Traders on the floor weren’t prepared for fireworks when the January 2026 jobs report was released. The price of a barrel of oil was already rising above $90. The fallout from the Iran conflict had taken weeks for stock markets to process. Uncertain about whether to cut or hold, the Federal Reserve was sitting on its hands. After witnessing the worst hiring year in more than 20 years in 2025, the majority of economists had quietly prepared for yet another letdown. The Dow Jones consensus estimate was about 70,000 new jobs. Some estimates had dropped even further, to about 55,000.…

On a Tuesday morning in 2025, there’s something strange about passing any large corporate headquarters. Yes, the parking lots are more crowded than they were in 2022. The elevators are operating once more. However, a closer look reveals that the open-plan floors are filled with workers wearing headphones and sitting in back-to-back video calls with their laptops open, essentially replicating the remote setup they left at home. There are people in the office. The question of whether it is genuinely effective is quite different. The return-to-office experiment that corporate America started with such conviction has now been the subject of…

When the money starts to disappear, an industry experiences a certain kind of silence. Not the loud headlines of a corporate bankruptcy, nor the spectacular crash of a stock ticker. Just a slow, creeping silence, with campaigns quietly shelved, contracts renegotiated, and unanswered emails. That’s the silence that’s currently permeating the influencer economy, and if you’ve been keeping a close eye on this field, you won’t be entirely surprised. The formula was almost embarrassingly easy for almost ten years. Look for someone who has a sizable fan base. Pay them to compliment your product. Keep an eye on the sales…

Fifty is a figure that frequently appears in discussions about Tesla these days. That is, half of it. In other words, the company’s stock value has dropped by half since its December peak, when it was momentarily worth more than the next ten automakers put together. It’s not a dip. It’s not a correction. That is more akin to a verdict, and the market has been delivering it for months, both silently and all at once. On December 17, 2024, Tesla’s stock reached $479.86. At the time, it seemed as though the market was pricing in a golden age, with…

Tucked away inside an app that most people had probably forgotten was still installed on their phones, the notification appeared silently. There was no press release. No parting blog post. The Elder Scrolls: Blades will go dark on June 30th, according to a brief in-app message for the remaining players. It was a remarkably humiliating farewell for a franchise with decades of history and a fan base that still discusses Morrowind as a religious experience. Before making its way to the Nintendo Switch in 2020, Blades first appeared in early access on iOS and Android in 2019. Playing as a…

When a stock like Amazon quietly drops below $200, there’s a moment when you automatically assume something has fundamentally gone wrong. In contrast to market data, the number has a symbolic quality. Trading at $199 in early 2026 carries some weight for a company that was once worth $258 per share just months ago. It’s not quite panic, but it’s close to unease. Since January, AMZN’s stock has dropped by about 14%, which hasn’t gone unnoticed in a market already shaken by spikes in oil prices and geopolitical unrest throughout the Middle East. The odd thing, though, is that the…

To put it mildly, IREN stock has had a difficult few weeks. On a single Friday in late March, shares of IREN Ltd. dropped 7%, attracting a lot of attention from traders. Some were intrigued, many were concerned, and some loudly predicted much worse. The stock has now dropped by about 10% since January, and that kind of pressure is significant for a company that has spent the better part of the last year repositioning itself as a major player in AI infrastructure. The discrepancy between what IREN is developing on paper and how the market is reacting on screen…

Observing a stock market collapse in slow motion can be disorienting. It bleeds rather than crashing all at once. Additionally, the bleeding that is currently occurring throughout Asia is visible, consistent, and linked to events taking place thousands of miles away in the Middle East. This week, trading floors opened in Seoul, Tokyo, and Sydney under a noticeably darker sky than the Monday before. The worst of it went to South Korea. Before closing almost 3% lower, the KOSPI, which had until recently been among the world’s best-performing indexes for the year, fell more than 5% during afternoon trading. In…

