Abandoned for months on their fishing boat off West Africa, Indonesian sailor Surono and his shipmates face a dilemma: return home without almost a year’s wages or stay on the docked vessel. He is among a growing number of migrant workers abandoned by shipowners, who flout their obligations and desert crews without paying the salaries owed. “My family cries because I can’t get any money. My childr...
Abandoned for months on their fishing boat off West Africa, Indonesian sailor Surono and his shipmates face a dilemma: return home without almost a year’s wages or stay on the docked vessel. He is among a growing number of migrant workers abandoned by shipowners, who flout their obligations and desert crews without paying the salaries owed. “My family cries because I can’t get any money. My children and wife need money to eat,” Surono, 47, who like many Indonesians goes by one name, said from the abandoned ship in Cabo Verde, formerly known as Cape Verde. Advertisement “We want to go home, but if we go home without money, then what? We’ve been working ourselves to the bone out at sea. How can we just be abandoned like that?” The Novo Ruivo fishing boat. Photo: AFP The engine technician flew from Indonesia to Namibia in March 2025 to work on board the Portuguese-flagged Novo Ruivo, a tuna longliner fishing boat.
Tom Werner/DigitalVision via Getty Images My original thesis for Central Garden & Pet ( CENT ) ( CENTA ) was that the company was sacrificing revenue for additional margin growth . Now, it appears that many of its efficiency programs have already been implemented, and this company might focus on growth in 2026. In addition to its organic growth initiatives, it plans to increase EPS through buyback...
Tom Werner/DigitalVision via Getty Images My original thesis for Central Garden & Pet ( CENT ) ( CENTA ) was that the company was sacrificing revenue for additional margin growth . Now, it appears that many of its efficiency programs have already been implemented, and this company might focus on growth in 2026. In addition to its organic growth initiatives, it plans to increase EPS through buybacks, and it might make another acquisition this year as well. It already made a small acquisition late in 2025, but that didn't have much impact on its results this quarter. Central Garden & Pet's Q1 2026 results weren't too surprising. The pet product and garden company reported that revenue fell 6.0% to $617.4 million. It also reported $0.21 in non-GAAP EPS, which was flat in comparison to last year. And its non-GAAP gross margin rose 100 basis points to 30.8%. But it looks like its bottom-line results were still impacted by its efficiency initiatives. Central Garden & Pet reported $50 million in adjusted EBITDA in Q1 2026, versus $55 million in Q1 2025, so its adjusted EBITDA margin actually weakened this quarter. If you bought this stock after my previous article came out, you might be wondering if it's time to sell it now or if you should wait for a higher price. This company has also released 2 earnings reports since I wrote my previous article, so I think it's time for an update. It looks like Central Garden & Pet's overall efficiency plan is still on track, even though it's incurring additional short-term costs. But it doesn't look like as much of a bargain as it did the last time I wrote about it. Maintained Its 2026 Guidance This company is still guiding for 2026 non-GAAP EPS of $2.70 or better, so the company is only providing the low end of its guidance range. Wall Street expects it to post EPS of $2.83 this year. So, it appears possible that Central Garden & Pet will outperform its EPS guidance this year. But it also looks like this outperformance might be priced...
If you had to pick a soundtrack for Spotify shares in 2026, a Baroque lament or a mopey darkwave number might work best, considering their 27% drop. As the music and podcast streaming giant prepares to report its fourth-quarter and full-year 2025 earnings tomorrow, its vaunted pricing power and the business potential of new offerings will face the music. More optimistic analysts are keeping the fa...
