stake in OpenAI, valued near $135 billion, with IP rights extended through 2032 including post-AGI models, plus OpenAI’s contracted purchase of an incremental $250 billion of Azure services, is a structural arrangement its peers cannot replicate. When agentic AI is billed per outcome as well as per seat, the company holding the model IP, the distribution surface, and the compute contract collects at every layer.

Risk I Am Not Ignoring

Capital spending is the real worry. Full-year fiscal 2026 capex hit $115.95 billion, up 79.62% year over year, and free cash flow fell 6.46% to $66.99 billion. Management has already signaled FY2027 capex will grow again. If AI demand cools, that build becomes an anchor.

What keeps me buying anyway: CFO Amy Hood said the largest slice of that spend is in short-lived CPUs and GPUs that can be slowed if demand shifts, and Microsoft expects to remain free-cash-flow positive in FY2027. Demand today still exceeds available supply.

Forward Conviction

With $678 billion of contracted work, a Copilot install base compounding inside the world’s largest employers, and a model partnership locked through the next decade, Microsoft is where my agentic AI capital keeps going, and I have no plan to stop.

The post My Agentic AI Capital Is Going One Place Over and Over appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM) sits at an interesting crossroads. The handset business is under pressure, but the automotive, IoT, and data center pipeline is finally showing up in the numbers.

Our 24/7 Wall St. price target for Qualcomm is $239.79, implying 35.45% upside from the current $176.88 quote. We rate the shares a buy with high conviction, 90% model confidence.

Recent Action: Amazon Deal Reignites the AI Narrative

Qualcomm has recovered smartly. Shares are up 4.93% over the past week, 9.32% over the past month, and 13.62% over the past year, though the stock still sits well below its $257.56 52-week high.

Momentum accelerated after Qualcomm issued warrants to Amazon to acquire $4 billion worth of the chipmaker’s stock as part of an AI infrastructure deal, a validation of the data center strategy.

The Q3 FY26 report showed revenue of $9.947 billion (beating consensus) and non-GAAP EPS of $2.21, a narrow miss driven by memory and wafer input costs. Automotive posted 61% year-over-year growth to $1.588 billion, its 23rd consecutive double-digit growth quarter.

Bull Case: The Case for $253+

Our bull scenario points to $252.85. The catalyst stack is compelling. CEO Cristiano Amon has committed to “more than $24 billion in revenue across automotive and IoT plus more than $15 billion in data center” by fiscal 2029, nearly doubling the prior target.

Automotive is tracking to a $7 billion annualized run rate exiting FY26, boosted by an expanded BMW ADAS win. Two hyperscaler custom-silicon programs go revenue-generating this December quarter, and management expects non-handset growth to accelerate from 24% in fiscal 2026 to greater than 60% in fiscal 2027.

Layer in the Amazon warrant deal and the Modular acquisition, and the multi-year story becomes hard to ignore.

Bear Case: The Risks Worth Watching

Our bear-case path lands near $200.49. Handset revenue fell 20% in Q3, and management now expects Apple share on the upcoming iPhone launch to come in materially lower than our prior estimate of 20%, with roughly a 50% decline in Apple revenue from September to December quarter. Memory and wafer inflation compressed operating income by 41.13% year over year.

Bulls fairly counter that pricing actions are already in motion and management expects gross margins to realign to the 48% to 50% range once absorbed, and that fiscal 2027 non-handset growth is expected to replace the entire Apple product revenue within the year.

How Qualcomm Compares to Broadcom and Texas Instruments

Broadcom (NASDAQ:AVGO) is the aspirational AI-infrastructure benchmark. Broadcom posted $29.591 billion in Q3 FY26 revenue with AI semiconductor sales of $16.7 billion, up 221% year over year, and carries a $1.72 trillion market cap versus Qualcomm’s $188.9 billion.

AVGO shows what happens when hyperscaler custom silicon scales. Qualcomm is entering that same lane at a fraction of the valuation, making our target look conservative if execution follows.

Texas Instruments (NASDAQ:TXN) is the diversified analog and embedded counterweight. TXN grew Q2 2026 revenue 22.82% to $5.463 billion on industrial and automotive strength, at a $236 billion market cap.

TXN validates the automotive and industrial demand thesis Qualcomm is riding, while trading at a richer multiple. QCOM’s trailing P/E of 34 is not cheap, but relative to peers with similar end markets, the setup for multiple expansion is reasonable.

Qualcomm Price Prediction 2026-2030

Our 24/7 Wall St. price target is $239.79, a buy with 90% confidence. The tipping factor is the confirmed inflection in non-handset revenue and the Amazon-validated data center push.

I would be a buyer here if you believe Amon can execute on the $40 billion non-handset target by FY29. I would stay on the sidelines if you think memory-cost pressure and Apple modem attrition will overwhelm the transition through calendar 2027.

Looking further ahead, here is where our model projects Qualcomm could trade, assuming current growth trajectories hold.

These projections assume Qualcomm continues executing on its diversification strategy. Significant upside or downside could result from the pace of data center revenue scaling and the trajectory of premium handset demand (the same power, cooling, and networking suppliers behind that buildout are the subject of a free report we put together here: 7 stocks powering the AI boom that aren’t chipmakers).

The post The Next Growth Cycle Could Take Qualcomm to New Highs appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

I keep hitting the buy button on Micron Technology (NASDAQ:MU) because the setup in front of me is the cleanest supply and demand story I have seen in my investing life, and the numbers keep confirming it. This is Economics 101 playing out in real time: tight memory supply meets exploding AI demand, and the price clears at a level that fattens gross margins into territory chip investors used to only dream about.

Why the Buy Button Stays Warm

My core thesis is simple. AI systems are memory-starved, and the world has exactly three DRAM makers left. Management put it plainly on the last call: “DRAM and NAND industry demand continues to significantly exceed industry supply”, and they expect tight conditions to persist beyond calendar 2027. New fabs take years. Permitting, energy, skilled labor, and EUV tools all gate supply. Meanwhile every AI accelerator, CPU rack, and storage rack is a memory buyer. When a scarce input meets non-negotiable demand, the seller sets the price. That is what I am buying.

Receipts That Back the Thesis

First, the margin story. Fiscal Q3 2026 revenue landed at $41.46 billion, up 345.7% year over year, with non-GAAP gross margin of 84.9% and operating income of $33.32 billion. Non-GAAP EPS of $25.11 beat consensus by 23.79%, the seventh consecutive EPS beat. Guidance for Q4 calls for $50.0 billion in revenue, roughly 86% gross margin, and non-GAAP EPS of $31.00.

Second, cash generation. Free cash flow climbed from $803 million in fiscal Q4 2025 to $18.30 billion in fiscal Q3 2026. The balance sheet shows $24.4 billion net cash after a $4.3 billion senior notes tender and a credit upgrade to BBB+. The board raised the dividend 30% to $0.15 and plans to return 100% of excess cash to shareholders over time.

Third, and the reason I stopped treating this as a cyclical trade, is the Strategic Customer Agreements. Micron has signed 16 take-or-pay SCAs, largely running five years from 2026 through 2030, backed by $22 billion in cash deposits and letters of credit and roughly $100 billion in minimum-price RPO across 14 of the 16 agreements. Management said “Even on the floor price, we expect the margins to be significantly above prior peak margins.” That is the sentence I re-read every time I add.

What I Would Buy Instead, and Why I Don’t

The reflex trade for memory exposure is a pure storage name, but those businesses lack DRAM and HBM. Micron is the only U.S.-based memory manufacturer, and its $1 billion in HBM4 revenue already shipped, with the 12-high ramp tracking twice as fast as HBM3E 12-high, is the part of the stack AI accelerators cannot live without. I would rather own the scarce input than the commodity around it.

Risk I Refuse to Wave Away

Memory is historically cyclical, capex is heavy at roughly $27 billion for fiscal 2026, and today’s price action reminded me: shares fell 4.9% on news that an Intel (NASDAQ:INTC)-backed startup is aiming at the memory-chip market. New entrants are real. What blunts it for me is the SCA architecture. Roughly 40% of revenue is expected to sit under fixed or ceiling-price contracts near current levels, with floors set above prior peak margins. That converts a cycle into a rent roll.

Forward Conviction From Here

Shares are up 242.67% year to date and 599.28% over one year, and I understand the vertigo. What I own is a scarce industrial asset with contracted demand into 2030, a fortress balance sheet, and pricing power written into legal documents. Until the memory bottleneck breaks, the thesis stays intact for me.

The post Micron’s Powerful Economics 101 Lesson Keeps Me Buying appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

Investors funneled $43.6 billion into the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF (NYSEARCA:VOO) over the trailing thirty days, according to Eric Balchunas at Bloomberg, even as pundits filled the airwaves with warnings about an overdue selloff. If retirement savers were nervous, their money didn’t show it.

What VOO’s Flows Actually Show

ETF inflows measure something distinct from a rising fund balance. VOO’s assets can climb on market gains alone, without a single new dollar arriving. Flow figures track cash that investors actively pushed in by buying new shares, which makes them a cleaner read on behavior than a headline AUM number.

For scale, VOO’s June 30, 2026 semi-annual shareholder report listed Fund Net Assets of $1,675,038 million as of that date. The $43.6 billion in fresh money represents real buying stacked on top of an already enormous base, and it arrived in a single thirty-day window. Those disclosures are as-of their stated period, not live snapshots.

Selloff Talk Meets a Mild Pullback

The doom chatter was louder than the price action. VOO traded at $704.29 intraday on September 11, 2026, and the recent numbers look nothing like a rout. The fund was down 0.9% over the past week and 0.58% over the past month. Year to date, it was still up 12.99%.

The options market told the same measured story. The CBOE Volatility Index closed at 16.46 on September 9, 2026, up 6.5% from a month earlier but still inside the 15-to-20 range that typically reads as normal. Compare that with the 31.05 reading on March 27, 2026, when real fear was priced in. September’s caution was mild, and buyers treated it that way.

Why the Money Kept Arriving

A large share of VOO’s inflow arrived on autopilot: 401(k) payroll deferrals, target-date funds that hold S&P 500 index sleeves, and dollar-cost-averaging investors who buy on a set schedule regardless of the headlines.

The scale of that automation is significant. Fidelity reported that more than 2 out of 3 (68%) of its workplace plan participants were “do it for me” investors at the end of 2025, using target-date funds or managed accounts. More than 95% of Fidelity plans with auto enrollment default to a target date fund, and through the volatility of 2025, fewer than 1 in 10 workers changed their allocation. That is the pipeline sending money into broad index products every pay period.

Cost seals the argument. VOO’s semi-annual report disclosed that a hypothetical $10,000 investment in the ETF share class carried just $2 in costs over the last six months, or 0.03% annualized. When the friction to own the entire S&P 500 is that low, holding through wobbles becomes the easy choice, and adding to the position on a schedule is easier still.

Retail chatter matched the flows. Reddit sentiment around VOO across late August and early September was generally neutral to bullish, with threads framing broad index exposure as a hedge to concentrated AI and semiconductor bets. Panic never showed up in the conversation.

What This Says About Retail Investors

The takeaway is simple: the American retirement saver has largely stopped reacting to short-term selloff narratives. The plumbing of workplace plans, the default choice of index funds, and a rock-bottom expense ratio have turned VOO into a near-passive conveyor belt for household savings. Commentators can debate whether stocks are expensive, but the flow data suggests the audience for that debate is smaller than it used to be. Watch whether the pace of inflows persists into the fall if volatility genuinely picks up, and whether Vanguard’s next semi-annual disclosure shows the June net-asset figure climbing further.

The post Investors Just Poured $43.6 Billion Into VOO in One Month. Here’s Why They Ignored the Selloff Talk appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

Moderna (NASDAQ:MRNA) stock is up 8% to $147.37 in Friday morning trading, a sharp single-name move on a session when biotech as a group is quiet and broader U.S. equities are only modestly higher. The SPDR S&P Biotech ETF (NYSEARCA:XBI) is down 0.1%, so the sector benchmark isn’t providing any lift for Moderna. Broad-market context comes from the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (NYSEARCA:SPY), which is up 1% and sets the backdrop rather than acting as a driver of Moderna stock’s rally.

BioNTech (NASDAQ:BNTX) stock, Moderna’s closest cancer-vaccine peer, is up 0.5% to $96.85. At the same time, Merck (NYSE:MRK) stock, Moderna’s partner on the personalized cancer vaccine program, is down 0.3% to $144.23. With BioNTech nearly flat and Merck slightly red, Moderna is moving against both its sector and its most direct partner, which frames Friday as a stock-specific event for Moderna alone.

The scale of the recent run makes the setup unusual. Moderna stock is up 143% over the past month, so the shares had already repriced dramatically before Friday’s session began, and today’s advance sits on top of an already extended chart that any additional gain has to justify on its own.

Looking for a Catalyst With MRNA Stock

A wire and disclosure sweep this morning turned up no Moderna announcement, no regulatory decision, no clinical readout, no analyst rating change and no filing that lines up with a move of this size. On the schedule of company-specific events for Moderna, Friday is empty. That absence is the most important fact for interpreting Moderna stock’s action, because it removes the usual candidate explanations before any positioning story is even considered.

Moderna’s last real catalyst landed in August, when the personalized cancer vaccine the company develops with Merck met its goal in a late-stage melanoma trial by reducing recurrence and spread. Moderna shares nearly doubled on that news, and the past-month gain cited above is largely that event still being reflected in the price. Nothing new has replaced it, so Friday’s advance is happening against a backdrop where the fundamental news flow has already been priced in.

Momentum or Squeeze? Positioning Takes Over

With no news to explain Friday’s move in Moderna and biotech peers not participating, the useful lens is positioning. A stock that has traveled this far this fast draws in momentum buyers who chase the trend, and it also punishes anyone still short into the strength. From the outside, those two flows can look almost identical in the price action, especially in a name where recent history has trained buyers to expect further upside.

Separating momentum from a genuine squeeze in Moderna stock would require short interest data, borrow costs and float turnover figures. Without those inputs, any confident label would be premature. What can be said is that positioning is the residual explanation once sector, broad market and company news have all been ruled out as drivers.

BioNTech stock’s muted reaction reinforces the read on Moderna stock. If the cancer-vaccine theme were re-rating across the group today, BioNTech would be participating with more conviction, and Merck wouldn’t be red on the day. The lack of confirmation across the peer set argues that Moderna’s session is a positioning event centered on who owns the stock and how.

What to Watch Next

For Moderna stock, the near-term question is whether Friday’s gain holds into the close or fades as the day wears on, which is often how positioning-driven moves resolve when no fresh news arrives. A close near the highs would keep the momentum bid intact into next week, while a fade would suggest that early short covering did most of the heavy lifting and left few natural buyers behind it.

Given the size of the past-month run, investors considering new exposure to Moderna can look for signs that the next real clinical or regulatory milestone is close enough to justify chasing at these levels. Chasing a stock already up triple digits in a month has a right way and a wrong way to do it, and we put ten rules for the right way in a free breakout buyer’s guide. Anyone already long Moderna stock can keep their position sizing modest until the story reconnects to a dated event rather than to flow, since momentum and squeeze dynamics tend to unwind quickly once the trigger fades.

The post Moderna Rallies 8% on 2026 Melt-Up Momentum Even While BioNTech and Merck Stay Flat appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

Shares of Bloom Energy (NYSE:BE) are climbing in Friday morning trading, up 7% to $276.31 after S&P Dow Jones Indices confirmed the fuel cell maker’s addition to the S&P 500. The reaction is spreading beyond Bloom Energy stock into the broader fuel cell group.

The bid extends past the name being added. Also trading higher, FuelCell Energy (NASDAQ:FCEL) stock is up 4% to $16.22, and Plug Power (NASDAQ:PLUG) shares are up 2% to $2.15. Both stocks sit outside the rebalance entirely.

The sector trade is firm without being extreme. The iShares Global Clean Energy ETF (NASDAQ:ICLN) is up 1%, running with the fuel cell names. Meanwhile, the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (NYSEARCA:SPY) is up 1%, but the broad market isn’t the story here.

Index Add Fuels Mechanical Buying

S&P Dow Jones Indices is adding Bloom Energy to the benchmark before the open on September 21, an inclusion announced earlier this week. Every fund benchmarked to the index has to own Bloom Energy shares by that effective date, which creates buying that has nothing to do with fuel cell economics. Passive rebalance demand typically concentrates into the closing auction the day before the add and the open of the add itself.

Bloom Energy didn’t publish a company announcement, contract award, regulatory decision, or analyst action on Friday. A review across financial wires turned up no same-day company-specific item, so the catalyst points squarely at the index news and the flows it sets in motion.

Fuel Cell Theme Adds a Second Bid

Peer action complicates a pure index-flow reading. FuelCell Energy and Plug Power aren’t part of the rebalance and receive no index-related demand, yet both are higher in the same session. Both companies sell onsite power systems into the same data center customers Bloom Energy serves, and buyers appear to be extending the theme across the group.

That leaves two bids stacking on Bloom Energy at once. One is mechanical and specific to the index add; the other is thematic, tied to onsite power for AI data centers, and it’s the one showing up in FuelCell Energy and Plug Power today (we profiled seven suppliers riding that same AI power buildout, from generation to cooling, in a free report you can grab here).

What to Watch Next

The mechanical half of the Bloom Energy trade carries a known expiry. Once index funds finish buying into the September 21 open, that source of demand ends, and how Bloom Energy stock behaves after the add reveals how much of this move was theme rather than flow, according to S&P Dow Jones Indices.

Investors can watch for whether the fuel-cell segment bid in FuelCell Energy and Plug Power holds through the effective date. If the peer strength persists past the add, the data center power narrative earns more credit than the index mechanics for what’s happening in Bloom Energy stock this week.

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Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) and Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL) just delivered earnings that reframed the enterprise AI race. Microsoft closed fiscal 2026 with Azure crossing $100 billion in annual revenue. Alphabet answered days earlier with Google Cloud growth accelerating to 82%. Both are pouring cash into data centers. Only one is stealing seats the other assumed were locked up.

Azure Prints Cash While Google Cloud Prints Growth

Microsoft posted Q4 revenue of $90.01 billion, up 17.8%, with Intelligent Cloud at $39.31 billion (+32%) and Azure up 43%. Satya Nadella told investors that “demand continues to exceed available supply”, a constraint you can feel in the commercial RPO backlog that surged 84% to $678 billion.

Alphabet flexed different muscles. Q2 revenue hit $119.80 billion, up 24.2%, with Google Cloud reaching $24.77 billion. Sundar Pichai said “nearly 90% of the Fortune 100 using” Gemini Enterprise, and that Gemini processes 22 billion API tokens per minute. That last figure is the shot across Redmond’s bow.

Alphabet Kicks the Door Open on Enterprise

Microsoft’s moat was supposed to be the Office tenant. That moat is leaking. Alphabet is winning Fortune 100 mindshare with Gemini Enterprise while Google Cloud backlog sits north of $460 billion. Microsoft’s counterpunch is optionality: a catalog of more than 11,000 models spanning OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, xAI, and its own MAI family. Nadella framed it bluntly: “The models are an input, not some extraction of the knowledge of the enterprise.”

Copilot adoption is still ripping. Microsoft cited NHS England rolling out to 505,000 clinicians and EY deploying E7 to 400,000 employees. But the pricing model is shifting to “per seat plus consumption”, which quietly admits that seat saturation alone will not carry growth forever.

Capex Is the Real Referee

Alphabet’s aggression carries a bill. Free cash flow flipped to negative $5.86 billion, the buyback was suspended, and long-term debt jumped to $98.2 billion. Microsoft still generated $19.64 billion in Q4 free cash flow even after doubling capex. All of that spending flows to the power, cooling, and networking suppliers behind the data centers, and we profiled seven of them in a free AI infrastructure report.

I will be watching two things: whether Azure’s guided ~45% constant-currency growth holds, and whether Google Cloud’s 82% pace decelerates as comps stiffen. Copilot’s shift to consumption billing is the tell on monetization depth.

Alphabet’s Edge Over Microsoft Today

On the numbers, Alphabet screens attractively today. A P/E near 17 against 82% cloud growth is a rare pairing, and shares are up 39.43% over the past year versus Microsoft’s roughly flat performance. For investors focused on fortress cash flow, dividend growth, and installed-base gravity, Microsoft trades at a 27 P/E. The key risk on both names is AI capex ROI. For now, Alphabet is the disruptor with the momentum, and Microsoft is the incumbent defending ground it never expected to defend.

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Investors entered September expecting the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates on hold. Five days before the next Federal Open Market Committee meeting, that assumption has been turned on its head.

CME FedWatch now puts the odds of a quarter-point rate hike at 85.6% for the Sept. 16 meeting. That’s a remarkable shift from Aug. 11, when traders saw just a 48.4% probability of an increase. In other words, the market has gone from essentially a coin flip to treating a hike as the overwhelmingly likely outcome. The catalyst is inflation.

Inflation is Making the Fed’s Job Harder

The latest inflation data gave investors another reason to rethink the Fed’s next move. This morning, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported consumer prices rose 3.4% year-over-year in August, while core inflation increased 0.3% from the previous month. While the numbers matched expectations, they offered little evidence that inflation is moving cleanly toward the Fed’s 2% target. Yesterday, the Producer Price Index came in above expectations

Energy prices aren’t helping, either. Oil has remained elevated amid tensions surrounding the Middle East, adding another potential source of inflationary pressure. That makes it harder for the Fed to justify easing policy when price pressures are already proving stubborn.

The market’s response has been swift. Treasury yields have jumped, with the 10-year yield approaching 5%, while shorter-term yields have also climbed as traders price in tighter monetary policy.

What a Hike Means for Investors

Higher interest rates increase borrowing costs throughout the economy, from mortgages and corporate debt to credit cards. They also raise the discount rate investors use to value future corporate earnings, which can put particular pressure on high-growth stocks whose valuations depend heavily on profits expected years down the road.

That’s especially important after a market rally fueled by enthusiasm around artificial intelligence and expectations for strong future earnings.

But investors shouldn’t automatically assume a rate hike means stocks are headed for a collapse. The market has had time to adjust as the probability of a hike has climbed. And a single 25-basis-point increase would hardly constitute an aggressive tightening cycle. The bigger question is what the Fed signals afterward.

Key Takeaway

An 85.6% probability doesn’t mean a rate hike is guaranteed. But with the odds having risen from 48.4% in just one month, investors clearly believe the Fed’s inflation problem has become more urgent.

More importantly, the Sept. 16 decision could establish a new market narrative. If Fed officials signal that additional hikes may be necessary, bond yields could move higher, and equity valuations could face another test. If the Fed presents the hike as a one-and-done move, stocks could breathe a sigh of relief.

For investors, the takeaway is simple: With the market now pricing in an 85.6% chance of a hike, the Sept. 16 meeting is less about whether the Fed acts and increasingly about how much further it may be willing to go.

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Britain’s Ministry of Defence just became the first government outside the United States to publicly confirm it uses Starshield, the military variant of Starlink built by SpaceX (NASDAQ:SPCX). Reuters reported the disclosure on September 10, noting UK spending of nearly $40 million on the company’s satellite services.

That admission matters because Starshield’s customer roster, payloads and missions remain officially undisclosed, even though the program itself is not secret. For SpaceX investors, the news reframes a question the market has circled since the IPO: can Starshield become a second lucrative network business alongside Starlink? The company has already booked over $6 billion in multi-year U.S. government Starshield contracts from Space Force for LEO-based communications and sensing, and management sounded openly bullish on government demand on the August 4 earnings call.

What Britain’s Admission Reveals

The UK deployment is small in dollar terms but operational. The capped Starshield service tier in Britain includes five terabytes of monthly data, with per-terminal hardware starting at £4,000. Those price points sit well above consumer Starlink economics.

A five-terabyte allowance is a working military tier for a forward unit or a headquarters node, with unlimited plans above it for streaming sensor feeds or persistent video. The premium reflects encrypted routing, priority access and sovereign controls that consumer broadband never touches.

Britain’s participation matters more for validating the export story than for moving SpaceX’s revenue line. Allied defense ministries watch each other, and the UK going on the record gives cover to the next buyer.

Starshield’s existence is public and officially acknowledged. What stays classified is the roster of customers, payloads, and missions the constellation actually supports, and that distinction matters when you read the headlines.

Where the $6 Billion Actually Comes From

The disclosed Starshield awards are overwhelmingly American, with two United States Space Force satellite programs behind most of them.

Gwynne Shotwell told analysts on the second-quarter call:

“On the government side, we won more than $6 billion in U.S. contracts in Q2, supporting major Space Force programs that offer our nation mission-critical communications and sensing capabilities, and we see even more room for growth in this sector in this coming year.”

Enterprise & Government revenue reached $1.806 billion in the quarter, up 108% YoY, driven by airline partnerships and Starshield. Management called that line “a durable source of revenue, contributing to strong segment margins overall.”

The federal appetite behind these awards is real. The FY 2027 Space Force request includes $9.8 billion in Satellite Communication and $10.8 billion in Space-Based Sensing and Targeting, the exact phenomenologies Starshield is built to serve.

Constraints on the Second Network Story

Starshield is small next to Starlink today. Starlink ended the quarter with 12.0 million subscribers and Connectivity revenue of $4.29 billion, +66% YoY, dwarfing the government line.

Three constraints deserve serious weight. Political dependence on Elon Musk as a single decision-maker is one, and allied capitals have said as much publicly, which is why European sovereign-constellation programs exist.

Government customer concentration is the second. Budgets shift, and the FY 2027 request has to survive Congress before it becomes contracted revenue.

Execution is the third. SpaceX spent $18.37 billion in capex in the quarter, with $15.83 billion directed to AI compute infrastructure, while posting a $541 million net loss. Government revenue has to scale into that capital base rather than merely grow alongside it.

Is SPCX Stock a Buy?

At $148.18 as of September 10, SPCX trades above both its 50-day moving average of $135.65 and its 200-day moving average of $141.97, with a forward PE of 204x and a price-to-sales ratio of 84x.

The Street is broadly constructive: 6 Strong Buy, 22 Buy, 5 Hold, 2 Sell, with a target of $214.57.

Starshield’s export path is credible, and the Space Force baseline gives the segment a real floor that pure-play defense primes cannot match on timeline or price. Starship losses and AI capex intensity remain unaddressed by that segment.

I’d call it a Hold. The government network story is real and growing, but the valuation already discounts much of it, and the pending $60 billion Cursor acquisition plus the AI capex profile add execution risk that is hard to justify at this price.

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Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) shares are climbing midday Friday after the company unveiled the Duo, its first foldable iPhone, at the highest price point ever set for the lineup. Apple stock is up 3% to $335.49, extending a run that predates today’s launch and putting the anchor name near the top of a broadly green tech tape.

The supplier read-across is louder than the anchor move itself. Skyworks Solutions (NASDAQ:SWKS) stock is rallying 9% to $91.69, and Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) stock is also higher, up 2% to $340.86 on broad mega-cap tech strength.

The broader tape confirms the tone across the technology complex. The Technology Select Sector SPDR Fund (NYSEARCA:XLK) is up 1.74%, reflecting sector-wide buying. Meanwhile, the Invesco QQQ Trust (NASDAQ:QQQ) is up 1.22%, and Apple stock is outpacing the broad technology tape though it isn’t the fastest mover among the names here.