QQQ stock exudes a certain level of confidence that is more subdued and calm than the boisterous, anxious energy you occasionally feel around meme stocks or speculative plays. The name usually comes up in any serious discussion about long-term investing in the United States. Not always with great fanfare. Like a familiar face in a crowded room, it’s always there. Nearly a year before the internet bubble reached its most dangerous peak, in March 1999, the fund started trading. The events that followed were not pleasant. As the dot-com frenzy faded into one of the worst market corrections in modern…

Every few years, a certain level of tension arises around Tesla. It’s not the typical anxiety that comes with watching a stock move; rather, it’s more akin to true confusion—the sense that there isn’t a perfect fit for a standard valuation framework and that using one could be a mistake. For more than 20 years, Tesla’s stock, which is listed on the NASDAQ under the ticker TSLA, has baffled those who believed they understood. There was a time when a record number of short sellers lined up against it. Analysts issued cautions. The business publicly referred to a period of…

Francisco Partners and Vista Equity Partners have put a preliminary takeover proposal to the Progress Software board as buyout firms continue to target cash-generative software businesses Francisco Partners and Vista Equity Partners have submitted a preliminary all-cash takeover proposal for Progress Software Corporation (NASDAQ: PRGS), valuing the business at $48 per share. The proposal is unsolicited and no binding agreement has been reached. People with direct knowledge of the matter confirmed that the Progress Software board is reviewing the approach with independent financial and legal advisers. All three parties declined to comment publicly. Progress Software has drawn private equity interest…

Palo Alto Networks has been doing something subtly unique in Santa Clara, where the company’s campus is located amidst the dense cluster of tech companies that characterize the South Bay: making actual money. Real profit, real free cash flow, the kind of financial performance that most cybersecurity companies spend years promising before delivering—not just revenue growth money, the kind that determines startup valuations. Palo Alto made $9.22 billion in revenue, $1.13 billion in net income, and $3.47 billion in free cash flow during the 2025 fiscal year. These figures show a well-established, successful company. The stock is currently trading at…

After rising more than 1,000 percent from its 52-week low of $45.66, Lumentum Holdings’ stock reached an all-time high of $808.80 two days ago. Everything that the AI infrastructure narrative has to offer—record quarterly earnings, a significant partnership with Nvidia, inclusion in the S&P 500, and the announcement that the company was purchasing a 240,000 square foot manufacturing facility in Greensboro, North Carolina, to produce the indium phosphide lasers that AI data centers increasingly rely on—fueled the journey from those depths to that peak. All of that remained true on Thursday. The stock lost $88 per share in a single…

The medications are effective. There is no longer any doubt about that part. Semaglutide, the active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy, has been shown in clinical trials to cause 15–20% weight loss in patients who continue their treatment. That’s 37 to 50 pounds lost for a person weighing 250 pounds, which would be impressive for any kind of intervention. What happens when people stop is the issue, which a group of Cambridge medical students have now quantified more accurately than anyone has ever done. The study, which was published in eClinicalMedicine on March 4, combined data from 48 studies to…

Think about a fairly typical situation. After having a serious discussion with their doctor about weight and cardiovascular risk, a patient leaves with a plan that may include medication, increased exercise, or a better diet. They do a fair job of adhering to the plan. Even after six months, they have put on weight. The physician modifies the strategy. The patient modifies their level of effort. The numbers continue to go in the opposite direction. Chronic stress is running a parallel biological program that most treatment plans don’t directly address in those cases, and there are more of them than…

It’s difficult to retain the numbers in your mind. Over the past thirty years, nearly 5,000 square miles of Antarctica’s coastline have seen a retreat in the grounding line, which is the point where ice begins to float on ocean water rather than rest on bedrock. Over the course of three decades of satellite observation from a continent that most people will never see, that area is roughly equivalent to ten cities the size of Los Angeles. On March 2, the UC Irvine researchers who spent years compiling this image published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy…

