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Yahoo
26 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Is Target the next Best Buy?
-- Target may be on the verge of its own turnaround story if Chief Executive Brian Cornell steps down in September and a new leader steps will be looking for a fresh strategy to reverse falling sales, restore customer appeal and compete more effectively with Walmart (NYSE:WMT) and Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN). Target is losing market share in core categories, struggling in online business and there is a consumer perceptions that its prices are higher than rivals. These are similar to what Best Buy (NYSE:BBY) faced a decade ago when many thought it was headed for 'death by Amazon.' Best Buy's revival under Hubert Joly between 2012 and 2019 had electronics retailer refreshed its stores, invested in its staff, committed to price matching, improved its website, cut costs and closed weaker locations. Most importantly, Joly set a clear vision for the company's purpose and hired the right leaders to deliver it. For Target, a new management team could take similar steps. That could mean using more private-label goods to narrow the price gap with rivals, trimming expenses to fund price cuts, improving the online shopping experience to reduce profit losses, and rethinking its store footprint. A sharper focus on returns on invested capital could help guide decisions."A new management, especially one with an outside perspective, could be a positive catalyst," analyst at Bernstein said. The bigger question is whether Target should invest heavily in a Walmart-like e-commerce supply chain, which may not pay off without greater scale. Without that, online sales may continue to erode margins unless the company finds a new approach. Better economic conditions could give Target more breathing room, but the company still needs to stop losing market share before any turnaround can take hold. For now, the outcome remains uncertain. Related articles Is Target the next Best Buy? Risks Rising? Smart Money Dodged 46%+ Drawdowns on These High-Flying Names After soaring 149%, this stock is back in our AI's favor - & already +25% in July Sign in to access your portfolio
Yahoo
26 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Bitcoin Soars Past $124k, a New All-Time High. 4 Tailwinds Behind the Momentum.
Key Points Bitcoin just hit a new all-time high. It's probably going to keep climbing. There are four trends that make higher prices quite likely from here. 10 stocks we like better than Bitcoin › Markets reward scarcity, and today the world's biggest cryptocurrency just reminded everyone why that principle still rules. On Aug. 13, Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) traded above $124,000, surpassing its prior record. Four tailwinds are driving this move, and they're all going to stay in play for a while, so let's examine each and understand them. 1. Post-halving scarcity is biting Bitcoin's fourth halving in April 2024 cut the mining reward to 3.125 coins per block, reducing net new issuance to roughly 450 bitcoins per day. That means less fresh supply is meeting the market. And, fortunately for holders, the supply crunch is taking root just as buyers are looking to make large purchases. Invest in Gold American Hartford Gold: #1 Precious Metals Dealer in the Nation Priority Gold: Up to $15k in Free Silver + Zero Account Fees on Qualifying Purchase Thor Metals Group: Best Overall Gold IRA In particular, U.S. spot exchange-traded funds (ETFs), which hold the coin on behalf of their shareholders, have become persistent buyers. The iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF showed nearly $89 billion in net assets as of Aug. 12, a live proxy for the substantial coin balances held off the market. Persistent inflows across the ETF landscape have repeatedly tightened Bitcoin's floating supply available for public trading. The result is more price sensitivity to each marginal dollar of demand. And, there are new players arriving to the market with plenty of demand. 2. Corporations, financial institutions, and treasuries are accumulating it The ownership base of Bitcoin is tilting toward entities that tend to buy and hold, which is another major tailwind. As of Aug. 13, there were roughly 1.5 million bitcoins held in ETFs, 935,498 held by public companies, and 517,296 attributed to countries, together representing more than 14% of Bitcoin's supply cap of 21 million. One type of holder stands out. Corporate accumulation is a major driver of the coin's price this year, as companies seek liquidity, collateral value, and brand alignment with a finite asset. When those long-term owners buy coins, turnover declines, and prices tend to grind higher over time. 3. Regulatory clarity and policy support are improving rapidly The third tailwind is regulatory clarity. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approved spot Bitcoin exchange-traded products (ETPs) for listing and trading in early 2024, establishing a mainstream wrapper with daily liquidity and standard investor protections. Now, those ETPs are quite popular, and the SEC's ongoing rulemaking regarding crypto is helping to give big organizations the confidence they need to buy and hold it, too. Abroad, the E.U.'s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) framework has been in force since the end of 2024, with transitional timelines for service providers to come into full compliance during 2025 and 2026, creating a single rulebook and clearer pathways for banks and fintechs in the region to participate. Policy does not have to be perfect to be additive. It just has to be clear enough for institutional compliance teams to say yes, and Bitcoin is now past that hurdle in much of the world. 4. Crypto is now accepted across the investor spectrum The final tailwind is that Bitcoin is now obviously at the tail-end of its acceptance as an asset. Originally, owning Bitcoin meant wrestling with an awkward technical stack of wallets, keys, and exchanges. Explaining it to friends and relatives was more likely to be met with confusion or the stated conviction that it simply wouldn't ever be worth anything. Go back 13 or 14 years, and holding it often meant being considered to be a potential criminal, or worse, a nerd. Today, there are ETFs in retail investors' brokerage accounts, model portfolios at all of the leading wealth platforms, and research roadmaps for financial institutions. Even public pensions and endowments are investing or thinking about it. Everyone has heard of it, and many people own it. The frontier of awareness has been nearly fully tamed. That's going to ensure that a huge number of people keep up with this asset over time -- and that will almost certainly power it even higher over the long run. Should you invest $1,000 in Bitcoin right now? Before you buy stock in Bitcoin, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the for investors to buy now… and Bitcoin wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $663,630!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $1,115,695!* Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor's total average return is 1,071% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 185% for the S&P 500. Don't miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join Stock Advisor. See the 10 stocks » *Stock Advisor returns as of August 13, 2025 Alex Carchidi has positions in Bitcoin and iShares Bitcoin Trust. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Bitcoin. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. Bitcoin Soars Past $124k, a New All-Time High. 4 Tailwinds Behind the Momentum. was originally published by The Motley Fool
Forbes
29 minutes ago
- Forbes
Sam Altman Is Going After Elon Musk's Empire, One Company At A Time
O ver the last year, the feud between Silicon Valley heavyweights Sam Altman and Elon Musk has devolved into personal attacks, social media swipes, and lawsuits. Musk calls his foe Scam Altman and Swindly Sam. Altman has said that Musk 'can't be a happy person" and that his "whole life is from a position of insecurity." Just this week, after Musk announced he plans to sue Apple for allegedly promoting Altman's OpenAI on the app store over his own startup xAI, Altman called out Musk for manipulating X to 'benefit himself and his own companies.' Musk responded by calling Altman a liar. The two men famously co-founded OpenAI as a non-profit in 2015 before Musk left the organization's board three years later following a failed power grab. After OpenAI released ChatGPT to public acclaim in late 2022, Musk founded xAI in March 2023 and promoted it as the 'anti-woke' alternative. Last year, Musk sued Altman to stop him from turning OpenAI into a for-profit entity. Altman countersued, claiming Musk has worked "nonstop" to torpedo OpenAI. But the rivalry between OpenAI and xAI is now just one front in the larger war between Altman and Musk. Altman has been making moves, both through OpenAI and with his own expansive investment portfolio, to develop products and technologies that target several of Musk's businesses. Altman is backing a new brain-computer interface startup called Merge Labs, which will directly compete with Musk's own brain-computer interface outfit Neuralink, the Financial Times reported this week. Altman is a cofounder of the new venture, which is seeking to raise capital at a $850 million valuation. (Weirdly, Altman is also a small investor in Neuralink). Musk cofounded Neuralink (recent valuation: $9 billion) in 2016, and is its largest individual shareholder. Meanwhile, Altman is positioning OpenAI to compete directly with Musk's X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. OpenAI is working to build a social media arm that would be an 'X-like social network,' according to The Verge , which first reported on those plans in April. OpenAI's push into social networking could potentially pose a big threat to X. At last count, X has around 600 million monthly users (per Statista). OpenAI says ChatGPT is more popular, with 700 million weekly users. And Altman is coming after Tesla too. Compared to a year earlier, sales of Tesla vehicles plummeted 13.5% in the second quarter of 2025, leading Mush to pivot to self-driving taxis as a potential future area of growth for his electric vehicle maker. 