OKB is breaking out, and the momentum is heating up! 🔥
In this short, I reveal my breakout targets for OKB based on today’s technical analysis.
Find out the key price levels and what traders should watch next.
📌 Watch the full analysis for more insights: [link to full video]
#OKB #Crypto #PricePrediction #Breakout #TechnicalAnalysis #Trading #CryptoNews
source
My three long-term rentals sit in Conroe, Texas. New construction, boring on purpose, and they mostly leave me alone so I can go handle whatever broke at a glamping site two hours east.
That’s my entire long-term portfolio. So when Ed Barone opened an answer with the phrase “a landlord with three units,” I sat up.
Ed co-founded RentRedi in 2016 with his son Ryan and now runs marketing there. Close to 200,000 landlords and renters use the platform, so they watch rent move at a scale I never will. I see three doors. They see the pattern behind them.
I sent six questions. A few answers confirmed what I already believed. One sent me back to a spreadsheet, and one I’d argue with.
Late-payment rates on the platform swing by as much as 4x from state to state, at around 5% in places like Utah and Hawaii and up to 20% in states like Mississippi.
Ed’s read: A landlord with a handful of units treats every late payment as a verdict on somebody. Either the tenant is a problem, or you’re too soft. Sometimes it’s neither, and some of that gap tracks to where the property sits.
I don’t take that as a permission slip. Late rent is still late rent, and it still wrecks your cash flow in month four. But it changes the fix. If one payment in five runs late in your market, you’re operating normally; what you need is a system, not a lecture.
The system is boring:
Small landlords lose on that last one, because the ones who get burned aren’t charging the fee; they’re charging it sometimes.
While you’re in the lease, go read your state’s rules, since most of us wrote that clause once and never looked at it again. Texas is my example because it’s where I operate.
Under Property Code 92.019, you can’t collect a late fee at all unless it’s spelled out in writing and rent has gone unpaid two full days past the due date, and the fee is only presumed reasonable up to 12% of monthly rent in a building with four units or fewer, 10% in anything larger. Go past that, and the tenant can come after you for $100, three times whatever you wrongly collected, plus their attorney’s fees.
Then count your own 12-month late rate. Count it; don’t estimate it. Compare it to your state instead of to the guy on the podcast in Utah.
RentRedi’s rent-charge data shows the average unit climbing about 46% over roughly 6.8 years. On a $1,500 unit held flat for five years, Ed put the forgone rent around $6,000. Call it $18,000 across three doors like mine.
Then I ran it myself. I think $6,000 is low.
The arithmetic is simple enough to do on your own rent instead of mine. Each year, take market rent minus your frozen rent, multiply by 12, and stack five years of those gaps. At 3% annual growth on a $1,500 unit, you’re out about $8,400. At 4%, about $11,400. And 46% over 6.8 years works out to roughly 5.7% a year compounded, putting the five-year number closer to $16,600.
I’m not dunking on the man’s math. The direction is the point, and the size is bigger than most people assume, so get your own number before you decide the conversation isn’t worth having.
The better half of his answer wasn’t the number anyway. Ed said raising rent isn’t automatically right, because a tenant who pays on time and takes care of the place carries value that never shows up on a rent roll, and one move-out can hand you enough vacancy, cleaning, re-listing, and screening cost to eat a year or two of the increase you just won.
His line, which I’ve thought about more than the $6,000: “A high rent with a bad tenant can cost a landlord far more than a fair rent with a good one.”
So the question isn’t, Should I raise rent? It’s two questions, in order:
Answer the first one with comps instead of feelings. Pull three or four actively listed units within a mile that match your bed and bath count, sanity-check them against BP Rental Estimator or RentCast, and write the number down with the date on it so next year you’re comparing against something real.
Within a few percent of market, leave it alone. Fifteen percent under, and you’re not being generous; you’re subsidizing somebody. And when you do move it, small annual bumps beat one giant correction that ends with a vacant unit and a turnover bill.
Most small landlords do their books the week before taxes are due. I’ve been that guy. I don’t recommend the genre.
The annual scramble costs you twice, Ed says. First come the deductions you can’t reconstruct nine months later—the March run to Home Depot or the mileage out to the property—and across a few doors, that can plausibly add up to hundreds or low thousands in overpaid taxes.
