poco_bw/iStock via Getty Images Shares of gold mining companies have been on a wild ride already in 2026. The VanEck Gold Miners ETF ( GDX ) has returned 108% YoY, outperforming the S&P 500 by more than 80 percentage points. It has more than doubled gold’s return. YTD, GDX sports a 10.3% gain, dividends included. Still, the volatile fund is about 20% off its February all-time high. Rising real int...
poco_bw/iStock via Getty Images Shares of gold mining companies have been on a wild ride already in 2026. The VanEck Gold Miners ETF ( GDX ) has returned 108% YoY, outperforming the S&P 500 by more than 80 percentage points. It has more than doubled gold’s return. YTD, GDX sports a 10.3% gain, dividends included. Still, the volatile fund is about 20% off its February all-time high. Rising real interest rates have weighed, along with money possibly moving from precious metals to energy commodities amid the war in Iran. Still, Goldman Sachs recently reiterated that it expects gold to reach $5400 per ounce by year-end 2026. Likewise, I reiterate a buy rating on GDX. While new risks appear—such as higher energy prices—GDX’s valuation is appealing, while the technical situation points to some support on the chart. I was bullish on GDX in January . GDX Correction, Outperforming the S&P 500 & Gold YoY StockCharts.com Rising Real Yields Stinging Gold The Daily Shot Goldman Sticks With Its Gold Price Target Goldman Sachs According to the issuer , GDX seeks to replicate as closely as possible, before fees and expenses, the price and yield performance of the NYSE Arca Gold Miners Index, which intends to track the overall performance of companies involved in the gold mining industry. VanEck states that gold miners have historically provided leveraged exposure to gold prices, and the fund owns the largest global gold mining firms. GDX is a large ETF with $29 billion in assets under management as of April 3, 2026. That’s up from $26 billion at the time of my previous analysis. Shares are up 8% since then, outperforming the S&P 500 by 12 percentage points. GDX’s annual expense ratio is moderate at 51 basis points, while its trailing 12-month dividend yield is low at just 0.67%. Share-price momentum is rated well by Seeking Alpha’s quantitative scoring system, but I’ll call out later that the technical situation shows some signs of exhaustion. From a risk perspective , GDX has a ve...
Jonas Hanacek/iStock via Getty Images It is my expectation that the Goldman Sachs Hedge Industry VIP ETF ( GVIP ) will underperform the iShares Core S&P 500 ETF ( IVV ) this year, as its 13F filings-focused strategy has a natural lag that will likely hinder it from both reducing the downside and capturing sufficient upside. More specifically, what feeds my skepticism is that GVIP has a history of ...
Jonas Hanacek/iStock via Getty Images It is my expectation that the Goldman Sachs Hedge Industry VIP ETF ( GVIP ) will underperform the iShares Core S&P 500 ETF ( IVV ) this year, as its 13F filings-focused strategy has a natural lag that will likely hinder it from both reducing the downside and capturing sufficient upside. More specifically, what feeds my skepticism is that GVIP has a history of poor performance during stressful periods, with the examples being the 2018 trade war, the pandemic, the 2022 bear market, and the April 2025 tariff drama. And I attribute its weakness during all these episodes to the strategy lag. We also already see signs that GVIP is doing worse than IVV during the Iran war, though the recent rebound has helped to trim the YTD loss a bit. Data by YCharts That is to say, I have been neutral on GVIP consistently since 2024, citing "weighting and timing issues" of its strategy, and I remain mildly skeptical about it today, maintaining a Hold rating. GVIP Strategy and Portfolio Let us start with a quick review of GVIP's strategy. In essence, as I have already explained in the previous articles, it is supposed to offer exposure to hedge-fund darlings selected from the Form 13F filings. More specifically, as we know from its website , the ETF ...seeks to track the GS Hedge Fund VIP Index, which is constructed in accordance with a rules-based methodology derived from concepts previously developed by Goldman Sachs’ Global Investment Research division. The Index consists of fundamentally driven hedge fund managers’ “Very-Important-Positions,” which appear most frequently among their top 10 long equity holdings. Form 13F filings are released by institutional investment managers every quarter. As explained in the GVIP summary prospectus: Hedge fund managers report their U.S. equity holdings, which are made public 45 days after the end of each calendar quarter. The Index is normally reconstituted and rebalanced on a quarterly basis once the informat...
California Bans Government Officials From Using Insider Knowledge To Bet On Prediction Markets Authored by Dylan Morgan via The Epoch Times, California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday issued an executive order banning state officials from using insider knowledge to profit, or assist another person in profiting, on prediction markets, effective immediately. The governor’s office said there have been mo...
California Bans Government Officials From Using Insider Knowledge To Bet On Prediction Markets Authored by Dylan Morgan via The Epoch Times, California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday issued an executive order banning state officials from using insider knowledge to profit, or assist another person in profiting, on prediction markets, effective immediately. The governor’s office said there have been mounting reports of individuals in the federal government with access to sensitive government information placing well-timed bets ahead of major Trump administration actions. These reports are currently allegations and have yet to be verified. “ Public service should not be a get-rich-quick scheme. At a time when Trump’s Washington is riddled with ethical failures and insider profiteering, California is drawing a bright line: If you serve the public as a political appointee, you serve the public—period,” Newsom said. “We’re not going to tolerate this kind of corruption in California.” Prediction markets are platforms that allow users to bet on real-world events, including government decisions, political events, sports, pop culture, and everything in between. The governor’s office said that, in one example, six suspected insiders made $1.2 million betting on a U.S. strike against Iran from accounts funded only days before the strike and bet only hours before it occurred. The governor’s office also said another person has made nearly $1 million from a 93 percent win rate on bets related to Iran and Israel. In a separate incident, an individual made more than $400,000 betting on the U.S. military capturing former Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro just hours before that occurred, according to the governor’s office. Kalshi, one of the largest prediction market platforms, said on X in response to Newsom’s order that it already enforces insider trading violations and that these examples by the governor’s office took place on a separate, unregulated prediction market. “Insider trading...
