Yahoo Finance

We are 2 hours into the trading day. It's time for Yahoo Finance's market. Stock trading higher as they push to extend recent gains on trade optimism. Tech, one of the leaders of the day. Kraft Heinz is investing $3 billion to upgrade its US factories, according to Reuters. The company's president.says the upgrade is intended to make plants more efficient and to lower costs. Rivian getting a downgrade to hold from buy at Jeffrey's, the firm citing a downbeat demand outlook for the year. The analyst points out that the main positive surprise in the EV maker's first quarter report came from a change in accounting.And PBH, owner of Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger, getting an upgrade to buy from Hold on Jeffrey at Jeffrey's on sales growth potential. The firm says China overhang from regulations could be resolved soon either through new licensing deals or better trade relations, and that's your Yahoo Finance market minute. For more on what's trending on Yahoo Finance, scan the QR code below to track the best and worst performing stocks of the cession.

Welcome to Wealth brought to you by Synchrony. I'm Brad Smith, and this is Yahoo Finance's guide to building your financial footprints. Our community of experts will give you the resources, tools, tips, and the tricks that you need to grow your money. On today's show, Portfolio checkup, we discuss one investing alternatives to stocks that performs better in a slower growth environment. And good news for renters, according to Realtor.com, you're spending 23% of your income on rent under the 30%.rules. So is it better to be renting right now versus buying? We'll dive in with an expert plus President Trump's tax policy proposals and how they may impact you. We're going to dive into some of the details that we know so far. But first, we take a look at some of the market action 90 minutes into the trading day stocks are higher. Well, they were across the board as of right now we are mixed. The Dow just flat barely to the downside here, but overall we've seen some recent gains.On trade optimism. Wall Street, do they still have all of the things, all the concerns about growth as President Trump's looking to negotiate trade deals? That's the big question here joining us now. Our next guest sees growth slowing in the US. So where are the opportunities in a slower growth environment here with more we've got Noel Korum, senior portfolio manager at Agile Investment Management. So where, where are those opportunities in a slower growth environment from your perspective?

Yeah, I will caveat that with we think this is a broader theme of shifting from this US exceptionalism trade to global growth and looking for those opportunities elsewhere, but slower growth environment, as you just alluded to, isn't always bad for fixed income. So at Investment Management we look, we're also looking for opportunities in the US, but we think in Europe they just launched a big fiscal package. We think that's gonna be a broader trend for European growth over the next 5 years. It's a long term trend.We think European credit and risk assets should do well as Europe steps in with a bigger fiscal package. We're also expecting more stimulus and fiscal spending in Canada and Asia, so looking for opportunities outside of the US to help diversify our risk assets.

And so when you're thinking about the diversification and among risk assets right now, does that mean more broadly that we're kind of emerging and getting back into a kind of risk on appetite?

Yeah, I think what you saw earlier in April was spreads blew out a ridiculous amount, really didn't make a whole lot of sense, but I think at that point, investors were under risk and we thought at that point.That the risk to being under risk was greater than being over risk, so we look to add risk going into that and did really well here because we do think that as these tariffs de-escalate, we're actually looking at a US economy that it's service based remember it's a service based economy that's doing well. The company fundamentals are still strong, consumers still well supported. Yes, we might see some.Pickups in growth and slowing in growth, but we still think it's well positioned while also looking for opportunities to diversify globally. And

so when you think about that, where are you kind of identifying within the equity markets right now? Perhaps some of the companies that might have the most global exposure as well as investors are kind of looking through their own portfolios, seeing where they already have that global exposure versus where they need to add on.

On the fixed income side, again, just looking at sectors there. So energy and banking are more US centric. The companies that blew out back in April really haven't come in and caught up to the rest of spread. So that's an opportunity within the US.And then globally consumer cyclicals, defense names, automakers, a lot of the names that have were blown out because of tariffs we really felt like the bad news was price and after you dug into the details a little bit, you really were compensated for the risk that you were taking.

And so with that in mind as we're thinking through the rest of not just this earnings season but more broadly what CEOs what executives are saying about what they're looking for in trade deals and in the global environment, what are you listening for?

We're listening for details in general. We want more clarity at this point and certainty is better, so we're just watching the policy, looking at the details, taking it back to the hard data. I think that's important. It's easy to get lost in the soft data, right? And then lost in the forward guidance, but at the end of the day, we don't actually know a lot. We don't know where we're gonna land, so taking it back to the hard data, looking at what companies.are doing thus far how the consumer thinking and spending all of it comes down to thinking about the hard data and where we where we gofrom here.

