Key News Asian equities and currencies were mixed overnight as South Korea and Mainland China outperformed while Indonesia underperformed with President Donald Trump’s tariff threat weighing on sentiment. It is hard to say if Trump’s tariff threat, the recent strong outperformance, or xAI’s Grok3 model launch sparked today’s Hong Kong growth/internet stock profit-taking. The timing is interesting, with Alibaba, NetEase, and Bilibili reporting earnings tomorrow, as all three have an AI angle. Mainland China and Hong Kong hard technology stocks in the semiconductor and high-end manufacturing sectors, specifically in auto/electric vehicle, hardware, and electric equipment, had a strong day. People…

Bonds (and bond proxies) are hated right now. That’s our shot at big dividends—because mainstream investors’ thinking here is totally backward. We’re going to pounce, and use this opportunity to grab ourselves a huge 7.6% payout sporting an unusual “discount in disguise.” Tariffs: Don’t Believe the Hype The reason for this opportunity comes back to tariffs—which I admit, dear reader, I’ve heard so much about that I’m starting to dream about them at night! The badly flawed logic most people are applying to tariffs is this: Tariffs will drive up prices, adding to an inflation rate that, according to last…

How two Chinese women turned their Ph.D. theses into machine learning that makes connections between seemingly unrelated events to discover emerging fraud schemes. By Hank Tucker, Forbes Staff Back in 2006, after earning her Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon, Yinglian Xie wasn’t thinking about whether she wanted to make her career in the U.S. or her native China, let alone about someday being an entrepreneur. Instead, she was laser focused on the best place to continue her work–her thesis was on identifying potential internet security threats by looking for correlations between seemingly unrelated events. She ended up at Microsoft Research’s Silicon…

Value stocks have had a difficult time over the last few years, but things could be looking up, especially for investors who seek out lesser-known names. In recent interviews with me, Jim Zimmerman, Abigail Zimmerman, and Ara Laterovian with Lowell Capital, and Ted Rosenthal with TMR Capital each shared their two top under-the-radar stock picks. Lowell Capital chose Macfarlane Group and Academy Sports and Outdoors, while Rosenthal selected REV Group and Celestica. Macfarlane Group Macfarlane Group is the leading specialist distributor of protective packaging materials in the U.K. It operates in the U.K., Ireland, the Netherlands and Germany, providing industrial…

Typically voting is thought of as a highly personal decision and practice. And yet, in the world of public markets, most investors that take the time to vote their proxies tend to actually outsource these decisions, or at least, the research behind them, to just two companies: Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) and Glass Lewis. According to the Wall Street Journal, they have cornered approximately 97% of the proxy voting market, giving them the power to sway voting by as much as 30%. Translating this into electoral politics, it’s as if two companies controlled the electoral college votes for all seven…

There has been extensive discussion about the tariffs the Trump administration wants to impose on U.S. trading partners. Much of this discussion remains inconclusive regarding the specific amounts, timing, affected countries, and the particular goods that would be subject to these tariffs. However, one proposal that appears certain is a 25% tariff on steel scheduled to take effect on March 12. For the most part, tariffs function as taxes paid by U.S. importers rather than by exporters in foreign countries. This means that a tariff is a tax, transferring wealth from local consumers (essentially everyone, since steel is widely used)…

Kraft Heinz has been named as the ‘’Top Dividend Stock of the Nasdaq 100’’, according to Dividend Channel, which published its most recent ”DividendRank” report. The report noted that among the components of the Nasdaq 100 index, KHC shares displayed both attractive valuation metrics and strong profitability metrics. For example, the recent KHC share price of $28.92 represents a price-to-book ratio of 0.7 and an annual dividend yield of 5.5% — by comparison, the average dividend paying stock in the Nasdaq 100 yields 1.8% and trades at a price-to-book ratio of 9.6. The report also cited the strong quarterly dividend…

If you’re like most income investors, you’re on the hunt for stocks and funds that can stand up to a storm these days. So that’s what I’m going to give you below—in the form of three “all-weather” closed-end funds (CEFs) kicking out an outsized 6.8% average yield. They’ve stood firm through every headwind imaginable—wars, pandemics, inflation, you name it—and have done nothing but profit over the long haul. Through all that, this trio has kicked out annualized total returns (with dividends reinvested) of 15%+ each. “Shock-Proofing” Your Portfolio, Crushing ETFs These funds’ stellar returns come from both the sector they…

Baidu Q4 Earnings Overview Baidu reported Q4 2024 financial results after the close in Hong Kong and before US markets opened this morning. Expectations going into the release were muted, especially following Founder and CEO Robin Li’s absence from President Xi’s historic private economy symposium attended by internet and technology entrepreneurs. In Li’s defense, the event timing could not have been worse with today’s financial release and the preparation around it. People often ask us about Baidu as the stock has struggled lately despite its AI focus. Today’s results provide one indication that financial metrics shrank year-over-year (YoY). The company’s…

T he stock market has never been higher, but that doesn’t mean it’s an easy time to start a fintech aimed at investors. In an industry saturated with legacy players like Vanguard, Fidelity, BlackRock and Charles Schwab that offer easy access to funds for retail investors with minuscule management fees, it’s difficult to scale fast enough to offer a product to retail investors at a competitive price. It wasn’t always so. Forbes put Robinhood on our very first Fintech 50 list in 2015. Back then, the startup was catalyzing the race to the bottom in fees by offering commission-free trading.…