We are very pleased today to be able to interview Eric Lauron from Air Canada Foundation to talk about what they do and a Points matching initiative between October 5, 2026 and October 11, 2026, just in time for Thanksgiving!…
The post [INTERVIEW] Air Canada Foundation Aeroplan Points Matching Week appeared first on Pointshogger.
<p>How companies can use their disclosures to reshape strategy and operations.</p>
Joining Bending Spoons, the Italian tech conglomerate that owns Vimeo and AOL, comes with a warning. Each prospective hire is sent a list of its “controversial” workplace principles, which advises candidates to prepare for “considerable” challenges, workloads, and expectations. Those that don’t fully commit, don’t get the job.
Despite this, Bending Spoons is regularly inundated with job applications. Last year, it received 800,000 CVs but hired only 286 people—making its recruitment process 100-times more selective than the Ivy League.
Chief executive Luca Ferrari once described Bending Spoons as “like private equity had a baby with Google.” It buys underperforming apps, rebuilds their technology with its own engineers and, unlike a typical buyout firm, keeps them. Since its founding in 2013, it has acquired more than 50 businesses.
“People want to work here because they know that they’ll be taking on big challenges with talented colleagues every day,” says Nicolle Wasserman, head of people operations at the company. Bending Spoons ranks No. 69 on Fortune‘s 2026 list of the 100 Best Companies to Work For in Europe.
The recruitment process is purposefully selective. About 60,000 applicants passed an initial CV screen and moved on to online tests designed to measure how quickly candidates solve unfamiliar problems and learn new skills. The tasks can take up to six hours, and some are monitored.
Wasserman says traditional interviews tend to penalize candidates who are shy or are not native English speakers and to reward those who oversell themselves. “It’s easy for a candidate to overstate their skills or accomplishments in an interview, but it’s hard to misrepresent them in a practical test,” she says.
To manage the volume of applicants, the company built its own recruiting software called Role Model. It draws on candidates’ test results and AI models trained on years of hiring data, including how past recruits went on to perform in the job. The company says this allows each member of its talent team to handle tens of thousands of applications a year.
About 3,300 candidates reached interview stage, but it is a central talent team, not a hiring manager, that makes the final call. The company says this limits personal bias. Each recruit’s performance is tracked for up to two years and fed back into the company’s selection models. “We’ve gotten more selective in recent years, and much better at identifying predictors of success,” Wasserman adds.
Even those that secure a job remain at risk. Bending Spoons says it parts ways with employees performing “adequately” if stronger contributors are available, something it acknowledges is uncommon.
Wasserman describes the company’s employees, known internally as ‘Spooners’, as central to its success. The company employs 600 people and revenue per full-time employee has more than doubled in two years, from $1.12 million in 2023 to $2.57 million in 2025, according to its IPO filing.
Bending Spoons flew out more than 500 of its employees from Italy to New York for its opening day on the Nasdaq in July—breaking the exchange’s record attendance figures. The IPO valued Bending Spoons at $18.4 billion and raised $1.68 billion, one of the largest by a European company this year.
Despite the large amounts of revenue being brought in by its employees, Bending Spoons does not pay performance bonuses, which are common at other tech companies. It argues that pay tied to targets encourages short-term thinking without reliably improving results, and Wasserman says it makes relationships between colleagues “more transactional and less honest.”
Instead, the company invests more heavily in salaries and reviews them annually. Employees can also purchase stock in the company directly through their salary at a discounted rate, and plans to continue offering this perk now it is listed. In 2025, 84% of eligible staff did so.
Hierarchy is kept to a minimum. Internally, the company makes no distinction between junior and senior engineers, and managers are known simply as “leads.” In most cases, there are no more than three layers of management between the chief executive and a member of the core team.
Externally, employees can describe themselves however they like on LinkedIn, “as long as it’s reasonable,” Wasserman says. She adds that the company spent so much time debating what separated one level from the next, and fielding requests for better titles, that it concluded the exercise was “an enormous waste of time and energy.”