If you had to pick a soundtrack for Spotify shares in 2026, a Baroque lament or a mopey darkwave number might work best, considering their 27% drop. As the music and podcast streaming giant prepares to report its fourth-quarter and full-year 2025 earnings tomorrow, its vaunted pricing power and the business potential of new offerings will face the music. More optimistic analysts are keeping the faith that it will be a mix heavy on sunshine pop. Take a Hike Spotify’s stock has slid lower amid a broader tech sell-off. Markets, therefore, will be listening closely to what executives say about the streaming service’s outlook as they seek out value in the wake of the dip. One major consideration will be price hikes, which Spotify has used to drive revenue growth in recent years. In November, executives said past hikes led to only a “small amount of churn.” Spotify had 713 million active users at the end of the third quarter, during which time the number of paid subscribers increased 12%. Meanwhile, the company plans to keep testing its pricing power: This month, the US Premium subscription fee went up $1 to $12.99 per month. Another consideration for investors will be the earnings potential of new offerings: Last week, Spotify entered the physical book business, partnering with online retailer Bookshop.org to let audiobook listeners buy books in its app. That puts it toe-to-toe with e-commerce giant Amazon, whose business was built on a foundation of online bookselling. Last month, Spotify expanded its creator monetization program and added new video tools for podcasters, pitting it against YouTube. That followed another encroachment on the Google-owned video giant’s market share in December, when Spotify made music videos available to its Premium subscribers in the US and Canada. With Spotify shares at $422 as of Friday, many analysts are bullish on its buy-the-dip potential. Goldman Sachs upgraded the company’s rating to “buy” last month and has a $700 price target, im...
Deaths caused by a synthetic opioid that is hundreds of times stronger than heroin may have been underestimated by up to a third across the UK, according to research. Nitazenes are a class of synthetic opioids that are extremely potent, and up to 500 times stronger than heroin. They were manufactured originally as a painkiller in the 1950s but their development was halted due to their extreme pote...
Deaths caused by a synthetic opioid that is hundreds of times stronger than heroin may have been underestimated by up to a third across the UK, according to research. Nitazenes are a class of synthetic opioids that are extremely potent, and up to 500 times stronger than heroin. They were manufactured originally as a painkiller in the 1950s but their development was halted due to their extreme potencies resulting in a high risk of addiction. In 2024, the National Crime Agency (NCA) reported that 333 fatalities across the UK were linked to the drug. However, researchers at King’s College London say that the true number of deaths may have been underreported, due to concerns that samples of the drug are likely being missed in postmortem toxicology tests. The study involved researchers testing samples from rats that had been anaesthetised with the drug, and finding that on average only 14% of the nitazene present at the time of overdose was still present when tested under real-world pathology and toxicology sample-handling conditions. After this, the academics applied modelling to data from the UK National Programme on Substance Use Mortality (NPSUM) to reveal that there was an excess of drug deaths in Birmingham in 2023 by a third. The researchers concluded that an explanation for the discrepancy could be due to the non-detection of nitazene by toxicologists in these instances. “As a significant proportion of deaths are likely being missed, this has serious implications for the accuracy of drug-related mortality data, which are used to inform the design and funding of harm reduction strategies,” said Dr Caroline Copeland, a senior lecturer in pharmacology and toxicology at King’s and lead author of the study. She added: “If nitazenes are degrading in postmortem blood samples, then we are almost certainly undercounting the true number of deaths that they are causing. That means we’re trying to tackle a crisis using incomplete data. When we don’t measure a problem properl...
Campaigners are urging ministers to change the law so that music lyrics are inadmissible in court, a shift that they say would stop a practice that disproportionately affects young black men and criminalises creativity. At present, police can produce lyrics written by defendants, and even flag an appearance in the background of a music video, as evidence that a suspect is affiliated with a gang or...
Campaigners are urging ministers to change the law so that music lyrics are inadmissible in court, a shift that they say would stop a practice that disproportionately affects young black men and criminalises creativity. At present, police can produce lyrics written by defendants, and even flag an appearance in the background of a music video, as evidence that a suspect is affiliated with a gang or involved in criminality. Campaign groups want a change to the victims and courts bill, which is currently making its way through parliament, to stop police from being able to present lyrics as evidence except when they are “literal, rather than figurative or fictional”. The amendment, which is being tabled by Baroness Shami Chakrabarti and has support from Baroness Doreen Lawrence, is due to be debated in the Lords this week. Charkrabarti told the Guardian: “We’re in a ridiculous position at present where somebody’s musical taste is somehow probative of their criminal intent. It is like saying that my love of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather makes me a mobster. It’s extraordinary.” She is hopeful the amendment will be supported by the deputy prime minister, David Lammy. The amendment was drafted by Keir Montieth KC, who is part of the Art Not Evidence campaign group, which has argued that lyrics should not be read literally and are often entirely false, exaggerated or simply part of artistic expression. An open letter the group sent to Lammy when he was the justice secretary argued that “these creative expressions have no connection to the serious crimes alleged, and are used to paint a misleading and prejudicial picture, conflating art with evidence.” The amendment would not rule out the use of lyrics but would only permit the practice when they are directly related to a case. Charkrabarti said: “It has to be very limited and it has to be particular to the facts of the case and not just a general interest in this music, which somehow demonstrates a general proclivity ...
