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Yahoo
3 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
What is D-Day? How the Normandy landings led to Germany's defeat in World War II
Friday marks 81 years since D-Day, the first day of the Normandy landings that laid the foundations for the Allied defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II. The invasion – codenamed Operation Overlord – saw of tens of thousands of troops from countries including the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada landing on five stretches of the coastline of Normandy, France – codenamed Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword beaches. Planning for D-Day began more than a year in advance, and the Allies carried out substantial military deception to confuse the Germans as to when and where the invasion would take place. The operation was originally scheduled to begin on June 5, 1944, when a full moon and low tides were expected to coincide with good weather, but storms forced a 24-hour delay. Allied divisions began landing on the five beaches at 6:30 a.m. on June 6. The term 'D-Day' was military code for the beginning of an important operation, with the first 'D' being short for 'Day.' This means that D-Day actually stands for 'Day-Day.' According to the Royal British Legion, the phrase 'D-Day' was used fairly often before the Allied invasion in June 1944. After this, however, the two became synonymous, and now D-Day is commonly understood to refer to the beginning of Operation Overlord. D-Day saw unprecedented cooperation between international armed forces, with more than 2 million troops in the UK in preparation for the invasion, according to the Imperial War Museums (IWM). Most of these troops were American, British and Canadian, the IWM reports, but troops also came from Australia, Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Greece, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and Poland to participate in Operation Overlord. The Allied troops' invasion was coordinated across air, land and sea, in what can be described as amphibious landings. These were preceded by an extensive bombing campaign to damage German defenses, as well as the employment of deception tactics. Operation Bodyguard was an umbrella term for the deception strategy leading up to the Allies' invasion of Europe in June 1944. Operation Fortitude was a tactic under this umbrella specifically related to the Normandy invasion, and was intended to make Nazi Germany believe that the initial Normandy attacks were merely a diversion and that the true invasion would take place elsewhere. According to the IWM, Fortitude North intended to trick the Germans into believing that the Allies would attack Norway, and Fortitude South was designed to convince the Germans that the Allies were going to invade Pas de Calais, a French department northeast of Normandy that is closer to the UK. The US troops were assigned to Utah beach at the base of the Cotentin Peninsular and Omaha Beach at the northern end of the Normandy coast. The British subsequently landed on Gold Beach, followed by the Canadians at Juno, and finally the British at Sword, the easternmost point of the invasion. By midnight, the troops had secured their beachheads and moved further inland from Utah, Gold, Juno and Sword. However, not all the landings were successful; US forces suffered substantial losses at Omaha Beach, where strong currents forced many landing craft away from their intended positions, delaying and hampering the invasion strategy. Heavy fire from German positions on the steep cliffs, which had not been effectively destroyed by Allied bombing before the invasion, also caused casualties. According to the IWM, Germany's reaction to Operation Overlord was 'slow and confused.' Weather conditions on June 6 were still poor, many senior commanders were not at their posts, and Operation Fortitude convinced Adolf Hitler that the Normandy invasion was a feint before a bigger attack at Pas de Calais. Germany's air force was in action elsewhere, countering American bombing operations over Germany. Its navy ships were docked in ports or already destroyed by the Allies. This left only the German army to defend against Operation Overlord, according to the IWM. On top of this, the success of Operation Fortitude meant that many army units were kept away from the Normandy battlefield until July, as an attack in Pas de Calais was still expected. German troops manning coastal defenses 'did as much as they could have been expected to,' the IWM says, before eventually being 'silenced' and Allied units advanced inland. On D-Day alone, around 4,440 Allied troops were confirmed dead, according to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC), with more than 5,800 troops wounded or missing. Because Omaha Beach was the bloodiest landing beach, the US Army lost the most men in the amphibious landings. Some 2,500 American troops died in the beach assault and airborne operations on D-Day, according to the CWGC. The precise number of German casualties on the day is unknown, but they are estimated to be between 4,000 and 9,000. Of the tens of thousands of troops that stormed the beaches of Normandy on D-Day, 44 were soldiers, sailors and airmen from Bedford, Virginia, in the US. Within minutes of reaching Omaha Beach, 16 of these men were killed and four were wounded. Another Bedford soldier was killed elsewhere on Omaha Beach, and three others were presumed killed in action, bringing Bedford's D-Day fatality figure to 20 men. According to the National D-Day Memorial Foundation, Bedford suffered the highest known per capita D-Day loss in the US. Despite securing a stronghold on the French coast on D-Day, the Allied forces faced the risk that German bombardment could push them back into the sea. They needed to build up troop numbers and equipment in Normandy faster than the Germans, allowing for a continued invasion into mainland Europe. The Allies used their air power to slow the German advance toward Normandy by blowing up bridges, railways and roads across the region. This allowed the Allies to gain total control of Normandy 77 days later and move on toward Paris, which they liberated in August 1944. The US Department of