IN 2020, ELECTRIC car maker Lucid Motors brought in revenue of $4 million. Five years later, sales had risen impressively, to more than $1 billion. In 2025 alone, sales grew 68%. That sounds like a success story, and through that lens, it is. And yet, over that same period, the company’s stock dropped more than 89%.
What happened?
A better question is: What didn’t happen? Despite growing sales, the company has struggled to turn a profit.

IT’S BEEN MORE than six years since Covid first entered our vocabulary. It goes without saying that investors have experienced a lot, and for better or worse, recent market events provide some useful lessons. The first has to do with the nature of the stock market.
What drives stock prices? Open a finance textbook, and the answer will be clear: The value of a stock should equal the sum of the company’s future profits.

RECENTLY, The Wall Street Journal ran a story about a new type of investment known as a digital stock token. For now, they aren’t available in the U.S., but they’re coming soon, so it’s worth taking a closer look.
What are stock tokens? At the most basic level, they’re a technology designed to make stock market investing quicker and easier than it is today. With tokens, trading won’t be limited to traditional business hours.

TAX EFFICIENT FUND placement is an often underrated topic. The goal of the tax efficient fund placement is to minimize taxes within your investments, and select the right account for those investments.

But how much does that actually matter?

Vanguard’s research finds that a thoughtful asset location strategy can add significantly more value than an equal location strategy. The value added typically ranges from 5 to 30 basis points of after-tax return, depending on circumstances (e.g.,

HAVE YOU GIVEN any thought to what’s about to happen to your S&P 500 tracker?
Three enormous IPOs are expected later this year: SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic. Based on their most recent private transactions, SpaceX appears to be valued at around $1.25 trillion, OpenAI at roughly $800 billion, and Anthropic at approximately $380 billion. Combined, we could be looking at close to $3 trillion in private market value that wants to go public. To put that in perspective,

IN AN INTERVIEW a little while back, the technology investor Peter Thiel drew an uncomfortable comparison. Today’s frenzy around artificial intelligence, he said, parallels the tech stock bubble of the 1990s. To illustrate his point, Thiel pointed to Amazon.
By any measure, it’s been an extraordinary success. But, Thiel points out, it hasn’t been a straight line. At one point early on, Amazon shares lost more than 90% of their value.
“My suspicion is that that’s roughly where we are in AI.

LAST WEEK THE government released its monthly employment figures for February. The results weren’t great. Payrolls declined, and unemployment ticked up. These numbers square with other downbeat data, including a recent uptick in bankruptcy filings.
Another worry: Oil prices have been rising, a result of the conflict in the Middle East. That’s a concern because it could lead to a reacceleration of inflation. It could also dampen consumer spending because higher gas prices act like a tax on consumers,

I’VE RECENTLY MADE the most significant change to my own portfolio in thirty five years. For the first time I’ve moved away from pure market-cap investing, tilting meaningfully toward Europe and Southeast Asia and bringing my US technology concentration down to around fifteen percent.
I’m retired. I don’t need to chase the outperformance that concentration might deliver, and I don’t need the potential volatility that comes with it. This is a personal position rather than any kind of recommendation;

BEFORE ITS FAILURE in 2008, Lehman Brothers had been one of the most prominent investment firms in the United States. After 158 years in business, what caused it to collapse so suddenly? In a word: complexity.
Lehman had been involved in the securitization of mortgages, a process that resulted in taking something relatively simple—a home mortgage—and turning it into something much more complicated, thus obscuring its true risk level. That was the proximate cause for the firm’s failure.

LAST YEAR, an unusual story made the news: The University of Chicago was reportedly looking to sell an entity known as the Center for Research in Security Prices (CRSP). The story came and went quietly, but it’s worth pausing to understand it.
CRSP’s origins date back to the 1960s. Its initial goal was to build a database of historical stock prices. This is harder than it might seem. Before trading was computerized, stock prices were maintained on paper.

OVER THE PAST YEAR, a new term has entered the lexicon: “Sell America.” The idea is that investors are losing confidence in the U.S. economy due to persistent deficits and concerns about other policy choices. Owing to these fears, some investors are pulling money out of U.S. stocks and reallocating to international markets. Others are opting for gold and silver. The result: In 2025, for the first time in a long time, international stocks demonstrably outpaced domestic equities,

WHAT’S THE BEST way to manage your investments?
A new book titled Your Perfect Portfolio helps answer this question. I spoke this week with the author, Cullen Roche.
Adam Grossman: The title is Your Perfect Portfolio with an emphasis on your. 
Cullen Roche: I was very intentional about saying “your perfect portfolio” because everyone’s different, everyone’s unique. So I wrote this book with the intent of studying lots of different strategies and styles.

Vanguard just announced that they cut expense ratios of many funds:
“Vanguard has lowered expense ratios for 84 mutual fund and exchange-traded share classes across 53 funds, amounting to nearly $250 million in fee reductions in 2026. ”
Some popular ones:
VBIL 0-3 Month Treasury Bill ETF from 0.07% to 0.06%
VIG Dividend ETF from 0.05% to 0.04%
VUG Growth ETF from 0.04% to 0.03%
VV Large Cap from 0.04% to 0.03%
VB Small Cap from 0.05% to 0.03%
Full list

LISTEN TO THE financial news, and you’ll often hear reference to “the VIX.” But what exactly is the VIX, and how important is it?
The VIX index is intended to be a measure of investor sentiment. For that reason, it’s often referred to as the market’s “fear gauge.” How can investor sentiment be measured? While the math is complex, it’s based on a straightforward principle: When investors get nervous, they look for ways to protect their portfolios and are sometimes even willing to pay for that protection.

IN THE EARLY 1950S, journalist Walter Winchell popularized the term “frienemies” when he used it to describe the fraying relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union. Today, we’re seeing a similar dynamic in our relationship with China. This makes it an important topic for investors. 
Not long ago, the relationship between the U.S. and China was strong and mutually beneficial. Over the past 25 years, trade between the two countries has multiplied.