The company’s published principles are blunt about the demands of the job. It places responsibility for wellbeing on the individual. An employee bothered by Slack messages at night, for example, is expected to turn off notifications rather than look to the company for a policy, and someone who feels drained should adjust their schedule or take time off under a flexible vacation policy that requires no approval. This approach “chimes with our culture of freedom and responsibility,” Wasserman says.
Publishing the principles allows candidates to judge whether they fit before committing to a demanding hiring process. “These things need to be addressed openly and in good faith so people can determine for themselves how aligned they are with the principles,” she says. “It really sucks for someone to go through a successful process, start working here, and swiftly realize they don’t see eye-to-eye on these topics.”
For all Bending Spoons demands, unwanted departures are low. Wasserman says 0.6% of the core team quit in 2025—the rate so far this year has been even lower. Overall turnover was much higher, at 16.2%.
This is partly due to Bending Spoons’ business model. The company made headcount reductions at OL, Eventbrite, and Vimeo, following the acquisitions. Once those businesses have been restructured later this year, it expects only a few hundred of the 1,830 full-time staff to remain, its SEC filing states.
Having a leaner workforce comes with some benefits, according to Wasserman, allowing staff to take on more responsibility and work more flexibly. “A software engineer could spend a year rebuilding Evernote’s architecture, then six months rethinking subscriptions on Vimeo, then join a platform team building the payments technology every one of our businesses runs on,” she says.
Nearly all of the company’s businesses and functions are led by people in their twenties or thirties, most of whom had little or no prior work experience. “It’s not unusual for someone still in their 20s to be leading a business doing hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue,” Wasserman says.
The company acknowledges that its culture could be harder to sustain as it grows. In its filing, it warns that maintaining it may become more difficult across a larger, more dispersed organization with teams of different backgrounds and expectations. And with more than 1,000 potential acquisition targets identified, Bending Spoons is set to keep expanding.
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I’ll never understand why the government assumes parents will be paying for their kids to attend post-secondary school.
We were a one-income (educator) family until six years ago when my husband went back to work and finally got his own teaching position. He was a stay-at-home dad until then. So our savings is next to nothing.
Did our FAFSA last night and the SAI is 28,000. I knew it’d be high because of the two of us working now, but that doesn’t say anything about our actual situation. Obviously our daughter is applying for scholarships nonstop and has a part-time job when she’s able to work around school activities, but it’s all so sad for kids today. School is so expensive, even Pennsylvania state schools.
— Margot
Welcome to the Friday mailbag, where we take one reader question and answer it. Have one? Send it to us — details at the bottom.
You’re asking the question most parents never get a straight answer to after they see their Student Aid Index. The FAFSA treats your 18-year-old as part of your household’s balance sheet until she turns 24, and it does that whether or not you plan to pay a dime.
The idea that parents pay first started with the College Board’s College Scholarship Service in 1954, decades before the Department of Education existed. The age-24 cutoff came from the Higher Education Amendments of 1986. Congress set it just past the oldest age a student could still be receiving a Pell Grant, so parent finances would count for every traditional undergraduate.
The longer answer runs through three places: a private college pricing system from the 1950s, the 1979 law that created the Department of Education, and a 1986 rewrite of the Higher Education Act. Each one added a layer to the FAFSA formula your family ran into when you filed the 2027-28 FAFSA.
The idea that parents pay for their children’s college predates federal student aid. In 1954, the College Board launched the College Scholarship Service with about 100 member colleges, with the goal of collecting “a single set of financial data from students and parents”.
Harvard’s John Monro, its first chairman, built a formula to measure what a family could afford rather than using aid to bid for top students. That formula is the ancestor of every Student Aid Index calculation in use today.
The logic was rationing limited aid dollars: colleges had limited scholarship money, so they asked what each family could pay first and covered the gap.
When the U.S. Government created the Basic Educational Opportunity Grant (today’s Pell Grant) in 1972, it adopted the same structure with an “expected family contribution” built into the formula.