And just lastly while we have you here, we're thinking about not just what is taking place within equity markets, but given what you were talking about within some of the fixed income space as you're thinking through kind of the the duration or where you want to be on the curve knowing that.In years past we wouldn't have gotten this far in the conversation without some type of Fed mention, and we're finally getting there now in this conversation 6 minutes into it. All that considered, what are you anticipating from the Fed and how that ultimately passes through to what part of the curve investors should feel comfortable being invested in right now?

We like being on at the belly and in being in the long term, we think that the curve might steepen out a little bit more here just given where inflation's headed, where kind of the term premium of the curve is headed. Our, our Fed call is for one, maybe two cuts this year again on slower growth, but we really don't think we're in a full on cutting cycle and CPI yesterday kind of told us that as well. We haven't seen the hard data turned down. I think that's what the Fed's gonna have to respond to at the end of the day.

Noel, great to see you. Thank you so much for joining us here today.Now time for some of today's trending tickers. We're watching Nvidia, Tesla, and Warner Brothers. Joining me now, we've got my morning brief co-host Madison Mills. First up here, we gotta talk a little Nvidia on the day. Here's the scene setter Nvidia CEO Jenson Wong's compensation soared to $50 million in fiscal 2025. That includes a base salary of $1.5 million. And under his tenure, Nvidia has rejoined the $3 trillion market cap club. The stock getting a boo.Boost of late on trade optimism here you're seeing shares rising by about 2.8% and of course this coming as they're netting even more deals. CEO Jenson Huang traveling internationally to get some of those deals done too. Yeah,

twobig catalysts for the stock this week. Obviously the broader market optimism is going to impact a name like this so heavily weighted in the indices, but the biggest news for Nvidia this week is this Saudi Arabia potential deal coming. We do have reporting coming in here that the United States.is expected to buoy Saudi Arabia's ability to get those high level AI chips from the likes of both AMD and Nvidia. Important to note we don't have those details and those deals fully officially announced yet, but that is the reporting and Wall Street certainly running with it. I had a conversation with Dan Is over at Wedbush about this stock, and he says that it is the biggest winner in his view coming out of the US-China trade truce. He thinks that Nvidia is still the stock that is fueling the.AI revolution and he sees the stock only continuing to move upward, those shares up nearly 3%today.

Yeah, from the newsroom of Nvidia they mentioned Humane, the new full AI value chain subsidiary of Saudi Arabia's public investment fund, the PIF, announcing that landmark strategic partnership with Nvidia here and it's really a question of what that phase out of deployment will look like as of right now could be potentially 18,000 Nvidia GB 300, Grace Blackwell AI supercomputer.With that Nvidia Infinityban networking, of course casual terms that we talk about every Friday and Saturday when you're just kicking it with friends. But anyway, that is going to be part of the powering of factories of tomorrow as Nvidia is calling it within this investment for Saudi Arabia. Also, let's talk about Tesla here. Tesla's board has reportedly formed a special committee to explore ways to compensate CEO Elon Musk after his 2018 pay package was voided by a judge over possible conflicts of interest with the.The board that report, according to the Financial Times, Tesla did appeal that decision to the Delaware Supreme Court, and that process is still underway. Shares of Tesla are up by about 1.5% right now.

Yeah, and this new compensation package would potentially be performance-based according to reports here, as you noted here. This comes after a Delaware court voided Musk's $56 billion stock award back in 2018, citing lack of board independence.That was back again in 2018. The $304 million stock options, $304 million stock options valued at $56 billion are now worth about $98 billion from that 2018 award. Musk then meaning aggressive growth targets to earn those options by 2023. And of course now the question is what this pay is going to look like going forward, which is of critical note given the underperformance of Tesla's stock year to date here. I believe the stock is down about 30%.Its previous highs back in December, um, and I should also mention that there was some reporting that Elon Musk was potentially being considered a CEO replacement for Elon Musk was being considered and then Tesla denied that

reporting. Absolutely. And then finally here, we got to talk about this one because this is gonna get people to drop their remotes or even drop their cell phones that they might be watching on Warner Brothers Discovery. It's changing the name of its streaming service back to HBO Max from just Max.Now the entire arc of this has been quite crazy, to say the least here as we think about the past few years because it's not the first time that it's had this name before. It was originally HBO Go, then later HBO Now in 2015-ish, and then HBO Max in 2020, as many of us are old enough to remember here, 2023 rebranded to Max 2025 back to HBO Max. This has been wild to track over the past few years now.