Defense calls D-Day the 'successful beginning of the end of Hitler's tyrannical regime.' The IWM calls it the 'most significant victory of the Western Allies in the Second World War.' By being able to get forces into Normandy, the Allies were able to begin their advance into northwest Europe. Though World War II lasted nearly another year in Europe, the success of Operation Overlord led to the liberation of France and allowed the Allies to fight the Germans in Nazi-occupied Europe. The US' National World War II Museum says that a good way to appreciate the significance of D-Day is to imagine what would have happened if the operation had failed. According to the museum, another landing would have not been possible for at least a year. In this time, Hitler could have strengthened Nazi-occupied Europe's coastal defenses, developed aircraft and weapons, bombed the UK even more heavily and continued his killing campaign, the museum says. Fighting by the Allies on the western front and Russian soldiers on the eastern front eventually led to the defeat of the German Nazi forces. On May 7, 1945, the German Third Reich signed an unconditional surrender at Reims, France. Victory in Europe (V-E) Day is celebrated the following day as that's when the armistice went into effect.
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Investors taking on more risk through defense, international ETFs
In the latest installment of Yahoo Finance's ETF Report, Invesco's Nasdaq 100 ETF (QQQ) and the iShares Russell 2000 ETF (IWM) are seeing some recovery from April's tariff-induced sell-offs. CFRA Research head of ETF research Aniket Ullal examines the investor behaviors driving ETF inflows, noting the growth in defense funds and international market ETFs. To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Catalysts here. Since the early April tariff induced sell-off investors are piling back into risk on trades with both Invesco's NASDAQ 100 pegged ETF and IShares small caps ETF both back in positive territory. But, there are still concerns ahead especially when it comes to the dollar still being under pressure. For this, I want to bring in Aniket Ullal, CFRA's research's head of ETF research. This week's ETF report brought to you by Invesco QQQ. Aniket, great to have you here. Uh talk to me about what you're seeing in the flows. It seems like investors are buying a little bit of risk in everything. Well, uh we try to look at both performance and flows in tandem because sometimes flows can lag uh performance. From a performance perspective what you said earlier is absolutely right. We saw bottom on April 8th, which was of course the date when President Trump paused reciprocal tariffs. Since before that date in the year, you know, SPY was down 18%, uh IBIT the Bitcoin ETF was down significantly, as was QQQ which is really the best proxy from an ETF perspective for the AI trade. All of those ETFs have bounced back significantly since then, most of them 20 plus percentage, in the case of uh IBIT more than 30%. So, from a performance perspective we have seen investors really go back and kind of take on more risk. To your point about the flows, there are certain categories where we've seen significant inflows, uh defense ETFs is one of them, utilities flows another. So, you know, both from a flows and performance perspective, it's a much healthier environment now for ETF investors than of course early April. Yeah. And talk to me about those flows into defense ETFs. What is that signaling to you about sentiment? I I That I think is really driven by what's happening in the uh budget reconciliation process. If you look at the budget there's another $150 billion allocated uh to defense. This is on top of the $850 billion, of course, in annual spending that's funded through a continuing resolution. So, you know, this includes $27 billion for the golden dome project which President Trump has kind of talked about quite a bit. Um so, this really benefits of course the large um defense contractors. You know, we've got ETFs like ITA, which provide exposure to the big defense contractors. But, there's also another huge component here which is software automation process automations benefits firms like Palantir, and ETFs like PPA, which are kind of broader in terms of their defense exposure and hold some of the software and kind of process automation companies actually benefit a lot from the defense trade. So, we actually think PPA is a good proxy, which is an Invesco defense ETF, for the kind of broader defense play when it comes to uh benefiting from the budget reconciliation process. That's that's a really great overview. I want to uh have you do the exact same thing but for international ETF flows. What are you seeing there? And what is it indicating to you about where, or I guess how convicted investors are in the narrative that international is going to continue to outperform U.S.? It's going to be interesting to see how patient investors are with international. In the past we have seen investors sometimes go to international when we've seen some seen some weakness in the U.S. and then pull back. So far, this year flows have been very strong particularly within uh Europe, and we starting to see in in emerging markets, emerging markets ex China be kind of an interesting trade. Within Europe of course, Germany is one of the engines of Europe. Uh we've seen stimulus in Germany in terms of, you know, 500 billion Euro um infrastructure uh build, you know, spending allocation. Uh we've seen defense stocks really lead that. And the way we think about European allocation is it's really a complement to U.S. allocation because U.S. ETFs are very very tech uh dominated, very dominated by the AI trade. If you look at European ETFs in general, they tend to have less than 5% to 10% of their exposure to IT. It's a lot more financials, it's a lot more industrials. And industrials really benefit from some of the stimulus we talked about. So, we think European trading is here to stay, but it's really non tech driven. It's much between industrials and financials play. Mm yeah. So given that, because the U.S. continues to win when it comes to large cap tech uh how much is the U.S. equity market sort of relying on a dollar snap back