For days, the 25,000 residents of the Sicilian town of Niscemi have been living on the edge of a 25-metre abyss. On 25 January, after torrential rain brought by Cyclone Harry, a devastating landslide ripped away an entire slope of the town, creating a 4km-long chasm. Roads collapsed, cars were swallowed, and whole sections of the urban fabric plunged into the valley below. Dozens of houses hang pr...
For days, the 25,000 residents of the Sicilian town of Niscemi have been living on the edge of a 25-metre abyss. On 25 January, after torrential rain brought by Cyclone Harry, a devastating landslide ripped away an entire slope of the town, creating a 4km-long chasm. Roads collapsed, cars were swallowed, and whole sections of the urban fabric plunged into the valley below. Dozens of houses hang precariously over the edge of the landslide, while vehicles and fragments of roadway continue to give way, hour by hour, under the strain of unstable ground. Drone footage of Niscemi Drone footage of the landslide in Niscemi Authorities have evacuated more than 1,600 people so far. Entire sections of the historic centre are at risk, including 17th-century churches that could slide downhill at any moment. According to geologists and environmental experts, the landslide in Niscemi is the latest sign of how the climate emergency is reshaping the Mediterranean, where there has been indifference to decades of flawed building policies and an out-of-control model of urbanisation. “It all happened in a matter of moments,” said Salvatrice Disca, 70. She had been living in one of the homes now within the red zone designated by authorities as being at risk of collapse. “The power went out, and a few minutes later the police knocked on our door. They told us to leave immediately, to abandon everything and take only the essentials – a few blankets and our medicines. For a week we were unable even to wash or change what we were wearing.” View image in fullscreen A woman walks back out of the red zone. She and her husband were turned back by firefighters, who said it was too dangerous to approach her home. Photograph: Alessio Mamo/The Guardian Most of those evacuated are staying with relatives, while the oldest have been moved to care homes. Others have been temporarily housed in bed-and-breakfasts. Outside the red zone, firefighters have set up a tent where residents wait to be escorted by...
Ai Weiwei is talking me through the decision-making process before his first visit to China in over a decade. The artist, known around the world as the most famous critic of the Chinese communist regime, had to do some fraught arithmetic before deciding to head back home. Before boarding a flight with his son, who had never met the artist’s elderly mother, Ai thought back to his time in detention ...
Ai Weiwei is talking me through the decision-making process before his first visit to China in over a decade. The artist, known around the world as the most famous critic of the Chinese communist regime, had to do some fraught arithmetic before deciding to head back home. Before boarding a flight with his son, who had never met the artist’s elderly mother, Ai thought back to his time in detention when his captors told him he would spend the next 13 years in custody on bogus charges: “They said, ‘When you come out, your son won’t recognise you.’ That was very heavy and really the only moment that touched me.” I still have a Chinese passport. My mum is still Chinese. That’s my only relationship to China. I’m not patriotic He ended up spending several months in captivity. Lao, his son, is now 17. Ai says Lao doesn’t really need his guidance any more so he decided to book their flights and roll the dice. “People said, ‘Are you scared?’ I said, ‘No, why should I be scared?’ I’m Chinese. I have a Chinese passport. I’m entitled to go back and see my mum. So I went back.” View image in fullscreen 100m hand-painted seeds … Ai’s famous Turbine Hall exhibition. Photograph: Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images Welcome to the life of Ai Weiwei. For most people, returning home doesn’t involve weighing up the risk of whether you’ll see close family ever again, but that’s the reality for a 68-year-old whose whole existence has been shaped by authoritarianism and the struggle against it. His trip to China went well. He ended up being interviewed at the airport and released after a couple of hours into a country whose smells, sights and sounds were soothing to him. Ai described the journey as being like “a phone call suddenly reconnecting”. Today, he’s more poetic, describing it as “a piece of jade broken that you can put back together because it matches very well. Everything’s so familiar: the light, the temperature, the people.” Ai is meeting me in the London offices of his publisher to talk...
