‘I’m useless at this bit,” Malorie Blackman laughs, shifting awkwardly in a plum-coloured jacket and smart black trousers. It is a gloomy February evening in the back room of a theatre in west London, and she is having her photograph taken, the rain pummelling the brick outside. Blackman is, by any reasonable metric, one of the most significant writers Britain has produced in the past quarter of a...
‘I’m useless at this bit,” Malorie Blackman laughs, shifting awkwardly in a plum-coloured jacket and smart black trousers. It is a gloomy February evening in the back room of a theatre in west London, and she is having her photograph taken, the rain pummelling the brick outside. Blackman is, by any reasonable metric, one of the most significant writers Britain has produced in the past quarter of a century – the closest thing my generation, who were raised on her books, has to a literary rockstar. And yet, she seems faintly baffled by the notion that the spotlight should rest on her for long. “I hate being in front of the camera!” This year marks a quarter century since the publication of her most famous book, Noughts & Crosses, the first in what became a nine-book young adult phenomenon. Set in Albion – an alternative Britain colonised centuries earlier by Africa – Black citizens (known as Crosses) hold political, economic and cultural power; white citizens (Noughts) are the underclass, segregated, overpoliced and structurally disadvantaged. The country is recognisable but inverted: there has never been a Nought prime minister; “flesh-coloured” plasters do not match Nought skin; segregated schools are defended as tradition; and extremist groups radicalise young men who feel they have nothing left to lose. Noughts & Crosses was Blackman’s 50th book, and her first that tackled racism head on. “I sat down at my computer really angry,” she tells me. It was the 1990s, the time of the murder of Stephen Lawrence and the Macpherson report’s finding of institutional racism within the Metropolitan police. “It was my way of channelling that anger.” Even before she wrote a word, she encountered resistance. “People were telling me, ‘Oh, no one wants to read about racism.’ And I thought – that’s interesting. You haven’t read it. You don’t know what it is. You’re already making assumptions.” She remembers her mum calling her midway through reading a proof. “Is Callum [one of the p...
Donald Trump ordered the launch of the war on Iran last Friday afternoon while on board Air Force One, as the presidential plane made its descent towards Corpus Christi, Texas. Trump was on his way to the port city to give a speech titled American Energy Dominance and had spent the three-hour flight chatting to Texas Republican politicians including the state’s two hawkish senators, John Cornyn an...
Donald Trump ordered the launch of the war on Iran last Friday afternoon while on board Air Force One, as the presidential plane made its descent towards Corpus Christi, Texas. Trump was on his way to the port city to give a speech titled American Energy Dominance and had spent the three-hour flight chatting to Texas Republican politicians including the state’s two hawkish senators, John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, about his options in Iran. Also present on the plane in the countdown to Operation Epic Fury was a veteran film star, Dennis Quaid. At some point in the flight, Cruz filmed Quaid sitting next to Trump and persuaded the actor to reprise his role as Ronald Reagan in a 2024 reverential biopic, so that Cruz could frame the encounter as “two great American presidents”. Speaking as Reagan, Quaid declared Trump was “like me on steroids”. It was a highly stylised passing of the flame from the patron saint of Republican hawks to their current hero. Not mentioned was the fact that Quaid had also played a slapstick version of George W Bush in a 2006 film, American Dreamz, as a clueless good-ol’-boy president manipulated by war-hungry and oil-thirsty aides into invading Iraq, unaware there were more than “two kinds of Iraqistanis”. The shadow of Bush and the regional conflagration he ignited have loomed over the events of the past week, though the inevitable comparisons have gone unacknowledged or been angrily rejected by the White House. Trump had, after all, campaigned as a leader who would end America’s “forever wars” begun by Bush in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. His Maga movement was built on antipathy to foreign entanglement, and the president himself spent much of 2025 lobbying to be awarded the Nobel peace prize. In the space of a few months, however, the “peace president” became the first US leader since Bush to lead a regime change war against a major adversary. The factors behind this apparent transformation in the run-up to Operation Epic Fury are many and va...