Just_Super/E+ via Getty Images Introduction—The Architecture Shift Check Point Software ( CHKP ) has a long track record of proactive breach protection. Enterprise customers trust its deterministic approach built over 3 decades of existence. Its firewalls and gateway-based security architecture are standards in the network security industry. CHKP’s core architecture uses the concept of a gateway. ...
Just_Super/E+ via Getty Images Introduction—The Architecture Shift Check Point Software ( CHKP ) has a long track record of proactive breach protection. Enterprise customers trust its deterministic approach built over 3 decades of existence. Its firewalls and gateway-based security architecture are standards in the network security industry. CHKP’s core architecture uses the concept of a gateway. In this dimension, traffic flows through network gateways where stateful inspection enforces policy. Intrusion prevention systems (IPS) and signature-based antivirus detect and block known threats. Originally delivered as Firewall-1, this functionality evolved into CHKP’s Software Blade architecture. Customers trusted this because of its deep packet inspection and broadly high-confidence blocking of known threats before they could execute. To understand where Checkpoint fell behind, network gateways have lost their primacy as the primary control point. Today, they are just one layer among many. Applications are now delivered via SaaS over HTTPS and are hardly distinguishable from normal web traffic. Many users do not sit behind enterprise firewalls anymore - they operate from unmanaged devices across residential networks. North-south traffic’s primacy has been replaced by a mix of east-west traffic consisting of service-to-service communication via APIs, containers, and microservices. Some of these packets do not traverse a traditional firewall at all. The concept of security itself has shifted. CrowdStrike’s Falcon Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) platform now operates directly at the endpoint - not the choke point. The concept is now behavioral analytics, not signatures. Threat detection is now probabilistic, not deterministic. There are cloud-native platforms like Zscaler ( ZS ) that route traffic through distributed proxies. These platforms rely on a zero trust policy based on identity and context, not network location. Even attack modes have shifted, and the conce...
Repairs will be slow and costly, pro-Russian bloggers complain; Ukraine’s president says Iran war is benefiting Moscow. What we know on day 1,503 Continue reading...
Repairs will be slow and costly, pro-Russian bloggers complain; Ukraine’s president says Iran war is benefiting Moscow. What we know on day 1,503 Continue reading...
The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) has launched an academy to nurture the next generation of female medical scientists, aiming to bridge a sex gap in which women make up just one-third of researchers globally. The Women in Science and Medicine Academy (Wise) aims to attract 100 early-career female researchers from the city and overseas in five years, supporting them with mentorship, leader...
The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) has launched an academy to nurture the next generation of female medical scientists, aiming to bridge a sex gap in which women make up just one-third of researchers globally. The Women in Science and Medicine Academy (Wise) aims to attract 100 early-career female researchers from the city and overseas in five years, supporting them with mentorship, leadership training and global exposure. Professor Siew Ng, an associate dean of CUHK’s medical school and...
Rents in Hong Kong’s luxury housing market are rising as supply tightens, with returning overseas professionals heating up the competition to secure prime homes. The rebound is most evident in traditional upscale districts such as The Peak and Southside, where leasing activity has picked up sharply this year. Transactions reached 108 in the first quarter, with more than 40 per cent involving month...
Rents in Hong Kong’s luxury housing market are rising as supply tightens, with returning overseas professionals heating up the competition to secure prime homes. The rebound is most evident in traditional upscale districts such as The Peak and Southside, where leasing activity has picked up sharply this year. Transactions reached 108 in the first quarter, with more than 40 per cent involving monthly rents above HK$100,000 (US$12,760), according to Midland Realty. At the centre of the surge is...
Margaret Sullivan on the the billionaire father and son buying up the US media Speaking at a press conference last month, the US secretary of defence, Pete Hegseth, criticised CNN’s ‘fake news’ coverage of the US-Israel war on Iran. ‘The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better,’ he told the room of journalists. Continue reading...
Margaret Sullivan on the the billionaire father and son buying up the US media Speaking at a press conference last month, the US secretary of defence, Pete Hegseth, criticised CNN’s ‘fake news’ coverage of the US-Israel war on Iran. ‘The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better,’ he told the room of journalists. Continue reading...
After a brief hiatus, the market's bigger-picture pullback appears to be back underway, once again led by the names that were once its most popular picks. As veteran investors will still attest, however, this weakness is ultimately a buying opportunity. With that as the backdrop, here's a closer look at three deeply discounted growth stocks that long-term investors should consider buying on this s...
After a brief hiatus, the market's bigger-picture pullback appears to be back underway, once again led by the names that were once its most popular picks. As veteran investors will still attest, however, this weakness is ultimately a buying opportunity. With that as the backdrop, here's a closer look at three deeply discounted growth stocks that long-term investors should consider buying on this short-term dip. In no particular order... Continue reading