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The company speaks of headwinds, a polite term for the inevitable difficulties that attend any large undertaking. They report numbers – revenue, earnings per share – figures that dance on the page, attempting to distract from the underlying narrative. The year just passed was…adequate. Not disastrous, certainly, but not a triumph either. A lingering sense of something lost, perhaps, a former grandeur dimly recalled.

By the close of the day’s tradin’, Stride’s stock price was up more than 14%. A tidy sum, wouldn’t you say? Enough to buy a man a decent pair of boots, maybe even a small farm if he’s lucky and doesn’t spend it all on fancy notions.

The S&P 500 (^GSPC 0.01%) barely budged – a microscopic slip of 0.01% to 6,978. Talk about anticlimactic! The Nasdaq Composite (^IXIC +0.17%), however, managed a slightly more enthusiastic 0.17% climb to 23,857. Within the semiconductor arena, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD +0.28%) closed at $252.74 (up 0.28%) and Nvidia (NVDA +1.59%) finished at $191.52 (up 1.59%). But they were left in the dust by Intel’s rather spectacular rebound. It’s like watching a tortoise race a cheetah…and the cheetah tripped over a rogue ethernet cable.

Digging through the rubble, you find a few glimmers. Maybe. It’s a long shot, but a man can hope. Or at least, observe.

That date marks the full implementation of California’s Digital Financial Assets Law (DFAL). Now, laws are generally understood as attempts to impose order on chaos, but sometimes they feel more like attempts to catalogue the infinite possibilities of things going wrong. This particular law dictates that any entity “exchanging, storing, or transferring a digital financial asset” – which, let’s face it, is most of what Coinbase does – must either possess a license from the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation (DFPI) or cease operations within the state. It’s a bit like asking a fish to obtain a permit for swimming – perfectly logical, in a certain, deeply unsettling way.

According to a filing with the SEC – a government agency tasked with keeping track of these things, and doing a middlin’ job of it, if you ask me – PFG sold off all 62,410 shares of the Vanguard Malvern Funds – Core Plus Bond Fund (VPLS 0.03%) during the last quarter of 2025. Four and ninety-one hundred thousand dollars, gone like a puff of smoke. The fund itself reported a drop in value of the same amount, which is just a fancy way of saying money moved from one pocket to another. A perfectly ordinary occurrence, if you don’t dwell on the details.

The company’s premise – to organize the vast, chaotic ocean of digital data through its aiWARE operating system – is not entirely new. Many have attempted to impose order on the digital wilderness. But Veritone, at least for a time, seemed to offer a plausible method, a way to sift through the endless streams of text, audio, and video. The appeal, naturally, lay in the promise of efficiency, of extracting meaning from the noise. Though, one suspects, much of that meaning remains elusive, lost in the very data it seeks to categorize.

The early months were burdened by the specter of tariffs, a crude instrument wielded with a peculiar sort of enthusiasm. President Trump, a man of… decisive action, sought to reshape the economic landscape through levies. A blunt force, applied without subtlety. Now, Fluor, engaged primarily in domestic construction, might seem immune to such machinations. But the market, alas, is a web of interconnected anxieties. Increased material costs, imported necessities suddenly rendered more expensive… it was a contagion of rising prices, and Fluor, like a patient weakened by a hidden ailment, felt the chill.

There were, naturally, several factors at play. It wasn’t just luck, although a certain amount of serendipity is always welcome in the stock market. It’s a bit like making a decent cup of tea: you need the right ingredients, a bit of skill, and a healthy dose of not messing it up. And AbbVie, it seems, didn’t mess it up.