Federal law still frames it this way: aid fills the gap when parents can’t pay, not when they won’t. That’s why income limits for Pell are calculated on household income and not the student’s alone.
The 1979 law that created the Department of Education also explicity put parents first. The Department of Education Organization Act, signed October 17, 1979, includes this congressional finding: “parents have the primary responsibility for the education of their children, and States, localities, and private institutions have the primary responsibility for supporting that parental role” (20 U.S.C. § 3401).
The law’s stated purposes describe the federal role as supplementing state and local efforts and encouraging “the increased involvement of the public, parents, and students in Federal education program.”
That language captures the philosophy of how federal financial aid policies are crafted. It’s not a specific rule, but it’s a thesis that education is the responsibility of the parent first, even higher education. The parental contribution model was already 25 years old when the department opened. The charter reflects the same belief that drives the financial aid model today.
Before 1987, federal programs judged independence “strictly in terms of a student’s financial and living relationship with his or her parents“. A typical version of that test, used by Minnesota’s state grant program since 1968, required three things: parents didn’t claim the student on their taxes, the student lived at home no more than six weeks a year, and parents gave no more than $750 of support.
However, around this time, reports were warning that families were gaming the system to qualify for larger financial aid awards.
The numbers behind that concern: Independent students made up 14% of Pell recipients in 1974-75 and 47% by 1983-84, according to a 1985 study by economist W. Lee Hansen. Hansen traced much of that growth to older adults enrolling for the first time and found the incentive for students under 25 to switch status was modest, but status-shifting to unlock larger aid packages was the part that drew Congress’s attention.
Congress answered with the Higher Education Amendments of 1986, which President Reagan signed on October 17, 1986. Starting with the 1987-88 school year, a student was independent if he or she was 24 or older, an orphan or ward of the court, a veteran, married, a graduate student, or had legal dependents. Those same categories still decide who can borrow at the higher independent student loan limits today.
Higher education expert Mark Kantrowitz says the age limit was part of an effort to eliminate the so-called Bright Line Test for independent status, “which was prone to abuse,” the same kind of gaming that still drives the penalties for FAFSA fraud. A narrow version survived for single undergraduates who showed $4,000 a year of their own resources for two years, until Congress repealed it in 1992. “Congress wanted to make sure that families couldn’t abuse the new age-based rule, so they set the age threshold at 24 years old as of December 31 of the academic year,” Kantrowitz told The College Investor.
Kantrowitz said the number itself came from the Pell Grant time limits of the era. “Most college students graduate at age 21,” he said. “However, the Pell Grant was limited to five years for 4-year programs and 6 years for 5-year programs at the time. So, a student could still be receiving a Pell Grant at age 23, and Congress wanted to be sure that their parents’ finances were considered.“
In other words, 24 sits just past the oldest age a traditional student could still be drawing a Pell Grant, so no undergraduate on the standard path ages out of parent information while still eligible.
Kantrowitz put the goal plainly: Congress wanted “to be sure that students could not game the system to receive Pell Grants without parent information when they weren’t truly financially independent.”
Today the rule reads that an independent student “is 24 years of age or older by December 31 of the award year,” with exceptions for orphans, foster youth, emancipated minors, veterans and active-duty service members, graduate students, married students, students with dependents, and unaccompanied homeless youth. Marriage is one of the few legal ways an undergraduate gets out early, which is why FAFSA marital status rules draw so many questions.
The tax code’s version of 24 came later. The Technical and Miscellaneous Revenue Act of 1988 added the words “who has not attained the age of 24” to the student dependency rule, effective for tax years after 1988. A 2004 law folded it into today’s “qualifying child” test: under 19, or a student under 24.
The financial aid rule came first and the tax rule followed, the opposite of what most parents assume when they file their taxes.
The bigger difference is that the tax code still asks who supports the child, and FAFSA doesn’t care. A child who pays more than half of her own support can’t be claimed as a qualifying child on her parents’ return. Meanwhile, the Department of Education’s guidance states that parents who “refuse to contribute, are unwilling to provide information, or do not claim the student as an income tax dependent,” along with a student who shows “total self-sufficiency,” don’t qualify for a dependency override “either individually or in combination“.
