President Trump wasted little time in announcing the Stargate Initiative, a $500 billion private sector deal to expand U.S. artificial intelligence infrastructure. Spearheaded by tech giants OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle, Stargate represents the largest AI infrastructure project in history. Two key factors increasingly constrain AI’s growth: the rising electricity demand for data centers and evolving regulatory challenges. Data centers, which power AI training and deployment, consume immense energy, strain power grids, and drive up costs. A single Chat GPT search uses 10 times the computing power of a traditional Google search. As AI models scale up, their energy consumption surges,…

Is cash trash? Folding green may seem anachronistic. But Rick Kahler, president of Kahler Financial Group in Rapid City, S.D., begs to differ. Larry Light: So is that paper in the wallet hopelessly old-fashioned and best avoided? That sure is an assumption some hold. Rick Kahler: The CrowdStrike software failure in late July that disabled computers all over the world may contradict this assumption. Many of us were temporarily unable to complete simple financial transactions. Airline travel was disrupted. At least one major retailer closed stores. Some financial planning and investment advisory firms had to suspend trading for clients’ accounts.…

In trading on Wednesday, shares of AT&T were yielding above the 5% mark based on its quarterly dividend (annualized to $1.11), with the stock changing hands as low as $22.02 on the day. Dividends are particularly important for investors to consider, because historically speaking dividends have provided a considerable share of the stock market’s total return. To illustrate, suppose for example you purchased shares of the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) back on 12/31/1999 — you would have paid $146.88 per share. Fast forward to 12/31/2012 and each share was worth $142.41 on that date, a decrease of $4.67/share over all…

According to NextEarningsDate.com, the Exxon Mobil XOM next earnings date is projected to be 1/31 before market open, with earnings estimates of $1.79/share on $88.23 Billion of revenue. Looking back, the recent Exxon Mobil earnings history looks like this: The company has the following long-term earnings per share chart: And with quarterly revenue that looks like this: But earnings reports can often uniquely bring abrupt volatility to a stock, in either direction, as investors digest the fundamental details. And that volatility can be a stock options trader’s dream come true — so such traders will be interested to know that…

Many countries are on alert following President Trump’s inauguration, awaiting an announcement on whether he will impose the 20% universal tariff executive order on imports he promised during his campaign. The tariffs would have significant implications for major trading partners like Canada and Mexico but would also affect any nation that exports to the U.S. Switzerland is no exception. Behind pharmaceuticals and gold, watches are the third largest export to the U.S. Switzerland sells more than CHF 4 billion of watches to the U.S. every year or roughly 17% of total production. The U.S. is the largest export market for…

Key News Asian equities were higher, except for Hong Kong and Mainland China, which were off following President Trump’s 10% tariff threat, which prompted profit-taking after six days of gains. I would have thought that a 10% tariff was expected or would have been cheered, as 10% is better than 60%, which is why today’s market action could simply have been profit-taking. There was a fairly broad sell-off in both markets, less so because of Trump’s AI infrastructure effort called Stargate, which was cited for the outperformance of technology hardware and semiconductor stocks. CATL fell -2.34% after yesterday’s post-close financial…

Legendary investor Warren Buffett advises to be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful. One way we can try to measure the level of fear in a given stock is through a technical analysis indicator called the Relative Strength Index, or RSI, which measures momentum on a scale of zero to 100. A stock is considered to be oversold if the RSI reading falls below 30. Start slideshow: 10 Oversold Stocks You Should Know About » In trading on Tuesday, shares of Apple entered into oversold territory, hitting an RSI reading of 28.2, after changing…

We are now officially into Trump 2.0, and here’s the first thing I can tell you: This new administration will hurt the returns of folks who simply buy an index fund like the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY) and call it a day. What we’re now embarking on is a true stock picker’s market—a time when prudent moves into, and out of, individual dividend payers will be key. That puts holders of SPY, which has to represent the current makeup of the S&P 500 index, in a tough spot. Since it has no manager who can buy and sell…

They used to say, and still do, that there is no such thing as economics, only demographics. The idea is that whatever economic theory holds sway, it is overwhelmed by the effects of population. As a sidebar this is the key to predicting who will come out on top of the first world versus the emerging world economic dominance. India and China alone have populations approaching three times that of the U.S. and Europe, and that alone should indicate the outcome. In markets the same idea can be applied, “There is no stock market only money supply.” That is to…

If you take a journey down the rabbit hole of precious metals as currency you will note that it is not as stable as many of the precious metal lovers will have you believe. Gold and silver have no real intrinsic value. Value yes, use cases yes, but a God-given immutable value, no. The gold-to-silver ratio at the height of the Roman empire was about 15-to-1, which doesn’t seem so weird when you understand that silver took a lot more work to extract than much of the gold that was, at least initially, washed out of rivers or melted out…