Benjamin is a consultant who advises government agencies on technology partnerships. He signed up for an AI scheduling agent, expecting it to buy back his time. When we interviewed Benjamin, he told us how he envisioned a clutter-free calendar, fewer interruptions throughout his days, and an end to the soul-crushing back-and-forth of scheduling meetings. What he got instead was a second job: managing the agent he’d hired to manage his calendar.
Scott Bessent has some good news for consumers this morning: The K-shaped economy is officially over! Consumers on the lower end of the income spectrum are no longer being left behind by their richer counterparts, he insists.
The Treasury Secretary said he is “sick of hearing about this K-shaped economy,” during a CNBC interview yesterday, adding: “I can say here definitively, the K-shaped economy is over.”
Instead, Bessent said U.S. households are in a C-shaped economy “where the lower end of wage earners are finally calling it back, just like they did in President Trump’s first term.”
Bessent said the bottom 25% of workers have seen a 2% real wage gain. That’s likely a reference to Treasury data for 2025 that showed blue-collar workers saw growth of 1.7% in the first five months of Trump’s presidency.
The Treasury Secretary also pointed to White House policy under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (such as no taxes on tips or overtime, as well as reduced taxes for seniors on Social Security) as having a meaningfully positive effect on household finances. The act, described by the White House as the biggest tax break in history, purported to give Americans earning between $15,000 and $80,000 an average tax cut of 15%.
The bill also promised to increase tipped and overtime workers’ take-home pay by $1,500 a year, and has reportedly increased after-tax income for a typical two-child family by $7,600 to $10,900.
Bank of America has also observed that some elements of the K-shaped economy are beginning to close. In a note last week, chief U.S. economist Aditya Bhave wrote that consumer spending (excluding gas) has ceased to be K-shaped on a year-over-year basis—at least it had been for the previous fortnight.
There are three reasons for this trend, Bhave wrote: stronger job growth and/or lower tax withholding, June’s drop in gas prices, and the fact that the gap really opened up in June last year, meaning the base effect was favourable for the gap to reduce.
“With everything that we’re seeing in the media, it’s difficult to discern” economic upsides, Bessent added.
Nonetheless, the data does not yet fully support Bessent’s theory. On the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, for example, both Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have suggested that the Iran war’s knock-on effect on gasoline prices has almost entirely canceled out the promised windfall.
Likewise, wage growth by income percentile data doesn’t support the notion that the K-shaped economy has ended. The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta evaluates a 12-month moving average of wage growth by income quartile on an hourly basis. Its June update found the lowest quartile of wage distribution saw growth of 3.6%, while the top 25% of earners saw growth of 3.9%.
At no point in 2026, per the Atlanta Fed, has median wage growth for the bottom percentile of earners exceeded that of the top percentile. The quartile that has seen the most growth throughout 2026 has been the third.
Likewise, current drivers of wealth gains (notably, equities courtesy of the AI boom) are concentrated among higher earners. Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM, wrote in June that 75 cents of every spent dollar generated by the equity rally flows through the top income quintile. “If we are counting on the stock market to sustain the consumer economy, we are leaning on a channel that deepens the K-shape rather than offsets it,” he said. “When it comes to overall spending, no matter which estimate of spending concentration you use, the wealth-effect channel is more skewed toward the top.”
In a note Thursday, BNP Paribas’s markets team echoed: “Equity holdings are concentrated among higher-income individuals, where the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) tends to be lower, but the overall gains have been much stronger.”
MPC measures the extra income a person spends rather than saves, and while this tends to be lower among higher earners (because their basic needs can be met by a smaller percentage of their income)—that doesn’t mean their consumption isn’t what’s powering the economy.
“The K-shaped economy—with the well-to-do thriving and everyone else lagging—remains firmly intact,” Moody’s chief economist Mark Zandi wrote last month. Citing Fed data, he highlighted for the 12 months ending in the first quarter of 2026, outlays by earners of $200,000 a year or more grew an estimated 6.5%—nearly 4% in real terms. Meanwhile, outlays by those in the bottom 80% were unchanged after inflation.