She was just 14 when she was groomed by the R&B star, and filmed in an explicit video. She tells the extraordinary story of how she survived Picture Reshona Landfair in 1996 at 12 years old, when she met the R&B superstar R Kelly (real name Robert Kelly). Her world, she says, seemed like “a buffet” spread out before her. She was a popular girl, a seriously talented basketball player and the younge...
She was just 14 when she was groomed by the R&B star, and filmed in an explicit video. She tells the extraordinary story of how she survived Picture Reshona Landfair in 1996 at 12 years old, when she met the R&B superstar R Kelly (real name Robert Kelly). Her world, she says, seemed like “a buffet” spread out before her. She was a popular girl, a seriously talented basketball player and the youngest member – in her words, “the pint-sized girl rapper” – of 4 The Cause , the singing group she had formed with three cousins. They’d been signed to a record label, made the Top 10 in eight countries and toured much of Europe. Her large extended family from the West Side of Chicago was tight-knit. Life was filled with music, sport, church, Sunday lunch at Grandma’s, family road trips and everybody knowing everybody’s business. “That was a beautiful time,” she says. “I had love and good people all around me. I was living in my true light of who I wanted to become. I felt like I was on my way.” Fast forward to Landfair at 26 years old, when she finally left Kelly’s orbit. By then, half her family weren’t speaking to the other half, and the relationships that survived were charged with guilt, unasked questions and terrible past mistakes. She had no friends left, as Kelly hadn’t allowed it. Her hopes of a musical career were also long gone – Kelly had made her leave 4 The Cause when she was just 15. She had no qualifications beyond high school and no idea what she wanted to do because, for more than a decade, she’d relied on Kelly to tell her. She couldn’t imagine a healthy relationship; she’d learned sex, she says, “through the lens of a paedophile”. Every element of her 12-year-old life, everything on that “buffet table”, had been destroyed by Kelly. Yet she is still told regularly by total strangers that she must be a “gold digger”, that she “rode the gravy train” and took Kelly for all she could get. Continue reading...
Sounding amused, publisher Pramod Kapoor recalls the reaction of the Indian cricketing legend Bishen Singh Bedi when he learned Kapoor was printing 3,000 copies of his autobiography. “Only 3,000?” he protested. “I fill stadiums with 50-60,000 people coming to see me play and you think that’s all my book is going to sell?” Kapoor, the founder of Roli Books, explains that Bedi’s legions of admirers ...
Sounding amused, publisher Pramod Kapoor recalls the reaction of the Indian cricketing legend Bishen Singh Bedi when he learned Kapoor was printing 3,000 copies of his autobiography. “Only 3,000?” he protested. “I fill stadiums with 50-60,000 people coming to see me play and you think that’s all my book is going to sell?” Kapoor, the founder of Roli Books, explains that Bedi’s legions of admirers were unlikely to translate into book buyers. “That was in 2021. Nothing has changed. The average book in English sells only around 3-4,000 copies. If it tops 10,000, it’s counted a bestseller.” India does not have a great book-reading tradition. The author and columnist Parsa Venkateshwar Rao Jr calls this a mystery that social scientists should explore. “Maybe it’s because of the strong oral story-telling tradition? The epics are well known and passed down the generations and taken very seriously. I’m baffled by why so few Indians buy books and read,” he says. View image in fullscreen A book stall at the the Banaras Lit Fest in Varanasi. “Buying books is still a luxury for the middle and lower -middle class,” says publisher Priyanka Malhotra. Photograph: undefined/Amrit Dhillon If most middle-class homes are devoid of books; if you can sit in an airport departure lounge or train all day and not see anyone reading; if some affluent people think Reader’s Digest copies are literary heavyweights worth binding in leather to display in “studies” that are purely for show then why, come winter, do more than 100 literature festivals bloom every year, even in the smallest and unlikeliest of towns? For many, a book festival is a social and cultural experience where the book is the background, not the main event Priyanka Malhotra The answer is that festivals in India are only partly about books. They are a “spectacle” offering music, dance, handicraft sales and food. Even the T rex of them all, the Jaipur literature festival (which attracted 400,000 visitors last month according to it...
