Thanks to surging stock prices over the past two years, dividend yields on major stock indices have fallen to fairly low levels. The S&P 500, for instance, currently carries an average yield of just 1.3%.
The mature companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average fare a bit better, and some of them offer yields that exceed the S&P 500 several times over.
2024 was another banner year for the US stock market, with the S&P 500 notching a gain of 23%. Dwarfing even this return, though, was that of the Financial Select Sector SPDR ETF (XLF), which has delivered a 29.7% return over the last 12 months.
There is lots of speculation that the new President will be supportive of the financial sector so can XLF beat the market again in 2025,
Warren Buffett has spent 2024 stockpiling cash, even going so far as to sell off sizeable pieces of some of his largest investments. Recently, though, Berkshire Hathaway announced that it had made some modest acquisitions, including the addition of nearly 388,000 shares of domain name registry service Verisign (NASDAQ:VRSN).
These purchases brought Berkshire Hathaway’s holdings in Verisign to 13.2 million shares,
Iovance Biotherapeutics (NASDAQ:IOVA) is a fledgling pharmaceutical company that specializes in the use of immune therapies for cancer treatment. Specifically, Iovance is exploring new applications of tumor infiltrating lymphocyte (TIL) therapy, utilizing cells that the human body naturally produces to attack cancerous tumors.
There was lots of hype about this next-generation cancer treatment company but its share price has been decidedly lackluster this year,
» Read more about: Massive Upside In Big Money Pharma Favorite? »
In the early days of e-commerce, few could have imagined just how quickly video-driven, real-time product demonstrations would reshape global retail. But here we are: In China alone, live streaming e-commerce revenue soared from a roughly $64 billion market in 2019 to more than $300 billion by 2021, according to data compiled by Deloitte.
This shift,
» Read more about: Forget AI, The Next Massive Trend Is Starting In 3,2,1… »
With the market near all-time highs, buying stocks can look like a worrisome proposition and it’s no surprise that many investors feel more comfortable sitting on the sidelines.
Staying out of the market entirely, though, presents an opportunity cost in the form of lost potential returns. So, just what can investors worried about the market’s performance and potential volatility do to limit their risks while still putting their money to work for them?
» Read more about: How To Trade When Markets Hit All-time Highs »
It might surprise many that Veeva Systems Inc. (NYSE:VEEV), best known for its cloud-based software solutions tailored to the life sciences industry, has maintained a core principle of putting customer success and product excellence ahead of short-term gains.
In a market crowded with SaaS companies seeking to serve a wide variety of enterprises,
» Read more about: 1 Cloud SaaS Healthcare Stock to Buy on the Dip? »
NVIDIA gets a lot of attention for designing some of the world’s most powerful GPUs. It’s difficult to imagine that the recent advancements in artificial intelligence would have happened without NVIDIA. After all, OpenAI trained ChatGPT with 10,000 NVIDIA GPUs connected to a Microsoft supercomputer.
But NVIDIA actually does much more than build efficient processing units.
» Read more about: NVIDIA Investing In Tiny Robotics Firm, Should You Follow? »
Microstrategy (NASDAQ:MSTR) and its CEO Michael Saylor are in large part confounding valuation experts worldwide.
The traditional method of valuing a company goes something like this. Analyze the cash flows a company will produce over its lifetime, discount them back to present day, sum them up and arrive at a fair market valuation for the company.
» Read more about: Is Michael Saylor’s Bet Crazy: Bull vs Bear »
For nearly two years, the stock market has been steadily bidding up companies like NVIDIA and Microsoft that have emerged as front-runners in the AI race. In addition to these mega-cap companies, though, there are also many smaller companies trying to fill niche spaces in the AI market.
One such company is Nebius Group (NASDAQ:NBIS),
» Read more about: Why Did NVIDIA Invest In Little-Known AI Stock? »