Author: Charlotte

U.S. stocks inched to more records Wednesday after oil prices fell and eased the pressure on households and businesses worldwide. The S&P 500 edged up by less than 0.1% and added to its all-time high set the day before. The Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed 182 points, or 0.4%, and the Nasdaq composite gained 0.1% as both indexes also set records. Stocks of companies with big fuel bills helped lead the way on hopes that lower oil prices will remove a big drag on their profits. Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings climbed 6.1%, and United Airlines rallied 6.3%. Delta Air Lines…

Large mutual funds and passive index funds are setting aside additional cash and preparing to offload some existing holdings in large-cap stocks. This strategic move anticipates upcoming blockbuster initial public offerings (IPOs) from SpaceX and OpenAI. John Flood, managing director of Global Banking & Markets, FICC & Equities at Goldman Sachs, noted in a May 22 client brief that passive funds could be compelled to sell down current large-cap holdings due to the potential inclusion of newly public companies. Flood observed that U.S. equity mutual funds historically increased cash balances ahead of major past IPOs. This action by major asset…

Kevin McCoy, “Quantum”, 2014, Animated GIF, Non-fungible token. Image Courtesy of Jennifer and Kevin McCoy. NFTs made artists rich overnight, crashed spectacularly, and became shorthand for hype, speculation, and internet absurdity. Declared dead more times than anyone can count, they nevertheless changed the art world, forcing artists, collectors, museums, and institutions to rethink ownership, value, and what digital art could be. Kevin McCoy knows this better than anyone. Widely regarded as the inventor of NFTs, the artist never set out to create a speculative market. What he imagined instead was monetized graphics: a way for digital artists to own and…

A managing partner surveys a struggling platform company. When the numbers don’t add up, adding a bolt-on won’t fix what’s already broken.ManusAbout four years ago, the owner of a Northeast construction company called me, and he sounded like a man who hadn’t slept in a month. He told me he was looking at the “perfect storm” and it was a complete disaster. His healthy contracting business had turned into a roller coaster he couldn’t get off of, his banks were nervous, and his cash position was shrinking by the week.Eighteen months earlier, he had acquired a company about a third…

What happened: Robinhood stock jumped about 3% on Wednesday and continued to gain in after-hours trading. What’s behind the move: The financial services company announced that it will now allow artificial intelligence agents to trade or make credit card purchases on behalf of customers on its platform. Robinhood’s 27.5 million customers will now be able to open an agentic trading account, separate from the rest of their portfolio, to allow an AI agent to make decisions on their behalf. Right now, agentic trading is limited to equity trading. For example, an AI agent can help a long-term investor understand and…

AI’s mixed economic signals Financial Times Source link

Executive summaryTrend bias: Gold (XAUUSD) appears to be nearing the ending stages of wave c of (ii) lower.Support zone cluster: 4,377 – 4,401 to finalize the correction lower.Bias is turning bullish as price has reached the support cluster and while gold price holds above $4,099.Gold has been correcting lower since a near-term top developed on April 17. We previously forecasted this decline could reach as low as 4,377 and gold prices are nearing this low. The patterns suggest a bottom may develop nearby leading to a strong rally.Current Elliott Wave analysisThe current Elliott wave count for gold shows the yellow metal is in wave ((5)) of c of (ii), a…

A 2026 Wealth Pulse survey from FTSE Russell found that a large majority of affluent investors rely on their financial advisors to make allocations to private markets. Yet a substantial number of advisors have not yet addressed their clients’ interest in such allocations.In an online survey of 600 U.S.-based private investors with at least $500,000 in investable assets, 77% said they invest in private markets through a financial advisor. Another 89% of investors who employ an advisor said they would allocate to private markets if their advisor strongly recommended it. Without that recommendation, 55% of surveyed investors were interested in…

Hyperliquid has expanded its HIP-4 outcome markets beyond crypto price targets into macroeconomic events such as U.S. inflation data and Federal Reserve interest-rate decisions, intensifying competition with established prediction market platforms such as Polymarket. The decentralized exchange’s expanded offering allows users to trade prediction-style contracts alongside crypto perpetual futures from a single account, broadening Hyperliquid’s push to become a multi-asset trading platform. The rollout marks a shift from Hyperliquid’s initial testing phase, which focused on crypto-native outcomes such as whether bitcoin would trade above a specified level by a certain time.  The latest expansion introduces contracts tied to off-chain events, including…

Equities: The price of equity securities may rise or fall due to the changes in the broad market or changes in a company’s financial condition, sometimes rapidly or unpredictably. Equity securities are subject to ‘stock market risk’ meaning that stock prices in general may decline over short or extended periods of time. Mutual funds, ETFs, and index funds: When investing in mutual funds or exchange-traded and index funds, please consider the investment objectives, risks, charges, and expenses associated with the funds before investing. You may obtain a fund’s prospectus by contacting your investment professional. The prospectus contains information, which should be…