On the outskirts of Frankfurt last September, executives gathered beneath bright exhibition lights to discuss something that felt quietly monumental. According to the International Federation of Robotics, more than 4.6 million industrial robots are now operating worldwide. That number, up 9% from the previous year, is large enough to feel abstract. But standing inside a factory where robotic arms swing in disciplined arcs, welding car frames in bursts of blue light, the scale becomes physical. Audible. Slightly unsettling. It’s possible that we are underestimating what this surge really means. Investors certainly are not. Venture capital funding for robotics hit $8.8…

A woman in her fifties recently spread her bills across the table and circled what could go in a peaceful kitchen outside of Dallas. a subscription to streaming services. A fresh phone plan. fewer meals at restaurants. She was attempting to hold onto her prescription for Zepbound, a drug that had helped her lose over 40 pounds and lower her blood pressure in a matter of weeks. It wouldn’t be covered by her insurance. The math was straightforward and harsh. The medical discourse surrounding obesity has changed as a result of the new generation of weight-loss medications, such as Wegovy…

The question of whether artificial intelligence should be permitted to sound like a lawyer and what would happen if it did was being discussed by lawmakers. Kristen Gonzalez’s introduction of New York Senate Bill S7263 is the main topic of discussion. The bill would forbid AI chatbots from posing as licensed professionals or providing what it refers to as “substantive” legal advice. More startlingly, it would enable users who depend on such guidance to file lawsuits against the businesses that provide those tools. The proposal feels less symbolic and more like a line drawn in wet cement in a time…

The Caribbean Sea appears nearly glassy at dawn off the coast of Dominica, broken only by the sporadic ripple of giant surfacing. With its crew leaning over railings and their headphones pressed firmly to their ears, a research vessel floats silently. The ocean starts to speak in clicks as a hydrophone beneath the hull listens. For many years, scientists believed that sperm whales were communicating in ways that were much more intricate than previously thought. However, artificial intelligence has only lately started to show the depth of that discussion. Marine biologist David Gruber founded the multidisciplinary Project CETI, which is…

A group of engineers are sitting in a glass-walled office in the SoMa district of San Francisco on a gloomy morning. They have their laptops open and are watching lines of code appear on their screens without touching the keyboard. The AI agent is committing changes, running a test suite, and fixing a malfunction. Not a single dramatic keystroke. Quiet automation. For many years, coding required quick finger movements across keys. The situation changed when Microsoft released GitHub Copilot. Copilot, an autocomplete on steroids trained on vast amounts of public code, seemed like magic when GitHub introduced it in 2021.…

Gold doesn’t shine on Toronto’s Bay Street; instead, it trades. The screens flicker in subdued greens and blues, but one ticker has recently caught attention: AEM. Even in a booming commodities market, Agnico Eagle Mines Limited has accomplished something uncommon over the past year: it has surpassed many of its competitors and, occasionally, the metal itself. It’s difficult to ignore the numbers. In just one year, shares have more than doubled, increasing the company’s market capitalization from previously respectable levels to almost $60 billion. It was almost tied with Newmont Corporation for the title of the world’s most valuable gold…

The gym by Columbus Circle is full on a Monday morning in January. Treadmills hum together. At the water fountain, someone is opening a protein bar and looking at the label as if it were a secret code. Low-carb, high-protein, intermittent fasting, and juice cleanses that promise rejuvenation in mason jars are all popular during this season of new beginnings. The crowd diminishes by March. Approximately 90–95% of people who lose weight on a diet regain it within a few years, according to decades of research. Frequently, that statistic is presented as a moral judgment. Clinicians at Ohio State Wexner Medical…

It used to be a little embarrassing to forget a password. It’s almost nostalgic now. Last week, a man in a Brooklyn café looked at his laptop and unlocked it. Do not type. Without hesitation. The screen just acknowledged him, like it was saying hello to an old acquaintance. A teenager half-listening to a podcast across the room pressed her thumb to her phone. The movement was instinctive and hardly conscious. Passwords, those awkward combinations of capital letters and special characters, are quietly disappearing from everyday life. It’s easy to understand why. There are an estimated 300 billion passwords in…