0:10
For women, being creative at work comes with a hidden cost
Women still pay a higher social price for the same creative risk‑taking men get. A 2007 study showed that successful women in masculine‑coded roles were labeled abrasive and less likable, even though their competence was unquestioned. Fast‑forward to today: the World Economic Forum says creativity will be a top skill through 2030, and AI is pushing firms to value judgment and innovation. Yet the traits tied to creativity—assertiveness, risk‑taking, independence—still clash with gender norms, meaning women often face extra penalties for speaking up. Building genuine psychological safety, not just “feel‑good” vibes, is the only way to let all ideas surface without bias.
1:01
Thematic ETFs Boosted by SpaceX IPO Lose Altitude
What goes up must come down, even for a rocket company and the many thematic ETFs it boosted.
SpaceX dominated the headlines for weeks with its highly anticipated initial public offering in June, and several space-themed ETFs reaped the benefits. But now that the stock of Elon Musk’s company has fallen 38% from its all-time high to trade close to its $135 IPO price, those funds are feeling the Earth’s gravitational pull. The Tema Space Innovators ETF (NASA) has plummeted back almost to its late-March launch price. The State Street SPDR S&P Kensho Final Frontiers ETF (ROKT), which doesn’t hold SpaceX, has fallen too, as have the Procure Space ETF (UFO) and ARK Space & Defense Innovation ETF (ARKX).
The broad declines underscore the risks of thematic funds, which focus on everything from AI to energy and cannabis, and have become increasingly popular among investors thanks to their ability to offer exposure to niche areas of the market via an easy-to-use and often low-cost wrapper. But they also appeal to investors’ worst instincts and can lead to poor outcomes, even when the underlying theme ultimately succeeds, says Kenneth Lamont, principal in manager research for Morningstar UK.
“Investors are generally poor at timing markets, and this challenge is particularly acute in thematic investing,” Lamont said. “Many thematic funds are launched during periods of intense excitement, encouraging investors to buy in at elevated valuations, often just before a significant market correction.”
The recent performance surrounding the SpaceX IPO highlights an important distinction between having an investment thesis and simply buying into a theme, explained Matthew Smart, director of financial planning and portfolio analysis at WWM Investments.
“Investors may have been excited about SpaceX, but purchasing a space-themed ETF is not the same as investing in SpaceX,” he added. “It’s a reminder that investors aren’t buying one company, they’re buying an entire portfolio, and the success of that portfolio depends on much more than a single headline name.”
That’s not to say investors should shun thematic funds:
- Thematic ETFs can certainly have a place in portfolios, particularly when an industry is still developing and clear long-term winners have yet to emerge, Smart said.
- Lamont said that the odds of selecting a winning thematic manager are stacked against investors. But for those who choose to invest in thematic funds, maintaining valuation discipline and adopting a long-term buy-and-hold approach can help curb some of the key risks.
Lessons Learned. The sell-off of SpaceX and funds that hold its stock may serve as a warning to investors as Wall Street readies for the debuts of other mega-cap unicorns, including OpenAI and Anthropic. “When performance deteriorates, investors frequently panic and sell, crystalizing losses,” Lamont said. “The inherently higher volatility of thematic funds amplifies the consequences of these behavioral mistakes.”
The post Thematic ETFs Boosted by SpaceX IPO Lose Altitude appeared first on The Daily Upside.
4:26
Fed’s Warsh Promises Congress a Hard Line on Inflation Amid Looming Risks
Hawks looking for evidence a rate hike is urgently needed haven’t found it yet.
Consumer prices jumped 3.5% in June, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Tuesday morning. That’s higher than the Fed’s preferred 2% inflation rate, but lower than the 4.2% May rate as well as analysts’ expectations for the data. One month of Consumer Price Index figures isn’t enough for the central bank to toss the idea of a rate hike out the window, but it’s enough to at least give its Federal Open Market Committee an inkling that there’s no rush to increase the benchmark federal funds rate at its meeting later this month.
CME’s FedWatch tool placed the likelihood of a hike at the July 29 meeting at just 16.6% as of midday Tuesday. Traders put the chances of the Fed holding rates steady at 83.4%.
So what does that mean for new Fed Chair Kevin Warsh’s next move? In classic Warsh fashion, he’s not saying. But he made one thing very clear Tuesday morning during his first appearance before Congress as the central bank’s leader: Fed policymakers have “no tolerance” for high inflation. “The Fed’s No. 1 objective is to get monetary policy right, or as near to it as we possibly can,” he said in remarks shared ahead of his testimony. If they get it right, he added, “the inflation surge of the last five years will be a thing of the past.”