A 22-year-old who pays every bill can be independent for the IRS and dependent for FAFSA in the same year, a disconnect we see every day in questions about what counts on the FAFSA.
What most people understand, but rarely see directly, is that there’s no single age of adulthood in federal policy.
Health plans must let children stay on a parent’s coverage until 26 under the Affordable Care Act. The kiddie tax can reach full-time students through age 23, and the dependency exemption on income tax that once made claiming a college student valuable has been $0 since 2018.
Each age was set by a different Congress solving a different problem, which is why it’s so confusing!
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| Rule | Age | What It Means |
|---|---|---|
| FAFSA Independence | 24 | Parent info required unless 24 by Dec. 31 of the award year |
| Tax Dependent (Student) | Under 24 | Parents can claim a student who doesn’t pay over half their own support |
| Kiddie Tax | Under 24 | A student’s investment income can be taxed at the parents’ rate |
| Parent’s Health Plan | Under 26 | Child can stay on a parent’s plan under the ACA |
| Dependency Exemption | None | Worth $0 since 2018 |
| Court-Ordered College Support | Varies | Divorce cases only, in states such as Illinois |
The 2024-25 overhaul replaced the Expected Family Contribution with the Student Aid Index, allowed an SAI as low as -$1,500, and stopped counting how many children are in college at the same time.
Under the old formula, a family with a $30,000 ability to pay and two kids in college was expected to pay $15,000 per student. A family like yours now gets the same $28,000 SAI for each child who enrolls, with no credit for the tuition already going to a sibling.
That change hit households with several kids close in age harder than anyone, a pattern visible in our SAI chart.
After nearly 20 years writing about financial aid, my view is that the age-24 rule is defensible as an upper limit for undergraduate need-based aid and fraud control, and but it doesn’t work as a description of how American families handle finances today.
Congress finalized the current test because the system was being gamed, and that problem was real. However, the result is that as parents have more income, it could make it more challenging for a student to pay, regardless of the family’s overall financial circumstances, and you’re seeing that firsthand.
For your family, here are some options that may help.
A financial aid administrator can adjust an SAI for special circumstances such as a job loss or unusual expenses by appealing your child’s financial aid award.
If parents end financial support or refuse to file, the same law lets a financial aid office offer the student Direct Unsubsidized Loans without parent information, though not grants. Students can also stack private scholarships, target tuition-free colleges, or shorten the time in college with a three-year bachelor’s degree.
The rule itself only changes if Congress changes it. Until then, an SAI of $28,000 means the formula expects money to come from the students AND parents together. Nobody is forcing you to pay it, you can make choices on higher education, but you cannot expect need-based aid to cover a significant amount of your costs.
The result is that families are better off planning around that number through crafting a college list or strategy that works for their finances.
Got a student loan, financial aid, or money question you can’t get a straight answer on? Send it to us and we may answer it in a future Friday mailbag.
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Editor: Colin Graves
The post Why Does FAFSA Assume Parents Pay For College Until Age 24? appeared first on The College Investor.
“I do believe there’s a bubble forming with AI and data centers,” he said. “No-one’s been able to really monetize on the AI trade yet. The hyperscalers are still trying to figure it out. The semiconductors are the ones making all the money right now – they’re getting all the cashflow because the hyperscalers are buying those chips.”
While investors and financial markets are scrambling to quantify the full potential of AI, Friedman said he’s not convinced oof the actual terminal value of data centers.
Every cycle of AI development brings more efficient chip architectures, he said, potentially reducing the computing requirements that make today’s data center investments look indispensable.
“These are huge investments that are being made with the idea that this is going to be needed 20, 30, 40 years from now,” Friedman said. “No-one can give clarity if you’re going to need these data centers five to 10 years from now.”
He sees parallels between the current market euphoria and the fiber-optic boom in the late 1990s, when billions were poured into network infrastructure that became stranded far sooner than investors had expected.