I mean, what isTo say I happened to be talking about this last night with Dan, my fiance, and we were like, I can't believe that it's, it's Max. Like why would you let go of HBO, which is what so many of us know and love as the go to for your prestige TV? Why would you do that? So they were bugging our apartment in the Upper West Side and clearly listening to us. But I also think the back and forth, it's got to make you have questions about the executive presence in the room when you're going through this many changes.

Indeed, and taking a look at shares here today, they are moving lower by about 1.25%.I mean as we've continued to watch some of the direct to consumer entertainment efforts whether that be making sure that you're striking the tone correctly and naming a platform versus the content that you have on that platform, it's been uh it's been.Netflix, that's really been the kind of standard bearer for many of these others to kind of model their services around and that comes back to naming I guess to some certain extent. It's got to be something that has staying power.

Did you see CNN Plus is coming back too? I did. That lasted.Couple of weeks to bring it back years later so what's old is new again, I guess not streaming

exactly, uh, the reboots, they, they, they run abound. Thanks so much, Mattie. Appreciate it. You could scan the QR code below to track the best and worst performing stocks of the session with Yahoo Finance's trending ticker's page. Coming up, why renters are actually the winners of the pricey housing market that's next on well.Realtor.com's April renter report found that rents once again fell in the past month, with the median asking rents falling just under 2% month over month. Joining me now in studio to break down the latest housing data, we've got Danielle Hale, who is the retail or Realtor.com, chief economist here. Danielle, great to have you here. IRL in studio with us. How are things for renters in the US right now?

So there are some bright spots, so rents are easing a bit nationwide and in some cases in some markets more than in other areas and so that is improving rental affordability, um, but it really depends on what comparison point we're talking about. So we're looking year over year month over month, uh, rents have eased a little bit, but if we go back to before the pandemic, for example, rents are still up nationwide so it really is about the perspective shift.It also depends on how we're measuring rents. So Realtor.com data we're measuring asking rents for places that are advertised on Realtor.com. The CPI report was out yesterday, you know, it showed that shelter inflation is still going up because it's looking at the rents that all renters pay, not just the rents on properties that are advertised for rent right now.

And so as we think about whether it's better to be an owner of real estate or a renter of real estate right now, what is the, the ultimate answer at this juncture based on the figures?

Yeah, so I think in the long run for a lot of people owning a home makes sense. It's a good way to accumulate wealth, um, you know, in the past couple of years you might have seen people get rich quick. That's not the norm. It's usually a way to build wealth gradually over time, but if you look at the costs of buying versus renting today in many markets, renting is gonna be the better short run financial decision and you really have to be committed to the long run for owning to make sense.

You mentioned CPI.Print that we that we broke down for our viewers yesterday as well here and remembering that shelter rose 0.0% in April, accounting for more than half of the all items monthly increase here. What gauges or what are the key kind of like takeaways from that report, as well as what levers the Fed can actually pull to help, which is a very sticky component of inflation as they're continuing to track.

Yeah, so in shelter inflation, it has a long lag, so we've been tracking, you know, asking rents, and those have been declining for quite some time now, but we're not necessarily seeing that in shelter inflation because it's still in many ways playing catch up. So, you know, not, um, not every renter is gonna move every year. We see that people who stay put tend to have smaller rent increases than uh for a vacant unit, for example. So in many respects the market is still playing catch up, you know, the Fed in their most recent meeting left rates.Unchanged kind of in wait and see mode. Employment still looks good. Inflation is improving very, very slowly but still on the right track, kind of close to the 2% target. So that gives them some time to wait and see. But there's a lot of uncertainty in the general macro environment ahead

for those right now who are going out, they're house hunting and they're trying to figure out where they can kind of find a sweet spot, especially given some of the affordability issues that we've continued to track.How can they kind of work through that calculus of where affordability is is possible versus where they might need to continue to rent in the near term?

So affordability for buying we're seeing lower prices in parts of the Northeast or secondary markets and in the Midwest in parts of the south we're seeing prices come down a little bit so that can be an area of opportunity and the good news for potential buyers is that just about everywhere we're seeing more homes on the market, so they do have more choices.And in some cases even a little more bargaining power when they're dealing with sellers um but you know prices still are high mortgage rates still are high uh you know an opportunity to think about if you're in a market that has more building is new construction because builders have been willing to buy down mortgage rates which can make a difference for some people between being able to afford the payment and and not necessarily.