Apple’s Duo Reprices the iPhone Lineup

Apple launched the Duo with a United Kingdom starting price of £1,999, according to Ernest Doku, a mobiles expert at comparison service Uswitch. United Kingdom pre-orders open in October with devices arriving later that month. Doku called the Duo Apple’s biggest gamble in years and flagged first-generation trade-offs, including Touch ID rather than Face ID and a smaller battery than the Pro Max at a higher cost for Apple’s new flagship.

Doku argued that Apple has spent its first-generation effort on the hinge, that early looks suggest a genuinely crease-free display, and that the hinge could be the difference-maker against Samsung. The Duo effectively pushes Apple into an average selling price story ahead of a unit-shipment story, which is a different debate than the one that has framed recent iPhone cycles for the company. That reframing matters because a price-driven mix shift can carry revenue growth even when unit demand runs flat.

The strategic angle is straightforward for Apple. Priced above every phone Apple has previously sold, the Duo is an average selling price story before it is a unit story, and the trade-offs Apple accepted mean the upgrade case rests on the hinge as the primary differentiator. Whether a price-led cycle counts as a demand cycle for Apple is the question a single session of buying can’t settle.

For context on the rest of the lineup, Doku noted that Apple’s iPhone 18 Pro carries a United Kingdom starting price of £1,199, with a £100 increase on the Pro models tied to memory chip scarcity driven by the artificial intelligence boom. That input-cost dynamic ties Apple’s launch to the broader hardware complex and helps explain why sympathy buying is spilling across large-cap tech today. Apple stock is also up 10% over the past month, a run that predates this session and gives the setup a supportive backdrop.

Skyworks Rallies on Supplier Read-Through

Skyworks is Apple’s largest radio frequency (RF) front-end supplier, and Apple is Skyworks’ largest customer, an arrangement that anchors Skyworks revenue to iPhone unit volumes and dollar content per device. A premium-tier launch that lifts Apple’s average selling price is a favorable read for RF content dollars, which helps explain why Skyworks stock is leading the tape today rather than trading in line with its semiconductor group.

Skyworks has a second catalyst behind today’s move. Merger news around the pending combination with Qorvo is also lifting the stock, which stacks a deal driver on top of the launch-day read for Skyworks. Skyworks stock is up 48% year to date (YTD), pointing to a sentiment reset that began well before this morning’s rally.

Alphabet’s ascent is quieter and reads as sympathy strength across large-cap tech on a broad buying session. Alphabet stock is up 9% YTD, a middling result relative to peers, so today’s tick higher for Alphabet looks more like tone than a company-specific catalyst.

What to Watch

Apple’s session hinges on whether the Duo’s premium pricing translates into orders once United Kingdom pre-orders open in October and devices arrive later in the month. Investors can look for signs that content per device is expanding, not simply repricing, since a price-led cycle is distinct from a demand cycle for the iPhone franchise.

For Skyworks, the next informational cue is any update on Qorvo (NASDAQ:QRVO) deal timing or content commentary tied to the Duo ramp for Skyworks. Readers weighing their exposure to the Apple supply chain should size their positions to reflect that this Skyworks pop layers a merger catalyst on top of a launch-day read, and one session of buying doesn’t settle the underlying debate for Apple.

The post Apple Advances 3% as First Foldable iPhone Arrives at Its Highest Price Ever; Skyworks Rallies 9%, Alphabet Ticks Up appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

Regulated electric utilities earn their returns through a rate case process, where state commissions approve a required investment base and an allowed return on equity. That structure turns capital spending on poles, wires, substations, and generation into predictable earnings, which is what makes utility dividends usable for retirement income. Right now, the tailwind is unusually strong: the average individual data center load doubled from 150 to 300 megawatts (MW) between 2023 and 2024, and that surge is pulling regulated rate base higher across the Southeast, Midwest, and Northeast. Here are five US-listed regulated names built for steady checks.

Southern Company: Sun Belt Rate Base Meets Data Center Demand

Southern Company (NYSE:SO) pays an annualized dividend of $2.98 per share for a yield of 3.37%, with the most recent quarterly payment stepped up to $0.76. Trailing EPS of $4.15 against that payout leaves comfortable coverage, and the stock trades at a trailing P/E of 21. Adjusted Q2 EPS of $1.13 beat consensus, and management guided full-year adjusted EPS “near or at the top of our 2026 adjusted EPS guidance range of $4.50 to $4.60.”

The bull case is scale of contracted load. Total large-load agreements now sit at “over 17 gigawatts by the mid 2030s,” including a 3.2 gigawatt, 25-year electric-service contract with OpenAI for a site near Savannah, Georgia. Retail base rates in Georgia and Alabama are held stable until 2029, which reduces regulatory friction while the build-out earns a return. However, Southern Power carries some merchant and contracted-generation exposure, and accelerated depreciation tied to wind repowering is a near-term earnings drag.

Duke Energy: Two Decades of Raises and a Massive Build Plan

Duke Energy (NYSE:DUK) yields 3.54% on an annualized dividend of $4.26, with the September payment lifted to $1.085 from $1.065. Management explicitly noted the July hike “marking over 20 years of consecutive annual dividend increases” and framed the 2% raise as consistent with recent years. Trailing EPS of $6.64 covers the payout, and adjusted Q2 EPS of $1.43 topped consensus expectations. Shares trade at a trailing P/E of 18.

Duke is fully regulated and deploying capital at “more than $1 billion per month,” with 7.8 gigawatts of data-center electric service agreements already signed and a remaining 15.4 gigawatt pipeline targeted to convert by the first half of 2027. Management reaffirmed 5% to 7% long-term EPS growth through 2030 and expects to land in the top half beginning in 2028. However, there is an FFO-to-debt target of 14.5% that leaves less cushion than peers, so rising interest expense and any coal-ash remediation surprises could pressure credit metrics.

WEC Energy Group: Wisconsin’s Steady Compounder

WEC Energy Group (NYSE:WEC) yields 3.48% on an annualized dividend of $3.69, with the quarterly rate now $0.9525, up from $0.8925 through 2025. Trailing EPS of $5.11 supports the payout, and Q2 EPS of $0.91 topped consensus expectations. Dividend history at the company shows a durable step-up cadence: quarterly payments rose from 0.6775 in 2021 to 0.7275 in 2022, 0.78 in 2023, 0.835 in 2024, 0.8925 in 2025, and 0.9525 in 2026.

Fiscal 2025 operating cash flow was $3,379,400,000 against common dividend payouts of $1,147,800,000. Bull case: We Energies and Wisconsin Public Service are seeing weather-normalized retail electricity deliveries up 1.2% with heavy data-center capex driving future rate base. The risk here is that capital expenditures of $4,398,100,000 in 2025 exceeded operating cash flow, meaning growth is being financed with debt and equity, which raises the sensitivity to interest expense.

Xcel Energy: Clean Power Buildout for Google and Beyond

Xcel Energy (NASDAQ:XEL) yields 3.05% on an annualized dividend of $2.325, with a quarterly payment of $0.5925. Trailing EPS of $3.61 covers the dividend, and Xcel publicly targets a payout ratio of 45%-55% alongside annual dividend increases of 4%-6%. Quarterly increases are visible in the record, moving from 0.5475 across 2024 to 0.57 in 2025 to 0.5925 in 2026. Shares trade at a trailing P/E of 21.

The bull case centers on hyperscaler load. Xcel signed a landmark Google data center electric service agreement in Minnesota (1,900 MW clean energy resources, projected ~$1.1B customer benefits), and weather-normalized C&I electric sales grew 3% YTD. On the other hand, wildfire liability is real. Total estimated losses from Smokehouse Creek stand at $503M with only ~$80M insurance remaining, and Marshall Wildfire settlements totaled $640M. Moody’s carries a negative outlook on Xcel unsecured debt, and heavy 2025 capex of $10,908,000,000 against operating cash flow of $4,083,000,000 means the equity issuance treadmill continues.

Consolidated Edison: 52 Years of Dividend Increases in NYC

Consolidated Edison (NYSE:ED) yields 3.23% on an annualized dividend of $3.475, with a quarterly rate of $0.8875. The 2026 raise marks the 52nd consecutive year of dividend increases with 4.4% annualized raise in 2026, a streak long enough to place ED in Dividend King territory. Trailing EPS of $6.04 covers the payout, adjusted Q2 EPS of $0.83 topped consensus expectations, and shares trade at a trailing P/E of 18.

ED is a pure-play regulated utility serving New York City and Westchester, exactly the load pocket where electrification of new buildings is driving 20%-25% higher electric demand. Con Edison projects an 8.8% five-year CAGR in regulated investment base from $46.4B (2025) to ~$67.2B by 2030, which is the machinery that keeps the streak alive. However, New York’s Chapter 58 law may constrain future rate increases, and the $2B ATM equity offering announced in May 2026 introduces dilution as capex ramps to $8.6B by 2030.

Putting the Five Together

These five names sit on the same tailwind: accelerating electricity demand from data centers and building electrification is turning regulated capex into rate base and rate base into earnings that fund the dividend. ED wins on streak length and NYC electrification, DUK offers the largest capital plan with a two-decade raise record, SO brings contracted hyperscaler load in the Sun Belt, WEC is the steady Midwestern compounder, and XEL carries the highest growth targets alongside the highest wildfire tail risk. For retirees prioritizing income durability over yield, ED and DUK carry the cleanest track records; for those willing to accept more capex intensity to buy into the data-center build, SO, WEC, and XEL are the levered plays. If the goal is turning a mid six-figure balance into a monthly check rather than picking the winner among five, we sketched the full math in a free income guide.

The post AI Data Centers Need Enormous Amounts of Power: These 5 Dividend Stocks Provide It appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

Every few months, a financial planner receives the same question: Does Las Vegas pencil out for retirement? A couple in their early sixties, tired of a high-tax state, wants to know. The tax pitch is real, the entertainment is a bonus, and the desert appeals to them. But by the time they price out a house in Henderson or Summerlin, the math falls apart. The state wins. The metro does not.

A quieter answer sits less than a tank of gas up Interstate 15, near the Arizona line. Mesquite has been a small, golf-oriented retiree town for decades. People simply overlook it when comparing states instead of towns within a state. Close enough to Las Vegas that the airport, specialists, and a Saturday night out remain reachable for a day trip. Far enough that it is genuinely different, slower, and smaller with its own community already in place.

Why the Tax Argument Between the Two Cities Is a Wash

Both cities sit in the same state, so the entire state-level tax picture is identical. Nevada does not levy a personal income tax, which means 401(k) and IRA withdrawals, pension income, and Social Security benefits are not taxed at the state level. A retiree gains nothing on the income tax line by choosing one Nevada city over another.

The corollary matters, though. A state that forgoes income tax has to raise revenue somewhere, and in Nevada that job falls largely to sales tax and property tax, both of which can vary by county and municipality. The local tax picture isn’t automatically identical, even when the state one is. Worth verifying for your specific address.

Strip out state income tax as a variable, and the comparison collapses onto two things: what your house costs, and what daily life costs and feels like around it.

Where the Real Money and the Real Time Show Up

Housing is the main event, and to no one’s surprise, a smaller town away from a major metro costs less for structural reasons: less demand pressure, more available land, no proximity premium to a major job market and international airport. For a retiree staring at Las Vegas metro listings, the difference changes what withdrawal rate the plan actually needs.

Then there is pace. A small town is walkable in a way a sprawling metro is not. Traffic is negligible. Errands take a fraction of the day. For a retiree, time is the real currency. Climate deserves a candid word too. It is desert. Summers are brutal, and cooling a home through them is a real line in the budget. The trade for mild, playable winters is real, but don’t let anyone sell you July.

The active retiree infrastructure already exists. Golf, leagues, clubs, neighbors in the same season of life address the usual worry about moving to a small town.

Healthcare Question That Decides Everything Later

A small town has limited specialist care, so routine medicine is available locally, but anything complex likely means a drive to a larger metro. For someone in their sixties who is healthy and still driving, that inconvenience is worth trading for the rest of the package. For the same person at eighty-five, possibly no longer driving and managing something serious, it is a structural problem. Proximity to a major medical center is the single factor most likely to force a second move later in retirement, and a second move in your eighties is expensive in every sense. Anyone evaluating this town should check specialist availability for their own actual conditions.

Home care aides, skilled trades, and service providers are thinner on the ground than in a metro, which means longer waits and less choice when you need someone. The housing market is thinner too, so if you decide it is not for you, selling takes longer than it would in a major suburb. A small town is a concentrated bet.

One more trap: the town sits close to a state line, and it is easy to end up looking at listings that are technically in a different state with an entirely different tax regime. Verify address by address, not assume based on proximity.

Who Should Actually Do This, and Who Should Not

The profile that fits Las Vegas is specific, and it takes a lot to understand if this is a place you want to call home. This means a retiree who wants desert climate and no state income tax; who is priced out of, or tired of, the Las Vegas metro; who is currently healthy and comfortable driving; who values quiet over amenity density; and who is clear-eyed that the healthcare question gets harder with age. For that person, the trade is good, and the housing savings translate into a smaller portfolio requirement or a more comfortable withdrawal rate without giving up the state tax advantage.

The profile that should not do this is equally specific. Anyone managing a complex medical condition requiring regular specialist visits. Anyone who does not drive or expects to stop soon. Anyone who needs a dense social or cultural scene to feel alive. For those readers, the Las Vegas metro, with its higher housing cost, is the correct answer.

For a healthy, driving, quiet-loving retiree who wants the Nevada tax treatment without the metro price tag, Mesquite is the better trade. Just understand that you are buying it on the condition that your sixties and seventies go smoothly, and have a clear plan for what happens if they do not.

The post Las Vegas Has a Cheaper Neighbor and Almost No Retiree Is Talking About It appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

The Internal Revenue Service sets a 12% federal income tax bracket that, for a married couple filing jointly, runs up to $100,800 in taxable income for the current tax year. That single figure anchors a decision most retired couples never make on purpose: how much of a traditional IRA or 401(k) to convert to a Roth before December 31.

Taxable income is the key phrase, and the $100,800 ceiling sits on top of the standard deduction, which the IRS puts at $32,200 for a couple filing jointly this year. Money received and taxable income are two different measurements. The deduction comes off first, then the bracket layers start from zero. Confusing the two is the most common error people make when they try to size a conversion on their own.

Why Retirees Often Sit Far Below the Line

Between the last paycheck and the first required minimum distribution, a couple’s taxable income can be surprisingly modest. Some interest from cash or CDs, some dividends from a brokerage account, perhaps a pension, and Social Security, of which only a portion is taxable. Together, the total often lands well below the top of the bracket. The distance between where their taxable income falls and where the 12% bracket ends is unused conversion capacity, and the Internal Revenue Service says you can measure it directly. Pull last year’s return, adjust for anything that has changed, and the gap is right there.

The IRS publishes the figure every year and adjusts it for inflation, yet almost nobody looks at it. Those low-tax years between the last paycheck and the first required withdrawal are the whole subject of a free guide we put together on the Roth window. The couples who use it are the ones who bothered to check.

What Filling the Bracket Buys

The comparison worth thinking about pits a known 12% rate now against an unknown, likely higher rate later, once required minimum distributions begin and the account has continued to grow, or once one spouse dies and the survivor files as a single taxpayer, according to the Internal Revenue Service. Single filers hit each higher bracket at roughly half the income level a couple does, which means the same annual withdrawal that fit comfortably at 12% during joint filing can land in a much higher bracket the year after a spouse’s death, according to the Internal Revenue Service. This dynamic is often cited as a reason to convert while both spouses are alive and the joint brackets are available.

Every dollar converted at 12% is a dollar that will never be withdrawn later at 22% or 24%, according to the IRS. The Roth then grows without further federal income tax and carries no lifetime required distribution for the original owner.

Why December 31 Is the Real Deadline

Unused bracket room does not roll forward. A couple who converts nothing this year gets a fresh bracket next year of the same size, and this year’s opportunity simply disappears. A conversion must be completed within the calendar year to count for that year’s taxes, meaning the assets have to move from the traditional account into the Roth by December 31. Custodians get backed up in December, so the practical cutoff runs a couple of weeks earlier than the legal one. Paperwork started on the 30th often fails to settle in time.

What Quietly Eats the Room

A conversion raises income, and other pieces of the tax code respond to income in ways that shrink the room a naive calculation would suggest.

Social Security is the biggest one. As other taxable income rises, a larger portion of the couple’s benefits becomes taxable, so a conversion can increase taxable income by more than the converted amount. Long-term capital gains and qualified dividends sit in their own layered rate system that stacks on top of ordinary income, and filling the ordinary bracket can affect how those layers are taxed. If either spouse is on Medicare, higher income this year can raise Part B and Part D premiums about two years later, because those adjustments run on a lookback.

And for early retirees buying health coverage through the marketplace before Medicare eligibility, the premium subsidies phase out as income rises, which can make a conversion far more expensive than the bracket rate alone implies. These interactions are why many advisors suggest leaving a margin rather than filling the bracket to the last dollar.

How Couples Actually Run the Numbers

The mechanics are straightforward. Estimate this year’s taxable income before any conversion, using the most recent pay stubs, brokerage statements, and Social Security records. Subtract that from the top of the 12% bracket to find the room, according to the Internal Revenue Service. Convert somewhat less than that amount to leave a buffer for the interactions above. Pay the resulting tax from money outside the retirement account so the full converted amount stays invested and compounds inside the Roth. Then repeat the exercise next year, because the bracket ceiling moves with inflation and this year’s number will not be next year’s.

The post The 12% Bracket Ends at $100,800 for a Couple This Year. A Retired Couple With No Paycheck Can Convert Right Up to That Line by Dec. 31. Most Never Look Up the Number appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

TSMC has become the linchpin of the global AI buildout, and the market has priced it accordingly. But one number matters more than any other right now: the gap between where the stock trades and where our model says it should trade over the next 12 months.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (NYSE:TSM) is currently at $428.29, and our 24/7 Wall St. price target for TSMC is $492.37, implying 14.96% upside. Our rating is buy with high confidence (0.9).

24/7 Wall St. Price Target Summary

A Monster Year Meets a Fresh Monthly Release

TSMC has been on a run. The stock is up 41.56% year to date and 66.12% over the past year, with a 2.64% gain in the past week alone. Q2 2026 delivered EPS of $4.31 against a $3.8866 estimate, revenue of $40.20 billion (up 36.05% year over year), and a 67.7% gross margin.

The freshest data point, and the one Barron’s flagged this week, is the record August sales disclosure: August 2026 revenue surged 53.3% year over year, and January-through-August revenue was up 39.3%. Management has now raised full-year 2026 revenue guidance to slightly above 40% USD growth.

Why Bulls See $525 and Beyond

The bull case is straightforward: TSMC is the sole scale supplier of leading-edge silicon to Nvidia, Apple, AMD, and Broadcom, and management just raised its 2026 capital budget to $60 billion to $64 billion to keep up. Q3 revenue is guided to $44.6 billion to $45.8 billion, with 2nm now in ramp and A14 tape-outs running ahead of schedule.

CEO C.C. Wei told analysts conviction in the AI megatrend remains “very high” and characterized demand as “stronger and stronger and stronger.” Our bull-case one-year price is $525.08, and the sell-side consensus target of $552.38 reflects 6 Strong Buy and 12 Buy ratings against just one Hold.

What Could Go Wrong

The near-term risk is gross-margin compression. The 2nm ramp is expected to dilute gross margin by 3 to 4 percentage points, with overseas fabs adding another 2 to 3 percentage points of drag. Taiwan-Strait geopolitics remain the tail risk no model fully prices. Options positioning is cautious, with a full-chain put/call ratio of 1.23.

Our bear-case one-year price is $413.79. That said, bulls would counter that margin dilution is a self-inflicted price for capacity that customers are pre-committing to, and productivity gains plus the $165 billion Arizona buildout should broaden the geographic risk profile.

How TSMC Stacks Up Against NVIDIA, Broadcom, and Intel

NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) is TSMC’s largest customer and the cleanest AI-demand proxy. NVIDIA carries a market cap of $5.27 trillion and a trailing P/E of 44x, with Q2 FY27 revenue of $96.22 billion (up 105.85%). Every incremental Blackwell and Vera Rubin rack flows through TSMC’s leading-edge nodes, which makes NVIDIA’s Q3 guide of $108 billion a direct positive read for our target.

All that silicon still needs to be powered, cooled, and networked once it lands in a data center, and we profiled seven suppliers doing exactly that in a free AI infrastructure report.

Broadcom (NASDAQ:AVGO) is the fabless custom-silicon peer riding the same 3nm and 2nm nodes. Broadcom’s Q3 FY26 AI semiconductor revenue reached $16.7 billion, up 221% year over year, with Q4 guided to $21.7 billion. That backlog effectively guarantees TSMC’s 2027 order book at advanced nodes.

Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) is the only scale foundry competitor at advanced nodes, and the contrast is stark: Intel’s Q2 26 GAAP net loss was $11.03 billion, weighed down by CHIPS Act charges, with Intel Foundry losing $2.1 billion for the quarter.

Against a peer group where the only true foundry alternative is bleeding cash while AI-silicon customers are booking record revenue, our 24/7 Wall St. price target of $492.37 looks reasonable, arguably conservative versus the $552.38 Street consensus.

TSMC Thesis: Bullish With Eyes Open

The 24/7 Wall St. price target is $492.37, our recommendation is buy, and confidence is 90%. The factor that tips the scale is the combination of raised full-year guidance, a pre-booked capacity pipeline through 2029, and a foundry competitor that is not competitive on either technology or economics.

The setup looks most attractive if Q3 revenue lands inside the guided range with gross margin at 66% or better. The setup looks less attractive if 2nm dilution runs hotter than the guided 3 to 4 point hit or if Taiwan-Strait headlines re-price the risk premium.

These projections assume TSMC continues executing on its 2nm and A14 roadmaps and that AI capex holds through the decade. Significant upside or downside could result from Taiwan-Strait geopolitical developments or a step-change in customer concentration.

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A 68-year-old retiree walks out of a three-day hospital stay expecting his former employer’s retiree plan to handle the bill, the way it always has. Weeks later, the explanation of benefits arrives. The plan paid a fraction of the charges. The rest, thousands of dollars, winds up on his lap.

He never enrolled in Medicare Part B, because the retiree plan felt like enough. The plan disagrees, and it has been operating on that disagreement for three years. It pays as though Medicare paid first. Medicare paid nothing, because he was never enrolled. The plan does not adjust for that. It subtracts Medicare’s imagined share and pays what’s left.

His bill has two halves that fail differently. The room, the nursing, the facility charges: that’s Part A territory. The surgeon, the anesthesiologist, the radiologist reading his scans: that’s Part B, and it’s the part he skipped. If you’re 65 or older on a former employer’s retiree plan, meaning coverage not tied to a job you or your spouse currently hold, the mechanic driving this is payer order.

The Carve-Out Nobody Explains

Retiree coverage is not based on current employment. Under Medicare Secondary Payer rules, it pays secondary to Medicare for anyone 65 or older, whether or not the retiree enrolled. Medicare is primary in the plan’s eyes even when Medicare never sees the claim. Active-employee coverage at an employer with 20 or more workers pays primary, with Medicare second. Retiree coverage flips that order the month the job ends, even when the same card stays in the wallet and the same doctors keep taking it.

Here’s where the money disappears. Many retiree plans carve out Medicare’s share: they estimate what Medicare would have paid, subtract it, and pay only the remainder. The plan isn’t checking whether Medicare actually paid. It’s applying a formula. The Medicare-sized hole in the middle becomes yours, not because anyone denied the claim, but because a coordination-of-benefits clause assumed a payment that never happened.

The calculation is plan-specific, and that matters. Some plans carve out an estimate. Some coordinate differently. Some may not pay at all when a member was Medicare-eligible and failed to enroll. Don’t assume yours simply picks up the tab.

What Part B Would Have Covered

Skip Part B and you’re exposed to everything it pays: physician services, outpatient care, durable medical equipment, and most of what happens outside an inpatient room, including the doctors treating you inside one. Part B in 2026 carries a standard monthly premium of $202.90 and an annual deductible of $283. After that deductible, Medicare generally pays 80% of approved charges. Without Part B, that share has no payer, and a carve-out plan has already backed it out before writing its check.

Premium-Free Part A Is Not Automatic  

CMS notes that approximately 99% of Medicare beneficiaries pay no Part A premium, because they have at least 40 quarters of Medicare-covered employment. That’s eligibility. It is not enrollment. Automatic enrollment at 65 generally depends on already drawing Social Security or Railroad Retirement Board benefits. A retiree who delayed claiming to 70, exactly the discipline that also produces the confidence to skip Part B, may not have been enrolled in anything. He may hold no Part A at all.

If he does, the 2026 inpatient hospital deductible is $1,736, up from $1,676, and it applies per benefit period rather than per year. Daily coinsurance runs $434 for hospital days 61 through 90. His plan pays only what sits on top of those figures. If he doesn’t hold Part A, the entire facility bill is uninsured by Medicare, and a carve-out plan may still pay as though Medicare had covered its portion.

Enrolling Late Costs More Than You Think

Part B carries a late enrollment penalty of 10% for each full 12-month period you could have had it and didn’t. It isn’t a one-time charge. It rides every monthly premium for as long as you hold Part B. So a retiree who skipped at 65 and finds the carve-out at 68 faces two bills: the uncovered share of every claim already processed, and a permanently higher premium going forward. It is one of several Medicare surprises that silently drain retirement budgets (we mapped the rest, from IRMAA surcharges to coverage gaps, in a free guide to Medicare’s hidden bills).

What to Do Sooner Than Later

Before you wind up with a bill you didn’t see coming, take the following steps:

• Find your plan’s coordination-of-benefits language. Look for any version of “we pay as if Medicare paid first,” or “benefits are reduced by the amount Medicare would have paid.” If it carves out, you need Part B active.
• Know the window before you call. Retiree coverage does not create a Part B Special Enrollment Period. That comes from active employment coverage, and a retiree plan isn’t that. If you missed your Initial Enrollment Period at 65, you generally need the General Enrollment Period, January 1 through March 31. The next one opens in January 2027. Ask Social Security whether an exceptional-circumstances SEP applies to you.
• Get the payer-order answer in writing. Ask your former employer’s benefits office whether the plan is primary or secondary to Medicare, and whether it carves out. If a claim is later reduced on payer-order grounds, that written answer is your evidence on appeal.
• Budget for the penalty, not just the premium. Enrolling late means paying more than the standard $202.90, and it stays higher.

The plan is doing what the plan document says. The gap it leaves is the part you can still close, and January is your next chance.

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Diesel prices have officially crossed a threshold that should make investors and consumers nervous. The national average surged to about $6.05 a gallon on Friday, setting an all-time record and marking a stunning escalation from roughly $3.70 a year ago.

That matters for far more than the millions of Americans who fill diesel-powered vehicles. Diesel is the fuel that keeps much of the economy moving, powering long-haul trucks, trains, farm equipment, construction machinery and other heavy-duty transportation. When its price explodes, the added cost eventually works its way into the prices of goods and services.

And that could be particularly uncomfortable right now because inflation is already proving stubborn.

The Diesel Shock Hasn’t Fully Reached Consumers

The latest Consumer Price Index showed inflation running at 3.4% annually in August, well above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target. Gasoline prices jumped 3.9% during the month and were up 27.4% from a year earlier. Core inflation, which excludes food and energy, also accelerated 0.3% in August.

