FCA clashes with consumer group pushing for bigger compensation, alleging lack of transparency and conflict of interest The City regulator is trying to get the only consumer group arguing for higher motor finance scandal payouts thrown out of court, alleging that its co-founders have not been transparent about their funding and potential conflicts of interest. The accusations, laid out in legal fi...
FCA clashes with consumer group pushing for bigger compensation, alleging lack of transparency and conflict of interest The City regulator is trying to get the only consumer group arguing for higher motor finance scandal payouts thrown out of court, alleging that its co-founders have not been transparent about their funding and potential conflicts of interest. The accusations, laid out in legal filings on Wednesday, are the latest controversy in the long-running saga surrounding mis-sold car loans, with fears of large payouts having resulted in heavy lobbying by banks and a controversial intervention by the chancellor, Rachel Reeves. Continue reading...
Shipowners painted a mixed picture of their willingness to continue transiting the Strait of Hormuz in the hours after President Donald Trump said the US ceasefire with Iran is “ over. ” Of five owners surveyed by Bloomberg, whose vessels have crossed the vital conduit for energy flows in recent weeks, three said they were assessing whether it’s still safe to transit, while while two said they had...
Shipowners painted a mixed picture of their willingness to continue transiting the Strait of Hormuz in the hours after President Donald Trump said the US ceasefire with Iran is “ over. ” Of five owners surveyed by Bloomberg, whose vessels have crossed the vital conduit for energy flows in recent weeks, three said they were assessing whether it’s still safe to transit, while while two said they hadn’t yet changed their policies. When it comes to oil flows, much will depend on the approach of Sinokor Group, the world’s largest owner of supertankers and a key player in Hormuz traffic since the conflict began. One of the company’s vessels was attacked on Tuesday and three shipbrokers who deal with the firm said they hadn’t been updated on its current position on transiting. The risk of a return to all-out war appeared to be rising on Wednesday, with Trump warning that the US would probably launch further strikes on Iran and could resume a blockade on the country’s ports. In these circumstances, how much crude continues flowing out of the waterway, and the resulting impact on global oil prices, may come down to the decisions of the narrow cadre of shipowners that have been willing to enter Hormuz. See also: Saudi Efforts to Revive Gulf Oil Loadings Run Into Buyer Caution Two owners that have previously sent ships into Hormuz showed some willingness to continue. Their vessels passed through the waterway under cover of darkness in the hours after the US resumed strikes on Iran, according to vessel-tracking data compiled by Bloomberg. Visible traffic on Wednesday was muted on the Omani side of Hormuz — a shipping corridor that has become the primary alternative to Iranian-controlled waters. Amid the heightened tensions, ships may be more likely to make the transit without broadcasting their locations. The tendency of some tankers to exit the Persian Gulf in convoy formations has also made daily totals volatile. Benchmark tanker earnings, which reflect the cost of entering t...
Palantir Technologies (NASDAQ:PLTR) now carries a market capitalization of a little more than $300 billion as of July 3, 2026, which has taken many investors on a nice ride, given the company’s the software-with-a-defense-flavor story. Palantir is now arguing for a seat inside the mega-cap conversation, alongside the AI infrastructure names its own CEO likes ... Palantir Just Hit $300 Billion. The...
Palantir Technologies (NASDAQ:PLTR) now carries a market capitalization of a little more than $300 billion as of July 3, 2026, which has taken many investors on a nice ride, given the company’s the software-with-a-defense-flavor story. Palantir is now arguing for a seat inside the mega-cap conversation, alongside the AI infrastructure names its own CEO likes ... Palantir Just Hit $300 Billion. The Numbers Say That’s Only the Start.
DNY59/E+ via Getty Images As the markets sell off, focus on the signal and not the noise There's clearly palpable fear right now in the market. As the Nasdaq ( COMP:IND ) began Wednesday's trading, it was actually looking feeble. Yet, as I pen this update midway through the morning session, we are down by just 0.6%. In pre-market trading, we were actually down as much as 1.5 or 1.6%. So, if you ju...