So what should we expect of the spring into summer season for home buying and on the homeownership front?

Yeah, so mortgage rates have been a little bit stubborn lately. We're still up close to 6. 3.75%. Um, that's not a rate at which we see housing activity really pick up. I think we need to see, uh, mortgage rates come back to the low 6% range before we see a little bit more activity. So I think it's gonna be a little bit more slow and steady. The market is rebound.Balancing, giving a little more negotiating power to buyers and that means sellers who are still continuing to get into the housing market need to be mindful and price their homes

appropriately. Longtime friend of the show Danielle, great to have you here in studio with us. Thanks for having me. Coming up, everyone, President Trump's sweeping tax plan. What policy changes mean for your next return that's next on well?We are excited to partner with Synchrony Bank, our premier sponsor for Wealth. Synchrony Bank is working with Yahoo Finance and Wealth to bring you the insights for your personal finance playbook and help you make your money work for you. Let's get a check of the markets here as we're just about 2 hours into trade today. The Dow Jones Industrial Average here flat just barely to the downside. We've seen some hyper oscillation here in the most recent.A few minutes here as we're kind of taking a look at us nearing that flat line here and you're not seeing all of the tick by tick movement here, but we have touched both sides of the trade for the Dow both positive and negative. The Nasdaq composite, you're seeing that higher by about 0.5%, and I want to pull up the year to date scale there just to see how much room we still have to move to the upside in order to get back into positive territory year to date.Here as we're still off and down by about 1% year to date, got a little bit more work to do. The Nasdaq 100 has already moved back into positive territory year to date scale. We'll see if we hold on to that as well. The S&P 500, that's year to date back in positive territory. That's up by about 0.2% over the course of 2025 here with that recent rally that we've seen from about.Mid April and some of the lows that we seem to have set in there so we'll continue to watch that here today it's up by about 0.7% and we'll just quickly ride out with a look at some of the sector activity that we're tracking 11 S&P 500 sectors pretty split on the day, but it looks like we have more laggards and gainers, technology leading, and XLV. That's gonna be your healthcare sector, which was in positive territory earlier that's now lagging, bringing up caboose.Republican lawmakers are looking to push forward President Trump's tax agenda. The current proposal would make the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act permanent, increase the child tax credit, raise the cap for state and local tax deductions, and temporarily create a tax deduction for tips and.Overtime along with other provisions joining me now we've got Carla Dennis, KDA CEO and founder. Great to have you here with us. So let's start with one of the key issues in negotiations, the limit on the deduction for state and local taxes known as salt. What do people need to know about the salt and the proposed changes?

Well, right now they're proposing to take the cap off of salt. Some of the lawmakers are saying to $60,000 but this has been such a contentious issue in a lot of the high earning states like New York, California, New Jersey because they feel.Like they are being penalized not only paying higher state income taxes, but then they can't even deduct those because the cap has been at $10,000 so this would be a welcome change.

What about changes to the child tax credit? How do you believe that that's going to work?

The changes to the child tax credit is going to be beneficial because it's going to allow those parents to get a credit against their actual tax bill that's always a win when you can have a tax credit versus a tax deduction, and I think that that is going to be a welcome change as well.

OK, so can we explain the bill's proposals for Social Security and, and what it means for filers as well?

For Social Security they're talking about no tax on Social Security income so these are retirees that were living off of their Social Security and we're not even expecting to pay any tax on that Social Security. So not taxing it now regardless of if you're making other income is really gonna help them and they will have more stability in their retirement years going forward. And

sohow does that help stretch some of the retirement dollars potentially?

Yes, because when you're not having to pay that tax, that means there's gonna be more money in your pocket. Retirees will not have to pay tax on the money that they're receiving, so they can actually live off of all of the earnings that they make and hopefully stretch their income longer to take care of basic needs, housing, living, food, and things of that nature.

So the legislation also includes one of the president's promises to eliminate taxes on tips, but there's a lot of questions around exactly how it will work for some filers here. What do we know?

Yeah, for taxes on tips they're talking about not having any income taxes on tips. They're not clear as to how this is going to play out from an implementation perspective with actual employers how are they going to segregate that income out but definitely not having tax on tips is gonna help the working class Americans, people that are working in these various industries.Is that typically aren't paid that much to begin with so this is certainly going to be a welcome change for those working Americans.

