By 12:49 p.m. ET, the stock had risen by 15.7%, which is impressive until you consider that this is roughly equivalent to saying your pet hamster has learned to juggle chainsaws—it’s remarkable, yes, but also deeply unsettling and probably unsustainable.
Identifying a worthy vessel in this nascent field is akin to selecting a winning horse in a race populated entirely by unicorns. Fortunes will be made, and more likely, dissipated into the ether. However, one name keeps whispering through the corridors of research – a name burdened, as all promising ventures are, with the weight of expectation and the ever-present threat of oblivion: IonQ (IONQ). A pure-play, they call it. A rather dramatic designation, suggesting a company with nothing to fall back on but the unfathomable complexities of the quantum realm. A gambler’s paradise, surely.
I’m not much of a yield hunter, if I’m being honest. It all feels a little… passive. Like waiting for something good to happen *to* you, rather than actively making it so. Still, you can’t sneeze at a steady income stream. And my aunt Carol, who insists on printing out every stock ticker and taping it to her refrigerator, keeps asking. So, for Carol, and perhaps for anyone else secretly hoping to earn a little something without, you know, *effort*, here’s a glimpse at both.
Buffett’s been quietly dumping stocks like a teenager untagging themselves from a cringe family vacation photo. Eleven straight quarters of net selling? That’s not a streak—it’s a resignation letter to the entire concept of capitalism. And yet, here we are, acting shocked that the man who built his empire on “buy low, sell high” is suddenly all about the selling.
Dividend-paying stocks offer a stream of income, a trickle of resources against the potential flood. It’s not *getting* richer, precisely. It’s more…avoiding poorer at quite the same rate.1 And let’s be clear, it requires a modicum of faith. Faith that the company in question can actually *afford* to send you cheques, or these days, deposit a few coppers into your digital pouch. Here are three establishments warranting a closer look, as of this particular rotation of the celestial spheres.
Crypto treasuries, those modern-day alchemists, have turned Bitcoin into a corporate trophy. Strategy (NASDAQ: MSTR), once a name that evoked spreadsheets, now hoards 3% of Bitcoin’s supply. But the real spectacle lies in the copycats—pork processors turned Dogecoin barons, and dot-com survivors pivoting to NFTs with the urgency of a man fleeing a sinking ship. This is not fiscal prudence; it is the financial equivalent of a stampede of ostriches, heads buried in sand, hoping the ground won’t crack beneath them.
And get this: Exxon’s not just resting on its laurels. No, no. They’re positioning themselves to keep delivering these leading results, which makes them a pretty compelling oil stock to buy and hold for the long term. But let’s be honest, are we really surprised? This is Exxon we’re talking about. They’re like the guy who always wins at poker, even when you’re convinced you’ve got the better hand.
Wall Street. A colony of hyperactive squirrels. Short attention spans, easily distracted by the next shiny thing. This is exquisitely good news for those of us capable of remembering what day it is, let alone thinking in *decades*. General Mills, the silent overlord of breakfast cereals and processed everything, is experiencing a mild…malaise. Sales down 2% last quarter. Cue the panic. The vultures circling. Which, naturally, pumps the dividend yield to a screaming 4.8%. SWEET.
At $1.9 trillion, Meta’s ascent appears inevitable to the optimists. Its stock, they say, needs but a 53% rise—a mere stumble in Wall Street’s casino. The prophets chant of AI-driven ads converting clicks into gold, of virtual realms where avatars dance while flesh-and-blood laborers prop up the machine. But let us not mistake the map for the territory.
Valuations soar like kites untethered from earth, their strings cut by winds of speculative fervor. The Nasdaq Composite and the S&P 500, those twin towers of market triumph, have scaled heights that would make even the most ardent optimist pause. Is it still wise to entrust one’s capital to an exchange-traded fund (ETF) tracking the Nasdaq-100, or has this ascent become a perilous climb, demanding a retreat into safer havens?