DNY59/E+ via Getty Images As the markets sell off, focus on the signal and not the noise There's clearly palpable fear right now in the market. As the Nasdaq ( COMP:IND ) began Wednesday's trading, it was actually looking feeble. Yet, as I pen this update midway through the morning session, we are down by just 0.6%. In pre-market trading, we were actually down as much as 1.5 or 1.6%. So, if you just woke up to a late morning, you probably wouldn't be too dissatisfied with how the market has been holding its line so strongly ever since late June. President Trump calls off the ceasefire with Iran (Bloomberg) And then we obviously know there is this new report of President Trump highlighting that the ceasefire with Iran is over , given the skirmishes over the past week. Let's put it this way: I think geopolitical volatility and uncertainty will continue to percolate for the rest of the year as this fragile truce meanders. But I've also learned from my previous experiences with the Iranian war (and others) that these conflicts should ultimately resolve in due course. And for the U.S.-Iranian situation, I actually believe there's little incentive for Trump to keep it going, knowing that the midterms are inching closer than ever before. So coming back to the market, we always focus on what matters, which is the price action. As I've always encouraged and emphasized to my subscribers in Ultimate Growth Investing , paying attention to the market helps us to decipher and differentiate signal from noise. AI is a bubble? I've heard it for the past three years+ Let's try and understand what the noise is that we have heard this week. "AI is a bubble." I'm hearing it over and over again. Alright, I shall emphasize that this is not just this week. We have been hearing it for the past three years or more. Yet, the market continues to make new highs. You know what I mean? The so-called AI bubble continues to grow, so the way I see it, we are always in a bubble. Just what stage of th...
tupungato/iStock Editorial via Getty Images Introduction Microsoft’s ( MSFT ) stock has continued to decline following my Strong Buy rating in early June , as the stock is now trading below $400 a share, and it even reached a 52-week low, marking one of the sharpest quarterly drawdowns the company has seen in about 2 decades. So, I want to dive back into the firm to see if there is anything that h...
tupungato/iStock Editorial via Getty Images Introduction Microsoft’s ( MSFT ) stock has continued to decline following my Strong Buy rating in early June , as the stock is now trading below $400 a share, and it even reached a 52-week low, marking one of the sharpest quarterly drawdowns the company has seen in about 2 decades. So, I want to dive back into the firm to see if there is anything that has materially changed or if the new headlines can further validate my thesis. Current Dynamics First, I want to highlight the major news that is the potential Meta Compute, as Bloomberg reported that the firm is developing plans for a cloud infrastructure business that would sell access to AI compute and hosted models. Many AI infrastructure names tumbled following the news, and the read for Microsoft was that Azure just inherited a fourth hyperscale competitor that is backed by quite a substantial CapEx figure of between $125B and $145B . But I believe that this is a misread in the case of Microsoft, considering what Meta ( META ) would actually be selling, bare-metal GPU capacity and hosted Llama access, reportedly including sales to neocloud companies themselves. Thus, this is not really an enterprise cloud, and Meta has no Entra-style identity layer, no compliance and sovereignty stack, no enterprise sales motion, and no equivalent of the $627B commercial RPO that MSFT has contractually locked in. What Meta Compute does directly undercut is the economic reason the neoclouds exist, and the irony is that Meta itself has been their anchor tenant with roughly $21B committed to CoreWeave ( CRWV ) and up to $27B to Nebius ( NBIS ). As I have generally argued about Neocloud, those backlogs are propped up by a handful of concentrated bids, and the marginal seller of raw GPU hours entering the market is precisely the development that compresses their unit economics, not Azure’s. Considering what Zuckerberg said, “ at some premium to what we bought it at ,” this is a massive sign...
Attendance and viewing figures at T20 World Cup hit an all-time high – and the sport’s appeal is pushing boundaries Women’s cricket is growing faster than the men’s game in many areas of the world, according to the International Cricket Council chief executive, Sanjog Gupta, who has defended his organisation’s reliance on the Indian market for driving expansion. The first women’s Test to be played...
Attendance and viewing figures at T20 World Cup hit an all-time high – and the sport’s appeal is pushing boundaries Women’s cricket is growing faster than the men’s game in many areas of the world, according to the International Cricket Council chief executive, Sanjog Gupta, who has defended his organisation’s reliance on the Indian market for driving expansion. The first women’s Test to be played at Lord’s begins on Friday between England and India, five days after the ground staged the final of a record‑breaking T20 World Cup in front of a sellout crowd. Gupta, however, is just as excited by the sport’s potential in new markets. Continue reading...
OpenAI is overhauling ChatGPT's voice mode with a new model that it says is more like "talking to another person." The new GPT-Live-1 is designed to interrupt you less and will also wait for you to continue speaking if you pause mid-conversation. During a press briefing, OpenAI researcher lead Kundan Kumar called GPT-Live-1 the company's "smartest voice model" yet. It will automatically pass your ...
OpenAI is overhauling ChatGPT's voice mode with a new model that it says is more like "talking to another person." The new GPT-Live-1 is designed to interrupt you less and will also wait for you to continue speaking if you pause mid-conversation. During a press briefing, OpenAI researcher lead Kundan Kumar called GPT-Live-1 the company's "smartest voice model" yet. It will automatically pass your queries to its best text models, like GPT-5.5, when it needs to reason or search the web, allowing it to more quickly transition from researching the topic you've asked about to talking about its findings. The upgraded model will also supplement co … Read the full story at The Verge.