Listen to Odd Lots on Apple Podcasts Listen to Odd Lots on Spotify Watch Odd Lots on YouTube Subscribe to the newsletter A year ago, all of the talk was about how the big AI companies were wildly overvalued. Everyone was calling it a bubble. Fast forward to now, and a dominant idea in the markets is that AI is so powerful that all kinds of legacy businesses — particularly software — could go to ze...
Listen to Odd Lots on Apple Podcasts Listen to Odd Lots on Spotify Watch Odd Lots on YouTube Subscribe to the newsletter A year ago, all of the talk was about how the big AI companies were wildly overvalued. Everyone was calling it a bubble. Fast forward to now, and a dominant idea in the markets is that AI is so powerful that all kinds of legacy businesses — particularly software — could go to zero. So where does the truth lie? And what now for AI valuations? On this episode, recorded live at the On Air podcast festival in Brooklyn on February 25, we catch up again with Henry Blodget, the former Wall Street analyst turned Business Insider CEO, who is now the founder of Regenerator. In a wide-ranging conversation, Henry argues against the software doom scenario, and sees problems for OpenAI as it faces massive spending costs with stiff competition.
A year ago, all of the talk was about how the big AI companies were wildly overvalued. Everyone was calling it a bubble. Fast forward to now, and a dominant idea in the markets is that AI is so powerful that all kinds of legacy businesses — particularly software — could go to zero. So where does the truth lie? And what now for AI valuations? On this episode, recorded live at the On Air podcast fes...
A year ago, all of the talk was about how the big AI companies were wildly overvalued. Everyone was calling it a bubble. Fast forward to now, and a dominant idea in the markets is that AI is so powerful that all kinds of legacy businesses — particularly software — could go to zero. So where does the truth lie? And what now for AI valuations? On this episode, recorded live at the On Air podcast festival in Brooklyn on February 25, we catch up again with Henry Blodget, the former Wall Street analy
Tingting Ji/iStock via Getty Images By Shannon L. Saccocia, CFA February's market broadening came with volatility, as AI disintermediation fears pressured software and services companies in both equity and credit markets—even as Q4 S&P 500 earnings delivered broadly strong results. The Month in Markets While the past several years have been marked by a meaningful concentration in technology and ot...
Tingting Ji/iStock via Getty Images By Shannon L. Saccocia, CFA February's market broadening came with volatility, as AI disintermediation fears pressured software and services companies in both equity and credit markets—even as Q4 S&P 500 earnings delivered broadly strong results. The Month in Markets While the past several years have been marked by a meaningful concentration in technology and other artificial intelligence-adjacent industries and companies, February brought another month of broadening performance, but not without some hand-wringing. At the highest level, one could argue that improving earnings and momentum for sectors outside of technology should be welcomed by investors, but the rationale behind this month’s sharper moves came at a cost—and that cost was reflected in pressure on companies across sectors that face the threat of disintermediation by AI. What began with the meaningful outperformance of semiconductors versus software for much of 2025 morphed into a question of survival, not only for software companies, but for myriad service businesses that face obsolescence as AI expands its reach. This pressure was not only felt by the companies themselves in the form of stock drawdowns but was also reflected in the credit markets, both public and private, contributing to an undercurrent of uneasiness and a pickup in volatility during the month. This pressure came even as Q4 S&P 500 earnings were strong. With 96% of companies reporting, 73% of companies reported both positive revenue and earnings surprises, with earnings growth coming in at +14.2%—the fifth straight quarter of double-digit earnings growth. The strength was widespread as well, with 10 of 11 sectors reporting higher-than-expected earnings, but the broader revenue growth was even more notable at +9.4%—the highest since 2022. Perhaps most encouraging for broad benchmark investors was the continued strength in Magnificent 7 earnings. Despite seemingly ever-higher capex, and expectations ...
Underneath the glass and wrought iron ceiling of Antwerp’s stock exchange last month, French President Emmanuel Macron addressed a hall full of executives from heavy industries. He wasted no time in diving into the issue everyone cared most about: Europe’s perennially high energy prices. It is, he said bluntly, “a weakness.” Even before the war in Iran pushed up oil and gas prices and disrupted su...