in order to have some sort of catalyst to new or all time highs? I think I think your intro, you know, you said it well, which is that is this 2020, probably not. Because you know, there are factors that are different now than than we saw last year, right, which was the very AI driven trade. Now we've got dollar weakness. We've got much more of course driven by uh tariff uncertainty. So, if this year we've seen the dollar, if you look at a trade weighted basket uh index of the dollar against trade weighted basket of currencies, it's down about 5% to 6% this year. That's That's actually improvement from a couple weeks ago. And because of that we've seen money go into uh currency ETFs, you know. You look at ETFs like FXY, which is kind of a uh Yen USD uh trade that's taken in over $400 billion. FXE, which is the Euro USD pair, uh is taken in $300 million. So, we have seen investors kind of go into currency ETFs as a way to capture some of this dollar depreciation. We have seen dollar depreciation moderate a little bit, but I think there's a lot we need to watch in the next couple of weeks particularly with what happened with the pause on tariffs on July 9th and how that plays out. Aniket, really appreciate you joining us. Thank you so much. Thank you.
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Investors taking on more risk through defense, international ETFs
In the latest installment of Yahoo Finance's ETF Report, Invesco's Nasdaq 100 ETF (QQQ) and the iShares Russell 2000 ETF (IWM) are seeing some recovery from April's tariff-induced sell-offs. CFRA Research head of ETF research Aniket Ullal examines the investor behaviors driving ETF inflows, noting the growth in defense funds and international market ETFs. To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Catalysts here. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Scotsman
5 days ago
- Business
- Scotsman
The role water efficiency plays in a greener Scotland: Here's how your business can save water and money
Business Stream Given the climate crisis, increasing costs and the need to protect what is fast becoming a precious resource, Stephen Sheridan, Head of Account Management at Business Stream shares his insights into what businesses can do to reduce water use - and benefit from financial and environmental savings. Sign up to our daily newsletter – Regular news stories and round-ups from around Scotland direct to your inbox Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... The climate crisis has brought with it a new sense of urgency for businesses to act. From decarbonisation to resource efficiency, pressure is mounting from customers, investors, regulators and employees to demonstrate genuine progress - not just ambition. Yet in the race to reduce emissions and support sustainability targets, there's one area that often remains overlooked: water. It can be taken for granted. And in a country known for its rainfall, it doesn't always feel like a pressing concern. But the reality is quite different. The truth is water is a precious resource, and we are already facing shortage issues in the UK. And while water resources are a bigger issue in England, particularly the South of England, we're starting to see water shortage issues impact Scotland too. In addition, we also know that the amount of energy used to treat, heat and re-heat water negatively impacts our energy emissions and subsequent net zero targets. Against this backdrop, the need for water efficiency has never been clearer. As a water retailer, we believe we have an important role to play in promoting this message and helping our customers to use less water. Most businesses are aware of the practical interventions that can be taken, such as installing water efficient devices and undertaking water audits. But there are other initiatives and solutions designed to help businesses achieve water efficiencies that are worth exploring. For a start, technology in this space is rapidly evolving, which gives businesses the opportunity to truly understand their water use and identify savings. Last year, we launched Power BI Intelligent Water Management (IWM) reporting for our customers, giving them self-serve access to a suite of comprehensive reports for their sites. This new functionality enables us to analyse customers' consumption data on a site-by-site basis to identify anomalies, send high consumption alerts, track the carbon impact of water use and realise opportunities to achieve water efficiency savings. All of this is then visually displayed for customers to see so they can take ownership of their water use. And for those customers who are committed to embedding sustainability within the culture of their organisation, we've launched our Water Stewardship Programme, a UK-first initiative delivered in partnership with sustainability experts 20FIFTY Partners. The programme is designed to equip businesses with the knowledge, tools and support they need to understand their water use, identify opportunities to reduce it, and put in place practical strategies that drive change across their sites. It's a 12-week programme that combines group learning, one-to-one mentoring, and real-world action planning, with all participants receiving an accreditation on completion. And it's already delivering results. Businesses that took part in our pilot programme have reported improved efficiencies, greater engagement across their teams, and progress against their sustainability goals. There are also funding opportunities available. For public sector organisations, for example, we offer a £100,000 annual Water Efficiency Fund, which organisations can apply for. This fund has already helped organisations like National Museums Scotland, Scottish Fire and Rescue and Edinburgh Council to roll out water-saving interventions, from installing water-efficient urinals and taps, to undertaking water audits across large estates. Given the increasing focus on water scarcity and the on-going need for us all to address the climate crisis we're facing, water efficiency is growing in importance. For businesses that are pro-active in this space, the benefits are clear - using less water is good for the environment, supports sustainability targets and, ultimately, reduces costs.