To get John Authers’ newsletter delivered directly to your inbox, sign up here . Today’s Points: Winner Takaichi-All ! Japan’s prime minister has an emphatic mandate; Japanese stocks predictably love this — the yen’s response has been volatile; Friday’s rebound didn’t halt a big rotation out of mega-cap US momentum stocks; Last week’s big tariff deal should continue to buoy Indian markets; AND: A ...
To get John Authers’ newsletter delivered directly to your inbox, sign up here . Today’s Points: Winner Takaichi-All ! Japan’s prime minister has an emphatic mandate; Japanese stocks predictably love this — the yen’s response has been volatile; Friday’s rebound didn’t halt a big rotation out of mega-cap US momentum stocks; Last week’s big tariff deal should continue to buoy Indian markets; AND: A reminder that Japan's Iron Maiden follows another Iron Lady . Clarity in Japan Every so often, elections provide clarity. What just happened in Japan, however, is truly rare. Sanae Takaichi will be running the country for the next few years with minimal domestic impediments, and with a clear plan of what she wants to achieve. She has a mandate for it. Whether she succeeds or fails, Japan’s critical role in the global financial system ensures that there will be consequences for everyone. This happened at breakneck speed in a country that had earned a reputation for inertia. Four months ago, Takaichi was seen as an outsider in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s leadership election. The LDP itself was on the outs, losing its majority in the upper house and relying on shifting alliances to stay in charge. Now, not only does the LDP have power on its own, but it holds a two-thirds majority in the lower house — the first time this has ever happened. Takaichi is charismatic and forceful. Comparisons to Margaret Thatcher are apt, but Britain’s Iron Lady never won a mandate this emphatic: To ram home how big a shock this is, her decision to call this election was a gamble . Barely two weeks ago, prediction-market betting put her chance of a simple majority, let alone a two-thirds supermajority, at barely 50%: The critical point after years of drift is that there is no question at all about who is in charge. The LDP runs the country and Takaichi runs the LDP. Her majority allows her to overcome not only legislative gridlock, but also bureaucratic inertia. For better or worse, what...
A landslide victory by Japan’s ruling party in a parliamentary election aided a recovery in risk assets on Monday after a global tumult spurred by a rout in the commodity market, as investors anticipated that Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi would boost public spending to sustain growth and inflation. Stocks in the Asia-Pacific region surged after Takaichi’s Liberal Democratic Party secured a two-thi...
A landslide victory by Japan’s ruling party in a parliamentary election aided a recovery in risk assets on Monday after a global tumult spurred by a rout in the commodity market, as investors anticipated that Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi would boost public spending to sustain growth and inflation. Stocks in the Asia-Pacific region surged after Takaichi’s Liberal Democratic Party secured a two-thirds supermajority in the 465-seat lower house in the snap election over the weekend, marking the biggest victory for a single party in the country since World War II. Japan’s Nikkei 225 index surged almost 5 per cent to a record 56,647.30 on Monday, breaking out of a month-long consolidation pattern, as the so-called Takaichi trade gained traction. Yields on the nation’s sovereign bonds rose on concerns about more fiscal burden and debt issuances. Advertisement Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index rose 1.7 per cent, while the mainland’s CSI 300 Index gained 1.3 per cent. South Korea’s Kospi jumped more than 4 per cent and Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 added almost 2 per cent. “The cross-asset read is straightforward – equities get the sugar hit first,” said Stephen Innes, a managing partner at SPI Asset Management. “A commanding mandate delivers policy continuity, industrial intent and a domestic confidence bid that is easy for large pools of capital to justify. Japan becomes easier to own when the government looks stable and deliberate.” Advertisement The result of the snap election came as the worst of a global sell-off in risk assets, which started in the commodities market, seemed to be over. The Dow Jones Industrial Average wrapped up Friday’s trading by closing at a record, marking at least a tentative stabilisation in sentiment on equities and a rotation into cyclical names. Takaichi’s victory may further revive risk appetite among investors who are looking for new winners. The Liberal Democratic Party secured 316 seats – up from 233 for Takaichi’s ruling coalition – granting her a...