The danger with diesel is that its impact can take longer to show up in consumer prices.

A trucking company can absorb a fuel increase temporarily, but it cannot do so indefinitely. Eventually, higher fuel and freight costs have to be reflected in shipping rates and the prices charged by retailers. Groceries are particularly vulnerable because food may be transported multiple times before reaching a consumer’s shopping cart.

That creates an uncomfortable feedback loop: higher energy costs push up transportation expenses, businesses pass those costs along, and consumers face higher prices. The timing could hardly be worse.

Oil Isn’t the Only Problem

The diesel spike is being driven by a combination of geopolitical turmoil and supply constraints. The conflict involving Iran has disrupted energy markets and shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most important oil chokepoints. Crude prices have consequently pushed back above $100 a barrel at times, while concerns about refinery and fuel supplies have added another layer of pressure.

Diesel demand also tends to increase as the economy moves toward the fall harvest, winter heating season, and holiday shipping period. That means the market could be facing stronger demand at precisely the moment supply is under pressure.

There is already evidence that economists are taking the threat seriously. Fifth Third’s chief U.S. economist Bill Adams recently said record diesel prices could influence the Federal Reserve’s thinking, while wholesale diesel futures have continued climbing. The next Fed FOMC meeting is in just five days, Sept. 16.

For investors, that’s the bigger issue.

Key Takeaway

The Federal Reserve can’t produce more oil or reopen the Strait of Hormuz, but it can respond to persistent inflation by raising interest rates higher. That’s an especially important consideration after today’s inflation report sent market expectations for a September rate hike sharply higher.

A temporary gasoline spike is one thing. A sustained increase in diesel that spreads through transportation, food, and industrial costs is considerably more troubling because it risks keeping inflation elevated even after the initial energy shock fades.

Investors should watch diesel prices just as closely as they watch the CPI. The $6 milestone isn’t simply another painful number at the pump. It could be an early warning that another round of inflation is moving through the economy and grocery bills will begin soaring.

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Two Treasury ETFs from the same iShares family are delivering opposite outcomes for their investors right now. iShares 20+ Year Treasury Bond ETF (NASDAQ:TLT) is down 4.35% year to date as long-end yields keep climbing, while iShares 0-3 Month Treasury Bond ETF (NYSEARCA:SGOV) is up 2.53% and quietly banking a coupon each month. Both hold nothing but U.S. Treasuries. The difference is entirely about where on the yield curve each fund sits and what that means when rates move.

What Each Fund Is Actually Betting On

TLT owns Treasuries with 20 or more years to maturity, giving it an effective duration near 16 to 17 years. That is a leveraged wager on falling long-end yields. Every 1 percentage point rise in the 30-year yield knocks roughly 16% off TLT’s price. SGOV holds bills maturing inside 90 days, with duration close to 0.1 years. It is a cash-equivalent designed to harvest whatever the front end of the curve is paying and reinvest at prevailing rates each month.

The current curve makes the tradeoff explicit. The 30-year yield sits at 5.37% and the 20-year at 5.39%, while the 13-week T-bill yields 3.91%. TLT holders are collecting more coupon but absorbing daily price hits as long yields grind higher. SGOV holders collect less, but their principal barely moves.

Where the Divergence Shows Up

The 2022 rate shock was the cleanest demonstration. TLT fell roughly 31% that year as the Fed hiked. SGOV finished essentially flat on price while its distribution ramped alongside every hike. The pattern is repeating in a smaller way now. Over the past year, TLT is down 5.73% while SGOV is up 3.79%. Stretch the frame and it gets worse for TLT: down 35% over the same window against SGOV’s 20.15% gain. Long duration has been a wealth destroyer since 2021.

Income Looks Similar, Behaves Differently

TLT paid $3.89 per share over the past 12 months. SGOV paid $3.71. On distributions alone they look close. The gap is what happens to your principal underneath. A TLT investor collected that coupon while watching the share price slide from about $85.80 to $80.88. An SGOV investor collected that distribution while the price drifted from about $96.84 to $100.51 as monthly resets pulled it toward par.

Cost and Structure

SGOV also carries a lighter fee, which matters more when the entire return is coupon income. The 10Y-2Y spread of 0.39% tells you the curve has re-steepened only modestly, so there is no free lunch waiting further out.

Verdict

SGOV functions as a cash-parking vehicle that earns the front-end Treasury rate without price risk. TLT is a tactical position built around a specific rate view. It only makes sense for an investor who believes the Fed is about to cut aggressively and long yields will fall meaningfully from today’s 5.37% 30-year level. The calculus flips when the 10Y-2Y spread inverts on recession fears or the Fed signals a genuine easing cycle. Until then, SGOV holders keep collecting while TLT holders keep waiting.

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Morningstar strategist Tom Lauricella delivered a warning that should stop any diversified investor cold: the emerging markets fund and the value ETF you bought to spread risk have both quietly become AI bets. Speaking on Morningstar’s Investing Insights podcast in an episode titled How AI Is Taking Over Your Portfolio, Lauricella walked through weightings that suggest diversification, as most retirees understand it, has stopped working.

Emerging Markets Turned Into a Semiconductor Trade

An investor near retirement typically holds an S&P 500 index fund, an emerging markets fund, and a value ETF. The EM fund was supposed to cushion U.S. tech risk, and the value exchange-traded fund was supposed to cushion valuation risk.

Lauricella’s figures scramble that. Semiconductors are now “about 16% of the U.S. stock market.” He said, “22% of your big emerging market indexes” now sits in “just a handful of companies, three or four companies,” anchored by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (NYSE:TSM). A quarter of an EM portfolio now rides the same AI capex cycle that drives Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) in the U.S. index.

The pace of that shift should catch retirees off guard. “A year and a half ago or so, it would have been about half of that,” Lauricella said. A weighting that doubles in 18 months is more than a rebalancing event; it represents a fundamental change in the character of the fund. Alibaba (NYSE:BABA) is increasingly held for its AI cloud and compute story rather than its e-commerce business.

Value ETFs Are Half a Tech Fund Now

Lauricella said, “at the end of 2024, your typical value, some of the big value indexes would have had technology stocks at about 11% of the portfolio,” and “now we’re seeing some key value indexes at something like 20% technology.” Add the tech-adjacent names and “a lot of value ETFs … now have something like more than a quarter of their portfolio in tech and tech adjacent stocks.”

The most jarring figure is this: “Amazon is now the largest holding in the Russell Large value index at 6%.” Alongside Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) in most value indexes are Oracle (NYSE:ORCL) and Cisco Systems (NASDAQ:CSCO), both long classified as slow-growth dividend names and both now running AI infrastructure businesses. (We rounded up seven of these AI infrastructure suppliers, from power to networking, in a free report you can grab here.) Oracle’s cloud infrastructure revenue grew 121% year over year in Q1 FY27, per its most recent earnings release. That reads well outside a traditional value stock’s growth profile.

Even Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE:BRK-B) fits the pattern through its Apple stake and more recent Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) position. While the value wrapper stayed the same, the underlying exposure drifted.

Lauricella explained the mechanics. AI hardware growth has been so extreme that older tech leaders look cheap by comparison: “compared to something like the revenues that you’re seeing in SanDisk or Western Digital or Nvidia, Apple and Microsoft look like value stocks just because of where they are in the rankings.”

Active Managers Cannot Escape It Either

If the concentration were easy to dodge, Lauricella said, professionals would already be doing it. One T. Rowe Price emerging markets fund carries “some 33% in those three names.” Two Fidelity EM funds sit on opposite sides of the same bet. A Dodge & Cox fund is underweight, holding “just single digits in these … companies.”

The spread comes from the benchmark trap. “If you’re a portfolio manager and 22% of your index is in these three companies, four companies at most, then you have a very big decision to make,” he said. Underweight the AI names and risk lagging. Match them and inherit the concentration you were hired to manage.

Go Look at What You Actually Own

Lauricella’s practical suggestion is to go look at what you actually own. “Investors may want to peek and see what the percentages are in their emerging market funds.” Do the same for any value ETF in your portfolio.

Semiconductors are “historically very cyclical” and “even more volatile than just sort of general tech stock,” and several leaders carry “very high valuations.” The AI trade is already embedded in portfolios built to sidestep it. The useful first step is knowing by how much.

The post Morningstar Says Your Emerging Markets Fund and Your Value ETF Are Both AI Bets Now appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

Wharton professor Jeremy Siegel told CNBC’s Closing Bell on Thursday that new Fed Chair Kevin Warsh will have to “bite the bullet and raise rates” at next week’s FOMC meeting, warning that a hold could trigger “4 or 5 or maybe six dissents, which would be, you know, unprecedented.” Siegel framed the decision as “the test for Kevin Warsh” as bond and commodity markets pressure the central bank to defend its credibility.

The federal funds target upper bound sits at 3.75% as of September 11, 2026, unchanged for a month and down 0.75% from a year ago. Siegel argues that easing streak has run out of room.

Two Numbers Driving The Call

Pump prices are the most visible piece of the story. The national average for regular gasoline hit $4.16 per gallon in the week ended September 7, 2026, up $0.086 in a week and sitting at the 88.5 percentile of the past year’s range. Siegel cited “records in gasoline futures signaling another 20 to $0.30 potential rise in gasoline,” adding that this “is not good for consumer sentiment.”

The bond market is the second signal. The 10-year Treasury yield closed at 4.83% on September 9, 2026, the highest reading in the past year and up 0.11% in a month. The 10Y-2Y spread has narrowed to 0.39%, still positive but down 18.7% from a month earlier. Core PCE, the Fed’s preferred gauge, rose to 130.66 in July 2026, its highest reading in the supplied series.

Siegel’s Two-Stage Playbook For Stocks

Siegel expects equities to “first shudder and you’ll see a sell off,” then rally if the long bond treats the hike as “credible at fighting inflation.” He sees “range bound” trading in the weeks that follow. His view of Warsh’s political box: the chair “would love to be able to hold off until after the midterms” yet faces a market demanding action.

An August 28 Halftime Report panelist, discussing Warsh’s Jackson Hole remarks, framed the same dilemma: “He’s in A hard position. He has to be hawkish. I don’t think anybody’s expecting him not to be hawkish, but then the question is, does he deliver?”

Why Oracle Holders Should Care

Few names embody the rate-sensitivity question like Oracle (NYSE:ORCL). The database giant reported Q1 FY2027 results after the close on September 10, 2026, posting revenue of $19.34B, up 29.6% YoY, with cloud infrastructure revenue rocketing 121% YoY to $7.39B. Remaining performance obligations swelled to $664B, aided by more than $30B in new AI cloud contracts booked in the quarter. The full 8-K exhibit is on file with the SEC.

The catch is capital intensity. Q1 capex reached $28.5B, free cash flow was negative $5.40B, and Oracle completed a $20B at-the-market equity program while planning to raise roughly $40B in FY2027. Higher long yields raise the price of every dollar Oracle borrows to build data centers (we mapped seven of the suppliers powering that buildout, from electricity to cooling, in a free AI infrastructure report).

Shares are trading at $153.11, up 5.24% over one month and down 20.68% year to date, with the stock down 52.83% from a year ago. Related Oracle securities OCCLL and ORCL-PD carry the same CIK and inherit the same rate exposure through the parent’s balance sheet.

What To Watch Next Week

The August CPI print lands tomorrow, and the FOMC decision follows next week. Siegel’s thesis rests on the long bond validating any Warsh hike. If the 10-year holds near its 4.83% high after a move, expect the shudder he described. If yields ease, the second act of his call, a stock recovery grounded in restored Fed credibility, becomes the base case.

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Income investors often chase the fattest current yield on the screen. That is a mistake. A payout that has been raised straight through the 1990 recession, the dot-com bust, the 2008 financial crisis and the 2020 COVID shock tells you something a 6% yield cannot: management protected the cash return when earnings compressed, credit markets froze and consumers stopped spending. Below are five names whose raise streaks survived every US downturn on record, ranked by the length of that streak.

No. 5: PepsiCo, a 53-Year Streak Backed by Snacks and Beverages

PepsiCo (NASDAQ:PEP) has raised its dividend for 53+ consecutive years, spanning every US recession since 1972. The current quarterly payout is $1.48, up from $1.4225, and the dividend yield sits at 4.21%, the highest on this list. Q2 2026 revenue rose to $24.18B (+6.4% YoY) with core EPS of $2.20, and management plans ~$8.9B in total cash returns in 2026. The snack-plus-beverage model held up in past downturns because Lay’s, Doritos and Gatorade are cheap indulgences consumers keep buying.

No. 4: Colgate-Palmolive, 62 Years of Uninterrupted Increases

Colgate-Palmolive (NYSE:CL) has raised its dividend for 62 consecutive years, uninterrupted since 1963. The quarterly payout ticked up to $0.53 in 2026 from $0.52, with a yield of 2.37%. Q2 2026 base-business EPS of $0.99 beat the $0.95 estimate, the fifth straight beat, and gross margin expanded 140bps to 61.5%. Toothpaste, soap and pet food are recession classics: consumers keep brushing and feeding the dog when GDP contracts.

No. 3: Coca-Cola, a 63-Year Raise Streak With Global Reach

Coca-Cola (NYSE:KO) has lifted its payout for 63 consecutive years. The current quarterly dividend is $0.53, up from $0.51, and the yield stands at 2.38%. Q2 2026 revenue reached $13.38B (+6.7% YoY), global unit case volume grew 5%, and operating margin expanded to 34.9%. The concentrate model produces enormous free cash flow: management guides FY2026 FCF to ~$12.4B. Shares have rallied 27.82% year to date.

No. 2: Johnson & Johnson, 64 Years and a Healthcare Moat

Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ) marked its 64th consecutive year of dividend increases with a 3.1% hike to $1.34 quarterly. The yield is 1.96%. Q1 2026 revenue climbed to $24.06B (+9.9% YoY), driven by DARZALEX at $3.96B (+22.5%) and TREMFYA at $1.61B (+68.3%). Management raised FY2026 guidance to revenue of $100.3B-$101.3B and adj EPS of $11.45-$11.65. Pharma demand is inelastic across cycles, which is why the dividend rose through 2008 and 2020 without hesitation. There is some risk worth noting for JNJ: STELARA revenue collapsed 59.7% to $656M on biosimilar competition, and the beta of 0.235 reflects a market that assumes the pipeline will fill the hole.

No. 1: Procter & Gamble, 70 Years of Raises and 136 Years of Payments

Procter & Gamble (NYSE:PG) sits at the top on the metric that matters here: the company just marked its 70th consecutive year of dividend increases and 136th consecutive year of dividend payments, one of the longest streaks in existence. The current quarterly dividend is $1.0885, up from $1.0568, with a yield of 2.99%. FY2026 revenue reached $87.03B (+3.26%) and free cash flow rose to $15.83B (+12.74% YoY). Management plans ~$10B in dividends and ~$5B in buybacks in FY2027. CEO Shailesh Jejurikar called FY2026 “a year of foundation building while continuing to grow sales and profit and return high levels of cash to shareowners despite a very challenging geopolitical and economic environment.”

Committed View

A raise streak that survived four US recessions is a stress test no marketing deck can fake. Procter & Gamble earns the top slot because 70 years of increases and 136 years of continuous payments is the strongest evidence any income investor will find that a payout has been engineered to endure. Johnson & Johnson, Coca-Cola, Colgate-Palmolive and PepsiCo round out a list where the common thread is pricing power on products consumers refuse to give up when times get hard. If the goal is durable income rather than a headline yield, this is the shelf worth looking at (we ranked ten more of these 50-year raisers by valuation in a free Dividend Kings report).

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Florida has sued Netflix (NASDAQ:NFLX), and the case directly challenges the story Netflix has told advertisers, regulators, and parents for years: that a subscription streamer is a fundamentally different animal from a surveillance-driven social platform. In the 66-page lawsuit, Florida accuses Netflix of carrying out a “years-long bait-and-switch”, saying the company promised families an escape from ad-tech tracking.

Then, once its ad tier launched, it collected detailed information about children and households and shared that data with advertising platforms and brokers without the consent Florida law requires. The complaint says advertisers could then target Floridians by life stage, income, and household composition. It lands as Netflix scales an ad business it has told investors is central to the next leg of growth, which is why a state consent case reads, for shareholders, as a business-model case.

What Florida Alleges, and What Netflix Says Back

The state frames this as deliberate escalation, not a one-off. The Florida case follows one earlier lawsuit filed this year by Texas officials accusing Netflix of spying on children and designing its platform to be addictive. Florida also stayed out of a large multi-state technology settlement, choosing to litigate on its own.

The financial stake is stated in broad terms. Attorney General James Uthmeier said, “We’re going to send a message to big tech companies. If you hurt our kids, you are going to have to pay for it. And so, in this lawsuit, we will be seeking billions of damages.” That is an intention, not an amount at risk, according to the Florida Office of the Attorney General.

Netflix says the suit lacks merit, that it complies with privacy and data-protection laws everywhere it operates, and that it maintains dedicated safeguards for children, an annually refreshed privacy statement and terms of use, and parental controls that filter or block content. These are allegations, and no court has ruled on them.

The kids surface area is substantial. Netflix has been building here: the standalone Netflix Playground kids gaming app launched in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, the Philippines, and New Zealand, and kids mobile games engagement is up 600% year over year, according to The Guardian.

Why Consent Rules Bite the Ad-Tier Economics

Audience data makes an ad-supported minute worth more than a subscription minute, so consent rules directly affect unit economics. Management has been explicit that closing the monetization gap is the opportunity: “There’s still a gap between ad tier arm and then arm for our standard without ads tier, according to The Guardian. But that gap is narrowing,” co-CEO Greg Peters told analysts on the Q2 2026 call.

The scale-up is real. Netflix expects 2026 advertising revenue to roughly double to about $3 billion, advertiser count grew 70% year over year to more than 4,000 clients, and the ad-supported tier accounted for more than 60% of Q1 2026 sign-ups in ad-supported countries. A consent regime that restricts household-level targeting would hit the arm side of that equation more than the sign-up side.

Legal exposure and reputational exposure move independently here. A Florida judgment years out is one risk; a narrative that Netflix quietly behaved like the ad-tech platforms it distanced itself from is faster, because it travels through advertiser trust and parental trust at the same time.

Netflix’s own framing invites the scrutiny. On the call, management described “data that we can draw on to constantly improve every aspect of the business” as a strategic asset, without specifying what data or how it is used for targeting.

Where NFLX Stock Is Now

The stock is already under pressure. NFLX closed at $76.01 on September 10, 2026, down 18.93% year-to-date and 39.08% over the past year, against a P/E near 28x and a full-year revenue guide of $51.0 billion to $51.4 billion with a 31.5% operating margin.

The core business is still compounding. Q2 2026 revenue rose 13.4% year over year to $12.56 billion, EPS of $0.80 beat the $0.79 estimate, and the board authorized an additional $25 billion buyback with $27.1 billion remaining.

Against the fundamentals, one state consent case, even a serious one, is unlikely to reprice the equity on its own unless it triggers copycats that constrain targeting across the ad tier. That is the risk worth tracking, alongside the pending roughly $700 million Brazilian tax deposit shifted into 2026.

The ad-tier thesis remains intact, and cash generation supports the buyback, while the child-data litigation has become a category risk that will persist beyond headlines, and the reputational channel is what would compress the multiple before any court ruling arrives.

The post Netflix Said It Was Different From Facebook. A New Lawsuit Says It Tracked Kids for Ads Anyway. appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

Micron Technology (NASDAQ:MU) has become one of 2026’s defining AI trades, and the question now is whether the runup has more room.

Our 24/7 Wall St. price target for Micron is $980.72, essentially in line with the $977.41 close on September 10, 2026. That implies 0.34% upside and a hold rating, with confidence at 90%. The model sees Micron as near fair value after a historic move, with the setup still constructive but the easy money already made.

A Historic Run Meets a Fresh Competitive Jolt

Micron is up 242.67% year to date and 599.28% over the past year, with a 12.54% gain over the last month. Shares slipped 4.9% in the most recent session, coinciding with news that an Intel-backed start-up is taking aim at the memory-chip market.

Fundamentals remain extraordinary: fiscal Q3 2026 revenue reached $41.5 billion, up 346% year-over-year, with non-GAAP EPS of $25.11 beating estimates by 23.79%, the seventh straight beat. Q4 guidance calls for revenue of $50 billion and non-GAAP EPS near $31.

Why Bulls See a Breakout to $1,347

The bull case for Micron is genuinely powerful. Management now has 16 Strategic Customer Agreements covering roughly 20% of DRAM and a third of NAND volume, with take-or-pay commitments generating minimum revenue of approximately $100 billion over the term.

CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said the floor prices deliver margins “significantly above prior peak margins,” and management sees tight supply “persisting beyond 2027.” HBM4 12-high shipments already surpassed $1 billion.

Our one-year bull scenario reaches $1,346.99, and the analyst high target of $1,513.11 reinforces that path with 9 strong-buy and 35 buy ratings.

What Could Go Wrong at $977

Memory is cyclical, and MU trades at a beta of 2.22. Capex has ballooned to roughly $27 billion for fiscal 2026, and a Q3 $325 million debt prepayment loss shows the balance-sheet reshuffling underway. Insider activity is currently net selling, and Thursday’s slip followed the Intel-backed start-up headline threatening the memory-chip market.

Bulls would counter that heavy capex funds the very HBM4E and 1-gamma nodes underpinning the SCAs, and that management expects blended DRAM cost per bit to rise from current levels, keeping pricing power intact. Our bear one-year scenario lands at $727.80.

How Micron Compares to Western Digital and NVIDIA

Western Digital (NASDAQ:WDC) is the closest memory-and-storage peer, now a pure-play HDD company serving the same hyperscale AI customers. Its fiscal Q4 2026 revenue rose 43.84% to $3.75 billion, with a market cap of $166 billion.

WDC’s growth is strong, but Micron’s 346% revenue expansion and HBM leadership dwarf it, suggesting our target reasonably reflects MU’s premium positioning.

NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) is Micron’s most important customer proxy: NVIDIA’s Q2 FY2027 supply obligations surged to $279 billion, tied primarily to memory procurement for Vera Rubin.

Trading at a P/E of 44, NVIDIA earns a growth multiple Micron does not on cyclical earnings. That valuation gap is exactly why our model resists extending MU’s target closer to $1,500.

Micron Price Prediction 2026-2030

My 24/7 Wall St. price target of $980.72 lands within a percent of today’s price, and the hold rating reflects genuine near-term fair value at 90% confidence.

The Strategic Customer Agreements tip the scale from cyclical concern toward structural durability, but the stock has already priced most of that in.

The setup would look more attractive if MU pulls back into the $850 range or signs additional SCAs pushing revenue coverage above 50%. The risk/reward would weaken if HBM pricing rolls over or competitive threats materialize into share loss.

These projections assume Micron continues executing its SCA strategy through the calendar 2030 agreement horizon. Meaningful upside or downside could result from HBM4E ramp timing or a memory pricing correction.

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Shares of Chewy (NYSE:CHWY) are down 6% to $19.80 in Friday morning trading after a second analyst downgrade in two sessions, with JPMorgan pulling the pet retailer off its buy-equivalent list. The move deepens a rough stretch for Chewy stock, which is now down 40% year to date (YTD). Wednesday’s earnings reaction kicked off the current leg lower, and Friday’s rating cut is extending the damage.

The selling is specific to Chewy stock. Broad-market benchmark the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (NYSEARCA:SPY) is up 0.79% on the session, so the pressure on Chewy isn’t coming from a wider risk-off tone. That divergence matters, because both downgrade notes lean on macroeconomic pressure, yet the wider market is trading higher on the same session.

The peer group is moving in different directions on the same tape. Petco Health and Wellness (NASDAQ:WOOF) stock is down 0.6% to $2.42, and Freshpet (NASDAQ:FRPT) stock is up 2% to $66.41. The ProShares Pet Care ETF (CBOE:PAWZ) is a sector proxy that holds all three names, and the split reaction suggests that this is a single-name analyst call rather than a category rerating.

JPMorgan Downgrade Follows Evercore’s Cut

Chewy’s slide follows JPMorgan analyst Doug Anmuth downgrading Chewy stock to Neutral from Overweight with a $24 price target, citing persistent macroeconomic pressure on organic growth. Anmuth framed the company as executing well on its own initiatives but with muted organic growth pushing him to the sidelines. The new target sits above where Chewy stock is trading Friday morning, but leaves only modest upside from here on his math.

The downgrade comes a day after Evercore ISI cut Chewy stock’s rating to In Line from Outperform with a $25 price target. Two firms have now moved Chewy off buy-equivalent ratings in consecutive sessions, and the reasoning in both notes lines up: execution is fine, and the category isn’t cooperating. That framing isolates the macro backdrop as the swing factor, with Chewy’s own execution left largely untouched by either firm’s critique.

The analyst still credited Chewy with continuing to gain share, outpacing the broader pet market by two to three times, and with healthy customer additions and retention. He also noted that Chewy’s second-quarter earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) margin topped guidance, but that the beat was almost entirely driven by $15 million of timing-related and discrete gross-margin benefits, including a tariff refund, according to JPMorgan. Stripping out the one-time items turns a headline beat into a lower-quality result.

Sector Reaction Stays Contained

The peer reaction backs up the read that this is a Chewy-specific event. Petco is drifting fractionally lower, and Freshpet is nudging higher on the same session that Chewy is slumping. If the downgrade were being read as a sector-wide warning on pet spend, Freshpet stock wouldn’t be catching a bid and Petco would likely be under more meaningful pressure.

Chewy reported second-quarter results Wednesday, and Chewy shares fell that session on a free cash flow shortfall that overshadowed a raised full-year outlook. Petco fell alongside Chewy that day, and Freshpet rose, so today’s split is a continuation of Wednesday’s dynamic rather than a fresh divergence. The JPMorgan and Evercore ISI notes are ratifying the market’s initial reaction two sessions later, rather than introducing a new fundamental concern.

What to Watch Next

Chewy stock is trading below JPMorgan’s $24 target and below the $25 mark Evercore ISI set on Thursday. The question from here is whether Chewy stock can hold support in the high teens through the close, and whether any additional sell-side notes land before the weekend. A third downgrade would reshape the debate quickly.

Chewy CEO Sumit Singh is scheduled to appear at the upcoming Goldman Sachs consumer conference, and that appearance could shape the next leg of the narrative for Chewy. Investors can watch for whether Singh’s commentary on the pet-category backdrop matches the cautious framing in the two downgrade notes, or pushes back on it with fresh execution color.

The drop against a rising broad market frames today’s move as a single-name story rather than a sector call. The underlying reason (soft category growth) could still spill into peers if it persists, so anyone sizing their pet-retail exposure may want to keep both the company-specific execution and the category backdrop in view before adding to a Chewy share position here. That balance, between execution that’s working and a category that isn’t, is the setup heading into next week.

The post Chewy Slides 6% on Second Downgrade in Two Days as JPMorgan Cuts Target to $24; Petco Stays Put, Freshpet Nudges Higher appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

Tax Bill Ultra High Yield mREIT Holders Are Quietly Paying

A $500,000 position yielding 8% generates $40,000 in gross annual income. At the 24% federal bracket, that same position inside a taxable brokerage account nets $30,400 after tax, while inside a Roth IRA it keeps the full $40,000. The annual Roth advantage on a single ordinary-income position: $9,600, compounding permanently. Agency mortgage REIT distributions are ordinary income rather than qualified dividends, so the tax drag scales directly with the headline yield.