Yahoo
7 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Boom Bust: Assets Flee CALF as Performance Slumps
The Pacer US Small Cap Cash Cows ETF (CALF) has fallen sharply out of favor in 2025, as a dramatic reversal in performance has triggered a flood of outflows from the once-high-flying fund. Year to date, investors have yanked $2.6 billion from the ETF, the 12th-largest outflow among all U.S.-listed exchange-traded funds. That exodus, combined with deep losses, has slashed the fund's assets by nearly half—from $8.1 billion at the start of the year to $4.3 billion today. At its peak in 2024, CALF had just under $10 billion in assets. The sharp reversal underscores how quickly investor sentiment can shift. CALF's recent struggles have been particularly stark given its meteoric rise in prior years. From just $1 billion in assets in October 2022, the fund ballooned to nearly $10 billion in April 2024 thanks to blistering 2023 performance. That year, the ETF surged 35%, roughly double the returns of the biggest small-cap ETFs, including the iShares Russell 2000 ETF (IWM), the Vanguard Small-Cap ETF (VB) and the iShares Core S&P Small-Cap ETF (IJR). But the magic didn't last. In 2024, CALF dropped 7.4% even as its small-cap peers gained between 8% and 15%. And in 2025, the performance gap has only widened. As of now, the fund is down 12.5% on the year, compared to a 6.9% decline for IWM, a 4.7% drop for VB and an 8.2% loss for IJR. CALF's underperformance reflects both its concentrated nature and its unique strategy. While IWM, VB and IJR track broad, market cap-weighted indexes with hundreds or even thousands of holdings—none of which typically make up more than 0.5% of the portfolio—CALF is much more selective. The ETF chooses 200 companies with the highest free cash flow yields (free cash flow divided by enterprise value) from the small-cap universe. It's a value-leaning approach but one distinct from traditional value screens, such as those that emphasize price-to-book or price-to-earnings ratios. As a result, CALF's portfolio is relatively concentrated, with the top 10 holdings making up around 20% of assets and the top 20 more than 35%. Individual stocks can carry weights of 2% or more. That's not unusually high for ETFs overall, but it's elevated compared to other broad small-cap funds. Unfortunately for CALF, many of its top holdings have fared poorly in the past year and a half. Just five companies—Xerox Holdings Corp. (XRX), Alpha Metallurgical Resources Inc. (AMR), Peabody Energy Corp. (BTU), Signet Jewelers Limited (SIG) and Ironwood Pharmaceuticals Inc. (IRWD)—have collectively wiped nearly six percentage points off the fund's returns since the start of 2024. That kind of drag is difficult to overcome, and it's especially painful for a strategy that pitches itself as a more disciplined, cash-flows-focused alternative to traditional small-cap investing. To be clear, this year's weakness doesn't appear to be a referendum on value investing itself. Over the past 17 months, the Vanguard Small-Cap Value ETF (VBR) is up 8% while CALF has fallen 19%. VBR tracks the CRSP US Small Cap Value Index, which uses a multi-factor model that selects stocks based on price-to-book, various price-to-earnings ratios, dividend yields and price-to-sales ratios. CALF's struggles highlight the risks of a relatively concentrated portfolio of small-cap stocks. When it works, it can outperform in a big way. But when it doesn't, investors may quickly head for the | © Copyright 2025 All rights reserved Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