Update:
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Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
For decades, becoming a public company represented the ultimate milestone for ambitious
businesses. An initial public offering was a strong signal that a company had reached maturity,
provided access to significant capital and created a level of legitimacy that few other
achievements could match.
That relationship has changed.
Today, some of the world’s most influential companies have built enormous brands without ever
listing on a stock exchange. Stripe became one of the most recognizable names in global
fintech while remaining private. Databricks built a leading position in artificial intelligence and
data infrastructure without relying on public markets. OpenAI stands out as one of the most
recent examples of technology companies that broke the destructive innovation barrier without
relying on an IPO endgame.
The reason is not simply financial. Private companies often have advantages in areas that are
less concrete and harder to measure, but lend a great deal of in-house control to the founders.
Public companies still hold significant advantages. They have access to deep pools of capital,
increased visibility among investors and the ability to use shares as acquisition currency. But
public ownership also changes the way a company communicates.
Every major announcement exists alongside questions about earnings, margins, valuation and shareholder returns.
According to Felix Forsgren, co-founder of Eqvor, a marketplace for for unlisted shares, a lot of it boils down to control. Private companies face their own pressures from investors, but they often have more freedom to control their external narrative. They can spend years reinforcing the same long-term vision without having every strategic decision immediately interpreted through the lens of quarterly performance.
In a business environment where products can be copied faster than ever and artificial
intelligence is reducing barriers to entry across industries, that ability to build a distinctive
identity may become one of the most valuable competitive advantages available.
There is another reason this distinction is becoming more relevant. The private-company
ecosystem itself is becoming more sophisticated. Businesses that once might have felt
compelled to pursue an IPO to provide liquidity or attract investors now have more options for
raising capital and facilitating transactions while remaining private.
That development matters for branding because it changes the calculation for founders. If
remaining private no longer means remaining financially isolated, companies can potentially
retain the narrative control that comes with private ownership while still accessing a broader
investor ecosystem.
One of the biggest branding advantages of remaining private is the ability to maintain a
consistent long-term story.
Public companies rarely communicate with only customers in mind. They are simultaneously
speaking to shareholders, analysts, regulators, employees and the broader market. That
creates a balancing act where even positive announcements are often evaluated through a
financial lens.
A new product launch is not simply a product launch. Investors want to know whether it will
increase revenue. A major investment is not simply a strategic decision. Markets want to know
how it will affect margins.
That dynamic does not necessarily make public companies weaker. In many cases, it forces
discipline and accountability. However, it can change the way audiences experience the brand.
Consider the brand positioning of Microsoft and OpenAI. Both companies have played central roles in the artificial intelligence boom. Yet they are discussed in very different ways.
OpenAI’s public identity has largely been built around technological breakthroughs and how far
each model (primarily the chat bot) can be pushed in terms of accuracy and depth.
Microsoft, despite its close relationship with OpenAI and its enormous AI investments, operates
under a different communications environment. Every major AI announcement is inevitably
connected to questions around capital expenditure, cloud growth, operating costs and the
impact on shareholder returns.
The difference is not the importance of the technology. It is the context surrounding the
company.
Private companies can often spend more time building a story around what they are trying to
achieve rather than explaining how each decision affects the next earnings report.
Stripe stands out as another example.
The fintech company spent years positioning itself around the idea of increasing the business
done online by making it easier for companies to operate online. That message became a core
part of the company’s identity. Instead of being primarily known as a payments processor, Stripe
built a reputation as infrastructure powering the digital economy.
That kind of positioning requires consistency. It is difficult to maintain a long-term narrative when external communication is constantly shaped by short-term market expectations.
Research from McKinsey & Company has repeatedly highlighted the relationship between long-
term thinking and stronger corporate performance. The firm’s research has argued that
companies with a long-term orientation tend to outperform peers focused primarily on short-term results, although maintaining that approach becomes more challenging under constant market pressure.
For private companies, the ability to stay focused on a longer horizon can become part of the
brand itself.
Branding is not only about advertising. It is also about perception.