Sandisk (NASDAQ: SNDK) stock has been explosive this year. The relatively new stock, which was spun off from Western Digital at the beginning of 2025, is up nearly 5,000% in the little time it's been its own public company. Even if you'd waited and invested $25,000 at the beginning of this year, when it was already rising, you'd have $190,000 today. Can a $25,000 investment today make you a millio...
Sandisk (NASDAQ: SNDK) stock has been explosive this year. The relatively new stock, which was spun off from Western Digital at the beginning of 2025, is up nearly 5,000% in the little time it's been its own public company. Even if you'd waited and invested $25,000 at the beginning of this year, when it was already rising, you'd have $190,000 today. Can a $25,000 investment today make you a millionaire? Sandisk has always been known for its memory cards, and it makes a number of different memory products. It's one of a small number of producers of a technology called NAND flash memory, which can hold on to memory in an off state, making it a vital piece of almost any device used today, from laptops to smartphones and more. Continue reading
SpaceX’s executive compensation filing reads unlike anything in the history of SEC paperwork. The word “Mars” appears 63 times, including inside the formal executive compensation section, and the document contains a quote from Isaac Asimov. Reporters who reviewed it noted no real precedent in the history of executive compensation. The legal condition for CEO Elon ... Elon Musk Could Get a $165 Bil...
SpaceX’s executive compensation filing reads unlike anything in the history of SEC paperwork. The word “Mars” appears 63 times, including inside the formal executive compensation section, and the document contains a quote from Isaac Asimov. Reporters who reviewed it noted no real precedent in the history of executive compensation. The legal condition for CEO Elon ... Elon Musk Could Get a $165 Billion Payday, But There’s Just One Problem: Traders Say It’s Never Going to Happen
Remember when the biggest market worry was whether Samsung 's (OTC: SSNLF) earnings were too good? That was Tuesday , aka ages ago. By Wednesday, investors have moved on to weightier concerns such as whether the United States and Iran are about to resume full-scale hostilities. President Trump declared the interim cease-fire "over" at a NATO summit in Turkey, and Wall Street took the news about as...
Remember when the biggest market worry was whether Samsung 's (OTC: SSNLF) earnings were too good? That was Tuesday , aka ages ago. By Wednesday, investors have moved on to weightier concerns such as whether the United States and Iran are about to resume full-scale hostilities. President Trump declared the interim cease-fire "over" at a NATO summit in Turkey, and Wall Street took the news about as well as expected. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJINDICES: ^DJI) fell 1.4% by 12:27 p.m. ET, bearing the brunt of the sell-off. The S&P 500 (SNPINDEX: ^GSPC) and Nasdaq Composite (NASDAQINDEX: ^IXIC) indexes each declined 0.7%. Continue reading
Robert Way Amazon’s ( AMZN ) accelerating cloud business is expected to deliver a strong quarter for its parent with Amazon Web Services (AWS) revenue growth reaching 35.5% year-over-year in the second quarter, up from 28.4% last year and 3.4% above consensus estimates. TD Cowen analyst John Blackledge attributes this stellar growth to ramping GenAI workloads as Amazon’s ( AMZN ) significant AI in...
Robert Way Amazon’s ( AMZN ) accelerating cloud business is expected to deliver a strong quarter for its parent with Amazon Web Services (AWS) revenue growth reaching 35.5% year-over-year in the second quarter, up from 28.4% last year and 3.4% above consensus estimates. TD Cowen analyst John Blackledge attributes this stellar growth to ramping GenAI workloads as Amazon’s ( AMZN ) significant AI infrastructure investments start to ease supply constraints to meet GenAI demand. “We estimate GenAI revenue stack of $6.9B, up 88% quarter-over-quarter and up nearly 500% year-over-year; we estimate Anthropic associated revenue, from the Claude API, training revenue, and chatbot of $4.6B, or two-thirds of AWS GenAI revenue,” Blackledge said in his note to clients. For the second quarter, Blackledge expects AMZN to report revenue of $200.1B, up 19.3% from the same quarter last year and 1% above the high end of guidance. This includes 15.1% revenue growth for North America (versus +12.1% in Q1), driven by positive underlying trends such as faster delivery speeds and everyday essentials. For the third quarter, AWS should also fuel upbeat estimates with TD Cowen’s revenue and operating income expectations 0.3% and 3.2% above the consensus estimates “driven by further AWS revenue growth acceleration led by AI demand.” Blackledge views Amazon ( AMZN ) as a Buy but lowered the price target by 3% to reflect a slight retracement in the stock since May. More on Amazon Amazon: America's Largest Retailer Wants To Monetize Every Hour Of The Day Amazon: Don't Mind The Fears Of Infrastructure Spending Amazon: Fantastic Outlook In AWS And E-Commerce Vs. Potential Overvaluation Amazon's Moonraker project to enhance Alexa+ proves pricey: report Amazon Web Services could invest $5B in Philippines over 15 years, news agency says