How the Fed is going to do that is unclear, and Warsh is dealing with a committee that is split on where interest rates should head. Despite the positive inflation figures, it could be a bumpy ride. Oil prices surged this week as the conflict between the US and Iran escalated, so the nearly 10% drop in gas prices shown in the latest CPI data may not stick around:
- “Tuesday’s weaker-than-expected CPI print suggests the inflation surge driven by the Iran war is fading, but this may just be a temporary relief as tensions have escalated in recent days,” Skyler Weinand, chief investment officer at Regan Capital, said in written comments shared with The Daily Upside.
- “I wouldn’t bet on these more modest inflation readings continuing for the remainder of the year,” Mike Reid, head of US economics at RBC Capital Markets, told The Wall Street Journal.
Hawks Here: Weinand added that while the latest inflation data reduces the odds of a rate hike for now, investors should remember that “almost every communication that has emanated from Chair Warsh during his short tenure” has been hawkish. “Warsh is looking to get consumer prices under control, and the best tool the Fed currently has is raising interest rates.”
The post Fed’s Warsh Promises Congress a Hard Line on Inflation Amid Looming Risks appeared first on The Daily Upside.
7:27
Wall Street Takes In Record Haul, Projecting US Economic Health
It’s only July, but Tuesday made a case for bears to go into hibernation.
Five of the largest US banks reported a combined $49 billion in second-quarter profits, led by a record $21 billion at JPMorgan Chase. Great things were expected from the Wall Street lenders, but more crucially, executives reported strength on Main Street and in the broader economy, which bodes especially well for the rest of the quarterly earnings season.
They are numbers to brag about. In addition to JPMorgan’s $21 billion haul, up 41% year over year, Goldman Sachs’ profit jumped 78% to $6.6 billion during the bank’s best quarter in five years. Citigroup’s profit climbed 45% to $5.8 billion, Bank of America’s gained 27% to $9.1 billion and Wells Fargo’s increased 17% to $6.4 billion.
Two forces drove the mammoth results. First, trading desk revenue benefited from heightened stock trading around Iran War-related volatility. For example, Citi’s revenue from equities trading surged 45% to a company record of $2.3 billion. Second, investment banking revenue was fueled by major deals including the IPOs of SpaceX and chip designer Cerebras, as well as Alphabet’s $85 billion share sale. But equally, if not more, important were the banks’ upbeat readings of the American consumer:
- Revenue at JPMorgan’s consumer banking division rose 8% to $20.3 billion, reflecting the strength of the US economy. Spending on credit cards at BofA, which added 1 million new credit card accounts during the quarter, rose 9% to $266 billion.
- “Consumer spending is higher, charge-offs and delinquencies are lower, and savings and investments are growing across consumer segments,” said Wells CEO Charlie Scharf. “Concerns around affordability and inflation exist, but the labor market and wage growth remain strong.” His firm’s consumer banking revenue rose 8% to $7.3 billion.
All Things Must Pass: The Invesco KBW Bank ETF, which is weighted toward big banks, has climbed 14% this year, but some investors worry that the conditions favoring lenders today have all but maxed out. Oppenheimer analysts, who acknowledged there is “nothing on the fundamentals that strikes us as particularly worrying at present,” nevertheless advised bank shareholders last month to cash out, “take the money and run.” Similarly, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon cautioned Tuesday that the record paydays won’t last forever: “It’s getting close to as good as it gets,” he said. “We just don’t know how long it’s going to last.”
The post Wall Street Takes In Record Haul, Projecting US Economic Health appeared first on The Daily Upside.
10:21
Budget Carrier Frontier Joins Fleet of Airlines Offering Starlink-Powered Wi-Fi
Mere weeks after SpaceX’s mega IPO, founder Elon Musk is reaping some early rewards from his ambitious goals for Starlink.
On Tuesday, low-budget airline Frontier became the latest carrier to use Starlink’s satellite network to power in-flight Wi-Fi, with service launching next year. For Starlink, it’s a small step in its plans to become a global wireless powerhouse.
Star Gazing
When it comes to actually making money, Starlink is the brightest star in the SpaceX constellation of various future-flung business units. In its IPO prospectus, the company said that Starlink, with its 10.3 million subscribers, accounted for just over 60% of its $18.7 billion in revenue last year; that share ticked up to nearly 70% in the first quarter of this year. More importantly, Starlink is the only unit that’s actually profitable, generating $4.4 billion in income last year.