Dividend Safety Read Before The Tax Math

Orchid Island Capital (NYSE:ORC) cut its monthly payout from $0.12 to $0.10 beginning with the 2026-04-30 ex-dividend date, dropping the annualized forward dividend to $1.20 per share. Management said the Q2 dividend was “right around” the portfolio’s earnings yield on book value near 16.8%, but flagged that “the fact that we only cover 91% of the funding with hedges implies there’s some room there for leakage in terms of compressing the dividend.” The payment record shows repeated reductions since 2013.

ARMOUR Residential REIT (NYSE:ARR) has held the monthly common dividend at $0.24 per share across every listed record from 2024-01-12 through 2026-09-15. Q2 distributable earnings of $0.72 per common share covered the quarterly dividend of $0.72, and CEO Scott Ulm said the company prioritizes “maintaining common share dividends appropriate for the intermediate term rather than focusing on short-term market fluctuations.” A recent filing referenced a 16.2% dividend yield.

AGNC Investment (NASDAQ:AGNC) has paid 12 cents per share for 75 consecutive months, the most consistent record in this cohort. Q2 net spread and dollar roll income was 40 cents per common share against declared dividends of 36 cents, economic return on tangible common equity ran 6.7%, and the annualized forward dividend sits at $1.44 per share.

What Each Position Keeps: Roth vs. Taxable at 24%

Per-share dividend income is fixed. What changes is what the investor keeps.

All three payouts are non-qualified. In the 24% bracket, $0.24 of every $1.00 of dividend income leaves for the IRS inside a taxable account. In a Roth, the full dollar stays. Applied to the $500,000/8% frame above, that gap equals $9,600 per year on one position, or $96,000 across a decade with no reinvestment. At ARR’s referenced 16.2% yield, the gap widens materially per dollar invested.

Bracket Multiplier: Same Position, Different Damage

Tax leakage scales with the marginal rate. On the $40,000 gross income figure, the 24% bracket surrenders $9,600 annually. A 22% bracket investor loses proportionally less. A 32% or 37% bracket investor loses meaningfully more on the same portfolio. The higher the bracket, the more urgent Roth placement becomes on any holding throwing ordinary-income distributions, which describes every mortgage REIT payout on this list.

Compounding Insight Most Readers Miss

The $9,600 annual Roth advantage repeats every year the position is held. Reinvested inside a Roth at the same distribution rate, that cash buys additional shares that themselves produce ordinary income shielded from tax. Across 10 or 20 years the delta stacks: raw sum plus every tax-free distribution the reinvested income generates. Against a 4.83% 10-year Treasury benchmark, an ultra-high-yield agency mREIT position is where account location does its heaviest work.

Action Items Before Your Next Statement

• If ORC, ARR, or AGNC sits in a taxable brokerage account, calculate this year’s dividend income at your marginal rate before your next tax filing so the after-tax number is on paper.
• Run the Roth conversion math on any ordinary-income position first, since every dollar of non-qualified distribution converted permanently escapes the annual tax drag.
• Sequence any phased conversion by starting with the highest-yielding, non-qualified names ahead of positions paying qualified dividends already taxed at preferential rates.

Highest-bracket income investors holding ultra-high-yield mREITs in taxable accounts have the most to gain from account relocation. At higher yields the tax bill scales up; at higher brackets it scales up faster. The quiet years between a last paycheck and the first RMD are when conversions cost the least, and we sized up that window in a free guide here.

The post A $500,000 Roth Portfolio Loaded With High-Yield Dividend Stocks Pays $40,000 a Year and the IRS Gets None of It appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

Workers are often advised not to retire on Social Security alone. The reason? If you earn an average paycheck, Social Security will only replace about 40% of it.

Retirees typically need somewhere in the ballpark of 70% to 80% of their former income to live comfortably. So having other income streams to supplement Social Security is key.

Unfortunately, data from the nonpartisan Senior Citizens League reveals that many retirees are extremely reliant on Social Security. An estimated 24.6% seniors have only those monthly benefits for income.

Worse yet, the average monthly retirement benefit today is about $2,086 per month. On an annual basis, that’s a $25,000 income, which may not even be enough to cover basic expenses.

And of course there’s the potential for Social Security cuts to worry about. The program’s Trustees recently projected that Social Security’s trust fund could be depleted by late 2032. Without reforms, benefits could be reduced by about 22% across the board.

That’s why it’s important not to retire on Social Security. And if you want to avoid that fate, there’s one simple thing you need to do.

Prioritize retirement savings from the start

If you don’t want to have constant financial pressure in retirement, you should plan to have income outside of Social Security. And a good way to set yourself up with a comfortable lifestyle is make retirement savings a priority early on in your career.

If you get into the habit of contributing to an account like an IRA or 401(k) and invest your money wisely, you may be able to grow a significant amount of wealth over time. Better yet, you may be able to do that without parting with a significant amount of your pay.

Let’s say you begin saving for retirement at age 25. If you contribute $350 monthly to an IRA or 401(k), by age 65, you might have close to $1.1 million if your portfolio delivers an average annual 8% return, which is a bit below the stock market’s average.

But if you wait to start funding your savings, you’ll need to contribute a lot more money on a monthly basis to build a nest egg that large. If you start saving at 40, for example, and retire at 65, that’s a 25-year window. At that point, if you want a nest egg of just over $1 million, you’ll need to contribute about $1,200 per month, assuming the same 8% return as above.

Contributions that large may be doable if your salary is high. Otherwise, they may be restrictive or not even feasible.

Plus, in your 40s, you may find yourself grappling with college costs if you have kids. So you can’t assume ramping up on retirement savings will be easy or doable.

Make sure your financial plans are grounded in reality

Part of the reason some people may neglect retirement savings is that they expect Social Security to replace their paychecks in full. In the course of your planning, make sure you understand the role Social Security is designed to play in your retirement finances, and that you’re not overestimating your benefits.

Finally, realize that if you have a workplace retirement plan, the contributions you make may not all have to come out of your own paycheck. Many companies offer a 401(k) match that allows you to add to your savings more easily. The key is to capture all of the matching dollars you’re entitled to from the start to make the path to building retirement wealth more seamless.

The post 24.6 Million Seniors Live on Social Security Alone, About $25,000 a Year. Here’s How Not to Join Them appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

Once adjusted for inflation, Joe Biden’s four-year term (2021 to 2025) added an average of about $870 billion a year to the national debt. Only two presidents have added more per year in real terms.

That count needs resolution up front. Three presidential terms rank above Biden on an annualized, inflation-adjusted basis: Donald Trump’s first term (about $1.92 trillion per year), Barack Obama’s eight years (about $1.34 trillion per year), and Donald Trump’s second term, still in progress (about $1.31 trillion per year). Because Trump appears twice, the list resolves to three terms but only two distinct presidents. The headline uses the two-presidents reading, consistent with 24/7 Wall St.’s earlier nominal-dollar ranking of the same presidents, published September 1, 2026. Trump’s second-term figure is a partial-term running pace based on data through roughly August 2026.

Method in One Paragraph

“Real” means adjusted for inflation; all figures here are in Q2 2026 dollars. “Annualized” means the average per year of the term rather than the cumulative total. Ranking by annual pace reorders the list, so a two-term president can add more in total yet rank lower per year. Inflation adjustment also reorders things against an unadjusted ranking, because terms that ran during high-inflation years lose a larger share of their nominal total once deflated. Our companion unadjusted ranking is available for comparison.

Modern Ranking, 1961 to Present, according to Congressional Research Service

Average annual real, inflation-adjusted debt added, Q2 2026 dollars:

For scale, Biden’s total real increase across the four years was about $3.46 trillion, which illustrates the total-versus-annualized distinction. Context below the table: John F. Kennedy at about $0.025 trillion per year, Lyndon Johnson essentially flat at about $0.0002 trillion per year, and Richard Nixon at about negative $0.016 trillion per year in real terms.

Before 1961: An Independent Calculation, according to Congressional Research Service

The Congressional Research Service inauguration-day debt series, and the secondary source that rebased it into current dollars, both begin in 1961. Figures for presidents before Kennedy are computed separately, applying the same general method (the BEA GDP implicit price deflator) to historical debt levels. Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower both presided over real-dollar debt decreases. With Nixon, they are the only presidents going back to the early 1930s whose terms saw the debt shrink after inflation, and none since has repeated it.

Franklin D. Roosevelt (March 1933 to April 12, 1945, about 12.1 years): total real change of plus $2.97 trillion, or about plus $0.25 trillion per year. The total is enormous, driven by the Depression and the Second World War, but because the term ran nearly twelve years the annual figure lands mid-table.

Harry Truman (April 1945 to January 20, 1953, about 7.8 years): negative $0.82 trillion total, or about negative $0.11 trillion per year. Dwight Eisenhower (January 1953 to January 1961, about 8.0 years): negative $0.14 trillion total, or about negative $0.02 trillion per year, according to Congressional Research Service.

Reproducing the Method

BEA GDP implicit price deflator, 2017 equals 100 basis. Values used: 6.514 (1933), 9.120 (1945), 13.447 (1953), 15.660 (1961), and 133.855 for Q2 2026, according to Congressional Research Service. Debt anchors: about $22.5 billion at fiscal 1933, per the Tax Policy Center; $234.1 billion at Truman’s succession on April 12, 1945, from Harry S. Truman’s own official statement; approximately $263.0 billion at Eisenhower’s inauguration; and $290.035 billion at Kennedy’s inauguration, from the Congressional Research Service series.

The $263.0 billion figure is the least precise data point in the piece. It is linearly interpolated between the June 1952 and June 1953 fiscal year-end figures rather than pulled from a dated source. The other three anchors are better grounded. One further reconciliation: our earlier unadjusted article used a different end-of-term debt level for Roosevelt because that reading was fiscal-year-end, while this piece uses the level on the date of his death.

Attribution Caveat and Close

Wars, recessions, pandemics, monetary policy and congressional appropriations shape these figures as much as any administration’s choices, most obviously for Roosevelt (Depression, World War II) and Truman (postwar demobilization). A president’s first months also run under budgets enacted before inauguration. This is a transparent ranking built on a defensible method, but the two halves carry different sourcing certainty: the pre-1961 figures are an independent calculation, computed separately from the authoritative CRS series, according to Congressional Research Service.

The post Joe Biden Added $870 Billion A Year To The National Debt Adjusted For Inflation, Only 2 Presidents Have Added More appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE:HPE) stock is up 11% to $61.49 in Friday morning trading, one of the biggest single-session moves the server and networking maker has posted this year. The catalyst sits outside the company. Oracle (NYSE:ORCL) told investors after Thursday’s close that it plans an enormous year of capital spending, and that spending flows straight to the vendors that build, fill and cool the data center racks powering AI workloads.

Also rising sharply, Dell Technologies (NYSE:DELL) stock is up 11% to $561.79 on the same read-through, with Dell’s AI server franchise sitting directly in the line of sight for the build-out Oracle described the previous evening. Super Micro Computer (NASDAQ:SMCI) stock is climbing 7% to $40.15, a comparatively smaller lift for Super Micro but still well ahead of what a normal-tempo session for the shares would deliver.

The scale of the divergence tells the story. The iShares U.S. Technology ETF (NYSE ARCA:IYW) is up 1% on the session. Meanwhile, the Invesco QQQ Trust (NASDAQ:QQQ) is up 0.9%, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Dell and Super Micro shares are all moving many multiples of both funds, which frames the session as a targeted repricing of one corner of technology rather than a market-wide rally.

Oracle’s Capital Spending Lands as Server Revenue

Oracle CFO Hilary Maxson told investors on Thursday’s earnings call, “We continue to anticipate 90 to 95 billion in CapEx for the full year, with not more than 70 billion in net cash CapEx.” That’s an outlay measured in tens of billions of dollars for a single fiscal year at a single customer, and much of it flows to the physical build-out of AI-ready data centers, funding racks, cooling, power and networking gear at hyperscale. For Hewlett Packard Enterprise, whose server and networking businesses sell into exactly that kind of build, one hyperscale customer’s plan reads directly as future orders across racks, switches and storage for the segments carrying the growth story.

No press release, filing or company statement from Hewlett Packard Enterprise or from Dell has been published to explain a session move of this size at either name. The plain reading is a sector-wide repricing of AI infrastructure demand, driven by a customer commitment rather than by anything the server vendors themselves disclosed today (we profiled seven of the suppliers riding this build-out, from power to cooling, in a free report here). The Dell and Hewlett Packard Enterprise moves effectively imply a share of Oracle’s rack build flowing to each vendor, without any fresh company disclosure from either to anchor the reaction.

Super Micro’s Smaller Move and a Multiyear Framing

Super Micro is trailing its peers on the day, and the context sits in comments the company made after Thursday’s close. Mike Staiger, Super Micro’s senior vice president of corporate development, pointed at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia and Technology Conference to the company’s order book of $60 billion as the foundation for its fiscal year outlook, and he described the AI infrastructure build-out as a potentially multiyear cycle rather than a one-quarter surge. That framing gives Super Micro shareholders a demand narrative that predates today’s Oracle-driven read-through.

The relative underperformance versus Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Dell may reflect that Super Micro’s story was already partly told to the market on Thursday evening, so today’s Oracle-driven read-through registers as a smaller incremental datapoint for Super Micro than for the two larger peers. All three server names fell or lagged in Thursday’s regular session, when the weakness was attributed to profit taking after two-day post-earnings runs rather than to any company disclosure at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Dell or Super Micro.

What to Watch Next

The question for HPE shareholders is whether one customer’s spending plan is a durable demand signal or a single quarter of enthusiasm carried forward by the broader AI trade. Oracle’s capex line is now a variable Hewlett Packard Enterprise investors can track alongside the company’s own order backlog, because a customer whose data center cadence keeps accelerating translates directly into rack, server and networking orders for Hewlett Packard Enterprise across the coming quarters. The order book at Hewlett Packard Enterprise has become the natural checkpoint against which each new hyperscale disclosure could be measured.

Investors can look for signs that other hyperscale customers echo Oracle’s spending posture at their next updates. HPE stock trading well above where Thursday’s pullback began is a different event from a dip being bought, and it argues for a sector rerating on a single customer’s plan. Position sizing on one’s exposure to Hewlett Packard Enterprise should reflect how much of today’s move depends on one buyer’s fiscal year continuing to look as ambitious tomorrow as it did on Thursday evening.

The post Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Dell Surge 11% as Oracle’s Capex Guidance Lifts AI Server Demand; Super Micro Climbs 7% appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

Mark Zuckerberg has spent the past year telling investors that “personal superintelligence” would arrive through Meta (NASDAQ:META) apps that billions of people already open every day. Muse launched at the end of August and climbed to third place on the United States App Store within two days. JPMorgan responded with an Overweight upgrade tied to Muse’s early traction.

An App Store ranking captures downloads over a short window, while engagement and revenue remain the metrics that matter. The more interesting question is what Muse asks of you: the agent is only useful in proportion to how much of your digital life it can access. That is also why some analysts are unconvinced.

What Muse Actually Does

Muse is pitched as a general-purpose assistant that manages email, plans travel, books restaurants, monitors subscriptions, compares prices, and completes purchases with user approval. To do any of that, it needs access to your inbox, calendar, accounts, and, in some cases, payment credentials.

Meta says you approve each action, can revoke connections at any time, and receive an activity log. On the July earnings call, Zuckerberg said Meta launched incognito mode on WhatsApp and the Meta AI app so private conversations remain hidden, and framed privacy as “a fundamental part of the agents that we’re building.” After integrating Muse Spark, Meta saw “a 60% increase in the number of people interacting with the assistant each day.”

The transcript does not specify how Muse handles email passwords or stored payment secrets. An Oppenheimer analyst questioned whether ordinary consumers will hand a social-media company the keys to their inbox.

Distribution Is the Real Advantage

Meta’s advantage over a standalone AI startup is reach. Family of Apps daily active people hit 3.6 billion in the second quarter, and more than 1 million businesses already use Meta’s business agents on WhatsApp and Messenger every week.

Three plausible Muse revenue lines exist: subscriptions, shopping commissions when the agent completes a purchase, and business services sold to merchants. Zuckerberg described a “business in a box” ambition with subscription, volume, and performance-based pricing. The Brazilian rental-car company Movida saw a 44% increase in daily bookings through WhatsApp after deploying an agent, with 85% of conversations resolved without a human.

Costs are heavier than revenue today. Meta’s second-quarter free cash flow collapsed to $784 million from $8.55 billion a year earlier, with full-year capex guided to $130-145 billion. All of that spending flows to the power, cooling, and networking suppliers behind the data centers, and we profiled seven of them in a free report on the AI infrastructure buildout.

Trust as the Bottleneck

Usefulness and intrusiveness are the same property. If you want Muse to catch a fraudulent charge or rebook a canceled flight, it needs account access, and each connection widens the blast radius of any breach.

Meta’s regulatory history does not help the pitch. The company took $2.4 billion in legal charges in the second quarter alone and still faces U.S. trials scheduled for the year that may result in material losses tied to youth safety.

Meta trades at a P/E of 23x after slipping 14.03% over the past year, with the stock at $644.38. The ad engine still grew 27% while Muse gives the capex story a consumer product to point to. On the current valuation and distribution advantage, META screens favorably for investors researching names that can tolerate the capex cycle and legal overhang.

The post Mark Zuckerberg May Have Found Meta’s Next Hit. Would You Hand It Your Email and Passwords? appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

Single-stock leveraged inverse ETFs are among the most misunderstood products on U.S. exchanges, and Tradr 2X Short AXTI Daily ETF (CBOE:AXTQ) is a textbook example of a fund whose name tells you almost nothing about how it actually behaves, according to Tradr ETFs. AXTQ is engineered to deliver -200% of the daily performance of its underlying stock, which means the fund is rebuilt each morning through swap exposure and reset again at the close, according to Tradr ETFs. That daily reset is the entire story. Investors who treat AXTQ like a conventional bearish position on AXT Inc. quickly discover that the math of compounded returns does not cooperate, and the fund’s own issuer, Tradr ETFs, describes these products as tools for sophisticated traders rather than portfolio building blocks.

What AXTQ Actually Is

The registered fund is the Tradr 2X Short AXTI Daily ETF, listed on Cboe, and it tracks AXT Inc. (NASDAQ:AXTI), a Fremont, California based designer and manufacturer of single element and composite semiconductor substrates, according to Tradr ETFs. AXTI is a small, volatile name in the semiconductor equipment & materials industry with a beta of 1.92 and a 52 week range that runs from $3.70 to $143.16. The underlying itself is a high-octane trading vehicle before you apply any leverage.

The return engine is straightforward in concept and treacherous in practice. Tradr uses total return swaps to establish notional short exposure equal to roughly two times the fund’s assets, then rebalances that exposure back to the target ratio every day. If AXTI falls 5% in a session, AXTQ is designed to rise about 10% that day. If AXTI rises 5%, AXTQ is designed to fall about 10%. Held for a single trading day, the product does what it says. Held for a week, a month, or a quarter, the compounding of those daily resets produces returns that can diverge sharply from what a static -2x bet on AXTI would have earned, according to Tradr ETFs.

Why the Math Punishes Buy and Hold

The clearest way to see this is to look at what AXTI has actually done. Over the past year, AXTI is up 1,911.31%, moving from $3.36 on September 10, 2025 to $67.58. Year to date the stock is up 313.33%. In the past week alone it has gained 20.25%, even as it sits down 8.4% over the trailing month. That is the profile of a stock whose direction reverses violently and often.

A daily-reset 2x inverse fund held through that kind of price action is a wealth destruction machine, according to Tradr ETFs. Every up day on AXTI shrinks the fund’s asset base, and every subsequent down day rebuilds a smaller notional short. Volatility itself, independent of direction, drains value. The prospectus quantifies this risk directly. Tradr discloses that investors in a fund seeking two times daily performance would lose all of their money if the underlying security moves more than 50% adversely on a given trading day, according to Tradr ETFs. Given that AXTI has traded between $3.70 and $143.16 in the past year, a single-session move of that magnitude is a realistic scenario the product’s own prospectus contemplates.

Narrow Legitimate Uses

AXTQ has a role, but the role is small and requires active management. There are two defensible ways to use it.

• A short horizon directional trade. A trader with a specific catalyst view, say an earnings release or a customer concentration disclosure, can use AXTQ to express a one to three day bearish thesis without opening a margin short. The position needs a predefined exit and a stop, because holding past the catalyst forfeits the leverage math.
• A temporary hedge on an existing AXTI position. An investor with a large concentrated long in AXTI who cannot sell for tax or lockup reasons can use AXTQ to dampen exposure for a defined window. The hedge ratio drifts every day, so the position must be resized frequently.

Both uses share the same requirement: a plan to exit. Left alone, the position stops behaving like the trade the investor put on. Speculating on a product like this is fine as long as it stays small and follows rules, the sizing and guardrails we spelled out in a free speculation playbook.

Simpler Alternatives Worth Comparing

Before buying AXTQ, look at the AXTI options chain. The full-chain put/call ratio on AXTI is 0.67, and there is meaningful put liquidity at the December 18, 2026 expiration with put open interest of 17,257 and the September 18, 2026 expiration with put open interest of 16,297. Puts give the trader a defined premium, a fixed expiration, and no daily reset decay. For a multi-week bearish view, buying an AXTI put or put spread frequently produces a cleaner payoff than holding a daily-reset inverse fund. Directly shorting AXTI through a margin account is another route, though borrow availability on a stock with this kind of squeeze history is a separate question. Traders who want a menu of single-stock inverse products can also compare Tradr’s lineup against GraniteShares and Direxion Daily peers, all of which share the same daily-reset mechanics and the same decay problem.

Tradeoffs You Are Actually Accepting

Three constraints matter more than anything on a fact sheet.

1. Compounding decay. The longer AXTQ is held through volatile price action, the further its return drifts from a static -2x return on AXTI, according to Tradr ETFs. This is a structural feature that cannot be engineered away.
2. Single-day wipeout risk. The 50% adverse move threshold disclosed by Tradr ETFs is a real ceiling on how much bad news the fund can absorb in one session. On a stock that has already touched both $3.70 and $143.16 in the past year, that ceiling is closer than it looks.
3. Underlying fundamentals that argue against a persistent short. AXTI carries an analyst target price of $91.60 with one strong buy, three buys, and one hold, and quarterly revenue growth of 164.8% year over year. Whether or not those figures justify the current valuation, the sell-side consensus is not aligned with a long-duration bearish position.

Who This Fund Fits, and Who Should Walk Away

AXTQ fits a narrow audience: active traders with a defined catalyst, a predefined exit, and the operational discipline to monitor the position daily. It also fits an AXTI holder who needs a short, tactical hedge for a specific window. For anyone else, and particularly for retirement accounts, taxable buy and hold portfolios, or investors looking for a way to "bet against" a stock they think is overvalued, this ETF is the wrong tool. A put spread with a defined premium, or simply not owning AXTI, expresses the same view without the decay tax. The fund’s launch announcement from Tradr ETFs on August 13, 2026 is explicit that these products are engineered for sophisticated traders. Taking the issuer at its word is the shortest path to using AXTQ correctly, which for most readers means not using it at all.

The post AXTQ Is a Trading Tool, Not a Portfolio Holding. Know the Difference Before You Buy appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

Shares of Bitmine Immersion Technologies (NYSE:BMNR) are climbing sharply in Friday morning trading as Ethereum (CRYPTO:ETH) trades higher and a doubled Cantor Fitzgerald price target hands the crypto treasury trade a fresh anchor. Bitmine stock is up 8% to $26.09 in a morning session that’s already seen an outsized single-name run. Ethereum is up 7% over the past 24 hours to $2,606.20.

The peer complex is rallying alongside it. SharpLink Gaming (NASDAQ:SBET) stock is up 9% to $9.16, and Strategy (NASDAQ:MSTR) stock is up 4% to $134.15. Meanwhile, the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (NYSEARCA:SPY) is up 0.86%, framing the crypto treasury bid as leveraged asset exposure rather than a market-wide risk move.

Cantor’s Doubled Target Meets an Ethereum Bid

Cantor Fitzgerald doubled its price target on Bitmine stock to $63.60 from $30.60 and kept an Outperform rating, with the firm also raising targets on other crypto treasury names and arguing the current crypto bear-market drawdown will likely have bottomed by October. The Cantor note landed ahead of Friday’s session rather than inside it, so Friday’s fresh catalyst is Ethereum trading higher while the research call sits in the background. What the doubled target does is give Bitmine a number the market can trade against as sentiment turns.

Bitmine holds an Ethereum treasury of 5.93 million tokens, which is the mechanism that turns the stock into a leveraged proxy for the asset. The company raises capital in public markets and buys digital assets for its balance sheet, so shareholders carry exposure to both the treasury’s mark and Ethereum’s direction at the same time. Bitmine funds some of those purchases by issuing new shares, which enlarges the treasury and the share count together, and Thomas Lee runs the strategy as chairman.

Ethereum-Heavy Treasuries Move Together

SharpLink Gaming is built on the same template, with a large Ethereum treasury of its own and a share price that trades as a proxy for the coin. That’s why SharpLink stock is running with Bitmine this morning rather than on any company-specific catalyst, and it’s also why SBET stock can outrun Bitmine stock on a percentage basis when the crypto bid is strongest.

Strategy is the original corporate treasury vehicle of this kind, but it holds Bitcoin rather than Ethereum, which usually keeps it trading on a slightly different rhythm. On days when the whole digital asset complex bids at once, however, Strategy stock moves in sympathy with the Ethereum-heavy names. The sympathy bid is why Strategy stock is climbing this morning even though Bitcoin sits on its balance sheet rather than ETH.

What to Watch

The mechanism that lets Bitmine stock climb many times harder than the broad market when Ethereum rises works exactly the same way in reverse. A treasury that magnifies an Ethereum rally magnifies an Ethereum drawdown with the same efficiency, and investors sizing exposure to Bitmine or SharpLink are effectively stacking beta on top of an already volatile asset. That’s the trade-off the structure imposes on Bitmine shareholders in both directions.

Investors can watch for whether Ethereum holds its bid through the U.S. close, since that’s what has to remain true for today’s move in Bitmine stock to stick into next week. The next dated signpost is Cantor’s called-for October bottom in the broader crypto drawdown, which sets the timeline the sell side is trading around for Bitmine and Strategy alike. Position sizing on your exposure to these treasury names should reflect that a single asset’s daily range is doing most of the work in the equity, the kind of speculative sleeve we sized up rules-first in a free guide to keeping high-risk bets small.

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Greg Jensen, a chief investment officer at Bridgewater Associates, used a recent appearance on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast to argue that one of Wall Street’s most familiar jobs is already gone in practice. His claim is that AI systems now do the core equity analyst function, ingesting both structured filings and unstructured company disclosures and producing forward estimates, better than the humans who have historically done that work. He framed it as an assessment of where the technology stands inside his own firm today.

That is a notable thing to hear from the investment chief of one of the largest hedge funds in the world. Bridgewater’s clients are pensions, sovereign wealth funds, and endowments that have paid for exactly the kind of human research judgment Jensen is describing as displaced. And the audience most exposed to his claim is anyone who reads sell-side notes, tracks analyst ratings, or leans on consensus estimates to make decisions.