A company’s ownership structure can influence the way customers, employees and the media
interpret its actions. SpaceX used to demonstrate this clearly.
Before going public, despite becoming one of the world’s most valuable private companies, SpaceX was rarely discussed like a traditional corporation. Public attention instead seemed to focus on rocket launches, engineering achievements, NASA partnerships and long-term ambitions around space exploration. The company’s identity is built around innovation and possibility.
Compare that with a public aerospace company such as Boeing. Boeing has produced some of
the world’s most important aircraft, but public discussion around the company is often
connected to production targets, delivery schedules, regulatory issues, financial performance
and shareholder concerns.
Ownership does not determine whether a company is innovative. But it influences the
environment in which innovation is communicated. The same principle can be seen outside technology.
When Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard transferred ownership of the company in 2022 to a
structure designed to ensure profits support environmental causes, the announcement became
global news.
The story was not about revenue growth or valuation. It was about values.
The ownership structure itself became part of the company’s brand identity, which in turn is difficult to replicate. A competitor can copy a product design or launch a similar
marketing campaign, but it is far harder to reproduce decades of consistent decisions that
reinforce a company’s reputation.
The importance of branding is increasing because technology is making differentiation more
difficult.
Artificial intelligence is accelerating the speed at which companies can develop products, create
content and compete in established industries. As barriers to entry decline, companies may find
that their biggest advantage is not simply what they sell, but what customers associate with
them.
Marketing researchers have argued for years that strong brands are built through consistency
and recognition rather than constant reinvention.
The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, one of the world’s leading marketing research organizations, has
emphasized the importance of “mental availability” — the likelihood that consumers think of a
brand when making purchasing decisions. The companies that dominate categories are often
not those with the most complicated messages, but those that have created the strongest
associations in consumers’ minds.
Private companies can benefit from this because they often have more freedom to maintain a
consistent message over time.
This does not mean every private company automatically creates a stronger brand. Many
privately held businesses remain unknown despite significant valuations. A company still needs
strong products, effective leadership and genuine customer value.
But private ownership can remove some of the constraints that make long-term brand building
difficult. Public companies can absolutely create extraordinary brands; Nvidia is a perfect example.
The company has become one of the defining technology brands of the artificial intelligence era.
Its GPUs have become synonymous with AI infrastructure, and its leadership has positioned
Nvidia as a central player in the future of computing.
However, Nvidia’s public identity exists alongside constant discussion of market capitalization,
stock performance, valuation and earnings expectations. Those factors are not
distractions — they are fundamental parts of being a publicly traded company.
The difference is that public companies rarely control the entire conversation around their brand.
Financial markets inevitably become part of the story.
The growth of private markets has given companies more choices about how they scale.
According to research from McKinsey, private market assets under management have grown
dramatically over the past two decades, surpassing $10 trillion globally. That growth has
allowed more companies to delay public listings and continue operating with private capital.
For founders, that creates a strategic decision.
Going public can provide enormous benefits. But staying private can offer something
increasingly valuable: control over how a company is understood.
The companies that succeed in the next decade will not necessarily be those that communicate
the most. They will be the ones that build the clearest and most consistent identity.
Public companies must balance the expectations of customers, employees and shareholders.
Private companies still answer to investors, but they often have more freedom to decide which
audience comes first.
In a world where attention is scarce and technology is making competition more intense, that
freedom may become one of the most underrated advantages in business. The biggest branding advantage of remaining private may not be avoiding Wall Street. It may be the ability to decide what story the world hears.
There have been a lot of big winners in the artificial intelligence (AI) space this year, with a handful of stocks gaining more than 200% thus far in 2026. However, not all winners are created equal, and I’d hold on to some of these winning stocks while dumping others.
Let’s look at three winning AI stocks I’d keep in my portfolio and three I’d sell.
Image source: Getty Images.
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD -3.90%) has had a huge year, but there could be more to come. The company is riding two powerful waves with inference and agentic AI, and its pending acquisition of World Labs will also position it to become a potential leader in physical AI.