AI chip stocks like NVIDIA, Micron and AMD are all facing inventory-related questions, but the risk is not the same for all three.
In this video, we explain why NVIDIA’s $119 billion supply commitment may be about securing future AI demand, why Micron’s 2026 HBM supply is already sold out, and why AMD’s $8 billion inventory is getting more investor attention.
We cover:
What inventory means in simple terms
Why higher inventory is not always bad
NVIDIA’s supply commitment and AI demand
Micron’s HBM memory demand
Why AMD’s inventory days matter
What investors should track in AI chip stocks
How hyperscaler AI spending impacts NVIDIA, AMD and Micron
If you invest in AI chip stocks, this video will help you understand why inventory risk needs to be read company by company, not as one sector-wide headline.
#NVIDIA #AMD #Micron #AIChips #Semiconductors #StockMarket #Investing #AIStocks #NVDA #AMDStock #MicronStock #ArtificialIntelligence #TechStocks #Finance #indmoney
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Home equity is one of the biggest, most underused assets most investors have. It’s sitting there, tied up in the walls of a property, while cash-out refinances take weeks and traditional home equity lines of credit (HELOCs) come with paperwork, appraisals, and closing costs that can make the whole process feel like more trouble than it’s worth.
That’s the gap Aven is trying to close. BiggerPockets is excited to welcome Aven as our newest Pro perk partner, and the timing makes sense: More investors are looking for ways to access capital without taking on a new mortgage or waiting weeks for funds to hit their account.
Aven’s core product is a credit card backed by a home equity line of credit. In practice, that means you get a card you can use anywhere, for anything, but the credit line behind it is secured by your home’s equity rather than your credit history alone. Because the line is secured, Aven can typically offer rates well below what you’d find on a traditional, unsecured credit card.
For homeowners, that opens up a few practical use cases:
The application process is designed to be fast and mostly online, which is a meaningful shift from the multi-week timelines that have historically come with home equity products.
Investors tend to have more of their net worth tied up in property than the average homeowner, which also means they have more equity sitting idle. A tool that makes that equity easier to access, without refinancing a low-rate mortgage or taking on a second loan with a lengthy approval process, is worth understanding, even if you don’t use it right away.
That doesn’t mean a HELOC-backed credit card is the right fit for every situation. Like any credit product secured by your home, it’s worth understanding the terms, the variable rate structure common to HELOCs, and how it fits into your overall financial picture before applying. But for investors who want more flexibility with the equity they’ve already built, it’s a tool worth having in the toolbox.
Here’s where the partnership gets interesting for BiggerPockets Pro members specifically: If you apply and get approved for the Aven card, Aven will give you a $400 statement credit when you spend $400, the same amount as an annual Pro membership.
It’s one of a growing number of Pro Perks we’ve added because our members told us they wanted more than education and tools. They wanted partnerships that put real money back in their pockets.
Aven joins the lineup of Pro Perks built to help members put their real estate investments to work in more ways than one. If a lower-rate, home equity-backed line of credit is something you’ve been curious about, this is a straightforward way to see what you qualify for.
Click here to see if you qualify for the Aven card.
Terms and conditions apply. Approval for the Aven card is subject to Aven’s underwriting criteria, and statement credit terms are set by Aven. Review the full offer details before applying.
On August 3, 2026, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) announced that it had filed and settled charges against UBS Financial Services Inc. (NYSE:UBS), a registered futures commission merchant. The action centered on the firm’s failure to properly oversee the setup and functioning of systems used to monitor transactions for potential money-laundering risks, specifically those involving foreign-currency wire transfers.
Under the settlement, UBS Financial Services must pay an $8 million civil monetary penalty.
It also agreed to cease and desist from further violations of the Commodity Exchange Act and related CFTC rules.
The regulator noted the firm’s representations about remediation efforts already underway or completed in connection with the matter.
According to the CFTC order, the problems spanned the period from January 2019 through June 2023.
Deficiencies in how the firm configured its surveillance tools and managed related data practices meant that thousands of foreign-currency wires moving through retail customer commodity accounts either received inadequate review or were left out of anti-money-laundering monitoring altogether.