Inside Bridgewater’s AI Buildout

Jensen offered a concrete signal of how seriously the firm is investing in this shift. He said Bridgewater’s token spend is up roughly 200x year-over-year, a figure he presented as approximate rather than precise. That spend funds the compute behind the firm’s in-house models.

He then described the economic loop Bridgewater is trying to build. “We have a value creating AI that’s generating more value than we’re paying it. And one of the ways we set it up is as it makes money, we put more into making the intelligence better,” Jensen said. His moat argument follows directly from that setup. “The people that can use intelligence, that generate revenue that could then put that revenue back into generating better intelligence can create this moat,” he said, describing the design as a flywheel where better prediction funds still-better prediction.

The organizational implication is direct. Jensen described the goal as building an investment firm with “the AI at the center,” with human risk controls and human oversight of data acquisition maintained around it for safety reasons.

His Forecast on Firm-Wide Capability

Jensen went further and offered a forecast, framed as his own view rather than an established fact. He said the machine side of Bridgewater is already producing outputs that stand up next to the firm’s long-running human process. “The AI is making the investment decisions and doing that in a better and better way, such that now we’ve got these two intelligences, this human intuition system that we’ve worked on for 50 years, compounding all of our understanding, this AI system that’s now been at it for two and a half years,” he said. The unstated trajectory is that the newer system keeps compounding.

Why He Says Markets Still Won’t Be Efficient

The investing takeaway is where Jensen pushes back on the easy conclusion. He does not think universal AI adoption makes markets perfectly efficient. He argues the frontier keeps moving, and that firms competing on capability at that frontier will still generate durable edges over firms running one step behind. In his framing, the top model providers themselves keep leapfrogging one another on capability, and the same competitive dynamic applies to the investors deploying those models. Being at the frontier still pays.

He is candid about the risks that come with all of this. A separate 24/7 Wall St. piece covers his warnings about AI risk from the same episode and can be read here.

What It Means for Readers Who Follow Analyst Research

For investors who rely on published sell-side research and analyst price targets, Jensen’s argument suggests treating those outputs as one input among several rather than a definitive read. If the estimate-building and disclosure-ingestion work is increasingly automated at large buy-side shops, consensus figures may compress faster after events, and the useful lifespan of a given rating change may shrink. Cross-checking against primary filings, transcripts, and management guidance matters more. Jensen’s full remarks are available on the Bloomberg Odd Lots podcast page, and readers can judge his framing directly.

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Adobe (NASDAQ:ADBE) trades at $248.83, while the average Wall Street price target sits at $277.02, implying roughly 11% upside. Phillip Securities analyst Paul Chew models the stock at $385, a gap of roughly 55% above current levels.

Adobe sits at the intersection of every debate investors are having about software: creative tools, marketing clouds, document workflows, and a generative AI franchise scaling fast. The company posted its fifth consecutive EPS beat and raised full-year guidance, yet shares keep sinking. That dislocation matters. Either the market is pricing in something the numbers hide, or sellers are giving long-term holders a rare entry.

Strong Earnings, Weak Stock

Adobe fell 12.92% in the past week after reporting Q3 FY2026 results, capping a 28.9% year-to-date decline. Revenue of $6.76 billion grew 12.9% year over year and beat consensus. Non-GAAP EPS came in at $6.13.

The selloff trigger lay underneath the headline. RPO growth decelerated to 8% year over year and analysts flagged a 36% to 37% drop in net new ARR, which management attributed to a deliberate freemium push prioritizing user acquisition over near-term monetization. A CEO transition, with Shantanu Narayen handing the reins to Anil Chakravarthy, combined with AI-disruption fears tied to new OpenAI image tools, fueled the selloff. The S&P 500 slipped just 1.98% over the same week.

Bull Case: Three Pillars

Chew anchors his $385 target to three pillars. First, Firefly and generative-credit consumption are driving structural ARPU expansion inside Creative Cloud Pro. AI-first ending ARR now exceeds $650 million and grew more than 150% year over year. Firefly ARR itself expanded 40% quarter over quarter.

Second, the freemium engine. Adobe reached more than 1 billion monthly active users, with creative freemium users surpassing 100 million and growing greater than 70% year over year. Chew views that funnel as a low-cost acquisition machine converting once users hit generative paywalls. Third, valuation. Adobe trades at a forward P/E of 9, roughly a 29% discount to enterprise software peers.

The broader analyst community is more cautious. Of 40 analysts covering the stock, 4 rate it Strong Buy, 8 Buy, 23 Hold, 4 Sell, and 1 Strong Sell. Forward EPS estimates ticked higher over the past 90 days, with FY26 consensus now at $24.41 versus $23.54 ninety days ago. Chew’s timeline is tied to Adobe MAX in November and how fast agentic and Firefly monetization converts freemium volume into ARR.

Peers Fell Less

Enterprise software sold off together, but Adobe led lower. Salesforce (NYSE:CRM) trades at $243.11, down 8.1% for the week but only 7.79% year to date. Its average analyst target of $273.37 implies roughly 12% upside.

Autodesk (NASDAQ:ADSK) is the closest structural analog. Shares at $211.61 are down 28.51% year to date, yet the average analyst target of $315.37 implies roughly 49% upside. Consensus sees more room in Autodesk than in Adobe. Investors betting on the Adobe gap are siding with the bull outlier over the average analyst.

Setup and Catalysts

Adobe trades at a trailing P/E of 15 and a forward P/E of 9, with a PEG of 0.63. Shares are off 28.94% over the past year, while the S&P 500 has advanced 16.19% over the same period.

The bull thesis holds if Firefly and generative-credit monetization keep compounding at triple-digit rates while the freemium base converts on schedule. Q4 execution, the November Adobe MAX event, and early wins from the incoming CEO are the catalysts to watch. The bear thesis strengthens if net new ARR keeps decelerating and RPO growth stalls in single digits, validating concerns that OpenAI, Canva, and native model providers are commoditizing Adobe’s creative moat.

The valuation, cash flow, and AI ARR trajectory frame an attractive risk-reward, but Chew’s $385 target requires a monetization inflection not yet visible in net new ARR. The consensus $277 case looks more grounded in current data, with $385 representing upside optionality tied to an execution inflection.

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For retirees who pay bills every month, a portfolio that mails checks four times a year forces awkward cash management. Monthly payers smooth that out, letting income match the utility bill and the grocery run. These four names have demonstrated a solid track record and dividend coverage backed by fresh operating results, including Realty Income’s 115th consecutive quarterly dividend increase in Q2 2026.

Realty Income

Realty Income (NYSE:O) markets itself as The Monthly Dividend Company, and the recent record supports the tagline. The latest declared monthly dividend is $0.2715 per share, payable October 15, 2026, with an annualized forward dividend of $3.258 per share. Against a share price near $59.92, the yield sits at 5.3%, comfortably in high-yield territory.

Realty Income guided 2026 AFFO per share to $4.44 to $4.45, roughly 4% growth, versus an annualized payout of $3.252 per share, so the AFFO payout ratio leaves meaningful headroom. Portfolio occupancy is 98.8% with 102.7% rent recapture. The balance sheet carries a Fitch A rating with a Stable Outlook, net debt to EBITDAre of 5.4x, and an expanded $5.5B revolver. The dividend history is deep: the company’s latest release counted its 136th common stock monthly dividend increase and its 674th consecutive monthly dividend.

The bull case for income buyers is simple: a diversified net-lease book (Q2 2026 revenue rose 9.7% year over year to $1.55B) plus a $6B hyperscale data center joint venture that pushes growth beyond retail. Risk to watch out for: leverage has crept up, and 65.7% of annualized base rent comes from non-investment-grade tenants, which becomes more visible if the credit cycle turns.

Agree Realty

Agree Realty (NYSE:ADC) is the higher-quality, lower-yielding cousin in net lease. The current monthly dividend is $0.267 per share, most recently paid September 15, 2026, with an annualized forward dividend of $3.204 per share. At a recent price of $71.51, that pencils to a 4.33% yield.

Management raised 2026 AFFO per share guidance to $4.57 to $4.59, about 5.8% growth at the midpoint, well above the annualized monthly payout. Tenant quality is unusually clean: 73.2% investment-grade tenants, portfolio occupancy of 99.8% across 2,825 properties in all 50 states plus DC, and only 0.06% credit and occupancy loss. Liquidity stands at $1.9B, with net debt to recurring EBITDA of 5.2x (3.7x proforma). The dividend record shows a step up from $0.262 to $0.267 beginning with the April 30, 2026 ex-dividend date, part of a pattern of recurring increases since the switch to monthly payments in 2021.

Bull case: Q2 2026 was a record quarter for investment activity, $501.7M across 102 properties at a 7.0% weighted-average cap rate and an 11.2-year weighted-average lease term, meaning new deals are priced to accrete to the monthly payout. Risk: interest expense rose to $40.3M versus $32.3M year over year, and continued equity issuance dilutes per-share results even as it funds growth.

Main Street Capital

Main Street Capital (NYSE:MAIN) is a lower-middle-market business development company that pairs a monthly regular dividend with a quarterly supplemental. The regular monthly amount is $0.265 per share, in place for the July through December 2026 payments, up from $0.260 earlier in 2026. Supplemental distributions of $0.30 per share have been paid every March, June, September, and December in 2024, 2025, and 2026. The shares trade at roughly $56.51, with the Alpha Vantage overview listing a yield of 5.49% on the regular payout.

Q2 2026 adjusted net investment income of $1.04 per share comfortably covered three monthly regulars ($0.265 x 3 = $0.795) plus the $0.30 supplemental. Annualized return on equity ran at 18.9%, and NAV per share climbed to $33.92, up $0.46 sequentially. Portfolio credit stayed clean, with non-accruals at 1.1% of fair value and 4.0% of cost. Liquidity was $1.15B, with the Corporate Facility expanded to $1.24B and extended to June 2031. Management has already announced Q4 2026 regular monthly dividends at $0.27 per share, another step up, and the record shows 12 increases to the regular monthly dividend since Q4 2021 and 20 consecutive quarterly supplementals.

Bull case: the external asset manager business is a growing side engine, contributing $9.4M to NII on $1.8B of AUM. Risk: a lower benchmark rate curve pressures floating-rate interest income, and the quarter included a $13.3M realized loss on one restructured private loan.

Gladstone Investment

Gladstone Investment (NASDAQ:GAIN) is the small-cap BDC in the group, with a market cap near $639M and a share price around $16.23. The monthly distribution is $0.08 per share, declared for July, August, and September 2026, and the trailing 12-month total is $0.96 per share. Every listed ex-dividend record from January 24, 2025 through August 18, 2026 shows the same $0.08 monthly amount, which is what income planners want to see.

Fiscal Q1 2027 adjusted NII was $0.26 per share, topping expectations of $0.21, on total investment income of $28.36M, up 10.2% year over year. Annualized regular distributions of $0.96 per share are covered by the quarterly adjusted NII run rate. Management framed the coverage plainly on the prior quarter’s call: “From our operating income, we were able to maintain our monthly distribution to shareholders of $0.08 per share or $0.96 per share on an annual basis. So we have earned our ability to distribute from our income that we generated.” The credit facility was expanded from $300M to $405M with maturity extended to June 2031, and the weighted-average yield on interest-bearing investments is 12.9%, 100% variable-rate indexed to 30-day SOFR.

Bull case: buyout exits have funded lumpy supplemental distributions on top of the monthly base, and management expects full debt repayment and a significant capital gain from the SFEG Holdings subsidiary sale in Q3/Q4 2026. Risk: NAV per share slipped 3.2% sequentially to $16.24, reflecting $18.8M net unrealized depreciation and a $9.0M realized loss on the Home Concepts loan restructuring.

Putting the Roster Together

These four names give a retiree twelve income deposits a year from four different engines: a mega-cap net-lease compounder in Realty Income, a higher-quality net-lease grower in Agree Realty, a scaled BDC with a supplemental kicker in Main Street Capital, and a smaller buyout-oriented BDC in Gladstone Investment. Each one’s regular monthly payout is currently covered by AFFO or adjusted NII per the most recent quarter, and each management team has raised, sustained, or supplemented that payout in the trailing year. For an investor who budgets in monthly terms rather than reinvest, that combination of cadence and coverage is the point (if you want to broaden the bench, we lined up seven of our favorite every-30-day payers in a free monthly dividend report here).

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Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG) and Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META) both dropped Q2 2026 numbers in late July, and the reports pushed each company into a different AI narrative.

Alphabet posted a 82% Cloud surge and a clean beat. Meta beat on revenue but missed EPS by 14.42% after swallowing legal charges and severance costs. Two Magnificent Seven names, two very different quarters.

Cloud Momentum Lifts Alphabet While Legal Bills Sting Meta

Alphabet’s quarter was carried by enterprise AI infrastructure. Google Cloud generated $24.77B in revenue, up 82% YoY, with backlog reaching $514 billion. Sundar Pichai told investors “nearly 90% of the Fortune 100” are using Gemini Enterprise, and Search still grew 17% YoY to $63.27B. Operating margin expanded to 34%.

Meta’s ad engine kept humming. Advertising revenue climbed 27% to $59.36B, with ad impressions up 14% and price per ad up 12%. The catch: total costs jumped 55% to $42.03B, including $2.40B in legal charges tied to youth litigation and $1.18B in severance from an 8,000-person headcount cut. Operating margin compressed from 43% to 31%.

Full Stack Platform vs. Ad-Funded AI Bet

Pichai keeps framing Alphabet as a full-stack operator across chips, models, cloud, and apps. TPU system sales started hitting the books this quarter, and Gemini APIs are processing 22 billion tokens per minute. That breadth funds the capex without a single point of failure.

Meta’s bet is narrower and more concentrated. Mark Zuckerberg is pushing Meta Superintelligence Labs and personal agents, with $130 to $145 billion in 2026 capex funded partly by $83.66B in long-term debt. Free cash flow collapsed 91.31% to $784M.

Meta’s advertising monetization is real, but the balance sheet is doing heavier lifting than Alphabet’s. All that capex has to be powered, cooled, and networked by somebody, and we profiled seven of those suppliers in a free AI infrastructure report.

Watching Capex Discipline and AI Monetization

I want to see whether Meta’s new Muse Spark agent and enterprise APIs turn compute into recurring revenue before infrastructure depreciation compresses margins further.

For Alphabet, the question is whether Cloud can absorb third-party capacity costs without giving back the 35.6% Cloud margin. Analysts already like both: META’s target sits at $754.15 versus a spot price of $653.69.

Why I Lean Toward Alphabet After This Quarter

On the numbers, Alphabet looks better positioned here. A 17 P/E for a business growing Cloud at 82% and Search at 17% feels like a genuine mispricing, and the 37.22% one-year return suggests the market is starting to notice.

Meta trades at a richer 23 P/E with capex nearly doubling and litigation risk still unresolved. For investors focused on a higher-variance turnaround backed by an ad machine that keeps beating revenue, Meta remains in the conversation. But the risk-adjusted case looks stronger for the company whose Cloud backlog alone is bigger than most software vendors’ entire market caps.

The post Alphabet vs. Meta: One Magnificent Seven Stock Is the Better Buy appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) shares are climbing in early Friday trading after a report that the chipmaker is preparing to raise prices on selected personal computer processors. Shares are up 3% to $103.31, recovering the prior session’s decline in a single move. The bounce pushes Intel stock further into rare territory, with shares now up 183% year to date and generally outpacing other large-cap chip names on a percentage basis.

Semiconductor peers are moving higher today, with gains that trail Intel’s. Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ:AMD) stock is up 2% to $512.63, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (NYSE:TSM) stock is up 0.36% to $429.56. That leaves AMD moving higher and Taiwan Semiconductor sitting tight, with Intel clearly leading both on a company-specific catalyst rather than a sector-wide surge.

The iShares Semiconductor ETF (NASDAQ:SOXX) is up 1%, running roughly in line with the broader tech tape as Intel leads the group. The Invesco QQQ Trust (NASDAQ:QQQ) is up 0.94%, but Intel is doing better than both of these ETFs, which points to a stock-specific story rather than a massive rotation into chips.

Chip Price Hike Report Fuels the Bid

Reports this week said Intel could raise prices on selected personal computer processors by 10%. That figure comes from a report, not a company announcement, and it speaks to the margin question that has hung over the stock through its 2026 rally. Higher ASPs on client silicon would flow directly into the gross-margin recovery Intel has been building toward.

On Intel’s second-quarter 2026 call, chief financial officer David Zinsner said the client business benefited from Intel’s own like-for-like price changes, made where the company had seen cost inflation and needed to pass it on to the end customer. That framing turns today’s report from a rumor into a continuation of a pattern Intel has already been executing on. Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan has publicly tied the current cycle to AI-driven demand for compute across CPUs and foundry customers (we profiled seven companies supplying that data-center buildout, from power to cooling, in a free report you can grab here).

Pricing Power or Scarcity Rent

Pricing power and scarcity rent can produce the same headline number but very different follow-throughs. Raising prices while wafers, substrates and memory remain tight can persist only as long as those constraints hold, whereas raising prices because customers have no better option is a more durable margin story for Intel. The distinction is the one that will decide how much today’s report is worth to the shares.

Intel’s client franchise still faces a well-funded AMD, and Taiwan Semiconductor remains the shared foundry lifeline for much of the industry’s leading-edge silicon. AMD has been taking x86 server share and pushing Instinct accelerators into hyperscaler footprints, so any Intel ASP move needs to be read alongside what its main peer is doing on price and volume. Taiwan Semiconductor’s advanced-node capacity is the practical constraint that lets any of these companies raise prices at all.

Piper Sandler began coverage of Intel with a Neutral rating and a $110 price target in the prior session, and Intel stock fell on the call. The firm said Intel’s recent share-price advance leaves less room for further gains in the near term, cited execution risk, and pointed to data center competition, while also noting progress in Intel’s manufacturing roadmap and rising customer interest in its foundry operations. Intel stock currently trades below the target Piper Sandler set, so today’s rebound hasn’t settled the argument the initiation made.

What to Watch

Whether Intel holds its early gains into the close will hint at how much conviction sits behind the price-hike story. A steady bid in AMD and Taiwan Semiconductor through the afternoon would suggest the market is willing to reward pricing news across the group, and a fade in the peers would put the burden of proof back on Intel alone.

Investors can watch for signs that Intel stock keeps its premium to the semiconductor complex, so it makes sense to monitor the iShares Semiconductor ETF and the Invesco QQQ Trust today. Fresh exposure to Intel here should stay small in your allocation, since the stock still trades below the Piper Sandler target and the initiation’s cautions on execution and data center competition remain on the table.

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Shares of Skyworks Solutions (NASDAQ:SWKS) are up 7% to $89.64 in Friday morning trading, notching a second straight session of gains. The catalyst is a live update from chief executive Phil Brace, who told an investor conference audience that the pending combination with Qorvo (NASDAQ:QRVO) has reached its final stages.

Also higher, Qorvo stock is climbing 5% to $118.04 as the fixed exchange ratio pulls Qorvo along on a shorter expected path to close. Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM) stock is up 1% to $179.50, riding the same broader chip bid across the U.S. session.

Meanwhile, the iShares Semiconductor ETF (NASDAQ:SOXX) is higher by 1%, leading the broader technology tape today. The Invesco QQQ Trust (NASDAQ:QQQ) is up 0.82%, so chips are outpacing large-cap tech generally, and the Skyworks-and-Qorvo pair is leading chips today.

Merger Update Named on the Record

The two companies agreed last year to combine in a cash-and-stock transaction that Skyworks Solutions valued at $22 billion, creating a U.S.-based radio frequency (RF), analog and mixed-signal semiconductor company. Brace has now placed that deal in its final stages on the record, converting what had been an inferred outcome into a named one. He is also expected to serve as chief executive of the combined company after close.

Under the merger agreement, Skyworks Solutions will pay Qorvo shareholders $32.50 per share in cash at close, plus 0.96 Skyworks shares for each Qorvo share. That fixed exchange ratio is why Qorvo shares now tend to trade alongside Skyworks as the regulatory calendar narrows. The mechanical link tightens with every incremental piece of good news on timing.

Brace’s live comments also nudged the expected timing forward, from a calendar-year framing into potentially closing inside the current fiscal year for Skyworks. Two jurisdictions still sit on the outstanding regulatory checklist, so the remaining risk on the pair is procedural rather than existential. That framing is a meaningful shift in the story relative to where the deal narrative stood at the beginning of the summer.

Sector Setup Flips for Skyworks

Thursday’s session had a different shape, with the broader chip complex falling while Skyworks jumped and Qorvo tracked it higher, a pattern that read as pure deal-odds repricing against a weak session. Today’s session has flipped, and semiconductors are broadly higher, so Skyworks is now leading a sector that is already rising. That’s a healthier structural setup for the current move in Skyworks than what showed up in the prior session.

The one-month picture is starker for Skyworks: the stock is up 26% over the past month, a run that has taken shares back into a leadership position within the semiconductor cohort. Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) is the largest RF content customer for both Skyworks and Qorvo. That ties the combined company’s future revenue closely to iPhone unit volumes and to dollar content per device.

The move in Qualcomm stock is smaller in percentage terms, but it fits the same read on the session, with chip peers catching a bid rather than trading defensively. The takeaway for Skyworks and Qorvo is that today’s rally isn’t a lonely deal trade, it’s a full sector move with the merger pair sitting on top of it. That matters because it shifts the source of the bid away from a single, event-driven story.

The current setup gives Skyworks two supports underneath the move rather than one: a named catalyst on the Qorvo deal, and a rising cohort of chip peers led by names like Qualcomm. Either support could give way independently, so a stall in the semiconductor bid would not automatically break the Skyworks trade, and vice versa. That is a marginally different risk profile for Skyworks than the pair carried in the prior session.

What to Watch

The remaining question for Skyworks shareholders is execution risk on getting the deal across the line, with approval risk on whether it clears at all now largely settled. Investors can watch for whether Qorvo stock continues to track Skyworks stock tick-for-tick on the fixed exchange ratio through the session, since a widening arbitrage spread would signal fresh timing doubts on the close.

The next scheduled catalysts for Skyworks are the seasonal iPhone build cycle at Apple and any formal notice of clearance from the outstanding regulators on the Qorvo combination. Momentum in the broader semiconductor tape has been strong for weeks, so a sustained rotation into chips could keep Skyworks and Qorvo firm even if the closing timeline drifts back toward the original calendar-year framing.

Traders considering new positions in Skyworks or Qorvo around a merger close still face real execution risk on timing, so they may want to keep their exposure calibrated to their own view of how quickly the remaining approvals arrive. The next informational reset for the Skyworks story would be another dated public update on the regulatory path.

The post Skyworks Rises 7%, Qorvo Gains 5% as CEO Says $22B Merger Is in Final Stages; Qualcomm Ticks Up appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

Adobe Inc. (NASDAQ:ADBE) stock declined 3% to $241.52 in early Friday trading before recovering to $248, practically unchanged on the session, in an earnings reaction that runs against a firmer session for large-cap technology. The share-price wobble follows Adobe’s Q3 FY2026 report Thursday after the close, which set a quarterly revenue record and lifted the full-year revenue and adjusted earnings outlook. Adobe’s Q4 FY2026 revenue midpoint, though, landed below the analyst consensus, and that gap is where the selling has anchored.

For the year, Adobe stock is down 30%, so this morning’s volatility comes after a stretch of underperformance for the software leader. Checking in on the peers, Intuit (NASDAQ:INTU) stock is up 0.9% to $315.56, and ServiceNow (NYSE:NOW) stock is up 0.3% to $131.56, with both software names shrugging off any read-through from the Adobe report.

Meanwhile, the Invesco QQQ Trust (NASDAQ:QQQ) is up 0.99%, confirming that Adobe’s slide-and-recovery is a company-specific reaction rather than a broader tech rotation. The iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF (CBOE:IGV), which is up 1.2% to $102.42, rounds out the software peer set and suggests that volatility hasn’t spread across enterprise software generally.

Soft Q4 Guide Overshadows a Record Quarter

Adobe reported record third-quarter revenue of $6.76 billion and crossed one billion monthly active users across its creativity and productivity products. Adjusted earnings per share for the quarter came in above the analyst consensus, extending Adobe’s streak of five consecutive EPS beats, and Adobe raised its full-year revenue and adjusted earnings outlook. Adobe’s artificial intelligence-first annualized recurring revenue (ARR) grew more than 150% year over year, an acceleration management tied to broader Firefly adoption, expanding freemium reach, and rising credit consumption inside Creative Cloud.

The friction sits with the fourth-quarter revenue guide. Adobe’s Q4 midpoint only bracketed consensus, and that shape reads as the first visible crack in the AI monetization story. The framing matters because Adobe had trained the market to expect clean guidance raises through FY2026, and a bracket-the-consensus print sets a lower bar heading into Adobe MAX in November.

CEO and CFO Seats in Transition

Adobe named Anil Chakravarthy, who leads the customer experience division, as its next chief executive officer, effective December 1. He succeeds Shantanu Narayen, Adobe’s chair and chief executive, who announced plans to step down after eighteen years in the role. Narayen said Adobe delivered record third-quarter results and that he has confidence Anil will build on that momentum into the AI era.

Adobe’s finance seat is filled on an interim basis by Steve Day, senior vice president of corporate finance, following Dan Durn’s departure in June. Adobe is still searching for a permanent chief financial officer, so the two most consequential seats for the AI strategy conversation are in motion at the same time.

The timing is the sensitive part. Adobe’s incoming chief executive built his career in customer experience while the flagship creative franchise carries the most acute AI questions, and the finance chair remains interim. Adobe’s problem this morning sits with the leadership setup as much as with the quarter itself, and that combination is what makes the reaction to a beat-and-raise print feel disproportionate.

What to Watch Now

The bull case for Adobe is that a quarterly revenue record, a raised full-year outlook, and AI-first ARR growth of more than 150% year over year show a business monetizing AI at meaningful scale. The bear case is that a bracket-the-consensus Q4 guide, layered on top of a leadership handoff, gives skeptics room to argue the AI curve isn’t steepening fast enough to offset competitive pressure in creative tools. With Adobe stock down 30% year to date, patience has already been tested, and the reaction shows how thin the margin for error has become.

Investors can watch for whether Adobe holds $248 and whether Chakravarthy’s public appearances ahead of December 1 sharpen the AI product roadmap. Adobe MAX in November stands as the next concrete catalyst for the creative AI story and the first stage for the incoming leadership team, with the Topaz Labs acquisition expected to close in Q4 as another datapoint on how the creative AI stack fills out. Position sizing on Adobe stock should reflect that the leadership answer is now weighing as heavily as the quarter itself for anyone managing their exposure.

The post Adobe Pulls Back, Then Recovers as CEO Handoff Meets Soft Q4 Outlook; Intuit and ServiceNow Hold Steady appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

Picture a farmer in his mid-sixties who runs his last planting, brings in the crop and holds a machinery auction. The land goes to a neighbor. The equipment goes to the highest bidders. The grain stays in the bins.

He waits until the following year, watches the market and sells when the basis looks right. By then, he considers himself retired. The farm is gone. Surely moving grain harvested months ago is simply the last piece of liquidation. For tax purposes, not necessarily. For Social Security, the answer depends heavily on when he did the work.