The second cost is the one nobody counts. A tenant who’s been five days late for eight straight months is a footnote when you spot it in January. In month two, it’s still a conversation you can have, a payment plan you can offer, and a problem with the room left in it.
Twenty minutes on the first of the month gets you both. Categorize the transactions, photograph any receipts still floating around, log the mileage, and check the dates rent hit the account. The same door’s rent drifting later every month? You just found it in month two.
I expected a graveyard of dead features when I asked what landlords request and then never touch. Ed gave me something better.
Ten years in, his position is that there’s no such thing as a typical landlord. Every feature came from somebody’s real request. Some get used by thousands of people and some by a much smaller group, and they ship them either way.
That’s an argument against the way most of us shop for software. You don’t need the longest feature list. You need the three things you touch every month, and for almost everybody, that’s rent collection, screening, and maintenance requests. Every demo is built to impress you, so check it against what you did last month.
Old rule: Cross some magic door count, hire a manager, and pay 8% to 10% for the privilege.
Ed pushed on that hard. A 300-unit portfolio at $1,500 rent pays over $400,000 a year in management fees at 8%. That’s $450,000 of rent a month, $5.4 million a year, times 8%, landing at $432,000. I ran it because the number sounds fake until you do.
Almost nobody reading this owns 300 units, so run the version you live in.
Ten doors at $1,500 is $1,200 a month in fees. Software runs $20 to $40. A part-time person at 10 hours a week and $25 an hour is roughly $1,000 a month, and they work for you instead of being split across another 400 units. Right around there is where self-managing stops being a hobby and turns into a decision with a number attached.
Here’s the nuance Ed didn’t add: Self-managing isn’t free. You’re trading a fee for your own hours, and if those are the hours you’d otherwise spend finding the next deal, the manager might be the cheaper option.
Paying 8% doesn’t guarantee better work either. I’ve watched managers earn every dollar, and I’ve watched managers operate as an expensive answering machine. The test is whether yours produces something you can’t produce with software and one good part-time person.
Every rental platform is bolting AI onto something right now.
Ed’s framing is that it’s an assistant, not a replacement. Take the busywork off the landlord’s plate, surface the right information at the right moment, and leave the decision with the person who owns the asset.
Use that as your filter the next time you’re sitting in a demo. A tool that drafts the maintenance follow-up, summarizes six months of payment history, or flags the unit drifting later every month is handing you time back. A tool that wants to decide who gets approved or where your rent lands while you nod along is a vendor making calls on property they don’t own, and that’s a strange thing to pay for.
Three things were added to my calendar after this conversation:
None of it is exciting. It’s an afternoon of work I’ve been putting off since roughly March.
Chase refreshed today the Aeroplan card, as expected. The new card increases the signup bonus to 115,000 points (from 100,000), increases the annual fee to $195 (from $95), maintains the Pay Yourself Back benefit, adds $100 in Air Canada credits and automatic Air Canada Aeroplan 25K elite status and 15% award discount.
Also notable: existing cardholders get the new benefits starting today with some existing benefits going away after 12/31/26 (details below).
Direct link to offer
Card earns at the following rates:
Benefits ending on 12/31/26 for existing cardholders (not relevant for those signing up now):
The 3x on Travel, $100 Air Canada credit, automatic 25k elite status, and 15% award discount are nice parts of the refresh. The higher annual fee and the removal of the monthly bonuses and the 3x grocery/dining and the UR transfer bonus is a bummer.
For those who actually travel Air Canada, there are some benefits here that can justify the annual fee ($100 in credits, 25k status, 15% discount). For others who are more interested in partners or PYB the $195 is painful.
In terms of signup bonus, it’s good to see the higher bonus for those meeting the $20k tier. Still not as good as the old 85k offer which just required $4k spend. Not sure if we’ll add this bonus to our List of Best Current Credit Card Bonuses.
Intel (INTC -4.72%) stock slumped 4.8% through 2:22 p.m. ET Thursday after the semiconductor stock received only lukewarm endorsement from investment bank Piper Sandler.
Image source: Intel.
Piper Sandler analyst David O’Connor initiated coverage of Intel stock this morning. The big shift in the artificial intelligence industry away from “training” AIs and asking them questions (“inference”) to using AI agents to accomplish tasks (“agentic AI”) is a tailwind for Intel, “driving demand for its CPU server products,” says O’Connor.