In its prospectus, SpaceX identified “Airborne Altitude” as one of six areas where “terrestrial infrastructure” falls short that Starlink is uniquely positioned to service, listing it alongside low-density rural areas and deep-sea environments. Still, the company is betting that it can expand Starlink’s aperture:
- In late June, following the IPO, the Financial Times reported that SpaceX had been telling investors it plans to launch a direct-to-consumer mobile service to challenge AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile in the US. In September, the company agreed to pay competitor EchoStar $17 billion for wireless spectrum licenses in a move many saw as laying the foundation for such a network.
- Also late last month, Bloomberg reported that SpaceX had held discussions with Charter Communications to discuss partnering on a consumer mobile phone offering.
Traditional telecom stocks have been hammered in recent months over fears of satellite-based disruption. In May, the Big Three even formed a joint venture to launch a satellite-based service of their own.
The Final Frontier: The deal makes Frontier one of many airlines that now rely on Starlink for in-flight Wi-Fi, with United, American, Southwest and countless smaller players already signing on for the satellite internet. Unlike most of those competitors, this will mark the first time the ultra-budget carrier Frontier has ever offered Wi-Fi on its flights, meaning one of the last remaining email-free sanctuaries left on earth will be eliminated.
The post Budget Carrier Frontier Joins Fleet of Airlines Offering Starlink-Powered Wi-Fi appeared first on The Daily Upside.
13:11
Why This Ultra-Short Bond Fund Is Ultra-Popular
Keep it simple. Keep it safe.
Ultra-short-term bond ETFs, which invest in bonds with durations of less than a year, work to do both, providing low risk and high liquidity. Of course, there’s a drawback: A side effect of the strategy is that it caps returns far below those of longer-term funds, historically curbing inflows during periods of stable economic growth.
Investors, however, have apparently had a change of heart during the spiking volatility of the past 18 months, driven by trade wars, sticky inflation and soaring oil prices due to the US war with Iran. A case in point is the industry’s largest ultra-short bond ETF, which is racing toward the $100 billion mark. If (and more likely when) the iShares 0-3 Month Treasury Bond ETF (SGOV) reaches that milestone, it will be the first in its class to do so, per a report from ETF.com. Unless current market dynamics shift, SGOV is likely to go even higher and could eventually rival the likes of the $160 billion Vanguard Total Bond Market ETF (BND) and iShares’ own $139 billion Core US Aggregate Bond ETF (AGG), both of which have longer durations of more than five years.
Even compared with other ultra-short bond ETFs, SGOV’s holdings are strikingly short-term. It invests exclusively in 0-3 month US Treasury bills and boasts an expense ratio of 0.09%, with yields that track closely to the benchmark Federal Funds Rate, currently 3.50% to 3.75%.
SGOV’s peer funds are quite a way behind:
- The next-biggest fund in the category is the SPDR Bloomberg 1-3 Month T-Bill ETF (BIL), per ETF.com, with $46.6 billion in assets and a 0.14% expense ratio.
- The Vanguard 0-3 Month Treasury Bill ETF (VBIL), which launched last year and carries an expense ratio of 0.06%, has already grown to nearly $10 billion.
Not all funds in the category focus on quite such a short timeline. Vanguard’s Ultra-Short Bond ETF (VUSB), for example, is an actively managed fund with a broader mandate, holding both short-term US Treasuries and high-quality corporate bonds with a longer duration of about a year.
What About Money Market Funds? Ultra-short bond funds are often compared with money market funds, as both appeal to clients seeking investments with steady income and low risk relative to stocks and longer-maturity debt instruments. However, investors should be mindful of the effects of changing interest rates on their performance.
Generally, money market funds can only invest in securities with maturities of 13 months or less, while the weighted-average maturity of the portfolio must be 60 days or less. The shorter duration of these securities means their prices are less sensitive to changes in interest rates than longer-maturing bond fund prices.
The post Why This Ultra-Short Bond Fund Is Ultra-Popular appeared first on The Daily Upside.
Source:
16:19
The House Always Wins. Event Contract ETFs Gamble on Longer Odds
You’ve heard of the luck of the Irish. Want to bet on the luck of the asset manager?
Tidal Investments and Subversive Capital have filed a prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission for an “event contracts” exchange-traded fund tied to the outcomes of sports games. In other words, a sports gambling ETF. The Subversive All Season Sports ETF will have exposure to 40 to 80 bets at once, attempting to generate alpha by betting on where the adviser thinks the market’s odds are wrong. The filing also included a related fund, the Subversive Prediction ETF, tied to “economic, regulatory, climate and global events themes.” With the Securities and Exchange Commission still weighing approval of novel funds like these, whether they will actually make it to the market is a toss-up.
