Key News Asian equities were mixed following President Donald Trump’s Mexico-Canada tariff talk, which strengthened the U.S. dollar overnight. Taiwan, Thailand, and Indonesia underperformed. Hong Kong and China bounced around the room in a choppy session, though volumes were very high, which has become the new normal. Another strong day of Mainland investors buying Hong Kong via Southbound Stock Connect with $2.173 billion of net buying, with Alibaba and the Hong Kong Tracker ETF seeing very large inflows, with Tencent, SMIC, and Meituan also seeing large net buys. Xiaomi -5.68% despite announcing a new high-end sedan costing $112k in a…

Nvidia, the chipmaker that fueled 22% of the S&P 500’s total returns in 2024 with a 171.25% stock surge, continues to ride the AI wave into 2025. Its latest quarterly earnings, released after market close Wednesday, showcase a company still firing on all cylinders—yet the market’s response hints at a maturing narrative. With the stock down 2.24% year-to-date entering earnings, investors are wrestling with whether Nvidia’s meteoric rise can sustain its momentum amid economic uncertainty and shifting tech priorities. Nvidia’s fourth-quarter fiscal 2025 results, covering the period ending January 26, 2025, smashed expectations. The company reported revenue of $39.3 billion,…

Question: Why are there so many ETFs? Answer: ETF issuance is profitable, so Wall Street keeps cranking out more products to sell. I leverage my firm’s data to identify three red flags you can use to avoid the worst ETFs: 1. Inadequate Liquidity This issue is the easiest to avoid, and my advice is simple. Avoid all ETFs with less than $100 million in assets. Low levels of liquidity can lead to a discrepancy between the price of the ETF and the underlying value of the securities it holds. Small ETFs also generally have lower trading volume, which translates to…

The isolation imposed in 2020 by the Covid-19 pandemic triggered a boom in pet adoptions and a bonanza for vendors of kitty litter, dog food, and accessories. In the first 12 months of the crisis, shares of Chewy, an online pet supply merchant, quadrupled as its racked up 45-50% year-over-year quarterly revenue surges. The two dominant U.S. bricks-and-mortar retailers, PetSmart and Petco, saw similar spikes. Four years later, growth in the $136 billion annual pet supply business has slowed and Chewy’s stock trades at about a third of its 2021 peak price. Yet pet ownership remains as popular as ever.…

Recent data has suggested the U.S. consumer could be weakening a little. Nonetheless, nowcasts continue to imply strong overall U.S. Gross Domestic Product growth in Q1. Consumer Concerns Concern for the U.S. consumer comes from retail sales falling 0.9% on a seasonally adjusted basis for January compared to December. In addition, consumer confidence fell almost 10% for February according to the University of Michigan Survey of Consumers. However, this survey data may be more of a forward-looking assessment, with consumers expressing apprehension about the potential impact of tariffs, rather than reacting to immediate economic conditions. In addition, survey assessments divided…

Rolls-Royce shares have surged after the enginebuilder released robust trading numbers for 2024, and announced a resumption in dividend payments from this year. At 729p per share, the FTSE 100 company was last up 15.5% in Thursday trading. Statutory revenues rose improved 14.7% over the course of 2024, to £18.9 billion, while on an underlying basis they grew 15.8% to £17.8 billion. Operating profit, meanwhile, soared 49.5% and 55% on a reported and underlying basis respectively, to £2.9 million and £2.5 billion. Rolls’ underlying operating margin came in at 13.8%, up from 10.3% in 2023. Dividends Return, Buyback Announced Rolls-Royce’…

NVIDIA, the chipmaker that fueled 22% of the S&P 500’s total returns in 2024 with a 171.25% stock surge, continues to ride the AI wave into 2025. Its latest quarterly earnings, released after market close today, showcase a company still firing on all cylinders—yet the market’s response hints at a maturing narrative. With the stock down 2.24% year-to-date entering earnings, investors are wrestling with whether NVIDIA’s meteoric rise can sustain its momentum amid economic uncertainty and shifting tech priorities. NVIDIA’s fourth-quarter fiscal 2025 results, covering the period ending January 26, 2025, smashed expectations. The company reported revenue of $39.3 billion,…

Lately, I’ve seen a lot of people stay in marriages with financially irresponsible partners after the love has gone because they are worried about what it would cost them to get divorced. Financial irresponsibility might include extreme risk-taking behavior, consistently missing bill payment deadlines, refusal to include their partner in major spending decisions, taking on more debt than they can afford, spending beyond their means, an inability to hold down a job, or a proclivity toward financial dishonesty. This is an exploration of the financial cost of staying in this type of marriage versus cutting ties. Immediate Financial Consequences Because…

DeepSeek, a Chinese artificial intelligence research lab, recently introduced DeepSeek-V3, a powerful Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language model. With 671 billion total parameters and groundbreaking efficiency, it rivals closed-source models while demanding significantly less computing power. More recently, DeepSeek-R1, an open-source reasoning model, captured attention for its ability to autonomously generate complex thought chains, purportedly reducing computing power consumption by up to 95%. Instead of locking away this innovation, DeepSeek posted R1 on GitHub, allowing researchers and developers to explore its capabilities freely. While this openness sparked enthusiasm in tech circles, the stock market had a different reaction—AI-related stocks tumbled on fears…

With an ever-growing list of similar-sounding mutual funds to choose from, finding the best is an increasingly difficult task. How can investors change the game to shift the odds in their favor? Don’t Trust Style Mutual Fund Labels There are at least 836 different All Cap Value mutual funds and at least 5,348 mutual funds across twelve styles. Do investors need 445 plus choices on average per style? How different can the mutual funds be? Those 836 All Cap Value mutual funds are very different. With anywhere from 14 to 955 holdings, many of these All Cap Value mutual funds…