kyoshino/E+ via Getty Images No event scheduled More on S&P 500 Index S&P 500: From One Extreme To Another And No End In Sight (Technical Analysis) Liquidity Drain And Event Risk May Create A Volatile Week For Markets Dow Powers Past 50,000 - Momentum Or Market Euphoria? BMO’s Trahan sees cyclical bull market continuing into 2026 despite inflation risks 96 of 123 S&P 500 companies post EPS growth ...
kyoshino/E+ via Getty Images No event scheduled More on S&P 500 Index S&P 500: From One Extreme To Another And No End In Sight (Technical Analysis) Liquidity Drain And Event Risk May Create A Volatile Week For Markets Dow Powers Past 50,000 - Momentum Or Market Euphoria? BMO’s Trahan sees cyclical bull market continuing into 2026 despite inflation risks 96 of 123 S&P 500 companies post EPS growth in latest earnings week: Earnings scorecard
American activist investor Steven Wood’s one-man mission to overhaul the governance and culture of Swatch Group AG just became a lot harder. The Swiss watchmaker and its plain-talking, cigar-smoking Chief Executive Officer, Nick Hayek , may have spent most of the past two years disappointing shareholders with tumbling sales and shrinking profits, but last month they surprised with an upbeat outloo...
American activist investor Steven Wood’s one-man mission to overhaul the governance and culture of Swatch Group AG just became a lot harder. The Swiss watchmaker and its plain-talking, cigar-smoking Chief Executive Officer, Nick Hayek , may have spent most of the past two years disappointing shareholders with tumbling sales and shrinking profits, but last month they surprised with an upbeat outlook and bullish predictions of a recovery this year. The market reaction was dramatic. The company’s shares — the most shorted in Europe — had their best day ever , and are up 15% this year. It was a timely riposte from Hayek, the son of Swatch’s founder, as Wood’s push to get on the board enters its second year. The CEO says he’s not troubled by the campaign, but recent statements suggest the company isn’t taking any chances. Days after the updated forecasts, it nominated its own new board member, which it said would strengthen governance. The implied message from Hayek to shareholders: Trust him and don’t side with the outsider. The Hayek name is synonymous with the Biel-based company and the family is the dominant force, with 44% of voting rights and three board seats. The CEO has a testy relationship with investors and enjoys baiting them, once with a gimmick to publish the annual report in a format so small it required a magnifying glass to read it. Wood, the founder of US-based Greenwood Investors , argues that change is needed, particularly to loosen the family’s grip. He says he has support, and it may not be a one-man mission for much longer. Geneva-based Ace & Company plans to back Wood at this year’s AGM, as does BWM AG, according to people familiar with the matter. The activist campaign comes as Swatch deals with a challenging market . Swiss watch exports haven’t been this weak in more than 40 years, and 2025 sales at the company were the lowest since 2010, excluding the Covid-induced slump. Swatch’s reach into the industry is extensive , stretching from luxury na...
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AI will produce a wide variety of winning stocks. Artificial intelligence (AI) is still the leading market theme. There has seldom been a greater investment opportunity than what AI presents, and many companies are slated to produce massive returns as a result. There are several companies benefiting from AI right now, and two broad groups I can place them into are hardware providers and cloud comp...
AI will produce a wide variety of winning stocks. Artificial intelligence (AI) is still the leading market theme. There has seldom been a greater investment opportunity than what AI presents, and many companies are slated to produce massive returns as a result. There are several companies benefiting from AI right now, and two broad groups I can place them into are hardware providers and cloud computing companies. Both groups warrant investments right now, and I think all six of these companies can deliver market-crushing returns over the next five years. The hardware companies AI hardware is probably the best place in the entire market to be invested in. These companies are making money right now from AI because their computing units are required to run AI workloads. The most obvious stock in this area is Nvidia (NVDA +7.87%), but Broadcom (AVGO +7.26%) and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSM +5.57%) are also great additions. Nvidia's graphics processing units (GPUs) are the top computing option for AI workflows. They handle a wide variety of inputs and are tasked to train AI models, as well as perform inference tasks. This performance comes at a cost, and Nvidia products are known to be pricey, but you get what you pay for. Expand NASDAQ : NVDA Nvidia Today's Change ( 7.87 %) $ 13.53 Current Price $ 185.41 Key Data Points Market Cap $4.5T Day's Range $ 174.60 - $ 187.00 52wk Range $ 86.62 - $ 212.19 Volume 231M Avg Vol 183M Gross Margin 70.05 % Dividend Yield 0.02 % Cheaper alternatives from Broadcom are also starting to rise in popularity. Broadcom partners directly with its clients to design ASICs -- application-specific integrated circuits. These chips are designed to see one type of workload and process it efficiently. This can lead to a more cost-effective computing product, and the growth we're seeing reflects that. Broadcom expects AI semiconductor revenue to double in Q1 2026, showing that it's a worthy Nvidia competitor. Taiwan Semiconductor is another...