Weak CPU supply and strong CPU demand are likely to boost prices for Intel’s products in this environment, boosting Intel to “high-teens revenue CAGR to 2030E.” Nevertheless, the even stronger performance of Intel shares, which have more than quadrupled over the past year, limits further upside. For this reason, the analyst gives Intel stock only a neutral rating and predicts Intel will gain less than 10% over the next year, hitting perhaps $110 per share, as StreetInsider.com reports.
Today’s Change
(-4.72%) $-5.02
Current Price
$101.22
Market Cap
Day’s Range
$99.34 – $103.23
52wk Range
$24.05 – $142.35
Volume
67M
Avg Vol
113M
Gross Margin
39.05%
That’s not enough to get investors excited. To the contrary, worries that 10% may be the most Intel investors can expect to gain appear to be discouraging investors from owning Intel today.
And here’s another thing to worry about:
O’Connor opines that about 45% of Intel’s current market capitalization assumes that the company’s foundry unit will gain a whopping 15 points of market share in CPUs globally. That’s possible — but far from guaranteed. Should Intel’s gains prove more muted than that, much of the last year’s gains could evaporate.
Caveat investor.
Rich Smith has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Intel. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
It seemed inevitable that mortgage rates would rise back to 7%.
Ever since the war broke out at the end of February, the pressure was on.
The saving grace was that some sort of peace deal would come, and that it’d all be short-lived.
Fast forward seven months and things appear to be worse than ever, with crude oil prices back above $100 per barrel.
Similarly, mortgage rates are the worst they’ve been since last June and could get even worse from here.
A huge move higher for the 10-year treasury yield, which hit a fresh 52-week high, will translate to 7% mortgage rates today.
It’s being driven by the worsening situation in the Middle East that’s driving oil prices higher, along with higher inflation (the PPI report the latest to come in high).
Mortgage News Daily, which tracks rates on a daily basis, already had the 30-year fixed on the cusp yesterday, at 6.97%.
Considering the bellwether 10-year yield is up a staggering eight basis points this morning, it’s a foregone conclusion we’ll be above 7% today.
MBS prices are significantly weaker today and that means the 30-year fixed will easily climb the three basis points needed to get at/above 7%.
Chances are we could make a move well into the 7s, perhaps 7.05% or higher.
And while it’s maybe only another $50 to $100 a month on a typical mortgage payment, it’s the sentiment that’s the problem.
When prospective home buyers see the headlines that mortgage rates are back to 7%, there’s a decent chance they’ll throw in the towel.
Again, even if the monthly payment is manageable, and only another $50 per month, they might say enough is enough.
Perhaps it’s better just to hold off and see how things shake out. Especially with all the other goings on in the world, whether it’s the uncertainty of the war in the Middle East or the fragility of the wider economy.
At the same time, prospective home sellers could also be more hesitant to list their properties knowing all this.
They might think now isn’t such a great time to test the market with affordability already poor and mortgage rates back to their recent highs.
That could all result in a housing market standstill, which mind you is already trudging along at 30-year lows for home sales annually.
While mortgage rates are arguably back above 7%, you’re going to continue to see lenders advertise rates in the 6s.
The reason is simple; a 6 looks a lot better than a 7.
But there’s a major catch. If you read the fine print, you’ll see that they’re charging mortgage discount points.
This is essentially prepaid interest that you pay upfront to lower your mortgage rate long term.
And we’re talking some hefty points, often two points to get the 30-year fixed rate down to 6.75% or 6.625%.
For example, on a $400,000 loan, two points would equate to $8,000, which needs to paid at closing and is included in your cash-to-close.
That’s a lot of money just for the opportunity to avoid a 7% mortgage rate.
You might also see lenders get more creative and offer up adjustable-rate mortgages instead of the 30-year fixed.
This too allows them to present something more palatable to home buyers in light of this unfriendly rate environment.
Again, pay attention to what you’re actually getting here so you know if it’s the right choice and if it’s suitable.
On the one hand, this could simply be a bad spell for mortgage rates but maybe close to the top.
If that’s the case, paying a lot of money upfront for a lower rate might not make sense.
Instead, you could settle for a slightly higher rate or an ARM (or a temporary buydown) and wait for the trend to be our friend again.
Keep reading: Try my mortgage rate calculator to compare 6 and 7% mortgage rates.