Underneath the glass and wrought iron ceiling of Antwerp’s stock exchange last month, French President Emmanuel Macron addressed a hall full of executives from heavy industries. He wasted no time in diving into the issue everyone cared most about: Europe’s perennially high energy prices. It is, he said bluntly, “a weakness.” Even before the war in Iran pushed up oil and gas prices and disrupted supplies of key fossil fuels across the globe, energy was a major concern in Europe, where power prices are far higher than in the US and China. Plants have been shut down as costs made them uneconomical, there have been repeated complaints from corporate giants like BASF SE and industries such as steelmaking, and politicians have fretted about how their economic ambitions for the region risk being undone by the problem. The fallout from Middle East conflict is upping the pressure to act. This week, gas prices in Europe rose to the highest in three years . The spike probably added at least €1.3 billion ($1.5 billion) to the continent’s energy costs, according to calculations by Strategic Perspectives, a climate think tank. Though levels are well shy of the peak seen after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the latest moves come amid an increasing drumbeat of calls to cut prices. “This is really happening at the wrong time — we are very exposed to the global energy market, both in terms of prices and in terms of volume,” said Anne-Sophie Corbeau , research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy in Paris. “Industry is going to be thinking, ‘oh no, not another crisis.’ There aren’t any magical solutions.” It’s fueling a frantic rush for action. Proposals have ranged from scrapping taxes to ditching costly climate policies, yet critics say that jeopardizes Europe’s ability lower energy costs in the longer term by building out renewables. In Brussels, the scale of the concern is clear. At one meeting this week, senior EU officials warned member states that the Iran wa...
The price of Bitcoin (BTC 4.04%) is down more than 40% from its all-time high. Meanwhile, gold is trading near record highs. This is an important dichotomy as geopolitical events lead to increased market volatility. Far from being a hedge against market risk, as some market watchers had hoped, Bitcoin has turned out to be a volatility risk all on its own at exactly the point when investors probabl...
The price of Bitcoin (BTC 4.04%) is down more than 40% from its all-time high. Meanwhile, gold is trading near record highs. This is an important dichotomy as geopolitical events lead to increased market volatility. Far from being a hedge against market risk, as some market watchers had hoped, Bitcoin has turned out to be a volatility risk all on its own at exactly the point when investors probably hoped it would serve as a bulwark. Where is Bitcoin going? Prediction markets are a relatively new tool for monitoring sentiment across a wide range of topics, from the outcome of a political race to the weather. There's also a prediction market around Bitcoin. The numbers are interesting. It appears that prediction markets suggest an 11% chance for Bitcoin to hit $150,000 by the end of 2026. That would push the cryptocurrency to a new high, well above the roughly $126,000 it reached in October. What's more interesting is that the chance of revisiting just $120,000 is only about 21%, which isn't much better. If you bought at the recent highs, prediction markets aren't looking pretty for you right now. And that's an important factor to keep in mind as you consider why you bought Bitcoin in the first place. Bitcoin hasn't proven itself yet Cryptocurrencies are a speculative asset. The huge price swings are a sign that emotions drive price movements. Still, one of the big argument in favors of owning Bitcoin is that it could serve as a store of wealth, making it analogous to gold. However, as geopolitical tensions have risen, gold has soared while Bitcoin has plunged. And if prediction markets are any indication, Bitcoin isn't likely to regain the ground it has lost during the past few months. Expand CRYPTO : BTC Bitcoin Today's Change ( -4.04 %) $ -2855.38 Current Price $ 67828.00 Key Data Points Market Cap $1.4T Day's Range $ 67495.00 - $ 70763.00 52wk Range $ 60255.56 - $ 126079.89 Volume 40B If you bought Bitcoin expecting it to be a hedge against market risk, it hasn't ...
Michele Ursi/iStock via Getty Images The last time I covered nLIGHT, Inc. ( LASR ) was 12 months ago, and the stock is up nearly 600% in the period since then. I called it a tentative Buy , at the time, so clearly, “tentative” wasn’t quite the right adjective, although hindsight makes the call seem incredibly more understated than it was. But I wasn’t confident enough to take a stronger buy positi...