The Crop Carries Its Work Date With It

Farmland and harvested grain occupy different tax buckets. Gain from the sale of farmland generally sits outside net earnings from self-employment. Harvested grain held for sale is farm inventory, and selling it can still produce self-employment income after the farmer has otherwise shut down. But Social Security asks another question: When did he do the work that produced the crop?

The Social Security Administration (SSA) has a special exclusion for certain self-employment income received after retirement, and carry-over crops are specifically included. Suppose he raised, harvested and stored the grain before becoming entitled to Social Security, then sold it in the following tax year. If the requirements are met, SSA can exclude that income when applying the retirement earnings test. Even arranging the sale or delivering stored grain after retirement does not necessarily change that result.

Same Grain Bin, Different Answer

Change the calendar and the outcome can flip. SSA gives an example of a farmer who began receiving Social Security in May, then cultivated, harvested and stored another crop through November. He sold that grain the following March for $30,000. The exclusion did not apply. The check arrived after the harvest year, but the farmer had performed substantial work producing the crop after his Social Security entitlement began.

That is the nuance: the important date may not be when the elevator writes the check. It can be when the farmer earned it. For someone below full retirement age (FRA), the difference can determine whether the sale gets swept into the retirement earnings test. In 2026, someone under FRA for the entire year can earn $24,480 before Social Security begins withholding $1 in benefits for every $2 above the limit.

It Can Count Here and Disappear There

The treatment gets stranger. Qualifying carry-over crop income can be excluded from the earnings test even though the underlying farm income remains subject to self-employment tax. The covered earnings can also remain on the farmer’s Social Security record for benefit-computation purposes. The same grain can:

• Generate self-employment income and tax.
• Be excluded from the retirement earnings test.
• Still count toward the farmer’s Social Security earnings record.

That is why “taxable” and “counts against Social Security” are not interchangeable. A large farm-income year can also affect how much of his Social Security is taxable and potentially raise Medicare premiums later through the income-related monthly adjustment amount (IRMAA). Any one of those is an IRS rule that quietly siphons money out of a retirement account, and we mapped this one alongside eight others in a free tax trap guide.

Before the Grain Leaves the Bin

Before the last crop moves, check three dates:

1. When did Social Security entitlement begin? A crop produced before that point can receive different treatment from one produced afterward.
2. When was the grain raised and harvested? The work behind the crop can be more important than the date it sells.
3. When will the sale occur? The special exclusion applies to qualifying self-employment income received in a later tax year, and SSA may need information from the farmer to treat it correctly.

Selling the farm can end ownership in a day. The grain in the bin can carry the old business into another tax year.

The post He Sold $30,000 of Grain After Retiring. Social Security’s Answer Depended on When He Grew It. appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

The scenario is familiar to anyone who has read a few articles about Roth IRAs. A saver in his mid-fifties converted $100,000 from a traditional IRA to a Roth, paid the tax bill that year out of a taxable account, and watched the balance grow. Three years later, at 59, he needed $20,000 for a new roof and pulled it from the Roth, fully expecting the withdrawal to be tax-free. That is what a Roth is for. Instead, a 10% penalty landed on the converted amount. His misunderstanding was narrow. He got Roth accounts broadly right and tripped over one specific rule.

Why a Roth Does Not Behave Like One Pot of Money

A Roth IRA has distinct layers, and those layers come out in a fixed order the account holder cannot choose. Regular contributions come out first. Converted amounts come out next. Earnings come out last. The rules set the order, and the withdrawal request cannot change it.

That ordering is what makes the Roth story possible. The $20,000 came out of conversion money, since he had not made regular contributions to that Roth. Conversion money is governed by a rule most savers never hear about until it bites them.

Two Clocks Running on Different Rules

A Roth has two five-year clocks, and almost every reader conflates them. The first clock governs whether earnings come out tax-free. It starts once, with a saver’s first Roth IRA, and it never resets.

The second clock works differently. Every single conversion starts its own five-year clock. Convert in three different years, and three separate clocks run at once. Pull converted money before that specific conversion’s clock finishes and before reaching the age at which the early-withdrawal penalty no longer applies, and a 10% penalty hits the converted amount. You already paid income tax on that money when you converted it. The penalty sits on top of it.

The 10% is a separate charge designed to stop savers from using a conversion as a workaround to reach retirement money early. Understanding the purpose is what makes the rule stick.

How He Missed It by So Little

He was on the wrong side of both tests at the same moment, and either one alone would have saved him. Had he been past the age at which the early-withdrawal penalty no longer applies, the conversion clock would have been irrelevant. Had he waited until that particular conversion’s five years were up, his age would have been irrelevant. Missing both at once is what produced the penalty, and the gap on each side was small.

What Would Have Worked Instead

The cleanest fix is sequencing. Pulling the Roth money from a taxable account, or from Roth contribution basis if any existed, would have sidestepped the ordering rule, since straight contributions come out first and freely. Timing the conversion around a known upcoming expense, rather than converting first and discovering the constraint later, is the planning version of the same idea. Keeping a written record of each conversion and the year it happened matters too, because the clocks run per conversion and no one else is tracking them. The custodian will process a withdrawal request as submitted. It will not audit the request for penalties.

Savers Most Exposed by This Rule

Early retirees in their fifties who run conversions during low-income years are the group most exposed. They are the ones converting aggressively, often on advice they read somewhere reputable, and they are also the ones most likely to need cash before the penalty-free age arrives (we sized up that quiet window between the last paycheck and the first RMD in a free Roth conversion guide for anyone weighing the timing). The people following the smartest conversion strategy are also the ones most likely to trip this wire. Roughly 37% of workers have taken an early or hardship withdrawal from a retirement account, suggesting the impulse to reach for those balances early is common.

Narrow Exceptions Worth Knowing

The tax code does carve out situations where the early-withdrawal penalty does not apply. Certain hardship cases, disability, and a short set of qualifying uses can get a saver out from under it. The list is narrow and specific. A new roof does not appear on it. Assuming an exception applies without checking is how a planned withdrawal becomes expensive.

Bottom Line on Roth Conversion Timing

The rule itself is learnable, which is a good thing. However, the cost of not knowing it is real, and it hits hardest for savers doing the most thoughtful planning. The fix is knowing which account layer the money is coming from before requesting the withdrawal, which leads to smarter financial decisions.

The post He Converted $100,000 to a Roth at 56 and Pulled $20,000 Out at 59 for a New Roof. The ‘Tax-Free’ Money Came With a 10% Penalty appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

This edition covers GPU cloud and hosting capacity, and specifically the former Bitcoin miners repurposing power-advantaged sites into leased AI infrastructure. The bottleneck is secured megawatts, permitted land, and utility interconnects that take years to originate. Applied Digital’s management, on its most recent earnings call, framed the demand backdrop by citing hyperscaler annual CapEx reportedly rising from roughly $400 billion to $700 billion.

Three U.S.-listed miners have leaned into that shift by leasing capacity to hyperscalers and frontier labs. All three are speculative, high-volatility, mid-cap AI infrastructure names with heavy CapEx, dilution exposure, and customer concentration. Position sizing matters accordingly.

Applied Digital: CoreWeave’s Landlord Scales the Franchise

Applied Digital (NASDAQ:APLD) converts North Dakota power access into purpose-built AI factory campuses that it leases to hyperscalers. It houses the racks, cooling, and electrical plant. The tenant brings the GPUs. Market cap sits near $7.72 billion, and shares traded around $27.02 on Sept. 10, up more than 59% over the past year but down 3.88% year to date (YTD).

Fiscal Q3 revenue hit $126.64M, up 139.3% YoY, beating consensus by 61.37%, with adjusted EPS of 9 cents versus a 21-cent loss expected. HPC hosting delivered $71.0 million, including $44.1 million of base rent from CoreWeave at Polaris Forge 1, described as one of the only 100 MW direct-to-chip liquid-cooled data centers online. On the July call, CEO Wes Cummins said the company had reached $36 billion of total contracted long-term lease value, with approximately $20 billion added last quarter, and disclosed 1.41 gigawatts of contracted critical IT load across campuses under construction for three separate hyperscalers. Management also said it now expects to hit its $1 billion NOI run-rate a year from now, three years ahead of the original schedule.

Bull case: Applied Digital already has approved-vendor status with hyperscalers, a repeatable build template, and a project-finance model that funded Polaris Forge 2 with $2.15B of 6.750% senior secured notes due 2031. Each new campus stamps out familiar economics against investment-grade tenants.

Risk: Leverage is heavy at roughly $2.7 billion of total debt, and the GAAP net loss attributable to common shareholders widened to $100.9M. Customer concentration on CoreWeave remains a single-tenant fragility until Polaris Forge 2 delivers.

IREN: NVIDIA Exemplar Status and a $4B ARR Backlog

IREN (NASDAQ:IREN) is furthest along on the “own the entire stack” version of the pivot, running data centers, GPUs, and, through its Mirantis acquisition, a managed-services layer. Market cap is roughly $17.88 billion, and shares traded around $45.69 on Sept. 10, up nearly 36% over the past year and 7.01% YTD.

Fiscal Q4 revenue was $137.2 million, down 26.75% YoY, dragged by the deliberate decommissioning of mining hardware, which produced a $450.4 million non-cash impairment and a $684 million GAAP net loss. The relevant number for the pivot: AI Cloud Services revenue was $70.5 million, more than doubling sequentially, and full-year AI Cloud grew roughly 8x to $128.8 million. Bitcoin mining is expected to be effectively decommissioned by the end of December 2026.

On the August call, co-CEO Daniel Roberts said “$4 billion of ARR is now contracted for our 2026 capacity. And 1 billion of that is operating today.” Anchor commitments include a $3.4B five-year AI Cloud contract with NVIDIA, up to $2.1B of NVIDIA investment tied to deployment of 600,000 GPUs, and the delivery of Horizon 1, a 50 MW liquid-cooled deployment for Microsoft at Childress, which achieved NVIDIA Exemplar Cloud status on GB300 NVL72. Pricing is inflecting: management said recent three-year contracts are pricing in excess of $20 million per megawatt of IT load, with active discussions around $25 million per megawatt.

Bull case: IREN has combined pre-permitted power, investment-grade tenants, and a financing flywheel that included $6.5 billion of GPU financing in the past three months, plus a $2.4 billion AI factory financing led by Blue Owl-managed funds.

Risk: Fiscal 2027 capex guidance sits at approximately $25 to $30 billion. Meaningful revenue from Horizons 2 through 4 lands predominantly in the March quarter, so any construction slippage moves the entire ramp.

TeraWulf: Anthropic’s 20-Year Anchor in Kentucky

TeraWulf (NASDAQ:WULF) has moved the fastest from Bitcoin cash flows into hyperscale AI leases. Market cap is roughly $8.55 billion. Shares traded around $17.01 on Sept. 10, up 61.23% over the past year and 33.52% YTD.

Q2 revenue was $44.77 million, down 6.02% YoY, missing consensus, but the mix tells the story: HPC leasing generated $31.93M, up from zero a year earlier, and now represents approximately 71% of total revenue. The GAAP net loss of $939.92M was driven almost entirely by a $755.67 million non-cash charge from warrant fair-value changes, which management said had no liquidity impact.

The centerpiece contract is a 20-year lease with Anthropic for 401 MW at the Justified Data Campus in Kentucky, representing roughly $19 billion of contracted revenue over the initial term, with potential to grow to $33 billion with extensions. Delivery of CB-3 at Lake Mariner unlocked $600M of Google credit support for Fluidstack lease obligations. The company also acquired the Muskie Data Campus with up to 1 GW of contracted electric service from Kentucky Power. Total contracted revenue across the platform now exceeds $27 billion, with total platform capacity of 2.3 GW critical IT.

Bull case: TeraWulf holds a signed, investment-grade-credit-supported anchor lease, a repeatable playbook it calls a Lake Mariner clone, and is recycling capital via the $530M sale of 50.1% of the Abernathy JV to fund the higher-return, wholly controlled sites.

Risk: Anthropic revenue does not begin until initial delivery in H2 2027 with full delivery in early 2028, and Muskie initial service is not expected until Q4 2028. That is a long bridge to cross, funded through warrant-heavy capital structures and continued debt issuance.

What to Take Away

The pivot is real, but it is unevenly complete: WULF’s HPC leasing is already the majority of revenue, APLD’s HPC segment is scaling behind a single anchor tenant, and IREN just took a $684 million impairment to make room for GPUs. All three own something scarcer than chips right now, which is contracted power at delivered sites (we mapped seven other companies supplying the AI buildout beyond the chipmakers in a free report on the picks-and-shovels side of the boom). Balance sheets, warrant liabilities, and back-end-loaded revenue ramps make each one speculative and appropriate only for a small, size-controlled allocation within an AI infrastructure basket. The next catalysts to track are Horizons 2 through 4 at IREN, CB-4 commissioning at TeraWulf and Polaris Forge 2 delivery at Applied Digital.

The post Bitcoin Miners Are Turning Into AI Landlords. These 3 Stocks Are Riding the Pivot appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

Dell Technologies (NYSE:DELL) has turned into one of the loudest AI infrastructure stories in the market. Shares are up 306.2% year to date, powered by a Q2 FY27 report that showed $47 billion in quarterly revenue, an AI backlog of $95B, and raised FY27 EPS guidance of $25.50.

The question I want to answer: can Dell push through $700 a share by 2027, or has this run already priced in the AI server boom?

Why Dell Shares Cooled Off This Week

After ripping higher through August, Dell has taken a breather. The stock is down 1.89% over the past week and closed the most recent session off 5.39%, even though it is still up 14.89% over the past month.

Two things are weighing on sentiment. First, gross margin pressure is a real concern as AI servers become a bigger share of the mix, with Q2 gross margin sitting around 20.9%.

Second, free cash flow actually fell 47.22% year over year to $986M in Q2 despite record revenue. With a beta of 1.409, Dell moves hard in both directions, and profit takers have been happy to trim.

Wall Street Sees 11% Upside. I Think That’s Too Cautious

The Street currently pegs Dell with an average analyst target of $564.46, based on 5 strong buys, 14 buys, 9 holds, and zero sells. Our own base case sits higher at $596.46, implying 17.78% upside with a confidence score of 0.9, which I’d translate as high conviction. The optimistic scenario stretches to $621.78.

With 68% of analysts bullish and year-over-year earnings growth running at 2.72, the consensus target looks like it was set before the last two earnings beats fully sank in. Analysts are still catching up to the numbers.

Path to $700 Per Share

Here’s the math on my stretch target. Reaching $700 from today’s price of $506.41 would require a gain of 38.2%. With forward EPS of $24.45, a price of $700 implies a forward P/E of 29x.

Our base case of $596.46 already implies 28x, meaning the bold target requires just 1.1x of additional multiple expansion.

That is a low bar if guidance keeps moving up. Full-year FY27 revenue guidance was raised by $25 billion to $192 billion at the midpoint, AI server revenue is now guided to $74B, and Jeff Clarke told investors, “We enter the second half with strong momentum and confidence in our position.”

Management expects AI to represent 75% of all data center demand by 2030, sizing the opportunity at more than a trillion dollars. Traditional servers grew 122%, storage grew 26%, and the 247Factor sector multiplier of 1.15 reflects those tailwinds.

The primary risk: DRAM and NAND supply constraints that Clarke flagged as “DRAM, DRAM, DRAM, followed by NAND, NAND, NAND.”

Where Dell Trades Today vs Its Earnings Power

At $506.41, Dell trades at a forward P/E of about 21x on $24.45 in forward EPS. For a business guiding to +148% non-GAAP EPS growth this year, that multiple is cheap.

Shares sit essentially at the 52-week high of $562.99 and well above the low of $109.70, and the 10-year return of 2508.14% shows this is a stock that compounds violently when earnings accelerate. Cheap growth stocks with $95B backlogs tend not to stay cheap.

Is $700 Realistic? My Verdict

Getting to $700 requires a 38.2% gain from here, and I think it is a stretch but not a long shot.

Three things need to go right: FY27 EPS lands at or above the $25.50 guide, ISG operating margin holds near 15%, and Dell converts more of the $95B backlog into revenue as supply loosens. A DRAM-driven miss or a sharp AI capex pause would derail it fast. Returns at this level shouldn’t be expected every year, but we’ve outlined the blueprint for how Dell Technologies could reach $700 in 2027.

The post Prediction: DELL Could Be Ready for Another Rally. Here’s Our Price Target appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

Cathie Wood is planting her flag in Bitcoin again, and this time she is doing it against gold. In ARK Invest’s “In The Know” commentary, the ARK Innovation ETF advisor said “You know we’re big bulls on Bitcoin” and framed the asset as “both a risk-off and a risk-on asset.” She called Bitcoin’s correlation with gold “very low” by historical standards, described the breakout relative to gold as “very reassuring from our point of view,” and argued the asset has “miles to go.” Her specific call: the Bitcoin-to-gold ratio keeps climbing to new all-time highs.

What the Bitcoin-to-Gold Ratio Actually Measures

The Bitcoin-to-gold ratio is simple arithmetic dressed up as macro commentary: how many ounces of gold one Bitcoin will buy. On the morning of September 11, 2026, per TheStreet, Bitcoin (CRYPTO:BTC) was quoted at $78,007.67 while spot gold sat at $4,377.49 per ounce. When Bitcoin outruns gold, the ratio expands. When gold gains and Bitcoin sags, it contracts. Wood treats a rising ratio as evidence that scarce digital money is taking share from the oldest hard asset on the planet.

Reality Check on the Breakout Claim

Wood’s confidence is slightly at odds with the record, but this all comes down to the timeframe. In a report published on the 8th of September, 2026, TheStreet’s reporter Anand Sinha wrote that Bitcoin gained 22% over the trailing month while gold gained nothing. Over a longer window, Sinha’s reporting for TheStreet flipped the script: gold gained 20% over the trailing year while Bitcoin lost 28% during that same period.

Those two pictures disagree, and calling a structural regime change off the shorter one is thin evidence. A four-week ratio move can flip in another four weeks. Wood is calling a breakout in a ratio that has run against her on the longer window most allocators actually watch.

Wood’s Strongest Argument Deserves a Fair Hearing

Her risk-on and risk-off framing is what really carries real weight. ARK’s thesis is that the AI and software cycle is a creative-destruction event that will vaporize incumbents and their balance sheets, raising counterparty risk across the financial system. In that world, assets without counterparties, meaning gold and Bitcoin, both benefit. Bitcoin gets the additional tailwind of being programmable, portable, and held disproportionately by the same investors underwriting the AI buildout.

The macro backdrop looks calm. The CBOE Volatility Index closed at 16.46 on September 9, 2026, inside the normal 15 to 20 band and well below the 31.05 spike on March 27, 2026, according to TheStreet. If Bitcoin is bid here without a fear catalyst, Wood’s risk-on leg has some support.

Verdict and a Level Worth Watching

On its own terms, the ratio call could be argued as premature. A one-month burst in Bitcoin against a flat gold price does not overturn a full year in which the yellow metal outperformed by a wide margin, and Wood’s own language admits Bitcoin has “miles to go” precisely because it has not gotten there yet. Investors who want to test her thesis without taking her word for it can watch one dated marker: the trailing-year Bitcoin-versus-gold performance gap. If Bitcoin closes the 2025 to 2026 gap Sinha documented and starts posting positive trailing-year numbers against gold, Wood’s structural call earns real footing, according to TheStreet. Until then, this is a one-month breakout looking for confirmation.

Readers tracking Wood’s positioning directly can follow ARK Invest’s holdings and weekly commentary at ark-funds.com, and her filings history is available through her CIK 0001820212 profile at the SEC, according to TheStreet.

The post Bitcoin vs. Gold: Cathie Wood Sees a Breakout appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

Rocket Lab (NASDAQ:RKLB) and AST SpaceMobile (NASDAQ:ASTS) both reported Q2 2026 results on August 10, 2026. One is a vertically integrated launcher chasing SpaceX on rockets and satellites. The other is trying to be SpaceX for your phone. Same night, same “disruptor” label, radically different businesses.

Record Backlog for Rocket Lab, Beta Countdown for AST

Rocket Lab posted $234.07 million in revenue, up 62.0% year over year, with Space Systems contributing $189.5 million after the Mynaric and Motiv deals closed. Backlog swelled to $2.36 billion, up 137%, with launch capacity described as unusually constrained. CEO Peter Beck called it “another fantastic quarter”, and the numbers back him up.

AST SpaceMobile is earlier in its arc. Revenue reached $31.52 million, missing consensus by 8.36%, and the GAAP loss ballooned to -$0.77 per share after a $125.9 million charge tied to the BB7 launch incident. Still, the constellation now holds 13 spacecraft with roughly 20,000 square feet of aperture, and CEO Abel Avellan says the company is “preparing to initiate beta services with select strategic partners.”

Vertical Integration Versus a Single Bold Bet

Rocket Lab is stitching together a full space stack. The announced Iridium acquisition adds 66 satellites, 2.5 million subscribers, and more than $870 million in annual revenue. Neutron, priced at a $50 to $55 million ASP, is targeting a Q4 2026 pad delivery, with Beck admitting “the window for an end-of-year launch is narrowing.”

AST is doing one thing, at enormous scale: direct-to-smartphone broadband. It has 60-plus MNO partners covering 3 billion subscribers, a preliminary $1 billion J-LEO award with Rakuten in Japan, and Block 2 satellites aimed at ~200 Mbps peak data rates. Q2 capex hit roughly $610 million, so the runway matters.

Neutron Flight and Beta Launch Are the Real Catalysts

For Rocket Lab, I want to see Neutron actually leave the pad and Iridium close cleanly by mid-2027. For AST, the tell is beta service converting into paid commercial revenue and BlueBirds 17-46 launching on cadence toward ~45 satellites by early 2027. Both stocks have cooled, with RKLB down 22.56% over the past month and ASTS off 16.36%. The bar is higher now.

Why I Lean Toward Rocket Lab for Diversified Exposure

On the current data, Rocket Lab looks like the more diversified profile. Revenue is real, defense demand is stacking up (see the $397M Flatellite award), and the Iridium deal gives it a services annuity. AST is the higher-variance bet. If beta works and Japan converts, the upside is enormous. If launches slip again, dilution risk stays real. The framing splits cleanly: Rocket Lab as the compounder, AST as the moonshot (we wrote a free playbook on sizing speculative bets like this one without wrecking the rest of the portfolio, here). A bad Neutron test firing would raise the bar further on either name.

The post Rocket Lab Vs. AST SpaceMobile: Chase the Better SpaceX Disruptor appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

A Roth conversion done at age 62 and the same conversion done at age 63 can land in very different places on a Medicare statement. The earlier one never touches a premium. The later one can add a monthly surcharge to the first year of coverage at 65. What separates the two is a two-year lag between the tax year used to determine the income-related Medicare premium surcharge and the year the surcharge is applied. Income for a given tax year sets premiums two years later. A conversion at 62 shows up on the return that would set premiums at 64, before Medicare has begun. A conversion at 63 shows up on the return that sets premiums at 65, the year enrollment starts.

How the Surcharge Actually Works

Medicare premiums vary with income, and above certain thresholds, an income-related monthly adjustment is added to the standard premium. According to CMS, the standard monthly Part B premium in 2026 is $202.90, up from $185.00 in 2025, and the surcharge affects roughly 8% of people with Medicare Part B. It applies to both the medical coverage premium and the prescription drug premium, so a single high-income year raises the cost in two places at once.

The structure works in steps. CMS’s 2026 table shows the first step attaches when individual modified adjusted gross income crosses $109,000 (or $218,000 for joint filers), adding $81.20 to the monthly Part B premium. Each higher bracket lifts the surcharge further, with the top tier at individual income of $500,000 or more ($750,000 joint) reaching a $487.00 monthly adjustment. Because the brackets are cliffs, one dollar over a threshold triggers the full higher surcharge for the entire year.

The surcharge is reassessed annually, so a single high-income year produces one year of higher premiums, and if income returns to normal, the surcharge falls away.

Why the Pre-Enrollment Years Are Different

For people who retire before 65, income often drops sharply once the paycheck stops and before Social Security and required distributions begin. Those low-income years are already the natural home for conversions. The two-year lookback adds a second reason to use the earlier of the two. A conversion done in a tax year that falls before Medicare enrollment cannot attach to a Medicare premium, because there is no premium yet for it to attach to. That window is narrow and time-limited.

Complication After 65

The lookback does not end once coverage begins. Every conversion done from 63 onward eventually lands on a premium year. A surcharge in a given year is rarely a reason to abandon a conversion. Tax saved by moving money out of a traditional balance over a long retirement can exceed a bounded one-year premium increase, particularly when the alternative is larger required distributions later. IRMAA is one of several Medicare costs that quietly reshape a retirement budget, and we mapped the full set of surcharges and coverage gaps in a free guide here. Which years absorb the surcharge, and whether the trade is worth making in each of them, is what determines the outcome.

Part B premiums are withheld from the Social Security check, so the cost hits retirement income directly. With the 2027 Social Security COLA tracking toward 3.1% based on early third-quarter data, a bracket jump can consume much of an inflation raise for the year it applies.

Practical Handling

Before converting, a person can identify which tax year sets which premium year. The mapping is mechanical and knowable in advance. When a conversion lands on a coverage year, sizing it against the next bracket line matters more than picking a round dollar amount, because crossing a threshold costs in one step rather than gradually. When a genuine income drop has already occurred, such as retirement, Medicare lets a beneficiary request that the surcharge be reconsidered rather than waiting the full two years for the return to catch up. The surcharge is also assessed per person, so in a couple where both are enrolled, one joint return can lift both premiums at once.

Ultimately, the big takeaway here is that the two-year lag is mechanical and predictable. Mapping conversion years to premium years in advance lets you size or avoid the surcharge, and this can only be a good thing for most people.

The post Medicare Looks Back Two Years. A Roth Conversion at 63 Lands on the Premium at 65. The Same Conversion at 62 Never Shows Up appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

Oracle Corporation (NYSE:ORCL) stock is up 7% to $164.25 in Friday morning trading, following the company’s fiscal first-quarter earnings release after the close on Thursday. The reaction is Oracle’s sharpest single-session move to an earnings report in recent memory, and the market response reads as a re-rating rather than a beat-and-move.

CoreWeave (NASDAQ:CRWV) stock is up 4% to $92.90, and Nebius Group (NASDAQ:NBIS) stock is up 4% to $236.95, both trading in sympathy with Oracle’s release. The Invesco QQQ Trust (NASDAQ:QQQ) is up 1%, so Oracle is running several times the broad large-cap technology benchmark. The gap concentrates today’s rally squarely at Oracle within the sector.

The catalyst is a backlog figure large enough to reset the demand narrative for the entire AI cloud infrastructure trade. Oracle’s release, transcript commentary and datacenter delivery figures all point in the same direction, and customers are lining up for compute faster than the industry can bring capacity online.

Backlog Signals Real Revenue Conversion

Oracle CFO Hilary Maxson said on the earnings call that total revenue was a record $19.3 billion in the quarter, and that cloud infrastructure revenue grew 121% year over year. The company reported that its remaining performance obligations (RPO) backlog reached $664 billion after more than $30 billion in new AI cloud contracts closed during the period. The RPO figure is what the market is repricing, because the number now looks like a promise beginning to convert into revenue rather than a headline stacking up.