The company is placing significant emphasis on inference, and large deals with OpenAI, Meta Platforms, and Anthropic will drive rapid growth in the coming years. Meanwhile, it’s also a leader in server central processing units (CPUs), where demand is surging due to the rise of agentic AI.
Today’s Change
(-3.90%) $-25.18
Current Price
$620.68
Market Cap
Day’s Range
$613.34 – $643.85
52wk Range
$188.22 – $658.52
Volume
133.6K
Avg Vol
23.3M
Gross Margin
50.37%
Marvell Technology (MRVL -3.52%) shares have skyrocketed this year, and it too is riding powerful trends in custom AI chips and optical networking. The company has helped Amazon develop its custom AI accelerators and has also helped Microsoft develop its own custom AI chip. It also recently won a large deal with Alphabet for complementary components that attach to its Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) ecosystem.
In addition to its custom chip business, Marvell is also a leader in optical interconnects and is benefiting from the shift in AI data centers away from copper wire to optics. At its analyst day, it forecast that it could generate between $70 billion and $90 billion in revenue in fiscal 2031, blowing away analyst expectations.
Today’s Change
(-3.52%) $-10.02
Current Price
$274.60
Market Cap
Day’s Range
$265.73 – $283.84
52wk Range
$70.69 – $329.88
Volume
163.3K
Avg Vol
22.4M
Gross Margin
51.42%
Dividend Yield
0.09%
Another stock riding the wave in optics is Lumentum (LITE -5.62%). It is one of the few companies that builds high-power indium phosphide (InP) lasers, which are used to convert electricity into light for high-speed data transmission. It is also an important player in the optical circuit switches (OCS) and co-packaged optics (CPO) markets.
Lumentum holds around a 60% market share in the electro-absorption-modulated laser (EML) market, and this is a sticky business. The company has a huge patent portfolio, and once a laser or transceiver component is certified, it’s there to stay. Given its market position, the stock has greater long-term upside.
Today’s Change
(-5.62%) $-62.47
Current Price
$1,048.60
Market Cap
Day’s Range
$1027.00 – $1099.60
52wk Range
$147.81 – $1137.20
Volume
74K
Avg Vol
4.7M
Gross Margin
39.74%
Micron Technology (MU -4.79%) stock has been on a tear, but I’d be taking profits, despite the stock looking cheap. The company has benefited from the surge in memory prices, but it’s not a technological leader in the space, trailing Korean rivals SK Hynix and Samsung in advanced memory.
The memory market is currently being driven by high bandwidth memory (HBM) demand, which is packaged with graphics processing units (GPUs) and other AI chips. However, Micron has benefited from being the least-exposed big DRAM (dynamic random access memory) maker to HBM, as demand for advanced memory has led to larger price increases in conventional memory, as the big three memory makers focus their resources on HBM. When ordinary DRAM and NAND (flash) prices start to drop, Micron’s earnings could fall off a cliff.
The S&P 500‘s best-performing stock this year, Sandisk (SNDK -4.90%), has also been riding the memory boom. However, it’s arguably even more of a commodity player than Micron, focusing purely on flash memory. This market has fewer barriers to entry, more players, and will likely return to balance faster than the DRAM market, making Sandisk a stock I’d be dumping.
Intel (INTC -5.34%) stock made a tremendous turnaround this year, but it was more about being in the right place at the right time. The server CPU market has taken off with the rise of agentic AI, and hyperscalers are now scrambling for these chips. However, Intel has been losing market share in this space, a trend expected to accelerate in the coming years. Meanwhile, its foundry business continues to lose significant money. Take your profits and run.
In this video, we are going through three user-submitted portfolios from my Discord channel and Graham Stephan and I will review and roast their portfolios. Enjoy!
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WHO AM I?
Hello 👋 I’m Humphrey, I used to be a financial advisor, worked in gaming/tech, and started my own eCommerce business. I make practical, rational content on investing, personal finance, the news, and much more with a data-backed approach. My goal is to help you with financial literacy and creating wealth.
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⏱️ Timestamps:
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15:49 – Submission 3
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