Michele Ursi/iStock via Getty Images The last time I covered nLIGHT, Inc. ( LASR ) was 12 months ago, and the stock is up nearly 600% in the period since then. I called it a tentative Buy , at the time, so clearly, “tentative” wasn’t quite the right adjective, although hindsight makes the call seem incredibly more understated than it was. But I wasn’t confident enough to take a stronger buy position because I thought the company was still more of an industrial laser supplier that was dealing with weak demand and margin pressure. That’s not the case anymore. LASR has been building out its aerospace and defense capabilities, especially around high-energy lasers that are used in directed-energy systems, and the opportunity that exists in those markets has driven the company’s topline and margins to their highest levels in 5 years. That level of performance has changed how we see the company, and now, what I’m considering is whether the current price reflects most of that transformation. FY25 confirms the pivot LASR’s performance in FY25 makes it clear that the shift I was watching last year is now showing up plainly in the numbers. Revenue for the year came in at $261.3 million, up 31.6% year over year, which on its own is already a solid growth year. But the more important detail is where that growth is coming from. Last year, I pointed out that, taken together, the company’s location, IP portfolio, and close ties to the aerospace and defense (A&D) industries were the biggest factors that could help it take advantage of its newfound opportunity to pivot, and that is the case today. A&D is now the dominant part of the business, and it generated $175.3 million in revenue during the year, or roughly two-thirds of total sales, compared with about 55% the year before. Conversely, industrial lasers, which used to be the backbone of nLIGHT’s business, now make up only about 15% of revenue, and the microfabrication segment contributes the remaining share. Segment FY24 FY25 Sh...
Tax-deferred accounts such as traditional IRAs and 401(k) plans allow workers to delay taxes on qualified distributions, provided they meet income-based eligibility requirements. But the government will not let you withhold tax payments indefinitely. Upon reaching a certain age, individuals with a tax-deferred retirement account must begin taking required minimum distributions (RMDs), meaning they...
Tax-deferred accounts such as traditional IRAs and 401(k) plans allow workers to delay taxes on qualified distributions, provided they meet income-based eligibility requirements. But the government will not let you withhold tax payments indefinitely. Upon reaching a certain age, individuals with a tax-deferred retirement account must begin taking required minimum distributions (RMDs), meaning they must withdraw a percentage of the account balance each year. Any contributions and investment gains are subject to income tax. Read on to learn more about RMDs, including when they begin and how to calculate the withdrawal amount for a retirement account with a balance of $500,000. Which types of retirement accounts are subject to required minimum distributions (RMDs)? A required minimum distribution (RMD) is the smallest amount of money that retirees must withdraw from tax-deferred accounts each year. RMD rules apply to account holders and beneficiaries with the following plans: Importantly, RMD rules do not apply to Roth accounts while the original owner is alive, but beneficiaries of Roth accounts must abide by RMD rules. In general, account holders must take RMDs by Dec. 31 each year. The only exception is the first RMD can be postponed until April 1st. For instance, someone who turns 73 in 2026 could delay their first RMD until April 1, 2027. However, their second RMD must still be completed by Dec. 31, 2027. At what age do required minimum distributions (RMDs) begin? The age at which required minimum distributions begin depends on when you were born: Account Holder's Birth Date Age When RMDs Begin Before July 1, 1949 70 ½ July 1, 1949, to Dec. 31, 1950 72 Jan. 1, 1951, to Dec. 31, 1959 73 After Dec. 31, 1959 75 Anyone who does not take their RMD before the deadline will be penalized with an excise tax equal to 25% of the amount not withdrawn. The penalty can be reduced to 10% if the error is fixed within two years. The penalty can also be waived entirely if the accou...
Sundry Photography/iStock Editorial via Getty Images Introduction Texas Instruments ( TXN ) is the biggest producer of analog chips. With the recent announced intention to acquire Silicon Laboratories Inc. ( SLAB ), the latest annual report, and the Capital Management Presentation, which took place on 24 th of February 2026, there is a lot of information that needs to be analyzed and evaluated. In...