Maxson said that the newest contracts were signed through prepayment or bring-your-own-hardware arrangements that don’t require incremental capital from Oracle. That framing addresses the cash-burn concern that had weighed on Oracle stock earlier in the year, when heavy datacenter spending pressured cash generation. Management’s framing is that growth from here can be funded with less strain on the balance sheet, and the share reaction is consistent with that claim.

Oracle’s cloud share of the top line has now crossed 60%, up from 48% a year ago, and the company delivered 850 megawatts of additional datacenter capacity along with more than 300,000 GPUs to AI cloud customers during the period. Those operational numbers matter because they turn RPO from a promise on paper into a supply story with equipment on the ground. Renewals came through at premium pricing relative to prior contracts, reinforcing that demand for deployed capacity remains firm.

GPU Cloud Names Follow Oracle Higher

The read-across for GPU cloud pure-plays is direct. If Oracle is filling capacity as fast as it can bring it online, CoreWeave and Nebius sit in the same demand pool, with the same enterprise and hyperscaler customer set behind them, and their sympathetic bids this morning reflect that shared narrative.

CoreWeave carries a revenue backlog of $104 billion as of the end of the second quarter, plus more than $25 billion in net new customer commitments added early in the third quarter. The stock is up 30% year to date, still off its highs from the prior year but rebuilding as the AI infrastructure narrative firms and enterprise adoption accelerates.

Nebius signed a five-year, $27 billion capacity agreement with Meta earlier this summer, took a $2 billion strategic equity investment from NVIDIA, and has guided contracted power above 4 GW by year-end. The stock is up 183% year to date, reflecting a willingness to pay up for early positioning in dedicated AI compute capacity.

The First Trust Cloud Computing ETF (NASDAQ:SKYY) holds both Oracle and CoreWeave among its top constituents, offering diversified exposure to the same infrastructure theme. Oracle stock is down 15% year to date, so the bulls can point to room to recover, while the bears note that the stock is still working through a summer drawdown driven by cash-burn worries.

What to Watch

The next anticipated Oracle catalyst is delivery. The contracts are signed, and Oracle’s datacenter capacity has to arrive on schedule for the RPO to convert into revenue at the pace management now implies. Investors can watch for whether the cadence of GPU deployment holds through the fiscal second quarter, and whether CoreWeave and Nebius add more anchor customers as the AI capex cycle plays through.

Investors sizing their exposure to AI infrastructure names may want to keep their positions modest until Oracle demonstrates that conversion at scale over multiple quarters. Oracle stock is now trading against a higher bar, and any slip on datacenter timelines or component supply could reverse today’s rerating quickly.

The near-term consideration on the peer side is customer concentration, since much of the AI cloud backlog across CoreWeave and Nebius rests on a handful of large hyperscaler and lab agreements. The power, cooling, and networking suppliers behind this buildout are getting less attention, and we profiled seven of them in a free report on the AI infrastructure trade. If Oracle’s fiscal second-quarter delivery numbers pull more diversified enterprise demand into the same trade, that would validate the broader thesis and support the group beyond a single-session move.

The post Oracle Surges 7% as AI Cloud Backlog Hits $664B, CoreWeave and Nebius Climb 4% appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

My 24/7 Wall St. price target for Rocket Lab (NASDAQ:RKLB) is $120.99, versus a current price of $61.96. That implies roughly 95.3% upside over the next 12 months and supports a buy rating with a 50% confidence level.

Confidence sits at moderate because Neutron’s first flight and the Iridium deal are binary events that can materially shift the trajectory in either direction.

24/7 Wall St. Price Target Summary

Where the Stock Sits After a Volatile Summer

Rocket Lab has been anything but quiet. Shares are down 22.6% over the past month and 11.2% year to date, yet still up 34.2% over the past year and 231.5% over five years. The stock sits well off its 52-week high of $151, but comfortably above its 52-week low of $37.57.

Fundamentals continue to firm. Q2 FY2026 revenue reached a record $234 million, up 62% year over year, backlog grew to $2.36 billion, and non-GAAP gross margin expanded to 41.5% from 36.9%. CEO Peter Beck called the launch environment extreme, noting customers are locking in Neutron slots because “launch has never been so constrained.”

Bull Case: A Path to $156 and Beyond

The bull thesis is straightforward: Rocket Lab is compounding backlog, expanding margins, and stacking transformative catalysts. Beck’s team signed more than $1 billion in new contracts straddling Q2 and early Q3, including a $397M Flatellite award, a $816M Space Development Agency Tracking Layer contract, and selection for the $17.9 billion Golden Dome program alongside Raytheon.

Neutron, with an ASP of $50 million to $55 million, is targeting Q4 2026 delivery to the pad, and Beck says he has “zero issues in selling full price neutrons pre-test flights.” Layer in the pending Iridium deal, which brings 2.5 million subscribers and $870 million in annual revenue, and the bull-case path to $156 looks well grounded.

What Could Go Wrong

Valuation is stretched. Rocket Lab trades at a price-to-sales ratio of 52.4, and the company remains unprofitable, with a Q2 GAAP net loss of $49.3 million and a FY2025 free cash flow of -$321.8M. Dilution has been meaningful: $1.08 billion was raised through the ATM in Q2 alone.

Neutron’s timeline has already slipped once after a Stage 1 tank test failure. It should be noted, however, that bulls would argue the current losses reflect deliberate investment in Neutron, GHOST, and three simultaneous acquisitions, all of which management expects to drive significant free cash flow once integrated.

If Neutron slips into 2027 and integration stumbles, the bear-case path lands near $94.84.

How Rocket Lab Stacks Up Against ASTS and Kratos

AST SpaceMobile (NASDAQ:ASTS) is the natural new-space comp: another pre-profitability satellite operator with a $17.96 billion market cap, $150M to $200M in 2026 revenue guidance, and a $1.30 billion backlog. Rocket Lab’s $2.36 billion backlog and diversified launch plus space systems revenue makes RKLB’s setup materially more mature at similar risk profile.

Kratos Defense (NASDAQ:KTOS) is the hypersonic and defense-tech contrast that overlaps with HASTE’s end market. Kratos has posted a -40.7% year-to-date return, worse than RKLB’s -18.5%, suggesting the market is already awarding Rocket Lab a scarcity premium. Against these peers, our $120.99 target looks reasonable rather than aggressive.

Rocket Lab Price Prediction 2026-2030

The 24/7 Wall St. price target of $120.99 reflects a buy with moderate confidence. The tipping factor is backlog quality: $2.36 billion combined with a Golden Dome seat and Iridium optionality gives RKLB rare visibility.

I’d be a buyer here if Neutron reaches the pad in Q4 2026 and Q3 revenue lands inside the $250M to $265M guide. I’d stay on the sidelines if Neutron slips past mid-2027 or if Iridium regulatory approval stalls.

These projections assume Rocket Lab scales Neutron to a full cadence, closes Iridium on schedule, and continues to win Space Force and SDA awards. Significant upside or downside could result from Neutron ASP expansion or a delay to the Golden Dome buildout.

The post Price Prediction: Rocket Lab’s Next Leg Higher Could Be Massive, 95% Upside Ahead appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

Here is a split screen inside one corporate family that you have to see to believe. Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) is up 317% over the past year, one of the loudest comeback stories on Wall Street. The autonomous driving business Intel still majority owns, Mobileye (NASDAQ:MBLY), is down 43% over the same year, trades below book value, and posted a trailing loss of $4.97 per share.

And this morning, that money losing unit wrote a venture check.

Florida Shuttle Bet Lands Inside a Comeback Story

Mobileye led the Series B for Beep, the Lake Nona, Florida operator of driverless shuttles, bringing Beep’s total capital raised to approximately $130 million. The release does not disclose Mobileye’s specific check size. Beep already sits inside Mobileye’s orbit through the Volkswagen MOIA robotaxi program, which announced Orlando as its initial driverless launch location in collaboration with Beep.

Kobi Ohayon, Mobileye’s Chief Operations Officer, framed it this way:

“Mobileye and Beep have been working closely on AV deployment projects, and our excitement for the future of improving transportation through applied physical AI on the road has never been greater.”

Physical AI is the connective tissue. I have been following Mobileye since the Intel acquisition and the pattern in 2026 is unmistakable. Earlier this year, Mobileye acquired Mentee Robotics for approximately $612 million to push into humanoid robots. Now it is anchoring a Florida shuttle operator’s growth round. This is a company spending like a platform.

Why an Impaired Asset Is Writing Checks

Intel already told the market what it thinks Mobileye is worth today. Q1 2026 included a $4.07 billion restructuring charge tied primarily to a Mobileye goodwill impairment. Mobileye itself recognized a $3,788 million goodwill impairment in H1 2026. The stock now carries a $7.2 billion market cap and a price-to-book ratio near 0.9x.

Meanwhile, CEO Lip-Bu Tan is pointing Intel’s spotlight elsewhere. Q2 2026 delivered $16.13 billion in revenue, up 25%, with Data Center and AI up 59% year over year to $6.26 billion. Tan told investors:

“AI is driving unprecedented demand for compute, and as we continue to execute, Intel is well-positioned to capture sustainable growth across our CPU franchise, ASICs, advanced packaging and vast wafer foundry network.”

Mobileye does not appear once in that Q2 script. CFO David Zinsner did allude to roughly $10 billion of “non-core assets” that “can still be monetized on the balance sheet”, adding Intel is “not anxious in any stretch to do anything there.” Read that with the Beep news and a strategic question surfaces for Intel holders.

What Intel Shareholders Should Actually Watch

The Beep round tells you Mobileye is deploying capital into Orlando shuttles, Mentee robots, and a Volkswagen ecosystem targeting a 100,000+ self-driving fleet by end of 2033. If you believe physical AI will actually earn its keep, the impaired stub inside a $562.9B parent might be the most mispriced piece of the Intel story. If you do not, today’s venture check just extended the burn. That is the split screen, and Mobileye just picked a side.

The post Why the driverless company Intel controls just bet on a Florida shuttle startup appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

At $644.38, Meta (NASDAQ:META) screens attractively here. The stock has climbed 7.55% higher over the past month even as the S&P 500 slipped, and that divergence is the tell.

Meta owns the world’s largest social advertising engine through Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Threads, and now runs a rapidly scaling AI stack anchored by Meta Superintelligence Labs and the MuseSpark model family. The company reaches 3.60 billion daily active people across its Family of Apps.

The stock got there by surviving a bruising summer. Shares sold off after a Q2 miss and a raised capex bar, but the setup has quietly repaired itself as ad growth accelerated and AI product traction became visible.

Why the AI Ad Engine Justifies a Higher Multiple

Advertising revenue grew 27% year over year to $59.36 billion in Q2, with ad impressions up 14% and price per ad up 12%. Meta’s GEM ad-ranking system drove an 8.3% lift in Facebook ad clicks and a 15.7% conversion uplift, while Advantage Plus crossed a $75 billion annual revenue run rate.

Valuation looks reasonable. Shares trade at 23x trailing earnings and 18x forward, with a PEG of 0.812, 30.2% ROE, and 41.4% operating margins. Business agents already serve more than 1 million businesses weekly, opening a subscription and API monetization layer beyond ads.

Where the Capex Bill Could Break the Thesis

Q2 free cash flow collapsed to $784 million from $8.55 billion, a 91.31% drop, as capex hit $31.1 billion. Operating margin compressed to 31% from 43%, and EPS of $6.18 missed by 14.42%, ending a six-quarter beat streak.

Full-year 2026 capex guidance sits at $130 billion to $145 billion, expenses at $165 billion to $169 billion, and legal charges added $2.40 billion in a single quarter with youth-safety trials still ahead. A spend of that size flows straight to the power, cooling, and networking suppliers behind the data centers (we profiled seven of them in a free AI infrastructure report). Reality Labs continues to bleed, posting a $4.03 billion Q1 operating loss. If AI monetization slips, the returns math gets ugly fast.

Why Patience Has an Argument Too

The 2026 EPS consensus has drifted from $33.05 thirty days ago to $31.37, with 45 downward revisions against 4 upward in the last month. That is a real signal that the Street is still absorbing the spending ramp.

A patient investor could wait for Q3 results, the Connect event on September 23, and resolution of youth-safety litigation before committing. The cost of waiting, though, is watching the stock rerate without you.

What the Numbers Say About the Setup

Meta trades at $644.38 against a consensus analyst target of $754.15, implying roughly 17% upside. The rating mix is decisively bullish: 8 Strong Buy, 47 Buy, 7 Hold, 0 Sell, 0 Strong Sell. Targets are one data point, not a promise.

Performance tells the momentum story. Meta is up 5.52% over the past week and 7.55% over the past month, while the S&P 500 is down 1.97% and 1.64% over those windows. Year to date Meta is off 2.21% versus the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (NYSEARCA:SPY)’s gain of 11.15%, meaning most of the AI-capex reset is already in the price.

Buy Verdict on Meta at Current Levels

At $644.38, Meta screens as an attractive setup. Here is why.

The path to appreciation runs through three near-term catalysts: Q3 revenue guided to $61 billion to $64 billion, the Connect keynote unveiling the EssilorLuxottica AI glasses lineup, and continued conversion gains from GEM and Advantage Plus. Any one of those printing cleanly recompresses the risk premium the stock has carried since July.

The entry point matters. Buying at a forward P/E of 18 for a business growing ad revenue 27% with 30%+ ROE is the kind of setup that historically compounds. The bear case is fully visible in the price action: shares still trail the S&P by nearly 13 points year to date, and estimates have already been cut. The market has done the derisking.

The thesis breaks if 2027 capex guidance shocks higher without matching revenue acceleration, if a youth-safety verdict lands materially above the $2.4 billion already booked, or if ad pricing rolls over. Watch quarterly free cash flow and the ratio of capex growth to ad revenue growth.

When a mega-cap outruns a falling market on improving fundamentals and a compressed multiple, that is a meaningful signal.

The post Meta at $645: Recent Momentum Makes One Thing Very Clear appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

NuScale Power (NYSE:SMR) stock is down 5% to $9.72 in early Friday trading after UBS downgraded shares to Sell from Neutral and cut its price target to $6. The uranium and nuclear complex is close to flat this morning, and that gap points to a company-specific reaction inside the group.

The SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (NYSEARCA:SPY) is up 0.93% in the same window. The Global X Uranium ETF (NYSEARCA:URA) is down only 0.3%, and Oklo (NYSE:OKLO) stock is easing 2% to $38.94 in sympathy with the NuScale Power slide.

The NuScale Power move deepens what has been a difficult stretch for the stock. NuScale Power shares are down 31% year to date (YTD), and today’s slide pushes NuScale Power closer to its 52-week low of $7.21.

Downgrade Cites Timeline and Cash Burn

UBS’s note builds its bear case around three points: a construction timeline the firm estimates at more than five years, the absence of firm customer commitments, and $700 million of cumulative cash burn UBS forecasts across the next three years. Those figures come from UBS models and land at a moment when the NuScale Power income statement is thin.

NuScale Power reported second-quarter revenue of $75,000 and ended the quarter with $1.9 billion in cash and investments. The balance sheet can absorb the burn UBS is worried about, and that liquidity is the counterweight to the timeline concerns UBS raises in the NuScale Power file. The downgrade is also the second analyst action to hit NuScale Power in two sessions, after Piper Sandler initiated coverage across advanced nuclear on Thursday with opposing calls on two developers.

Bull Case Rests on Certification and Cash

NuScale Power’s management has argued the company is ready for commercial deployment once definitive contracts land. On the second-quarter earnings call, NuScale Power CEO John Hopkins said “We are near-term deployable,” and told analysts the company has already negotiated supplier agreements with more than half of its 60-plus supplier relationships. Furthermore, NuScale Power says its long-lead components have been in production for a two-year period.

NuScale Power holds the only U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) design certification in the small modular reactor industry, and it plans to operate on standard low-enriched uranium that is available today from established suppliers. That combination of licensing, fuel and supply chain is what NuScale Power leadership calls commercial readiness, and it’s the argument the UBS note is disputing on timing.

Peers Ease as Sector Holds Up

Oklo stock is the natural peer read, and the smaller decline reflects UBS’s relative argument. The firm’s view is that competing small modular reactor developers reach the construction stage sooner than NuScale Power, which concentrates the pressure at the NuScale Power name inside a group otherwise close to unchanged. Oklo’s own execution narrative around the Aurora reactor at Idaho National Laboratory, plus first criticality at its Groves isotope facility in early August, gives Oklo a separate story from the NuScale Power file.

Oklo also raised its 2026 operating cash-use guidance to a range of $120 million to $150 million from a prior $80 million to $100 million, so cash outflow is a live theme across the peer group. Moreover, Oklo ended its second quarter with $3 billion in cash and marketable securities, which gives Oklo a similar cushion to the one NuScale Power is defending in this UBS note.

What to Watch

NuScale Power’s problem in this note is timing, and timing is what today’s tape reflects. Investors can watch for whether InterOne and the Tennessee Valley Authority reach a definitive power purchase agreement, since NuScale Power’s management has flagged that contract as the next trigger for cash to move from the balance sheet into project work.

NuScale Power shareholders can weigh their exposure against that deployment timeline, since project schedules and customer contracts still drive the thesis. The broader reactor restart trade reaches well beyond the small modular reactor names, and we picked five ways to play it in a free nuclear report here. The next data point that could shift the NuScale Power picture is a signed agreement on either the Tennessee Valley Authority program or the RoPower project in Romania.

Options positioning around NuScale Power could stay active while the stock trades below $10, with both bear positioning and speculative bounces in play. NuScale Power management’s August commentary framed liquidity as the tool for absorbing this kind of gap, so the next scheduled company update is the natural inflection point.

The post NuScale Power Drops 5% as UBS Cuts to Sell on Timeline and Cash Burn, Oklo Slips appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

GameStop (NYSE:GME) stock is up 4% to $21.26 in early Friday trading after a regulatory filing disclosed that chairman and chief executive Ryan Cohen bought one million shares in the open market. That single insider signal is the reason GameStop is separating from an otherwise quiet session for the video game group, and it lands only days after the company reported quarterly results.

Video game peers Take-Two Interactive (NASDAQ:TTWO) and Roblox (NYSE:RBLX) are barely reacting to the news. Take-Two stock is up 0.4% to $217.90, and Roblox stock is up 0.7% to $45.20. Both names are drifting higher rather than joining the move at GameStop.

The SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (NYSEARCA:SPY) is up 0.93% and the VanEck Video Gaming and eSports ETF (NASDAQ:ESPO) is up 1%, so GameStop stock is moving several times what either the broad market or the gaming sector is delivering this morning. That places the catalyst squarely at the company rather than in the industry.

Cohen’s Open-Market Buy Anchors the Move

Per a regulatory filing, Ryan Cohen bought one million shares of GameStop with his own money in the open market, rather than through a grant or an option exercise. The purchase follows two smaller buys by GameStop directors disclosed after the company’s quarterly results earlier in the week. Open-market insider buying is the cleanest bullish signal an insider can send, because the money and the personal risk are the insider’s own.

The backdrop is a mixed quarter for GameStop. The company reported second-quarter net sales down 19%, yet it posted a record for its strongest second-quarter operating income and GameStop raised its full-year adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) outlook to more than $650 million. That EBITDA lift came from a collectibles-led product mix and disciplined selling, general and administrative expense rather than from stronger video game sales, and it maps directly to the pivot that has defined GameStop under the current board.

Video Game Peers Hold Steady on Sector Calm

Take-Two shares aren’t chasing the GameStop move, and the stock’s own investment case runs on a different clock. Grand Theft Auto VI is scheduled to launch on November 19 as the industry-defining catalyst of the year for Take-Two, and holders appear content to sit through a quiet session while that release date approaches. That is a very different kind of event than a single insider buy at GameStop.

Roblox stock is equally muted, with the company’s operating story around age-check rollout and international user growth working on a different timeline than the insider news at GameStop. The modest lift across the ESPO gaming basket and a positive session in SPY reflect sector-wide calm rather than a rerating driven by anything happening at GameStop this morning. The read-through for Roblox holders is that today’s move belongs to one name.

That gap between GameStop and its industry peers is the signal that matters. When a stock separates by several multiples from both its sector fund and the broad market on a single-name catalyst, price action tends to concentrate in that one name. Today GameStop owns the story, and Take-Two and Roblox are along for a much smaller ride.

What to Watch Next

The bull case for GameStop is straightforward. Cohen bought in the open market at his own expense, which is the one insider signal that carries real information, and it lands on top of a raised EBITDA outlook and a durable margin story out of collectibles.

The bear case is that a purchase this size is small against GameStop’s $4.85 billion cash position and doesn’t change the trajectory of a retailer whose sales are still shrinking. GameStop is now a profit story built on category mix and cost discipline rather than a growth story, and Cohen’s buy adds no fresh operating evidence for anyone underwriting the stock at a higher price. That framing matters at GameStop’s $9.15 billion market cap, which already prices in the balance-sheet optionality.

Investors can watch for whether GameStop holds today’s gains into the close and for confirmation that additional director purchases show up in filings over the next few sessions. Sizing your exposure to what one insider signal can and can’t tell you is the more useful discipline here, and GameStop gave existing holders a reason to stay while giving new buyers little else to underwrite.

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China’s push to swap out NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) silicon for homegrown accelerators just got noticeably more expensive. Huawei’s forthcoming Ascend part and Cambricon’s next-generation processor have been repriced upward by as much as 50% against quotes given only two months earlier, with the culprit being a shortage of high-bandwidth memory that Chinese fabricators can only obtain through grey-market resellers who mark it up several times over the prices paid in the United States and Korea.

NVIDIA is locked out of Chinese data center compute revenue by export rules, so none of that flows to its top line. But the pricing signal matters. When the cheap alternative stops being cheap, the argument that Jensen Huang’s platform is optional gets weaker.

Memory Bottleneck Squeezing the Substitutes

High-bandwidth memory, or HBM, is the stacked DRAM that sits next to a GPU and feeds it training data at extreme speed. Without enough of it, a modern AI accelerator stalls on its own bandwidth ceiling and delivers a fraction of its rated throughput.

Export controls have cut Chinese buyers off from direct HBM supply, so Huawei and Cambricon reach the parts through third-country intermediaries who charge multiples of the sticker price. That cost lands inside the finished accelerator, which is why two vendors raised prices at roughly the same time.

NVIDIA is fighting the same shortage from the other side. On the August 26 call, the company described “extreme pricing conditions in memory” and said the increases had “exceeded our prior expectations and are headed even higher into next year.”

The difference is scale and access. NVIDIA has direct relationships with all three HBM suppliers and a multiyear partnership with SK hynix (NASDAQ:SKHY); Chinese buyers pay a grey-market premium on top of an already tight market.

What NVIDIA’s Numbers Say About Pricing Power

Second-quarter revenue reached $96.22 billion, up 105.8% year over year, with Data Center at $89.02 billion. Guidance for the October quarter is $108 billion, plus or minus 2%, explicitly excluding any China data center compute revenue.

China Hopper shipments came in at less than 1% of Data Center revenue last quarter. The company is growing at this pace without the second-largest AI market on Earth contributing meaningfully.

Huang framed the moment plainly: “AI has reached its inflection point. It’s doing useful work. Its tokens are productive and profitable. Now, compute is revenue.”

Management said fiscal 2028 revenue should grow roughly 70% year over year, and even that is a “supply-constrained outlook” against demand growing near 100%.

Does This Hand NVIDIA the China Market Back?

Some observers argue that expensive domestic silicon builds political pressure inside China for a negotiated reopening of NVIDIA sales. The more likely outcome is the opposite.

Beijing has been consistent: pay more now, build the domestic stack later. Rising Ascend and Cambricon prices are far more likely to accelerate Chinese investment in domestic HBM production than to trigger a policy reversal in Washington.

Over a three-year horizon, that is the real risk to the moat. Chinese memory fabs will eventually close some of the gap, and when they do, the substitution math changes.

For now, the takeaway is narrower and cleaner. The cheap alternative to NVIDIA is disappearing, which validates the pricing power NVIDIA already commands everywhere it can sell. All of that compute still has to be powered, cooled, and networked by somebody, which is why we pulled seven suppliers behind the AI buildout into a free report you can grab here.

Is NVDA Stock a Buy?

At $218.36, NVIDIA trades at a P/E near 44x with 57 buy ratings against 2 holds and 1 sell. Against custom-silicon competition from hyperscalers and a Chinese substitute pool that just got more expensive, the platform advantage is intact, and the demand backlog is real. NVDA remains a buy, since the forward PE ratio is still cheap and the company keeps growing at hypergrowth levels.

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On Tuesday morning, CNBC’s Julia Boorstin reported that “Meta is unveiling a personal AI agent that Mark Zuckerberg has been teasing for months”, a product Meta calls Muse that ships as a standalone app and inside WhatsApp.

Boorstin said Muse “gives users a personalized agent which can act like an assistant. It can monitor security cameras, file, fill in paperwork, find items to buy, or can book tee times.”

The key number: Meta released Muse with a free tier and two paid tiers, the higher-priced at $100 a month, positioning the product between OpenAI’s $20 ChatGPT Plus and its $200 Pro plan.

For shareholders in Meta (NASDAQ:META), this matters because every dollar the company has earned from consumers historically came from advertising sold against free products. Asking a Facebook user to hand over a credit card each month is a genuinely new business model.

The stock is not acting as the market has priced that in. META closed at $613.48 on Tuesday, down 18.19% over the last year.

Why the Pricing Matters More Than the Feature List

Meta AI Chief Alex Wang said, “We are incredibly excited about consumer AI. And we see today a very small number of people who have really experienced the power of advanced agents in these new models.” The category is wide open, but nobody has proven consumers will pay a subscription for a personal agent at any price, let alone $100 a month.

The pricing itself signals to Wall Street that Meta is moving beyond its core story. The company has spent years telling investors AI would show up as better ad targeting, with $59.36 billion in advertising revenue in Q2.

A paid tier creates a recurring line item independent of ad load and gives Zuckerberg a way to defend the $130 to $145 billion in 2026 capital expenditure the company just guided to.

Why WhatsApp Is the Real Weapon

OpenAI and Anthropic have mindshare. Meta has a messaging app installed on billions of phones.

Meta ended Q2 with 3.6 billion daily active people across its family of apps, and management said WhatsApp is the leading surface where people engage with Meta AI. Business agents are the proof of concept: more than 1 million businesses already use them weekly on WhatsApp and Messenger.

Compare that to Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL), which reaches consumers through a Gemini App with 950 million monthly active users, and Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), which reaches workers through 30 million Copilot paid seats sold at roughly $30 per user per month.

WhatsApp lets Meta skip the acquisition funnel. Users don’t download anything, and payment flows through a channel they already trust.

What the Paid Tiers Say About Meta’s AI Spending

Meta’s Q2 free cash flow collapsed to $784 million from $8.55 billion a year earlier, with capital spending hitting $31.1 billion in the quarter alone. Long-term debt climbed to $83.66 billion to fund the buildout. Full details are in the Q2 8-K.

Analysts have noticed, with 45 downward EPS revisions for fiscal 2026 in the last 30 days against only 4 upward.

A $100-a-month subscription is how Zuckerberg starts answering the return-on-invested-capital question. Even modest paid conversion across a billion-user surface would meaningfully change the revenue mix.