Presented by F5 As enterprises pour billions into GPU infrastructure for AI workloads, many are discovering that their expensive compute resources sit idle far more than expected. The culprit isn't the hardware. It’s the often-invisible data delivery layer between storage and compute that's starving GPUs of the information they need. "While people are focusing their attention, justifiably so, on G...
Presented by F5 As enterprises pour billions into GPU infrastructure for AI workloads, many are discovering that their expensive compute resources sit idle far more than expected. The culprit isn't the hardware. It’s the often-invisible data delivery layer between storage and compute that's starving GPUs of the information they need. "While people are focusing their attention, justifiably so, on GPUs, because they're very significant investments, those are rarely the limiting factor," says Mark Menger, solutions architect at F5. "They're capable of more work. They're waiting on data." AI performance increasingly depends on an independent, programmable control point between AI frameworks and object storage — one that most enterprises haven’t deliberately architected. As AI workloads scale, bottlenecks and instability happens when AI frameworks are tightly coupled to specific storage endpoints during scaling events, failures, and cloud transitions. "Traditional storage access patterns were not designed for highly parallel, bursty, multi-consumer AI workloads," says Maggie Stringfellow, VP, product management - BIG-IP. "Efficient AI data movement requires a distinct data delivery layer designed to abstract, optimize, and secure data flows independently of storage systems, because GPU economics make inefficiency immediately visible and expensive." Why AI workloads overwhelm object storage These bidirectional patterns include massive ingestion from continuous data capture, simulation output, and model checkpoints. Combined with read-intensive training and inference workloads , they stress the tightly coupled infrastructure upon which the storage systems are reliant. While storage vendors have done significant work in scaling the data throughput into and out of their systems, that focus on throughput alone creates knock-on effects across the switching, traffic management, and security layers coupled to storage. The stress on S3-compatible systems from AI workloads is mult...
Today's AI challenge is about agent coordination, context, and collaboration. How do you enable them to truly think together, with all the contextual understanding, negotiation, and shared purpose that entails? It's a critical next step toward a new kind of distributed intelligence that keeps humans firmly in the loop. At the latest stop on VentureBeat's AI Impact Series, Vijoy Pandey, SVP and GM ...
Today's AI challenge is about agent coordination, context, and collaboration. How do you enable them to truly think together, with all the contextual understanding, negotiation, and shared purpose that entails? It's a critical next step toward a new kind of distributed intelligence that keeps humans firmly in the loop. At the latest stop on VentureBeat's AI Impact Series, Vijoy Pandey, SVP and GM of Outshift by Cisco, and Noah Goodman, Stanford professor and co-founder of Humans&, sat down to talk about how to move beyond agents that just connect to agents that are steeped in collective intelligence. The need for collective intelligence, not coordinated actions The core challenge, Pandey said, is that "agents today can connect together, but they can't really think together." While protocols like MCP and A2A have solved basic connectivity, and AGNTCY tackles the problems of discovery, identity management to inter-agent communication and observability, they've only addressed the equivalent of making a phone call between two people who don't speak the same language. But Pandey's team has identified something deeper than technical plumbing: the need for agents to achieve collective intelligence, not just coordinated actions. How shared intent and shared knowledge enable collective innovation To understand where multi-agent AI needs to go, both speakers pointed to the history of human intelligence. While humans became individually intelligent roughly 300,000 years ago, true collective intelligence didn't emerge until around 70,000 years ago with the advent of sophisticated language. This breakthrough enabled three critical capabilities: shared intent, shared knowledge, and collective innovation. "Once you have a shared intent, a shared goal, you have a body of knowledge that you can modify, evolve, build upon, you can then go towards collective innovation," Pandey said. Goodman, whose work bridges computer science and psychology, explained that language is far more than ...