“They’re pretty much a pro-innovation SEC,” said Eric Balchunas, senior ETF analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. Still, he theorized that the SEC wants to make sure it has a consistent framework in place to approve prediction market ETFs. “I think their issue here is that if they approve one of these, they could see 500 to 1,000 filings within a month or two. It would be raining filings.”
Prediction market funds might be a way to generate some serious alpha, said Balchunas. With index funds priced so cheaply and information so readily accessible, it’s harder for active portfolio managers to beat the benchmark. “Places where there’s less analyst coverage, like sports and crypto, it’s possible you could have a portfolio manager rise out of that world who just killed it,” he said. “I don’t know if that’s something that would matter to regular investors, but I certainly think there’s a lot of dispersion and a lot of room for serious outperformance if somebody is really good at betting.”
Where’s the Fun in That? While the sports-gambling product is geared toward retail investors, Athanasios Psarofagis, an ETF analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, questioned whether the market really wants an ETF wrapper for such bets. “Usually you go to the ETF because it makes it easier,” he said. “This doesn’t really solve that problem” since prediction market apps like Kalshi or Polymarket are already easy to access. Plus, where’s the joy in winning a bet that someone else made? “If I go to Vegas, I don’t want to give you my money to go play blackjack or roulette,” he said. “It feels like they’re outsourcing all the fun.”
The post The House Always Wins. Event Contract ETFs Gamble on Longer Odds appeared first on The Daily Upside.
19:10
Canva's cofounder explains why the company isn't forcing employees to use a specific AI tool
- Canva's cofounder said that making staff use a single AI tool, like Claude or Gemini, is the wrong move.
- Employees will use the tool "begrudgingly," he said, which hinders experimentation.
- Canva staff are given a budget to use on whichever tool fits their workflows, Cameron Adams said.
Canva cofounder Cameron Adams said there's one way to get your employees to stop caring about AI: forcing them to use a specific AI tool.
Speaking in an interview with Rapid Response, released on Tuesday, Adams said his staff can choose whichever AI tool they want. The interview was filmed during the Cannes Lions festival last month.
"So, we're not mandating Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever tool you want to use in your part of the company," Adams said. "You can figure it out."
He said employees have their own AI budgets to try out tools, figure out workflows and processes, and tackle the problems they face.
By giving staff the freedom to choose the tools they use, staff feel more comfortable experimenting, he said.
"If you force a tool on them, they're just going to do that very begrudgingly, and they're not going to enter into this very experimental mindset that we need them to," Adams said.
Another way to encourage AI experimentation, he said, was to give staff time off from their other responsibilities to play around with AI, during Canva's AI Discovery Week.
"The whole week, we said to people, 'Please don't do your normal work. We want you to think of the problems that you have, the tools that you've heard about, the opportunities that you've heard from colleagues in other industries, and we want you to try those out for the entire week," he said.
The design company has made AI a core focus of its business. In April, it launched Canva AI 2.0, a conversational platform that lets users turn simple prompts into designs. Business Insider previously pitted Canva 2.0 against Claude Design to build the same slide deck and found that Canva 2.0's final product was comparable to Claude's.
Getting employees to adopt AI into their workflows has been a challenge for many companies. Some, like Duolingo, added employee AI use as a performance metric. JPMorgan and Disney started AI token leaderboards ranking their staff's usage.
AI spend has become a foremost challenge for enterprises, and companies are looking for ways to spend less without throttling their employees' AI ambitions.
One cost-saving tactic that has emerged is using different AI models and tools for different tasks, rather than being loyal to a single AI provider.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said in June that this tactic prevents excessive AI tokens from being burned on simple tasks. He also recommended using cheaper Chinese models as defaults.
Cloud platform Vercel's CEO, Guillermo Rauch, said in a TechCrunch interview earlier this month that companies are now becoming smarter about how to use different AI tools across their AI stack, including the model, harness, data platform, sandbox, and gateway.
Read the original article on Business Insider
22:36
Banks have never been this profitable
$49 billion— that's what the five biggest U.S. banks pulled together in the latest quarter.
The boost came from a mix of AI‑related activity and the trading swings tied to the Strait of Hormuz tension. A $85 billion SpaceX IPO also nudged retail interest, adding roughly $500 million in trading gains for the banks involved.