So is this from what we understand, an elimination on the front end where it's just not coming out of your paycheck or is it something that you have to file for later on in the year and and after the kind of full year and and season for tax filing uh commences?

It's going to be an elimination at the paycheck level because there would really be a nightmare trying to do it on the back end because that would require employees to really understand what dollars were over time, what dollars were not over time, and it's not reported like that on an individual's W-2, so that would take a lot of overhauling. Right now it is slated to take place at the employer's end when they're actually administering the paychecks.

Another inclusion lastly is a plan to create a new tax advantage money account for growth and management for children born between 2025 and 2028. How will that impact taxes?

Yeah, so you're talking about the my American Dream savings. This is very new and basically what it is is to encourage Americans to start to save for things like buying a primary residence to save for their education and to do it tax free.I think in this particular instance they need to be clear on what the particulars are going to be because I always say to individuals, we wanna make sure we understand the compliance so that this is going to work for everybody and not just the wealthy, the top 1%.

Carla, thanks so much for taking the time here with us today.Thank you.Coming up, thinking of a last minute gift for your favorite grad, we'll dive into the details you should know about gifting stocks next.Whether it's graduation or a holiday, stocks can be a great gift to help build longer term wealth for the recipient. Here are a few things though to keep in mind before you gift shares of a company. Susan Hirschman, director of wealth management at Schwab Wealth Advisory, joins me now. Susan, good to have you here with us. So let's just start simple here. What are the benefits to gifting stock instead of just giving somebody the greenback, giving them cash?

Yeah, I think the first is education, right? And it starts them building that foundation for investing. So that's #1. #2 is knowledge, right? So they start understanding about how companies work and ownership.And the third is perhaps it's not as liquid as cash, so they'll use it for the long term versus the short term. And then you get something that could be an appreciating asset out of your estate if you're subject to a state tax.

So how can you use gifting stock as a teachable moment around financial literacy?

Yeah, it's, it's, and that's the power, I say, of giving that, that stock. Because it's really about the connection you have with your children, and talking to them about the why. What's the purpose of this stock, right? Is it to enhance the law?Long term. Is it to teach them about ownership of, of companies? Is it to teach them about how markets work? And the fact that you're the only person that's responsible for you, and you have to keep investing for the long term.

So now that we've covered the why, let's get into the how. What account might a recipient need if you're going to gift them shares?

Yeah, so it depends, right? And it depends on the circumstances of the child. So let's say if you have a child who actually has earned income.And again, if we're trying to gift them stock for the long term and teach them the power of savings, instead of gifting them into a brokerage account, perhaps you want to use a custodial Roth IRA. And that word custodial is key, because children, minors cannot own stocks. So it would have to be.If you're gonna give it outright, so to speak, into a custodial account. They're the owners of that stock, but they don't manage the staff until they hit their age of majority, which is 18 or 21 depending on the state that they live in.

Are theretax implications that you need to keep in mind of gifting stock to a child or a young adult?

There's always tax implications. And so there's such a thing called the kitty tax. And that was put into place, I think in the 80s. And it was purposeful because people were gifting shares of stock to their children and then having the children sell and not pay capital gains. And, and the government, the IRS said, no, no, no, that's not.Good. We want the kids, um, to pay capital gain as well. And so what it, what it is is for kids who are 18 or under or up into their 20s who are full-time students, um, if they have unearned income, it is taxed at the rate of the parent.

OK, and so all this in mind as you're continuing to kind of help the child as well over time, learn more about their investment, what are kind of three keys that parents need to continue to communicate as their gifting stock and ensuring that, you know, it's not just something that kind of falls on deaf ears, if you will.

Yeah. I think number one is purpose, right? Really connecting tothe purpose of what is investing all about, right? What am I doing? The second is about the markets, right? Because, and, and setting realistic expectations, because we know that stocks go up and down. And if a child sees a stock that went down, they may lose interest. So it's keeping them interested in teaching them about what's going on.In the world and then the values that you have about money and how is money related, right? And the values related to the stock itself and what you're trying to accomplish and why you think it's so important to have discussions and communication and why you care for them and why, um, leaving a legacy of positive financial.Management is so key.