Early in that timeframe, the firm relied on a manually prepared report.
That report did not capture every relevant foreign-currency wire and was not designed to detect patterns that might indicate suspicious activity.
Officials determined the firm knew about these weaknesses because they had already been identified in earlier enforcement actions by other regulators and a self-regulatory organization.
In 2021 the firm switched to an automated system intended to review all wire transactions for signs of suspicious activity.
However, it did not correctly configure the data feeding into the new platform.
As a result, the monitoring function’s effectiveness was compromised for a substantial period.
The CFTC’s action formed part of a coordinated set of resolutions announced the same day by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) of the U.S. Department of the Treasury, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.
Those related matters addressed broader Bank Secrecy Act and anti-money-laundering program failures at the firm, including inadequate monitoring of large volumes of foreign-currency wires and shortcomings in customer due diligence.
FinCEN assessed an overall civil money penalty of $125 million against UBS Financial
Services for willful violations—the largest such penalty ever imposed on a broker-dealer under the Bank Secrecy Act.
Payments to the other agencies, including the CFTC’s $8 million, are credited against that total.
The firm admitted the Bank Secrecy Act violations in its resolution with FinCEN.The CFTC expressed appreciation for the assistance provided by FinCEN, the SEC, and FINRA.
The case underscores the importance regulators place on supervision of transaction-monitoring systems, particularly for products and accounts that can facilitate cross-border fund movements.
Persistent gaps in such controls can leave institutions vulnerable to misuse and deprive authorities of timely information about potentially illicit activity.
UBS has stated that it cooperated with the various regulators and has made substantial investments to strengthen its anti-money-laundering controls in line with industry standards.
The settlements require ongoing remediation steps, including independent reviews and look-back analyses in some of the parallel actions, aimed at identifying any previously undetected suspicious transactions and further enhancing compliance frameworks.
This enforcement outcome serves as a reminder that financial firms registered with the CFTC must maintain diligent oversight of the systems and processes supporting their anti-money-laundering obligations. Failures to properly implement or supervise those systems, even when earlier warnings have been issued, can result in significant monetary penalties and additional compliance obligations.
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Your business is ready for growth. You are past the launch phase. You have hired your first employees. You are ready to grow monthly revenue. But how? What are the next steps with the best ROI for the right kind of growth?
Many companies, new and long-established alike, say they are ready to grow, ready to hire more and ready to open a new office or expand into a new market. Few are actually prepared for it.
Being unprepared for growth is rarely a matter of effort. Growth stalls because of misdirected investment — too many companies spend on ads, sales pushes and visibility campaigns without first repairing the strategic foundation underneath.
If your company is serious about growth, and not just activity for the sake of hard work, these six moves will deliver the fastest and most sustainable return.
Growth accelerates when friction disappears. Most customer journey maps are built on internal assumptions rather than real customer behavior. Even ideal customer personas do not move in a straight line, and your strategy should not assume they do.
A useful journey map accounts for continual market disruption, the decision moments that matter most and how those moments shift over time. It captures current buying patterns, points of friction and capacity gaps that slow conversion from consideration to purchase.
Ask yourself where prospects drop off — and how those drop-offs are quietly capping the ROI of every dollar you spend on marketing, brand and PR.
If you are talking to everyone, you are persuading no one. Personas that are too generic — or that ignore the emotional drivers behind real decisions — produce generic messaging. And generic brands do not scale.
The most valuable personas go beyond geography, buying power and reachability. They surface the behavioral and emotional drivers that move a customer from “nice to have” to “cannot live without.” Brands that invest in understanding those drivers waste less spend and sharpen their targeting, messaging and positioning.
Your fastest growth channel is already paying you. Existing, satisfied customers are one of the most undervalued growth assets in most companies. Yet too many brands overspend on acquisition while under-investing in the customers who could sell for them. A Google review or the occasional testimonial does not count as advocacy.
Real advocacy starts with a system. Identify which customers are the most credible ambassadors for your brand. Figure out what would motivate them to advocate publicly. Then design an advocacy program with incentives that align with — rather than undermine — their credibility.
