Author: News Room

Closed-end funds (CEFs) are incredible wealth generators, combining huge (8%+, in many cases) dividends, with the potential for stock-like price gains. But to make the most of them, you need to look at one essential indicator: the discount to net asset value (NAV, or the value of the fund’s underlying portfolio). We don’t have to go too far into the weeds here: it’s just another way of saying that CEFs can, and often do, trade for less than their portfolios are actually worth. That makes our approach straightforward: Buy when a CEF trades at an unusually deep discount—then ride along…

Whenever I walk down the street, I can’t help thinking of René Barjavel, a science fiction writer, who when asked (in 1947) to imagine what the future might look like conceived of a vision (then made into a short film ‘La Télévision, l’oeil de demain’) where human life was dominated and disrupted by handheld ‘television’ devices, to the extent that people walked through streets bumping into each other as they watched their screens. The guiding thesis of Barjavel’s work related to the undermining of civilisation by technology, something that is now becoming more apparent as a widespread trend. We are…

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his fiancée Lauren Sánchez are awarding $50 million each to Bill McRaven, a retired Navy admiral and former chancellor of the University of Texas System, and actor and entrepreneur Eva Longoria as part of Bezos’ annual prize to individuals who make significant contributions to society. The annual Bezos Courage and Civility Award has been handed out since 2021 and is given to people who try to find solutions to complicated problems, attempt to be uniters and embrace civility. The Amazon founder is the second richest person on the planet, behind only LVMH boss Bernard Arnault, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires…

In a tumultuous turn of events, the cryptocurrency market has been rattled by a sharp decline in Bitcoin prices. After a sustained period of remarkable gains and record highs, Bitcoin has plunged to a weekly low of $65,000, marking a significant setback for investors. At the time of writing, Bitcoin numbers were all painted in red, and trading at $65,710, losing value in the 24-hour and weekly timeframes by 5.6% and 4.5%, respectively, according to data from Coingecko. A few days after its previous low of $68,000, Bitcoin plummeted to its present level, a figure not seen in a week,…

Cetera Financial Group, a platform with $475 billion in assets under administration and $190 billion in assets under management, has approved four U.S. spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) for use in brokerage accounts on its platform. “We are prudently embracing bitcoin ETFs and we prioritized developing this important guidance to help our financial professionals implement these products in client portfolios,” said Cetera’s head of investment products. Cetera Approves 4 Spot Bitcoin ETFs Cetera Financial Group announced Thursday that it has introduced a new policy regarding the usage of spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in brokerage accounts. “The policy includes education…

Russian President Vladimir Putin has given a wide-ranging interview to the Russian press a few days ahead of the presidential election, which will see Putin elected to another six years in power — short of a miraculous change in the immediate course of Russian politics.In an interview with pro-Kremlin media published Tuesday, Putin laid out his vision for relations with the West, war and peace. Here are five comments he made ahead of the March 15-17 vote.1) Russia ‘technically’ ready for nuclear warPutin was again keen to point out that Russia is ready for a nuclear war on a technical…

Congress is running up on yet another critical government funding deadline on March 22, with one week to go before the potential, partial shutdown of several critical departments. Negotiators are still working furiously around the clock to finish their work on the remaining six bills. And so the federal government has once more begun the mandatory process of planning to bring the affected agencies’ nonessential functions to a halt one week from Friday. “One week prior to the expiration of appropriations bills, regardless of whether the enactment of appropriations appears imminent, OMB will communicate with agency senior officials to remind agencies of…

You might be able to save yourself tens of thousands of dollars by reshuffling positions between taxable and tax-sheltered accounts. By William Baldwin, Forbes Staff First decision for investors: allocation. What percentages of your net worth do you want in stocks, bonds, cash, exotic things? Second decision, following right behind: location. Where do you put this stuff? You have to determine which holdings go inside tax-sheltered accounts and which outside. If all of your investment money is in one place or the other, of course, there’s nothing to decide. But most savers nearing or in retirement have assets divided between…

A few weeks ago we wrote of the ‘Bubble Brewing’ in large US technology stocks. Since then some tech stocks like Tesla TSLA have struggled, but the leader in the ‘bubble’ pack Nvidia has powered on though it is becoming more volatile, such that on a given day it rises or falls by the same magnitude of the market capitalisation of well-known European firms like Volkswagen (Nvidia is worth over USD 2 trn, while Volkswagen is worth a paltry USD 65bn). The disparity in size between what many would consider a giant of European industry (Volkswagen employs 670,000 people half…

London — An Australian computer scientist who claims he invented bitcoin is not “Satoshi Nakamoto,” the pseudonymous inventor of the cryptocurrency, a judge at London’s High Court ruled on Thursday. Craig Wright has long claimed to have been the author of a 2008 white paper, the foundational text of bitcoin, published under the pseudonym. The Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA) took Wright to court to stop him suing bitcoin developers, asking for a ruling that Wright was not Satoshi. Judge James Mellor said at the end of closing arguments on Thursday that the evidence Wright was not Satoshi was “overwhelming.” “Dr Wright is not the author…