'My prediction is by the end of next year, we'll have hundreds of thousands if not over a million Teslas doing self-driving in the U.S,' Musk said in May on CNBC . Maybe. But there is little evidence to support Musk's claim, given that no Tesla vehicles are currently approved for full self-driving. In June, OpenAI announced it had partnered with self-driving software maker Applied Intuition (recent valuation: $15 billion) to 'advance next-generation, AI-powered experiences in vehicles worldwide.' Altman then hailed OpenAI's progress in developing self-driving tech, while also obliquely dissing Tesla's progress: 'We have some new technology that could just do self-driving for standard cars way better than any current approach has worked,' Altman claimed his brother's podcast, Uncapped with Jack Altman. Altman has also backed the company Longshot Space, which dreams of taking on Musk's SpaceX with a gigantic gun that shoots satellites into orbit (seriously). He has also invested in Glydways, another robocar startup that could one day compete with Tesla's self-driving robotaxis. Neither Musk or Altman responded to Forbes' requests for comment for this article. Musk, 54, and Altman, 40, weren't always at odds. The two men first met in the early 2010s when Altman was president of startup incubator Y Combinator and Musk was working to build out SpaceX and Tesla. The two men bonded over their shared concern about the dangers of artificial intelligence, and they cofounded OpenAI in 2015 as a nonprofit with the mission of developing AI in a responsible manner. Musk was the organization's largest individual backer, donating $44 million in 2016 and 2017. Elon Musk and Sam Altman speak onstage at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit on October 6, 2015 in San Francisco, California, back when they were still friends. (Photo byfor Vanity Fair) Getty Images for Vanity Fair Musk left OpenAI's board in 2018 after he allegedly tried and failed to merge the entity into Tesla, but even then, the two men seemingly remained on good terms. In 2019, during a difficult time for Tesla, Altman railed against those who 'root against' the EV maker and warned that 'betting against Elon is historically a mistake.' When OpenAI launched its ChatGPT product to the public in November 2022, Musk praised the chatbot as 'scary good' and scolded the New York Times for not sufficiently writing about ChatGPT. The vibes started souring in 2023, as Musk was laying the seeds of xAI. Musk posted a meme that February that claimed ChatGPT had usurped the mainstream media as 'the captain of propaganda.' The following month, Musk expressed concern that Microsoft had 'exclusive access to the entire OpenAI codebase' as part of its $13 billion investment in the startup. Still, the two men were at least publicly friendly with one another, trading jokes and philosophical observations. 'We live in the most interesting of times,' Musk said in October 2023, in response to Altman's musings about being alive in today's day and age. One month later, Musk was mocking ChatGPT as 'insufferable' and using Grok (xAI's chatbot) to generate disses of the chatbot. 'The woke mind virus, which is fundamentally anti-human, has been deeply ingrained into ChatGPT!' Musk railed in one tweet. After a short-lived coup which briefly saw Altman ousted as OpenAI's CEO, Musk warned that the organization needed 'directors who deeply understand AI and will stand up to Sam' and that 'human civilization is at stake.' Musk accelerated the conflict in early 2024 when he made a $97.4 billion bid for OpenAI's assets (despite them not being for sale) and then sued OpenAI, Altman and fellow cofounder Greg Brockman in California, alleging that their plans to convert OpenAI into a for-profit enterprise violated the nonprofit's founding contract. Musk withdrew his lawsuit before a state judge could rule on whether to dismiss it, but then filed a similar lawsuit in federal court. This April, OpenAI countersued Musk, alleging that he engaged in a 'yearslong harassment campaign' against OpenAI in court and social media posts, and that his $97.4 billion offer was a 'sham bid' designed to hurt OpenAI. The judge has denied Musk's request to block OpenAI's restructuring plans, tossed out some of Musk's claims and permitted OpenAI's counterclaim to proceed. A jury trial is scheduled for next year. As the ill-will between the men deepens, many in Silicon Valley are getting their popcorn out and enjoying the show. Vinod Khosla, the legendary billionaire investor who has warned of AI's potential dangers, says that ultimately, the pair's rivalry will be good for the ecosystem as a whole. 'More competition is always good,' he told Forbes via email. Good luck convincing Musk or Altman of that. More from Forbes Forbes Google And Pollster Scott Rasmussen Will Use AI To Survey Americans' Political Views By Richard Nieva Forbes Inside The Richest Presidential Cabinet Ever By Kyle Khan-Mullins Forbes Zuckerberg Squandered His AI Talent. Now He's Spending Billions To Replace It. By Rashi Shrivastava Forbes Longer Leash On Life: Inside The Dog Longevity Startup By Amy Feldman Forbes As Meme Stocks Make A Comeback, Beware This Tax Trap By Kelly Phillips Erb