Scaling a weak position just accelerates failure. Growth amplifies whatever already exists — strengths and gaps. Before you invest more in acquisition, ask whether your positioning is genuinely clear or simply convenient to your current operations. Would the market miss your brand if it disappeared tomorrow?
De-risking means stress-testing four things: relevance, differentiation, value and credibility. Brands that skip this step tend to confuse awareness with demand — and pay for the mistake at scale.
If it is not protected, it is temporary. Most brands assume they are differentiated until a competitor or new entrant says the same thing, only louder. True differentiation is more than a claim. It is a position that can be clearly articulated, is hard to replicate and is reinforced across every touchpoint in the customer journey.
If your value proposition can be copied in a week, it is not defensible. The goal is ownership of the position, not dominance of the awareness game.
The most important question in any growth plan is also the hardest: Where do we say no?
Strategic trade-offs sharpen positioning, create clarity inside and outside the company and ultimately drive growth. Brands that scale well are intentional about what they will not do. They focus on the efforts that reinforce what the brand is for, and resist the distractions that dilute it.
Trying to be the brand for everyone reduces your capacity to be the brand for anyone.
The brands that scale fastest grow with intention, guided by a winning strategy. Real growth requires alignment between customer experience, clearly defined positioning and defensible differentiation.
Growth does not start with spending more. It starts with deciding better.
Your business is ready for growth. You are past the launch phase. You have hired your first employees. You are ready to grow monthly revenue. But how? What are the next steps with the best ROI for the right kind of growth?
Many companies, new and long-established alike, say they are ready to grow, ready to hire more and ready to open a new office or expand into a new market. Few are actually prepared for it.
Being unprepared for growth is rarely a matter of effort. Growth stalls because of misdirected investment — too many companies spend on ads, sales pushes and visibility campaigns without first repairing the strategic foundation underneath.
Finance of America grew its reverse mortgage business significantly in the second quarter, despite posting a $29 million loss during the period.
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Funded volume increased 21% year over year to $730 million for the Texas-based reverse mortgage company, meanwhile its net income fell 136% from $80 million in the second quarter of last year, although that doesn’t tell the whole story, the lender said on an earnings call Tuesday.
On an adjusted basis, FOA totaled a net income of $19 million, or $0.84 per share, still well below the S&P Capital IQ Pro consensus estimate of $1.10 per share. The difference primarily reflects non-cash fair value adjustments, combined with one-time impacts during the quarter. The company recorded $84 million of negative fair value adjustments in the period, Chief Financial Officer Matt Engel said on the call.
“The second quarter of 2026 reinforced what we’ve been communicating over the past several quarters: that the operational improvements and investments we have made are now translating into a stronger, more scalable business,” CEO Graham Fleming said on the call. “Demand is strengthening, conversion and sales productivity are improving and our proprietary products are expanding the ways we can serve older homeowners.”
Revenue fell 48% quarter over quarter 65% year over year to $62 million, according to the earnings report.
FOA’s retirement solutions produced $15 million in adjusted net income, up slightly from
Its portfolio management generated $18 million in adjusted net income, down 26% from the first quarter but up 13% year over year. FOA also completed the acquisition of
The line of credit is currently only available in California, while HomeSafe Second is now
For the rest of 2026, FOA expects demand growth in its reverse mortgage business and a stable yield from its expanding portfolio. It reaffirmed its full-year guidance for origination volumes at $2.8 billion to $3.1 billion and adjusted earnings per share at $4.50 to $5.
The lender hopes to retire the remaining $150 million of its senior secured notes this November, which will reduce nonfunding debt, lower financing costs and improve recurring earnings, Engel said.
“We believe Finance of America is well positioned to capture the long-term opportunity in home equity and create durable shareholder value,” Fleming said.
When a stock falls more than 40% in just a few months, it’s natural to assume something has gone terribly wrong.
Sometimes that’s true. A collapsing share price can signal slowing demand, deteriorating fundamentals, or a broken business model. But sometimes, the business remains largely intact while investors simply become less optimistic about its future.