Susan, thanks so much for taking the time here with us today. Really valuable insights and advice.Thank you.Coming up, could Samsung's new smartphone finally win over Apple devotees? We're breaking it down after the break.The Biden era ban on junk fees took effect this week, and with it comes some big changes to purchasing your next concert ticket. Ticketmaster says it will start displaying the full price of a ticket to customers online. No more hidden fees that are only disclosed at the checkout last minute. The company says it will also give real-time updates to customers with a more than 30 minute wait time.The company will also continue to crack down on bots that buy mass quantities of tickets for resale in the blink of an eye. Ticketmaster says it blocks an average of 200 million attempts every day.The junk fee rule was announced back in December. It requires that hotels, rental platforms, and live event promoters include and disclose all fees in their initial pricing. Ticketmaster was supportive of the rule when it was announced but has still faced scrutiny from the government. Last year, the Department of Justice launched an antitrust lawsuit against Ticketmaster and Live Nation.The DOJ accused the two platforms of running an illegal monopoly to boost US ticket sales. That suit is still ongoing.Well, it's time now for tech support, our weekly deep dive into all things technology. Samsung's Galaxy S25 Edge is its thinnest smartphone ever, and it's available for pre-order now. Yahoo Finance tech editor Dan Halley got the chance to check it out in person. Uh, Dan, I can just imagine myself sitting on this and it immediately just disintegrating or cracking, but what do consumers need to know? And is this a shot at Apple?Of the so-called iPhone Air.

Yeah, absolutely a shot at Apple. It's, it's interesting. These companies always know what the other one's doing. So obviously they're, you know, developing this in tandem. Samsung says they learned a lot from their foldables to manage to get these phones so thin. And as to whether it's sturdy, it's built with titanium. I got to hold it. It felt as sturdy as any other smartphone. Uh, granted, I only got to hold on to it for, you know, a couple of minutes here and there during, during my hand.On with it. Here's the baseline. It starts at 1099. So a premium phone, it slots in between Samsung's Galaxy S25 Plus and their S25 Ultra. It has a 6.7 inch AMOLED 2X display, basically just a very pretty display. Samsung is known for those, and two rear cameras. It's kind of a bummer because you're paying that $1099 and you would expect to get 3 cameras.This has a regular camera and an ultra wide rather than a telephoto. Samsung says they kind of get around that because the main camera offers up to 200 megapixels, and so they use AI technologies to get 2X optical like image quality, and then they can go up to 10X with the various AI zooms that they have there. But the big, the big deal here is obviously the size and so this comes in at just 0.22 inches thick. It is absolutely ridiculous.How thin this is when you hold it. Now compare that to an iPhone which comes in at 0.32 inches, so it's about 1/10 of an inch thinner than the iPhone and then slightly thinner than the the S25 Plus and Ultra. That's uh 0.28 inches and 0.32 inches. Now, OK, that sounds like nothing on paper, right? You're like, alright, well why, why do I care about 1/10 of an inch here and there? But truly when you hold it, I mean, I thought the same thing. I was like, well this is just, you know, we we.Talking about next to nothing, but it really does make a difference when you're holding onto it. You can reach a little bit more across the screen because it's not as thick. It just feels overall like a more premium device. And also because it's so thin, it's also incredibly lightweight. And so the edge weighs just 5.7 ounces. That's less than the iPhone 16 Pro or Pro Max. The 16 Pro is 7 ounces. The Pro Max is 7.9 ounces. Again, sounds like next to nothing on paper, but in reality it.Does make quite a difference. And you know, you're holding this thing and the whole time I'm using it I'm like, I just chuck this at a wall and get it to stick like a ninja star because it's so thin or you know, can I whip it like a frisbee? Samsung's PR team not excited about that idea, so I did not do that. But you know, when you're holding this with with your iPhone, your iPhone 16 Pro, it it does feel chunkier now, you know, I mean, it's, it's something where you're, you're holding on to this device, you have this lighter one, you're sliding into your pocket, you're, you know, you're, you're typing on it. It just doesn't feel as bulky now.The the trade off, as I said, you don't get that that camera. They also had to lower the, uh, battery size. They say that they use uh different functionalities, uh, uh, some forms of, uh, heat dissipation, uh, and, uh, uh, their chip allows them to ensure that the battery life is still there, that you'll get all the battery life, but you know, overall the people want a thinner phone.Yeah, I mean, people want physical changes to their phones. They don't really care that much about software, so something like this, I think will sell 1099 though it's still kind of up there in price. All right,

soundslike OtterBoxx is about to make a lot of money here. Dan, thanks so much, appreciate it.Americans plan to spend a record breaking $226.6 billion on vacations this summer, according to a new survey from Allianz Partners. That is up a little more than 2% from last year. And despite weakening consumer sentiment across the US, the majority of Americans are optimistic about.Taking a vacation here to dig into the numbers we've got Emily Hartman, Allianz's partners, USA general manager for North America vacation all we ever wanted vacation got to get away and people are gonna be spending more, but how are they being strategic about this from what we're gathering thus far, Emily?

