One of this year’s hottest investments? 2019 Toyota Corollas that smell like cigarettes. Kidding, but also not: just look at this chart of how rental companies Avis and Hertz have performed this year! The news yesterday that hedge fund Pentwater Capital has roughly tripled the size of its stake in Avis is giving its shares an extra boost, and as far as we know, they don’t have the AI vehicle scans that are causing Hertz customers to complain. 

The S&P 500 came tantalizingly close to both an intraday and closing record but ultimately got neither, closing up 0.8%. The Nasdaq 100 gained about 1% while the Russell 2000 bounced back with a strong 1.7% advance.

Both monetary and trade policy appear to be evolving in a favorable direction for stocks: traders are pricing in over 65 basis points of easing by the Federal Reserve through year-end (versus about 50 basis points for most of the past month or so), and the White House said its July 9 deadline before reciprocal tariffs would be ramped up wasn’t really a hard deadline.

Trivia time: Test your knowledge on our recent stories with the Snacks Seven Quiz. Here’s a sample question:

Tiny industrial robotics company Cyngn Inc. went parabolic on Thursday, at one point going up more than 300% until it was halted for volatility after trumpeting its relationship with the biggest publicly traded company in the world: AI juggernaut Nvidia. It managed to finish the day up 173%.

Interest was needless to say intense. Over 44 million shares changed hands less than 15 minutes into Thursday’s session. By the end of the day, $2.6 billion had changed hands. That was more volume than every other session in 2025 combined. Heck, it’s more than was traded in the past three years. 

How in the world isn’t some algorithm scraping all of Nvidia’s corporate sites for mentions of companies and taking positions in stocks that had no previously disclosed relationship with the semi designer giant? That developer blog was published on Tuesday.

Big Pharma has failed to develop a disease-modifying therapy for osteoarthritis (DMOAD). It’s an oversight that’s burdened patients with temporary, inefficient treatments and left 365M+ people suffering with knee OA pain globally. But Cytonics plans to change the status quo with their market disrupting products. 

They’ve already treated over 10,000 patients with their first-generation biologic therapy for osteoarthritis. Now, their next-gen drug, CYT-108, is preparing to enter Phase 2 trials — and may become the first disease-modifying therapy for osteoarthritis.

This is your chance to invest before Big Pharma catches on. No institutional gatekeeping. No market timing required. Just real science, real patients, and a $393 osteoarthritis billion market ripe for disruption.¹ Join 6,000+ early investors (across all offerings) before the window closes.²

Bank stocks are typically considered… boring. Though the financial sector unofficially kicks off each earnings season, with giants like JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and Citigroup among the first to report, they don’t tend to be the most exciting events. 

With the froth around AI, it’s a lot less fun to consider the effect of deregulation on financial institutions than it is to guess about when AI will be smarter than us. But if you’re like most investors, making money on your trades is pretty fun, and the S&P 500 subindex that tracks banks alone was up 32% over the last year. The sector as a whole tops our table showing how every S&P 500 sector has performed over the past 12 months.

JPMorgan, the largest US bank by assets, has rallied in part because it’s seen as a prime beneficiary of growing momentum to ease a post-financial-crisis rule that forced banks to operate with less borrowed money — i.e. more of their own capital. That’s helped the stock rise 47% over the past year, which has also seen Morgan Stanley up 45%, Goldman Sachs up 51%, and Wells Fargo up 40%. 

Those returns aren’t boring at all, and it’s a huge turnaround from earlier in the year when recession fears and tariff troubles sparked a sell-off. 

While the financial sector is the top performer of the S&P 500 Index as a whole, rising almost 25% in the last year, in terms of driving the index higher, the information technology sector is still the big dog. It has a 33% weighting in the index — thanks to the presence of market cap giants like Nvidia and Microsoft. And the top performer in the S&P 500 financial sector isn’t an old fussy bank at all, but a newcomer that just joined the index in May.

The increased competition on the corporate bitcoin treasury scene is nothing to worry about for bitcoin miner MARA Holdings, which is the world’s second-largest corporate bitcoin holder. Salman Khan, MARA’s CFO, told Sherwood News about what sets his company apart in the bitcoin landscape…

…and what he thinks about the “quantum threat.”