That’s exactly the situation investors are trying to figure out with CoreWeave‘s (CRWV +7.16%) stock. After all, many investors are wondering whether they should stay away — and take advantage of the pullback. Or pull back from the stock altogether.
Image source: Getty Images.
If investors only looked at the share price, you might assume CoreWeave had reported terrible earnings or lost major customers. Neither happened.
CoreWeave remains one of the leading providers of artificial intelligence (AI) cloud infrastructure, supplying the specialized computing power needed to train and run artificial intelligence models. As AI adoption continues to accelerate, demand for those services remains strong.
To put it into perspective, revenue more than doubled year over year from $1.9 billion to $5.1 billion in 2025. Revenue backlog even hit an all-time high of $99.4 billion in the first quarter of 2026.
The company also continues to work with some of the world’s largest AI labs — such as Meta Platforms and Anthropic — reinforcing its position as an important player in the industry’s rapidly expanding ecosystem.
In short, the business doesn’t appear fundamentally weaker than it did a few months ago.
Today’s Change
(7.16%) $6.14
Current Price
$91.90
Market Cap
Day’s Range
$86.26 – $94.30
52wk Range
$60.55 – $153.20
Volume
33.6M
Avg Vol
29.3M
Gross Margin
34.82%
Imagine owning a restaurant that’s packed every night. Business is booming, and customers keep coming through the door.
Now imagine that every time you want to serve more customers, you have to spend millions of dollars building another restaurant. At some point, investors stop asking how many people are waiting in line. They start asking whether those expensive new locations will actually earn an attractive return.
That’s the challenge CoreWeave faces today. Unlike software companies, which can often add customers with relatively little additional cost, the AI cloud computing company must continually invest billions in GPUs, servers, networking equipment, power infrastructure, and data centers to support future growth. For perspective, it spent $15 billion in capital expenditures in just the past two quarters alone.
Those investments could generate substantial returns if AI demand continues expanding over the next decade. But they also make the business far more capital-intensive — and therefore riskier.
Adding another layer of uncertainty, technology giants such as Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta continue investing aggressively in AI infrastructure. Even if they don’t compete directly for every customer, their growing presence means CoreWeave will need to keep proving why customers should choose its platform over much larger rivals.
None of this means the investment thesis is broken. It simply means the market is demanding more evidence before assigning the company a premium valuation.
A falling stock price doesn’t automatically make a stock a bargain. But neither does it mean the long-term opportunity has disappeared.
In CoreWeave’s case, the long-term thesis appears largely intact. AI infrastructure demand continues to grow, the company remains strategically important to a growing number of AI developers, and its addressable market is likely still enormous.
What’s changed is the level of optimism reflected in the share price. That makes today’s valuation far more interesting than it was a few weeks ago, especially for those with conviction in the company’s prospects.
If you’re looking for a stock that will deliver quick gains or move steadily higher with little drama, CoreWeave probably isn’t the right choice. The company is still in the early stages of building its business, and the stock could remain highly volatile as investors debate its long-term economics.
But if you have a long investment horizon, believe AI infrastructure will remain one of the defining growth markets of the next decade, and can tolerate significant swings along the way, this pullback looks like an opportunity.
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In this video I break down the daily trading strategy I use almost every day to keep day trading simple, structured, and profitable. I walk through the 3-step trading framework that finally made trading click for me, with the full context and correct order I wish someone had explained when I was learning. I’m showing you my day trading strategy, market framework, and trading process so you can build more consistency, clarity, and confidence in the markets.
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The content covered on this channel is NOT to be considered as any financial or investment advice, it is for entertainment purposes only. Links and products in this video generate affiliate commissions for Craig Percoco. Compensation is received from Public for sponsored materials. Craig Percoco is part of an affiliate network. Futures and crypto trading are highly risky, not for everyone. Loss exceeds initial investment. Use risk capital, considering financial security. Past performance does not equal future performance. Always assess risks before trading. Trading may incur additional fees. If you disagree with these terms please leave the channel immediately.
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