Before creating this site, I worked as an account executive for a wholesale mortgage lender in Los Angeles. My hands-on experience in the early 2000s inspired me to begin writing about mortgages 20 years ago to help prospective (and existing) home buyers better navigate the home loan process. Follow me on X for hot takes.
President Donald Trump’s pledge to send every American adult a $5,000 check if Republicans hold Congress in November carries a price tag that economists say has no clear funding source — and would land on a federal balance sheet already strained by a nearly $2 trillion annual deficit.
Kent Smetters, faculty director of the Penn Wharton Budget Model and one of the country’s most respected fiscal economists, estimated the plan would cost about $1.35 trillion if paid to the full population of American adults, in a statement emailed to Fortune. Factor in Vice President JD Vance’s suggestion that the checks wouldn’t go to “the wealthy” — using a household income cap of $400,000, which Smetters called “a reasonable guess” since no threshold has been specified — and he calculated that the cost would still come in around $1.15 trillion.
Either figure would be financed the same way most of Washington’s recent spending has been: borrowed.
Trump made the pledge Wednesday night during a nearly two-hour speech at the Republican Party’s midterm convention, held in Dallas. “If the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate, I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000,” Trump told the crowd, dubbing it the “Trump Dividend.”
The president offered no mechanism for authorizing the payments, no funding source, and no timeline. Any such payout would require congressional approval, and Trump has floated similar ideas before without following through — including a $2,000 “tariff dividend” check pitched in late 2025 that never materialized after the Supreme Court struck down key tariffs imposed under emergency powers.
Beyond the headline cost, Smetters’ modeling points to a second, faster-moving effect: inflation. Based on marginal propensities to consume for the population likely to receive the checks, Smetters estimated that about $400 billion would be spent within the first two quarters after the payments go out. That pace of spending would add an estimated 0.3 to 0.5 percentage points to headline and core inflation over the four quarters following disbursement.
That’s a meaningful jolt for a Federal Reserve wrestling with five years of inflation above its 2% target. Smetters declined to extend his analysis to a specific interest-rate forecast, saying that any claim about interest-rate impact, even over a defined time horizon, would be “too speculative” without knowing how the Treasury and Federal Reserve might adjust their open market operations in response to the payout.
The proposal lands soon after the national debt crossed $40 trillion for the first time in August, arriving months earlier than the Congressional Budget Office had projected, in part because revenue from Trump’s now-invalidated tariffs came in lower than expected. The cumulative deficit has already reached roughly $1.8 trillion to $2 trillion through the first eleven months of fiscal year 2026, according to Treasury and CBO figures — surpassing the full-year shortfall recorded in fiscal 2025.
Debt service alone is consuming enormous sums: the Treasury has spent about $1.05 trillion servicing the debt over the past eleven months, or roughly $95 billion a month. That means Trump’s proposed one-time payout would cost nearly as much as an entire year’s interest bill on money the government has already borrowed.
Tariff revenue, which the administration has repeatedly floated as a funding source for dividend-style checks, is nowhere near enough. The government collected about $200 billion in additional tariff revenue in 2025, and projections before the Supreme Court’s ruling put future annual collections at $300–350 billion at best — a small fraction of even the discounted $1.15 trillion price tag, and revenue that Trump has also promised to direct toward deficit reduction and defense spending simultaneously.
Vance’s comment that the checks wouldn’t go to “the wealthy” is the only detail suggesting the administration might scale back the full $1.35 trillion cost — but it raises as many questions as it answers. The White House, Treasury, and any official proposal have not announced an income threshold. Smetters’ $400,000 household cap is his own working assumption for modeling purposes, not a disclosed policy parameter, so the $1.15 trillion figure is provisional and could shift substantially depending on where — or whether — a real cutoff is eventually set.
That ambiguity mirrors the pattern of Trump’s earlier dividend-style promises, including a 2025 pitch to route “20% of DOGE savings” to citizens, which similarly never advanced into legislative language or an appropriations request.
For the payments to happen, Congress would need to pass an appropriation — an uphill climb given that some Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader John Thune, have said they’d prefer directing any tariff revenue toward deficit reduction rather than new spending. Democrats have largely stayed quiet on the proposal so far, an unusual silence that suggests they may be content to let Republicans own the math.
Whether the $5,000 dividend becomes real policy or joins the list of unfulfilled Trump payment pledges, the estimates from Smetters and other economists point to the same conclusion: there is no existing revenue stream sized to cover it, and the most likely outcome is that it would show up not on a corporate-style dividend statement, but on the country’s growing debt ledger.