Billionaire Elon Musk is once again throwing his financial weight behind Republicans, reversing an earlier pullback ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. Musk Returns As GOP Mega-Donor After saying in 2025 that he planned to pull back from political spending, Musk has reemerged as a major Republican donor. Federal Election Commission filings show that Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) and SpaceX CEO has giv...
Billionaire Elon Musk is once again throwing his financial weight behind Republicans, reversing an earlier pullback ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. Musk Returns As GOP Mega-Donor After saying in 2025 that he planned to pull back from political spending, Musk has reemerged as a major Republican donor. Federal Election Commission filings show that Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) and SpaceX CEO has given at least $20 million to super PACs aligned with House and Senate GOP leadership, reported The Hill on Sunday. He also contributed $5 million to President Donald Trump's super PAC, MAGA Inc. This month, Musk also donated $10 million to a super PAC supporting Kentucky Senate candidate Nate Morris, who is seeking to replace retiring Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). The contribution far exceeded the campaign's existing cash on hand and significantly bolstered Republican fundraising. "Musk as a donor is important [because] money in politics is important, but Musk himself is a politically polarizing figure," said Cayce Myers, a Virginia Tech professor who studies political campaigns. He added, "As his money is needed, the fact that he is involved does create a complicated political situation for Republicans." Trump Ties Show Signs Of Revival Musk was the largest donor of the 2024 election cycle, spending roughly $250 million to support Trump and other Republicans. He later stepped away from Washington after controversy surrounding his role as head of the Department of Government Efficiency and a public falling-out with Trump. Recent donations, however, suggest relations have stabilized. "It certainly feels like the president and Elon Musk are back in a good place," said Republican strategist Brian Seitchik. Musk, Trump Reconnect Over Voting Debate Last week, Musk entered the U.S. voting debate, warning that democracy was at risk if Congress did not enforce stricter proof-of-citizenship rules, responding to Glenn Beck's call for the SAVE Act. He said, "It must be done or democracy...
Lemon_tm/iStock via Getty Images Written by Nick Ackerman, co-produced by Stanford Chemist John Hancock Diversified Income Fund ( HEQ ) has performed quite well since our prior update , even outpacing the S&P 500 Index during this time. This was formerly the John Hancock Hedged Equity & Income Fund, though it carried the same ticker. That change took place at the end of December 2024, which also s...
Lemon_tm/iStock via Getty Images Written by Nick Ackerman, co-produced by Stanford Chemist John Hancock Diversified Income Fund ( HEQ ) has performed quite well since our prior update , even outpacing the S&P 500 Index during this time. This was formerly the John Hancock Hedged Equity & Income Fund, though it carried the same ticker. That change took place at the end of December 2024, which also shifted its strategy from a heavier equity tilt to incorporating more fixed-income exposure. It also removed the specific "hedging" as a core component of the fund. So past performance is no guarantee of future results, but that is even more so the case here, as the track record essentially restarted at the end of 2024. HEQ Basics 1-Year Z-score: 0.7 Discount/Premium: -11.19% Distribution Yield: 9.01% Expense Ratio: 1.25% Leverage: N/A Managed Assets: $152 million Structure: Perpetual HEQ's investment objective is to "seek total return consisting of both income and capital gains." In an attempt to achieve the objectives, the fund : Under normal circumstances, the fund will invest at least 25% of its net assets (assets plus borrowings for investment purposes) in equity and equity-related securities and at least 25% in fixed-income securities and fixed-income related instruments. Equity and equity-related securities include common stock, preferred stock, depositary receipts (including American Depositary Receipts and Global Depositary Receipts), index-related securities (including exchange traded funds ("ETFs"), options on equity securities and equity indexes, real estate investment structures (including real estate investment trusts ("REITs")), convertible securities, private placements, convertible preferred stock, rights, warrants, derivatives linked to equity securities or indexes and other similar equity equivalents. Fixed-income related securities may include, but are not limited to, instruments such as: non-investment grade ("high yield" or "junk bond") instruments, swa...