Sundry Photography/iStock Editorial via Getty Images Introduction Texas Instruments ( TXN ) is the biggest producer of analog chips. With the recent announced intention to acquire Silicon Laboratories Inc. ( SLAB ), the latest annual report, and the Capital Management Presentation, which took place on 24 th of February 2026, there is a lot of information that needs to be analyzed and evaluated. In this article, I want to describe in detail the capital allocation of TXN and look at the opportunities the company has in the future. The current higher share price already reflects in part the recovery in the analog chips market from my point of view. This is why I give this stock a hold rating and won’t add to my own position at this stage. Q4 2025 On 27 th January 2026, TXN reported fourth quarter results for the fiscal year 2025. Revenue was $4.4 billion and increased by 10% in comparison to Q4 2024. Diluted earnings per share (EPS) was $1.27 and decreased by 2% in comparison to Q4 2024. This decrease was mainly driven by higher cost of revenue, higher provision for income taxes, and lower other income. For fiscal year 2025 in total, revenue increased by 13%, from $15.6 billion to $17.7 billion. Diluted EPS increased by 5%, from $5.20 to $5.45. Cost of revenue increased disproportionately and is the main reason why the increase in revenue is not reflected in net income and diluted EPS. During the conference call , the management gave some background information about the share of its end markets: in 2025, Industrial accounted for about 33% of revenue, Automotive was also 33%, and Data Center was 9%. In addition, Data Center grew by 64% in 2025 and is expected to continue strongly in 2026 which will be a driver for future revenue growth of TXN in my view. Industrial, Automotive, and Data Center, will be the end markets the company will focus on in the future. Personal electronics accounted for 21% of revenue, and communications equipment accounted for 3% of revenue. By ...
Blackston Financial Advisory Group LLC decreased its position in Broadcom Inc. (NASDAQ:AVGO - Free Report) by 87.2% in the 3rd quarter, according to its most recent filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission. The firm owned 688 shares of the semiconductor manufacturer's stock after selling 4,669 shares during the period. Blackston Financial Advisory Group LLC's holdings in Broadcom were wort...
Blackston Financial Advisory Group LLC decreased its position in Broadcom Inc. (NASDAQ:AVGO - Free Report) by 87.2% in the 3rd quarter, according to its most recent filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission. The firm owned 688 shares of the semiconductor manufacturer's stock after selling 4,669 shares during the period. Blackston Financial Advisory Group LLC's holdings in Broadcom were worth $227,000 at the end of the most recent quarter. Other hedge funds have also added to or reduced their stakes in the company. Modern Wealth Management LLC increased its holdings in shares of Broadcom by 4.2% in the third quarter. Modern Wealth Management LLC now owns 21,436 shares of the semiconductor manufacturer's stock worth $7,072,000 after acquiring an additional 869 shares in the last quarter. SPX Gestao de Recursos Ltda acquired a new position in shares of Broadcom in the 3rd quarter valued at approximately $6,928,000. Sequent Planning LLC bought a new stake in Broadcom during the 3rd quarter worth approximately $234,000. Intellectus Partners LLC raised its holdings in Broadcom by 1.9% during the 3rd quarter. Intellectus Partners LLC now owns 7,380 shares of the semiconductor manufacturer's stock worth $2,435,000 after buying an additional 140 shares during the period. Finally, Foster Dykema Cabot & Partners LLC lifted its stake in Broadcom by 54.8% in the third quarter. Foster Dykema Cabot & Partners LLC now owns 4,019 shares of the semiconductor manufacturer's stock valued at $1,326,000 after buying an additional 1,423 shares in the last quarter. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 76.43% of the company's stock. Get Broadcom alerts: Sign Up Broadcom Trading Down 0.5% Broadcom stock opened at $331.03 on Friday. The company has a market cap of $1.57 trillion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 64.65, a P/E/G ratio of 1.06 and a beta of 1.22. The firm has a 50-day moving average of $333.75 and a 200-day moving average of $342.79. The company has a debt-to-equity ra...