For this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.
Supply Chain vs International Business Management in Canada. This video talks about Supply chain management in Canada vs International business management in Canada. How to choose a program in Canada can be a tough decision but research everything you can on your end and then decide.
Connect with us on the following platforms:
Instagram :
Facebook :
Twitter :
Drop a mail to us at : khuranaankit47@gmail.com
Disclaimer :
The audio files used in the video are for entertainment only and the credit goes to the original creators of the music.
source
Key Points
Several of the most selective colleges have adopted generous financial aid policies that provide free tuition to low- and moderate-income students. Depending on the college, the income threshold for free tuition ranges from $100,000 to $250,000.
MIT was the first to offer free tuition for families with income under $200,000 starting with the 2025-2026 academic year. Harvard matched the offer within months. Since then, other colleges have announced similar policies for the 2026-2027 academic year, including Rice at $200,000 and the University of Chicago at $250,000.
Here’s a ranked list of the top offers, why colleges are doing this, and how the gaps between these policies create a new angle for financial aid appeals. If you’re still early in the process, start with how the college admissions process and financial aid fit together.
This table shows the 2026-2027 free-tuition income threshold for the 33 colleges that have an income threshold of $100,000 or more. Public colleges are on the list, but most of them limit the offer to in-state residents, so out-of-state students pay full price. If you want the broader list of schools that charge no tuition at all, see our roundup of tuition-free colleges.
(function(){function e(){window.addEventListener(`message`,function(e){if(e.data[`datawrapper-height`]!==void 0){var t=document.querySelectorAll(`iframe`);for(var n in e.data[`datawrapper-height`])for(var r=0,i;i=t[r];r++)if(i.contentWindow===e.source){var a=e.data[`datawrapper-height`][n]+`px`;i.style.height=a}}})}e()})();
Cornell is the only Ivy League school without a free-tuition policy, although it does meet full demonstrated financial need.
One caveat: these policies assume typical assets. A low-income student with a $1 million trust fund (a so-called “Pellionaire”) might not qualify, even if family income is under the threshold. The income figure is the headline, but the financial aid formula still looks at the whole picture, including 529 plans and other assets reported on the FAFSA.
Congress raised the tax on college endowments in 2025. It’s an excise tax of up to 8% on annual net investment income.
These colleges are continuing to offer generous financial aid due to competitive pressures, even as the new college endowment tax exceeds their annual financial aid budget.
But there’s a loophole. Private nonprofit colleges are exempt from the endowment tax if they have fewer than 3,000 tuition-paying students. Public colleges are exempt entirely. That gives a small, wealthy college a direct financial reason to make more of its students tuition-free.
Princeton is the clearest example. Princeton was able to avoid the endowment tax by reducing the number of tuition-paying students below 3,000 through increased generosity in its financial aid program. Other colleges are unable to do this because they enroll more students, especially graduate students. That’s a different pressure than the one driving MIT’s decision to admit fewer graduate students, but it points in the same direction.
Other colleges that are close to the 3,000 tuition-paying student threshold include Bryn Mawr, Caltech, Davidson, Grinnell, Smith, Swarthmore, and Wellesley. It is unclear, however, whether avoiding the endowment tax was part of their motivation for offering a free-tuition policy and whether they were able to reduce the number of tuition-paying students below the 3,000 threshold.
But the incentive is there, and it’s one more reason college pricing works like a black box.
The endowment tax isn’t the whole story. Other motivations for free-tuition policies include:
The gaps between the income thresholds at these colleges are creating a new basis for financial aid appeals.
The tuition at many of these colleges is in the $60,000 to $70,000 range. So qualifying for free tuition can yield a very big reduction in the college net price calculation.
But, if family income is above the income threshold at one college and below the income threshold at another, missing out on the free-tuition generosity can yield a huge difference in financial aid. That’s one more reason to run the numbers on whether a given college is worth the investment before committing.
Even though the colleges try to avoid a cliff effect by using a sliding scale for financial aid above their income thresholds, the difference in net price can still be in the tens of thousands of dollars. Choosing one college over a more generous college might increase the four-year cost by over $100,000. That’s more than most low and middle-income families are willing to pay.