Hi Brad, thank you. It's great to be here. Yes, uh, I was, I was excited to see the results this year, knowing that there was going to be, uh, potential some economic concerns weighing on Americans' minds, but excited to see that there is vacation resiliency and that, uh.Americans are still planning to go on vacation even more than ever before.

And so how are families, households evaluating affordability even of the destinations that they're kind of targeting and how they're planning to get to those destinations?

Yeah, so, uh, you know, one of the trends we did find within the survey results is that uh microcations are on the rise. So these are the shorter vacations, uh, that are up to 4 days, 1 or 2 nights being the, the most common.Um, and in this case too, we actually see, which I think is very interesting, that um, the highest spend per night is in the shortest travel. So Americans who are choosing or prioritizing travel are also prioritizing at times the shorter trips so that they can have more luxury on their trip in a shorter amount of time. We also see many American.

Yeah, I'm sorry, do continue.

Yeah, as I say, we also see many Americans taking advantage of leisure. Um, I'm not sure how many of your, your viewers are familiar with the term, but, uh, uh, leisure, uh, and business. And so while you might be already having to travel for business, being able to tack on that leisure trip, uh, to it as well, uh, sometimes also becoming part of that microcation where you're, you're going to a destination and.You might stay for an extra long weekend to be able to enjoy the the location while you were there. And I can, can personally attest that I, I'm one of those that falls in that category as well.

Wow, OK. All right. So, and yes, as, as a person who has written a few stories both for the accommodation side and how that had been benefiting or Bleacher had been benefiting accommodations.For some of the longer term stays and even for the airline side, I can attest that Bleacher, it seems like post pandemic, it's a trend that's around and something here to stay. So for the companies that are the biggest beneficiaries of Bleacher travelers, what are we kind of finding there? Who is this benefiting the most at the end of the day?

Um, that's a great question. I mean, honestly, I think I have to say it's benefiting the consumer. It's benefiting the traveler, being able to, uh, you know, take advantage of this opportunity where they're already in a location, uh, to be able to, to, you know, add on a little bit for their personal, personal experience, yes.I know that the hotels are benefiting. Um, airlines may have already had the, the flight going to have it regardless because of the, the business travel, uh, but ultimately I think it's the consumer who's choosing to prioritize a vacation despite probably some some financial constraints and economic concerns.

Emily, thanks so much for taking the time here with us today. Some really fascinating figures you and the team have been able to discover and unearth for us as well here. Thanks so much.

Thank you appreciate it.

Let's do a final check of the markets here. We're taking a look at the sector activity that's transpiring right now. Consumer discretionary is actually leading the pack, jostling a little bit with technology, which has been leading for the majority of the day, but consumer discretionary up by about 7%. You've got communication services also up 4%, and technology is still holding on to those gains, pulling up the caboosto still right now looking at some declines for health care. That's down by about 1.5%. XLV is here on the day, taking a look at the.Nasdaq 100 to see how those mega cap tech stocks are faring. As of right now you're seeing a little bit of a pullback on Apple. It's been hyper oscillating waffling on this Wednesday, if you want to call it that. It's down by about 2.2%. We'll round that off to right now. Amazon also down by about 2, 30%. However, you're going to move higher and Google by about 3.84%. We'll round that off to Alphabet catching a bid. Nvidia, same case there. That's up by about 3.2%. And then just lastly, let's take a look at some of the Dow.30 components here. I'll put this on an equal view just so we can see and get a gauge of how split things are. It looks like there's more laggards than gainers here. Nvidia the leader followed by Boeing. However, bringing up caboose here, Amgen, that's down by about 2.5%. Also Merck not looking too hot there. It's down by about 2.3%. That's it for wealth, everyone. I'm Brad Smith. Thank you for watching. You can stay tuned for market domination that comes your way at 3 p.m. Eastern time. They'll count you down to and through the market close.