Author: Money Mechanics

Microsoft’s selloff reflects macro pressures, while underlying cloud and AI businesses remain fundamentally strong. Hawkish Fed expectations and heavy AI spending have compressed Microsoft’s valuation despite solid growth. Analysts and valuation models suggest meaningful long-term upside, viewing the decline as a buying opportunity. Microsoft (NASDAQ:) has had a brutal 2026. The stock fell nearly 18% in June alone — its worst single month since December 2000, wiping hundreds of billions of dollars off its market capitalization and pulling the company’s total valuation down to roughly $2.74 trillion.  Shares are now trading close to 33% below their all-time high of $555.45, and…

WhatsApp this week started rolling out username reservations ahead of the broader launch planned later this year. The feature — which lets people find and message each other by handle instead of phone number — is already raising impersonation concerns, drawing scrutiny from security experts and regulators in India, the app’s largest market, with more than 500 million users. The rollout marks a shift in how people identify one another on WhatsApp. Instead of relying on phone numbers as the primary identifier, users will increasingly interact through platform-managed usernames, a change that Meta says improves privacy but that critics argue…

(By Oil & Gas 360) – Oil fields can be bombed. Refineries can be repaired. Pipelines can be rerouted. The Strait of Hormuz is different. For decades, analysts have viewed Hormuz primarily as the world’s most important oil chokepoint, carrying roughly one-fifth of global oil trade and a significant share of liquefied natural gas exports. But recent events suggest Tehran views the waterway as something much larger. It is not simply a shipping lane. It is Iran’s most valuable geopolitical asset. That helps explain why Iran continues insisting on maintaining authority over the Strait, even as negotiations with the United…

Stocks struggled to get off the ground Wednesday as volume thinned out ahead of the long holiday weekend. As a reminder, the bond markets will close early tomorrow for the Fourth of July, and both the stock and bond markets will be closed on Friday.At the close, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 0.03% at 52,305, and the S&P 500 was 0.2% lower at 7,483.The Nasdaq Composite, meanwhile, slumped 0.7% to 26,040 as investors continued to take profits on several red-hot memory chip stocks. Micron Technology (MU), for one, slumped 10.6% but remains up nearly fourfold for the year…

To see our latest updates on the Nancy Guthrie case, please click here.The FBI has concluded that all three ransom notes sent after the abduction of Savannah Guthrie’s mother, Nancy Guthrie, were fraudulent, according to a new report. Multiple ransom notes were sent to various news outlets in the days after the 84-year-old vanished from her Arizona home—and recent reports revealed that the second note had included a claim that Nancy had died shortly after she was kidnapped.Now, nearly five months after the first of the notes was sent, federal investigators—who asked that their identities be kept hidden—have told Reuters that the…

Raising financially responsible children means integrating financial education as early as possible.From helping them save money in their piggy bank in the early years to budgeting larger purchases as they grow older, parents are integral to their children’s financial success.Still, saving for them continues to prove challenging. The cost to raise a child in the United States from birth to age 18 now averages more than $300,000 and is expected to increase. From just $107.88 $24.99 for Kiplinger Personal Finance Become a smarter, better informed investor. Subscribe from just $107.88 $24.99, plus get up to 4 Special Issues CLICK FOR…

Happy Bobby Bonilla Day! For years, I’ve watched memes pop up across social media every July 1. Baseball fans celebrate the day as a reminder that former New York Mets player Bobby Bonilla is still collecting a paycheck decades after playing his last Major League game. It’s become one of sports’ favorite annual traditions, often accompanied by jokes about the contract that just won’t end.But here’s the thing: Bobby Bonilla Day isn’t really about baseball. It’s about money.Few of us will ever negotiate a multimillion-dollar deferred compensation deal, but the idea behind Bonilla’s annual paycheck is surprisingly familiar. Whether retirement…

Some forms of retail work better in a brick-and-mortar store than they do online. Clothing and footwear, for example, benefits from the ability to try the items on. Even people who wear the same size across multiple brands sometime put on an outfit, a pair of sneakers, or some fancy shoes only to find that they don’t fit right. The internet shines, however, on items that don’t need to be held, touched, or tried on. That has made some retailers more vulnerable than others. Office supply chains, which includes Office Depot and Staples, have been in a slow, steady decline.…

Once again the focus seems to be on the talk between Iran and the US which may or may not be face to face but there’s also rumors of some Iranian Revolutionary Guard generals getting murdered, which is kind of an interesting development — most notably, reports that the IRGC’s naval commander overseeing the Strait of Hormuz died in what Tehran is calling a ‘car crash,’ though speculation is swirling that it was actually a targeted hit (widely suspected to be Mossad) aimed at decapitating Iran’s Gulf command structure. If that’s what actually happened, it raises the stakes on the…

Companies added slightly fewer workers than expected in June, with hiring targeted heavily toward healthcare-related sectors, ADP reported Wednesday.Private sector employment grew by a seasonally adjusted 98,000 for the month, down from an unrevised 122,000 in May and a bit below the Dow Jones consensus forecast for 110,000, the payrolls processing firm reported.The ADP report serves as a precursor to the more widely watched nonfarm payrolls count due Thursday from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. ADP’s count in recent months has generally undershot the official government report, which has shown mostly solid job creation this year.Nearly half the growth in…