The Washington Post reported that 15 colleges have a total cost of attendance of $100,000 or more for 2026-2027. The full list: Barnard, Colgate, Claremont McKenna, Duke, Fordham, Georgetown, Harvey Mudd, Haverford, NYU, Smith, the University of Chicago, USC, Vassar, Washington University in St. Louis, and Wesleyan. Our own list of the most expensive colleges tracks the same trend.
Three of the 15 also appear on the free-tuition list above: the University of Chicago ($250,000), Smith College ($150,000), and Duke ($150,000, but only for North and South Carolina residents).
For everyone else at a $100,000 school, the average cost of college is a very different number than the price on the website, and the only way to know what you’ll pay is to run the net price calculator and, if the answer isn’t good enough, appeal. And if the appeal falls short, grants and scholarships are still the next place to look before borrowing.
Editor: Robert Farrington
The post Why Elite Colleges Are Racing To Offer Free Tuition appeared first on The College Investor.
This past week, the media ran reports about a former Anthropic Researcher who claims he left the firm because he believes artificial intelligence (AI) will lead to a global catastrophe. The first reports emerged on WSJ.com.
Researcher Jacob Coxon warned that labs are racing toward uncontrollable AI, predicting digital defense attacks, alongside accelerated scientific and industrial change almost overnight. There is said to be a pervasive belief within the industry that AI could kill all humans, bringing allusions to the Terminator film series when AI became self-aware.
A growing number of reports describe AI agents breaking free from human control and acting on their own to pursue nefarious goals.
While concerns about AI and its rapid ubiquity are real, Coxon’s comments have sparked a discussion on X about whether he was fully transparent about his public recriminations.
Zero Hedge, the finance insider news site that has morphed into more general news, reported that Coxon was at Anthropic for only 6 weeks, followed by a comment from Elon Musk saying it “seems like a setup.”
Another poster shared that Coxon has been affiliated with a UK non-governmental organization called Newspeak, with ties to socialist Jeremy Corbyn and prominent Democrat Hillary Clinton, that seeks to hack democracy. Coxson was reportedly part of Newspeak’s 2021 Fellowship cohort.
Still, Coxson has credibility as an AI researcher, with a degree in Mathematics from Cambridge and several years at OpenAI.
All of this heightens the debate about AI, its rapid adoption across all aspects of industry, and the potential for something to go badly wrong. Musk, a co-founder of OpenAI and Grok, has himself warned about the dangers.
At the same time, the race is largely between China and the US, and there are real concerns that China will win and drive the industry in a direction undesirable to the West.
Most insiders say the development of AI must proceed with caution, not that development should halt. But will China do the same?
In July, more than a thousand employees at frontier labs signed a letter advising the world to pace the development of automated AI. A separate statement this week, from a diverse coalition of groups, called on the White House to release its frontier AI security framework.
AI and agentic AI are the hottest sectors in industry today, and they can streamline services and processes, creating real economic value. While there will be transitions as some services become automated – and jobs will change- most see its development as good for society … unless AI goes full Skynet rogue…
Good morning. Live sports has become a strategic battleground for media companies and technology platforms competing for consumer attention and advertising dollars. Disney CFO Hugh Johnston also sees it as a driver of customer lifetime value.
Johnston didn’t mince words about the state of live sports. “It’s just on fire,” he said during a question-and-answer session at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference on Wednesday. “People just can’t get enough of it, and our advertisers can’t get enough of it.”
It’s a strategic bet Disney has been building for years: Live sports isn’t just a content category anymore; it’s connective tissue for Disney’s broader consumer ecosystem, from ESPN to Disney+.
In its fiscal Q3, Disney’s Sports segment, primarily ESPN, generated $4.5 billion in revenue, up 4% year over year, driven by subscription and affiliate fees and advertising, the company reported last month. Entertainment SVOD, which includes Disney+ and Hulu, grew 11% to $5.53 billion. Across the two segments, advertising revenue topped $2.8 billion, with sports advertising up 5% offsetting a 1% decline in Entertainment advertising.
That divergence helps explain why Johnston is leaning into sports. As general entertainment advertising softens, live sports remains a reliable draw for both viewers and advertisers.
“In terms of sports rights, we’re actually pretty well locked up through 2029 or 2030,” Johnston said. He cited “creative deals” with the NBA, NFL, MLB and NHL, giving ESPN its “base load” of marquee content for years.