Alphabet is monetizing AI through Cloud, which grew 82% year over year in Q2. Microsoft is monetizing it through per-seat Copilot and Azure, which crossed $100 billion in annual revenue. Meta is the only one of the three still searching for a repeatable AI revenue line outside advertising, and the picks-and-shovels names powering all three buildouts (we rounded up seven of them in a free report on the AI infrastructure trade) are the ones capturing the capex right now.

The Setup Now With META Stock

The stock trades at a forward P/E of 18x, a discount to Microsoft’s 27x multiple, with an analyst target of $754.77.

Muse is late to a market where ChatGPT already owns the noun. Distribution alone rarely closes a product gap, although WhatsApp is the closest thing to an unfair advantage anyone has brought to this fight.

The bear case: free cash flow is thin, capex is climbing, and consumers may not pay $100 a month for an agent that overlaps with cheaper tools they already use.

The bull case: Meta’s ad business is still growing 27%, the valuation is reasonable, and any paid AI revenue is upside the market has not underwritten.

The setup favors investors who can tolerate capital-spending headline risk through 2027. If Muse conversion disappoints by next summer, that thesis has to be revisited.

The post Mark Zuckerberg’s $100-a-Month Muse Bet Signals Meta’s Desperate Pivot Away From Ads appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

The “buy the dip” financial news teleprompter readers and the 30-year-old portfolio managers who have never seen a market crash are always insisting that stocks are going to the moon. Market veterans and “Hey Boomer” professionals know this show. In 1987, the Dow Jones industrials plunged by a stunning 22% in a single day. Today, a comparable drop in the venerable index would be 11,439 points. With 10-year bond yields at their highest level in over three years, 30-year bond yields at their highest since 2007, inflation relentlessly rising, profligate government spending, and a stock market far too overbought, these issues and others could lead to serious trouble.

From 2007 to 2009, during the height of the mortgage and real estate collapse, which brought us dangerously close to another depression, the market dropped a massive 57%. When the S&P 500 finally bottomed at an ominous intraday low of 666 on March 9, 2009, we set the floor for the longest bull market in history. That ended in January 2022 but picked right back up in June of that year. Except for the recent 10% decline that began when the war with Iran started, we have been in a huge bull market for almost four years. It’s been led by technology stocks and artificial intelligence hype.

So, where do we stand now? We may be on the precipice of a much more significant decline than we have seen since earlier this year, even as all major indices trade near all-time highs. One positive is that consumers and businesses are generally in reasonably good financial shape. Stock portfolios and home prices have increased dramatically over the last few years, and the economy isn’t teetering on the brink as it was globally in 2008, when Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers collapsed. To avoid a similar fate, Bank of America bought Merrill Lynch. But that all could change, and change fast.

Between issues with private credit, a potential AI bubble, concerns over data centers, and an overbought stock market being forced higher by a handful of stocks, it makes sense to take some precautions now. Boomers and older Gen X are at a juncture in their investing lives where a major market crash could destroy the future they worked so hard for. Here are six steps for worried investors to take now.

Start Building a Cash Stash Now

One positive is that consumers and businesses are generally in reasonably good financial shape. Stock portfolios and home prices have increased dramatically over the last few years, and the economic system isn’t teetering on the abyss as it was globally in 2008. Matching current losses against gains, even if they are short-term, makes sense for building cash. The proverbial dry powder may come in handy down the road. High-yield money market savings pay as much as 4.50% and are insured up to $250,000. Here are the HYSAs paying the most from Bankrate.com

Top High-Yield Savings Accounts (September 2026)

• GO2bank 4.50% APY. The top rate only applies to balances up to $5,000.
• St. Mary’s Credit Union 4.50% APY. Requires credit union membership; the top rate applies to balances up to $50,000.
• Elevault 4.34% APY. Outstanding high yield with no minimum deposit or strict hoops to jump through.
• Abound Credit Union: 4.25% APY. Requires credit union membership; top rate is capped on balances up to $5,000

Close Out Any Margin Positions Immediately

Margin is the money borrowed from a broker to purchase an investment. When times are good, using margin loans to buy more stock is a bad plan for individual investors, especially when those margin positions are high-volatility momentum stocks. A market collapse could wipe out a highly leveraged margin account. Close out all margin positions before it’s too late.

Gold and Silver Still Make Sense

Gold is the most popular precious metal investment and has been on a strong upward trend over the last few years. As we have recommended for years at 24/7 Wall St., a gold position helps mitigate the downside, and it always makes sense to keep 3%-5% in stock portfolios. One outstanding way to own physical gold is through the SPDR Gold Shares ETF (NYSE:GLD), which is one of the best pure plays on Gold for investors. The trust that sponsors the fund holds physical gold bullion and some cash. Each share represents one-tenth of an ounce of gold. However, the fund does not pay a dividend.

Make Sure Investments Are Reinvested in More Shares

Dividend reinvestment is a great way for investors to grow their wealth steadily. Ensure that all dividend-paying stocks, mutual funds, and ETFs in personal and retirement accounts are set to reinvest all capital gains and dividends, if possible. This allows you to buy more shares when prices fall. The third quarter is almost over, and many stocks and funds pay dividends on a calendar quarterly basis. Be sure to check your accounts today.

Real Estate Can Help

Buying and owning real estate is a strategic investment that can be both satisfying and lucrative. Consider real estate instead of the stock market if you have the good fortune to come into a windfall, like an inheritance or something similar. While mortgage rates have increased over the past two years, the 30-year fixed rate reached 7.25% at one point and is back at 7% now for a 30-year FHA mortgage. While still reasonable historically, that’s the highest since the late 1980s and early 1990s. Owning a cash-generating, passive-income rental property always makes sense if located in the right area.

U.S. Treasury Bonds Are Starting to Look Very Good

Treasury bonds include a range of debt securities issued and backed by the U.S. government. Sell high-volatility stocks and look at the short end of the Treasury market. Like all Treasury debt, the full faith and credit of the United States guarantees the two-year note, which yields a solid 4.55%. One-year certificates of deposit yield as high as 4.05% to 4.75%, depending on the deposit amount.

One fund we highly recommend at 24/7 Wall St. is the SPDR Bloomberg 1-3 Month T-Bill ETF (NYSE:BIL), which currently yields a whopping 3.76%. The fund invests substantially all, but at least 80%, of its total assets in the securities comprising the index and in securities that the adviser determines to have economic characteristics substantially identical to the financial characteristics of the securities comprising the index. The index measures the performance of U.S. Treasury public obligations with a remaining maturity of one month or more but less than three months.

The post Fall Market Crash Risk: 6 Defensive Moves for Boomers & Gen X Investors appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

Two of the market’s most-watched voices took opposite sides on the same quarter, six days apart. On September 4, 2026, StockTwits reported that Michael Burry had published a Substack post calling Lululemon (NASDAQ:LULU) a fat pitch. On September 10, 2026, Jim Cramer used his Mad Money segment to reach the opposite verdict on the same set of facts.

Burry’s Fat Pitch

A fat pitch is baseball shorthand for a ball down the middle: an at-bat where the reward looks unusually large compared with the risk of swinging. Michael Burry said Lululemon fit that description below $100 and told readers he planned to buy more shares when the market opened.

Burry engaged with the quarter directly. Burry said he read the 10-Q, the conference call transcript and the 8-K and concluded that “clearly things have changed for the worse.” His argument was that the damage is temporary rather than a permanent breakdown of the brand. Burry compared Lululemon’s current position to where Abercrombie & Fitch, Ralph Lauren and Lululemon itself sat in 2017, and said investors get paid for betting against the idea that a strong consumer brand never returns to growth.

Every valuation figure is Burry’s own model output. He said that even after lowering his assumptions for U.S. and China growth, global comps and operating margins, the stock still trades below his estimate of intrinsic value if the brand regains its footing. He pointed to the cash on the balance sheet, the absence of financial debt, and continued share retirement as downside protection. Financials in the quarterly release support that framing: $1.39 billion in cash and equivalents and 2.7 million shares repurchased at an average price of $120 in the quarter (see the company’s Q2 8-K).

Burry identified incoming CEO Heidi O’Neill as the biggest reason to believe in a turnaround. On the setup she inherits, Burry wrote: “Nevertheless, a new CEO is coming in and I smell the stench of a kitchen sink left with no running water for far too long. The new CEO is coming in with the lowest of bars, just as one would expect from a fresh-from-battle Chairwoman who silenced her biggest critic and won the choice of a CEO who could not start for six months just because she could.”

Burry closed by naming his short list: “Right now the only others that are clear super fat pitches in my universe are JD and Alibaba. I own the former but not the latter. I plan to buy Alibaba stock soon.”

Cramer’s Refusal

Cramer opened his segment with the headline verdict: “I can’t give you a good reason to buy Lululemon even after these stunning declines. Other than the kitchen sink thesis and the fact that the stock now appears to have a low price earnings multiple, according to CNBC. See, that’s not good enough though.” The shares carry a trailing PE near 8, which is the multiple he was referring to.

He laid out three causes. On leadership, Cramer said: “Basically, for the last eight months, Lulu’s had no permanent leadership, and that’s caused them to make a series of unforced errors.” On the category, Cramer said the athleisure category remains in the doghouse and the competition is as crowded as ever, slashing price and cutting margins. On China, Cramer pointed to a 2% China same-store sales decline when analysts had been looking for a 14.5% increase, tying the miss to a Great Wall marketing activation.

On the guidance, Lululemon cut its full-year outlook to diluted EPS of $9.48 to $9.73. Cramer warned that “Buying Lululemon because it’s cheap has been a sucker’s game all the way down because they keep cutting numbers.” He refused both sides of the trade: “I think it’s too risky to short this one. But I still can’t be a buyer either.” His close: “For now, let’s just say this stock is bleeding out in no man’s land, according to CNBC. Don’t try to be a hero and buy it. Just try to rubberneck and then move on.”

Same Kitchen Sink, Two Verdicts

Both men independently reached for the same image about the same quarter and the same incoming CEO. For Burry, cleared decks are the reason to buy. Cramer named the “kitchen sink quarter” possibility explicitly, tied it to Heidi O’Neill’s arrival, and then declared it not good enough.

Time Horizon Is the Real Split

They barely disagree on the facts. Both read the quarter as genuinely bad. Both see a new CEO walking into deliberately lowered expectations. What separates them is time horizon and what each is willing to underwrite. Burry is modeling an outcome measured in decades and is content to be early. Cramer is answering what to do with the stock now, and his objection is that a company which keeps cutting its numbers has repeatedly punished people who thought the bottom was in.

Where the Stock Sits Now

As of the September 11, 2026 pre-market session, LULU was quoted at $96.80, down 0.08% from the prior close of $96.88. That leaves the stock below the level Burry named. Over the past week it is down 20.51%, year to date it is down 53.42%, and over five years it is down 77.25%.

The post Cramer Says “I Can’t Give You a Good Reason to Buy Lululemon” After Michael Burry Calls the Company “A Fat Pitch” Below $100 appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

Although Visa (NYSE:V) is supposed to be the incumbent most exposed to a world in which AI shopping agents click “buy” on a consumer’s behalf, Wall Street keeps sending its shares higher. The stock changed hands near $368 Friday morning, ahead 8.6% over the past year and 351.5% over the past decade, with a market value near $685.6 billion. However, the agentic commerce narrative has quietly slotted into a template Visa shareholders have seen at least three times before, and each prior version ended with the same rails collecting the toll.

On the fiscal third-quarter earnings call held July 28, 2026, Chief Executive Ryan McInerney told analysts that “we believe agentic commerce will expand our addressable market and drive future growth for Visa” and framed the moment as the opening of a familiar adoption curve. He was blunt about the ordering: “Agentic Commerce is a when, not an if.” The strategy predates that July call. McInerney had already flagged it in the fiscal second-quarter release, saying “Throughout the quarter, we continued to enhance our Visa as a Service stack, including with agentic and stablecoin capabilities, to further strengthen our position as the leading hyperscaler of payments globally and drive growth for years to come.”

What Actually Happens When You Tap a Card

Before revisiting the precedent, it helps to identify the plumbing an agent would have to replace. Interchange is the fee the merchant’s bank pays the cardholder’s bank on every card transaction, with the rate set by the network. Settlement is the multi-party clearing process that moves money from the buyer’s bank to the seller’s bank, netted across millions of transactions a day. Chargeback liability is the legal spine of the system: if the transaction is fraudulent or the goods never arrive, a defined party (usually the merchant or the issuer) is on the hook, and the rules for who eats the loss are written by the network. Strip those three elements out and a “payment” is just a message on a wire.

Three Prior Existential Threats, Same Ending

Each of the last three commerce transitions was pitched as the end of the card networks. E-commerce arrived in the dot-com era with the promise that card-not-present shopping would route around Visa and Mastercard through bank drafts, digital cash, and closed-loop wallets. Mobile wallets landed in the smartphone era with a similar pitch, that a phone with a secure element would let issuers and merchants meet directly. Tap-to-pay and tokenization then arrived as the next disintermediation, replacing the card number with a device-bound token that in theory belonged to whoever generated it.

In every case, the network kept carrying the volume because settlement, fraud liability, and dispute resolution never moved. McInerney made the parallel explicit on the July call: “it’s instructive to look at other major cycles that we’ve been through, whether it was e-commerce or mobile commerce, tokenization, tap to pay.” Tokenization in particular is now inside the house. Visa said tokenized penetration was nearing 60% of its e-commerce transactions globally, meaning the “threat” became a fee-generating product line.

Fiscal Q3 Report Shows Who Is Collecting

The fiscal third-quarter results serve as the receipt. Net revenue reached $11.6 billion, up 14.4% year over year, with non-GAAP diluted EPS of $3.32 topping the $3.23 consensus, a fourth consecutive EPS beat. Data processing revenue, the line that captures each transaction Visa touches, grew 17% to $6.04 billion. Processed transactions reached 71.7 billion, up 10%, and payments volume crossed $4 trillion in the quarter. Value-added services revenue, which includes fraud tools, orchestration, and advisory, grew 34% in constant dollars to $3.8 billion. That is the same rail collecting a wider set of tolls, a point we flagged in the fiscal first-quarter earnings preview.

Stress Testing the Pattern

The precedent has limits. An agent-native rail would have to solve three problems prior challengers could not. First, it needs a scaled fraud-loss backstop that merchants trust when a bot goes rogue, because agents can execute at speeds no human can review. Second, it needs a dispute mechanism, since a chargeback filed by a consumer against an autonomous agent transaction has no established liability owner today. Third, it needs cross-border settlement faster and cheaper than existing correspondent banking, which is why Visa paired the agentic pitch with a stablecoin platform that begins with OpenUSD and integrates with Pismo.

The conditions that would falsify the precedent are specific. If a large merchant coalition adopts an agent protocol that carries its own liability rules, its own settlement token, and its own dispute court, and if a meaningful share of consumer checkout volume migrates to it within a couple of years, then the “same rails collect” pattern breaks. Absent a shift, agentic commerce will be absorbed into Visa’s product suite just as tokenization was. Visa’s recent partnership with OpenAI to secure agent-driven transactions shows this integration is already underway.

Valuation Gut Check

Visa trades at a premium. Shares near $368 price in the premium the network model has long commanded, well above the broader market. The counterweight is capital return. Visa sent $6.20 billion back to shareholders in the fiscal third quarter, repurchased roughly 14.5 million shares at an average of $330.71, and left $28.4 billion on the buyback authorization as of June 30, 2026. The quarterly dividend of $0.670 was paid on September 1, 2026. Read the full breakdown in the fiscal third quarter earnings release exhibit.

Over the long term, Wall Street has repeatedly misread commerce transitions as network-killers when they were network-extenders. Agentic commerce may prove different. History has repeatedly rewarded the rails.

The post Why Visa’s Agentic Commerce Play Isn’t the Threat Wall Street Thinks It Is appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

The 10-year Treasury yield sits right under 5% and the 10Y-2Y spread has narrowed to 0.39%, a compressed setup that squeezes the net interest margin every mortgage REIT relies on to fund its distribution. When the payout runs ahead of what the portfolio actually earns, the excess has a name: return of capital. The shareholder is being handed part of their own principal.

For a quick refresher, a mortgage REIT owns mortgages and mortgage-backed securities rather than buildings. Agency mREITs hold government-guaranteed paper and carry interest-rate risk. Non-agency and commercial mREITs carry actual credit risk on the loans themselves. The right coverage metric is distributable earnings (sometimes reported as earnings available for distribution, or EAD). EPS misleads because of non-cash marks, and FFO belongs to equity REITs. When distributions exceed taxable income, the excess is classified as return of capital: it reduces the shareholder’s cost basis rather than counting as ordinary dividend income, and no screener yield distinguishes between the two.

AGNC Investment (AGNC)

AGNC Investment (NASDAQ:AGNC) trades near $10.29, with an annualized $1.44 monthly payout producing a yield above 13%. Management highlighted the 75th consecutive monthly dividend payment of 12 cents per share, a stat that sounds reassuring.

Tangible book value ended Q2 2026 at $8.58, well below AGNC’s IPO-era book, and Q2 GAAP results leaned on a $461M gain on interest rate swaps that will not recur cleanly. AGNC also issued 16.2M common shares via ATM for $167M during the quarter, the classic mREIT pattern of raising fresh capital that helps fund distributions. Reported EPS swung from -0.17 in Q1 2026 to 0.4 in Q2, showing how thin the margin gets when hedges misfire. Coverage holds if mortgage spreads stay near management’s 145 basis points target.

Armour Residential (ARR)

Armour Residential REIT (NYSE:ARR) trades near $15.96 with an annualized $2.88 distribution, a yield above 17%.

Q2 2026 distributable earnings landed at $0.72 per share against a quarterly dividend of $0.72, exactly 1.0x with no cushion. Leverage is high at 7.54:1 debt-to-equity. Armour raised $218.7M in common ATM in Q2 with issuance continuing after quarter end, and its external manager routes 46.8% of repo financing through an affiliate, BUCKLER Securities. Book value gains rested on a $108.2M derivatives gain that offset losses on Agency MBS and Treasuries. Break-even coverage plus continuous share issuance means the distribution is being partly funded by new shareholder capital.

Orchid Island Capital (ORC)

Orchid Island Capital (NYSE:ORC) trades near $6.36 with an annualized forward payout of $1.20, a headline yield near 18%. The monthly distribution was already trimmed from 0.12 to 0.10 starting with the Q2 ex-dividend cycle.

Management’s own language gives away the game. Orchid’s CEO said returns available on the portfolio are “approximately equal to our current dividend yield expressed as a percentage of book value per share, at approximately 16.5% to 17.0%.” Translation: the payout sits at the ceiling of what the portfolio can earn. Portfolio effective duration jumped to 3.180 from 2.513, adding rate sensitivity, and continuous ATM issuance (18,558,681 shares in H1 2026 for about $135.5M) drags per-share economics.

Dynex Capital (DX)

Dynex Capital (NYSE:DX) trades near $12.58 with a $2.04 annualized payout, a yield around 15%.

The coverage math is the loudest warning on this list. Q2 2026 earnings available for distribution came in at $0.36 per share against a quarterly dividend of $0.51, coverage of roughly 0.71x. Dynex raised $391M of common equity via ATM in Q2 (about 30M shares) and deployed $2.8B of Agency MBS. The raise-and-deploy model requires constant new capital to sustain distributions, and GAAP profit was flattered by $128.84M swap gains. For DX’s payout to hold organically, the net interest spread of 1.17% would have to widen materially without a book value hit.

Ellington Financial (EFC)

Ellington Financial (NYSE:EFC) trades near $13.04 with an annualized $1.56 monthly distribution, a yield around 12%.

Ellington is the counter-example showing what real coverage looks like. Q2 2026 adjusted distributable earnings were $0.60 per share against the $0.39 quarterly dividend, roughly 1.54x. Book value expanded to $13.61 per common share, and H1 2026 delivered a 20% annualized economic return. The hybrid credit book and the Longbridge reverse-mortgage arm (ranked #2 HMBS issuer with 29% market share) add earnings variability, yet this is the profile of a distribution paid out of income.

Arbor Realty Trust (ABR)

Arbor Realty Trust (NYSE:ABR) is the live cautionary tale. Shares trade near $4.84, down 52.87% over one year, after the board reduced the quarterly dividend to $0.17 from $0.30.

Even post-cut, distributable earnings of $0.10 per share do not cover the new $0.17 dividend, roughly 0.59x. Credit stress keeps escalating: 19 non-performing loans with UPB $428.80M, an added $38.16M net provision for credit losses, and a GAAP loss of $0.20 per diluted share. Management said it “expects realized losses to increase and be in the range of 20 to 30 million for the next few quarters.” Arbor tapped a $375M convertible notes offering to buy back stock at roughly half of book, an aggressive capital-allocation choice while the credit book deteriorates.

Reading This Roster

A screener yield cannot separate income from return of capital. A distribution funded partly by ATM issuance and swap gains looks identical on paper to one funded by durable spread income, until the book value line quietly grinds lower or the dividend is reset. When an mREIT payout is cut, the share price typically goes with it, and ABR is the reference case (we cataloged the seven warning signs that a big yield is about to be trimmed in a free dividend trap guide). Yield alone was never a buy thesis, and in this corner of the market it is the least reliable one.

The post The Hidden Problem With These High-Yield Mortgage REIT Distributions appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

When it comes to building wealth, many people tell themselves they will invest when the time is right- when they discover that must-buy stock, when they have more money, or when things settle down and they can come up with a plan. But one of the biggest investor advantages has nothing to do with picking the perfect stock or having a large chunk of money. It has everything to do with time.

The earlier you start investing, the more time your money has to grow. This is the almighty power of compounding. What many don’t realize is that waiting, even just a handful of years, can have a much bigger impact than many people think.

These figures are hypothetical and assume a steady 7% average annual return, which is not guaranteed. Actual investment returns will vary.

Why Starting Early Matters

Imagine two people who both invest the exact same amount of money every month. The only difference? One person starts earlier. Assuming an average annual return of 7%, here’s how their results compare:

Investor #1: Starts at Age 45

• Invests $200 per month
• Invests for 20 years
• Total amount contributed: $48,000
• Value at age 65: approximately $104,185

Investor #2: Starts at Age 35

• Invests $200 per month
• Invests for 30 years
• Total amount contributed: $72,000
• Value at age 65: approximately $243,994

Investor #3: Starts at Age 25

• Invests $200 per month
• Invests for 40 years
• Total amount contributed: $96,000
• Value at age 65: approximately $524,963

The difference is huge!

The person who started at age 25 contributed $48,000 more than the person who started at age 45 yet ended up with hundreds of thousands of dollars more. Those extra decades gave both their contributions and their investment returns more time to grow.

Compounding Rewards Patience

Compounding means your investments don’t just grow based on the money you put in. Your returns can generate returns of their own. Over time, this creates a snowball effect. In the beginning, growth will feel slow, at times so slow that you might want to throw in the towel. But after years of consistent investing, your money begins stacking up and working for you. This is why time matters more than trying to come up with large amounts to invest.

Small Amounts Can Make a Big Difference

A common reason people put off investing is thinking they need a substantial amount of money to start. But investing $50, $100, or $200 per month consistently adds up over decades. The goal isn’t to make big investment decisions a couple of times a year. The goal is to build a habit that is sustainable. Boring consistency is the name of the game. Dare to be boring.

The Biggest Mistake: Waiting

Many people put off investing because they think:

“I’ll start when I make more money.”

“I’ll start when all my debt is paid off.”

“I’ll start when I find a really promising stock.”

“I’m only in my 20s/30s; I’ll start when I reach that phase of life.”

“I’ll start when life calms down a bit.”

“I’ll start when the kids are older.”

The problem is that time keeps moving whether you invest or not. While waiting might feel right, it is costing you one of your biggest financial advantages.

Start Where You Are

Don’t wait until you have it all figured out before you begin. You can start small. You can increase contributions later on if it works for your situation. Until then, remember: boring consistency. You don’t have to do anything dramatic. You can learn as you go. And you can make mistakes in the process. The most important thing is simply that you start.

The person who ends up with hundreds of thousands of dollars in their investment account isn’t always the person who made tons of money or picked the perfect stocks. It’s often the person who stayed consistent and gave their money more time to grow.

Start now. Your future self will thank you.

The post Why Time Is Your Most Powerful Financial Tool appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) and Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOG) both dropped Q2 2026 numbers that reshuffled the AI infrastructure hierarchy.

AWS posted its fastest growth in 18 quarters, while Google Cloud rocketed 82% year over year. Both are pouring tens of billions into chips, data centers, and models. If you can only own one, the differences below matter more than the shared headlines.

Cloud Reaccelerates for Both, but One Is Pulling Away Faster

Amazon reported Q2 revenue of $200.61B, up 19.6% YoY, with AWS at $42.23B and a 39.4% operating margin. CEO Andy Jassy said “AWS is booming, growing 36.7% year-over-year in Q2, our fastest growth in 18 quarters, and our AI and Chips businesses each eclipsed run rates of more than $25 billion.”

Backlog sits at $496 billion. Retail is quietly re-accelerating too, with Advertising up 26% and Amazon Now gross sales growing 80%+ QoQ.

Alphabet posted $119.8B in revenue, up 24.2% YoY, its 12th straight quarter of double-digit growth. Google Cloud hit $24.77B with operating margin expanding to 35.6% from 20.7% a year earlier. Backlog reached $514 billion.

Sundar Pichai told investors “Q2 was an amazing quarter, with Alphabet revenues growing 24% year-over-year and Google Cloud revenues accelerating to 82% growth.” Search still grew 17% despite AI Overviews fears.

Two Very Different Bets on the Same AI Boom

Amazon is spreading its bets across a sprawling stack: Trainium silicon with multi-year, multi-gigawatt commitments from Anthropic and OpenAI, Bedrock as a model marketplace, Zoox robotaxis, and nearly 400 Amazon Leo satellites. Qualcomm just handed Amazon $4 billion in warrants as part of an AI infrastructure deal, another vote of confidence in AWS scale.

Alphabet is going full-stack and vertical. Gemini has 950 million MAUs, processes 22 billion tokens per minute, and is embedded in nearly 90% of Fortune 100 companies via Gemini Enterprise. Waymo crossed 500,000 fully autonomous rides per week.

The tradeoff: Alphabet suspended its buyback in Q2, raised $70B in equity and debt, and long-term debt jumped from $46.5B to $98.2B. That is a lot of funding pressure for a company that used to print cash effortlessly.

What I Am Watching Into Year-End

For Amazon, Q3 guidance calls for $197B to $202B in revenue and $22.5B to $26.5B in operating income. I want to see AWS margins hold above 35% while capex keeps climbing.

For Alphabet, the tell is whether Search revenue keeps compounding as AI Overviews expands, and whether third-party capacity brought in as a bridging strategy squeezes Cloud margins in Q3.

Why I Would Pick Alphabet Today

On the numbers, Alphabet screens more favorably today. It trades at a P/E of around 17 versus Amazon’s 21, generates a 32% operating margin, and just showed Cloud can accelerate and expand margin at the same time. The stock is also up 37.22% over the past year compared with Amazon’s 5.94%, and analysts still see room to run toward $422.34.

Amazon remains the more diversified compounder, with lower embedded expectations that some turnaround-oriented investors may find appealing. For me, Alphabet’s cash engine plus Gemini distribution wins the coin flip.

The post Amazon vs. Alphabet: If I Could Buy Only One, I’d Choose This Stock appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..