On the fee side, a surge in mergers and acquisitions, plus a wave of AI infrastructure deals, lifted investment‑banking revenues well beyond the usual ATM charges.
Both JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon and Goldman’s David Solomon noted the economy’s resilience while flagging underlying geopolitical and inflation risks that could shift the landscape.
23:25
What to Know About Robinhood Chain
Welcome Avatar!
In its first week alone the Robinhood chain pulled in $3.1 billion in cumulative DEX volume.
Robinhood Chain is an Ethereum L2 built on Arbitrum’s tech. The chain will pay 10% of protocol net revenue under the Arbitrum Expansion Program. 8% will go to the ArbitrumDAO treasury and 2% to the “Developer Guild”.
Robinhood presented the chain to investors as a hub for tokenized tech stocks and corporate yields. In true crypto fashion retail traders flocked to a memecoin called “Cash Cat”. We are getting far too old for memecoins and do not have any, but it did hit $200 million market cap and become the topic of the week.
People are making the same case for Robinhood chain that they made for Coinbase’s Base L2, which was successful for Coinbase but provided limited investment opportunities for users and has not delivered on a token. As such it is essential to view Robinhood chain with a critical lens while acknowledging that they may have been able to iterate on Base’s playbook.
Robinhood has 27.7 million funded customers and $377 billion of platform assets.
And here is the reality today on Robinhood Chain:
DeFi TVL of ~$158.6 million
Stablecoin supply of ~$327.6 million
Assets bridged on the network total ~$777.7 million
7 Day DEX volume of ~$3.9 billion
Active RWA value is ~$12.7 million
~97% of DeFi TVL is concentrated in Morpho and Uniswap
This is a strong launch by trading volume standards but a much weaker launch when looking at stickiness of capital and protocol breadth, especially when compared to launches of the 2024 risk-on period. For reference, Blast L2 attracted $2.1 billion from more than 150K users before its February 2024 mainnet launch (although this was heavily driven by airdrop farmers). Our gut instinct is that Robinhood Chain would have attracted several times the capital during its launch in a bull market.
Past experience tells us that Robinhood may attempt to “kingmake” some tokens and applications to drive attention and capital to their chain. Incentivizing usage of some core apps is how chains drive activity and builders, although the success of these inorganic growth strategies varies.
Robinhood primarily seems to want to push its Stock Tokens like NVIDIA and Apple along with 24/7 borderless equity trading and fractional ownership. Instead, retail users are flooding the chain with memecoins.
Robinhood Stock Tokens (“STs”) are not actually shares placed on the blockchain. STs are debt securities issued by Robinhood Assets Jersey, an unregulated Jersey entity. These tokens provide economic upside but no direct ownership, voting rights or legal claim to the underlying equity. Dividends are reinvested and reflected via a share per token multiplier.
STs can trade around the clock but Robinhood’s equity price feeds from Chainlink update 24/5, which means this can create weekend and overnight gaps and potentially wide spreads. New chain, same old issues and concepts we’ve covered here before.
What might become interesting is the potential to use STs as collateral. We’re less interested in borrowing against Apple or NVIDIA. ETFs and short-term treasury products provide a better risk profile (less single name risk).
Lighter is a perps dex that was launched to compete with Hyperliquid. Robinhood invested in Lighter and integrated it into Robinhood Wallet (Note: Robinhood does not own or operate Lighter). Robinhood provides the storefront and access to its users, while Lighter supplies the underlying trading platform that handles orders, collateral and liquidations.
Inside the Robinhood Wallet app, the user opens the perpetuals section, deposits USDG from their self-custody wallet into Lighter’s smart contract on Robinhood Chain, chooses a market such as BTC/USDG or ETH/USDG, selects long or short and leverage, then signs the trade in the wallet. The position, live P&L, funding payments and liquidation price are displayed inside Robinhood Wallet. Lighter’s order book, matching engine, margin system and liquidation engine execute and manage the trade.
To attract Robinhood users and drive activity, Lighter has allocated $11 million worth of LIT tokens as rewards. Traders earn points that convert into LIT. You get twice as many points when accessing Lighter through Robinhood Wallet versus trading through Lighter’s own website.
It could make sense to migrate some perps trading here that you’re already doing for the boosted rewards but we would not recommend farming it solely for the rewards.
In its 2025 10-K Robinhood management said they believe blockchains will increasingly become core financial infrastructure by reducing dependence on clearinghouses, transfer agents and payment processors. Traditional assets will then operate on that infrastructure through tokenization.
Robinhood considers its L2s competitive moat to be distribution rather than any tech innovation.