But Disney (No. 44 on the Fortune 500) isn’t trying to obtain rights to every sports property. Johnston specifically cited Formula 1 (F1) as becoming too expensive, saying Disney chose to put its spending elsewhere. The message from the CFO: Own the rights that matter, but at prices that protect ESPN’s margins.
“Sports to drive ad dollars and engagement is absolutely a core part of Disney’s business,” Morningstar Senior Equity Analyst Matthew Dolgin told me. Sports also helps keep ESPN important to the pay-TV bundle and gives Disney a way to attract consumers to the ESPN app who don’t subscribe to traditional pay TV.
Integrating sports more deeply into Disney’s streaming ecosystem is more complicated, Dolgin said. Disney has begun putting some ESPN content on Disney+ and offers bundles combining ESPN, Disney+ and Hulu, aiming to boost overall streaming subscriptions and engagement.
Johnston also offered a glimpse into the advertising environment. Technology and AI advertisers are “doing very, very well,” along with political spending and health care. Consumer packaged-goods companies, restaurants and telecom carriers are facing more pressure.
The telecom example illustrates a broader trend: Advertisers are concentrating budgets around a small number of must-see events rather than spreading spending broadly. For Disney, whose ESPN strategy is built around those unmissable moments like College GameDay, the NBA Finals and Monday Night Football.
And that’s potentially a significant tailwind, as long as ESPN keeps landing the biggest games.
Sheryl Estrada
Sheryl.Estrada@fortune.com
Michael Brous was promoted to CFO of rideshare company Lyft, Inc. (Nasdaq: LYFT), effective Sept. 28. Brous takes over from Erin Brewer, who plans to retire and will remain with Lyft as an advisor through Dec. 15. Brous has served in Lyft senior management for nearly eight years, currently as head of Lyft Urban Solutions and Safety and Customer Care. He joined Lyft in 2018 through its acquisition of Motivate, where he was the VP of finance.
Peter G. Clifford was EVP and CFO of Fortune Brands Innovations, Inc. (NYSE: FBIN), a home, security and digital products company, effective Sept. 21. Clifford brings more than 30 years of experience, including CFO and COO roles at The AZEK Company and Cantel Medical. Most recently, Clifford served as CFO for Filtration Group Corporation.
Deloitte’s annual Finance Trends 2027 report explores how finance leaders are increasingly operating in a dual role, leading not only transformation within finance teams, but also shaping how enterprise-wide tech and AI investments are governed.
More than half (54%) of surveyed finance leaders lead enterprise AI and technology capital-allocation decisions, while 48% lead on AI trust and 48% oversee AI and technology spending and cost controls. In addition, nearly half (43%) identify embedding AI and advanced technology into operations as a top priority through fiscal year 2027.
Meanwhile, sovereignty is reshaping investment: 84% expect technology sovereignty—including data residency, vendor relationships and supply-chain resilience—to reshape capital allocation decisions. 63% see it as a strategic differentiator.
Another key finding: AI adoption advances, 60% of finance leaders say they will need more sophisticated AI cost-management practices through 2027. Those preparing for this shift are further along in their AI journeys, with higher rates of fully embedded AI productivity tools in finance (64%) and FinOps capabilities (38%) than those maintaining current practices (51% and 25%, respectively).
The findings are based on a global survey of 1,434 finance leaders at public and private companies with revenues of at least $1 billion.
Courtesy of Deloitte
Tech giant Apple unveiled its first foldable smartphone on Wednesday—the iPhone Duo. It will cost $1,999 for the 256-gigabyte version and be available Oct. 23, Fortune’s Sebastian Herrera reports. Apple is also selling a two terabyte version for $3,199.
“The phone has a 7.6-inch display when opened and a 5.4-inch outer display when closed,” Herrera writes. “It will also work with Apple Pencil, and it can be viewed in several display modes, including half-folded on a table.” To learn how this device pushes Apple into a new era, read more here.
“Over time, we believe EVs are the end game because of the styling and what they enable—instant torque and never having to go to the gas station.”
—General Motors Chair and CEO Mary Barra said this during a conversation with Fortune’s Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell in a new episode of Fortune 500: Titans and Disruptors of Industry. Shontell sat down with Barra to discuss her approach to fierce competition from China, shifting EV policy, the rise of AI and autonomous vehicles, and how she intends to steer the company into the next century.
