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A woman uses an umbrella to protect herself from the sun as she passes past the Colosseum during an intensely hot day in Rome, Italy, on July 11, 2024. Riccardo De Luca | Anadolu | Getty ImagesSummer trips to Europe are getting too hot for thousands of tourists.Delta Air Lines President Glen Hauenstein said travelers are opting out of flying to Europe during the traditional summer peak travel season. Instead, they are shifting trips to cooler months, a trend that airline officials have been noticing over the past couple of years as consumers look to escape crowds and record heat of popular destinations."The weather in Europe in August is really hot, and that people who have choices when they can take their vacations are moving into let's call it more temperate months," Hauenstein said Thur...

Interest rates are coming down, but investors can still find some solid opportunities for yield in the preferred securities market, according to UBS Financial Services. Preferred securities combine attributes of bonds and stocks. They trade publicly on exchanges but they also pay a quarterly stream of income. Issuing companies are often banks and utilities. Yields for these instruments can top 5%, and this income may be tax advantaged for investors. Generally, the coupons are taxed at the same rate as qualified dividends — that is, 0%, 15% or 20%, based on an investor's taxable income. Meanwhile, interest income from bonds is taxed as ordinary income, meaning it is subject to rates as high as 37%. Retail investors and preferreds The preferred securities sold to retail investors come at a f...

While "boring" bitcoin has been chopping sideways since March, bitcoin proxy MicroStrategy is trading at its highest level relative to the flagship crypto since 2019. Wolfe Research managing director Rob Ginsberg said he "loves [MicroStrategy's] chances to get out and continue climbing," but that the stock is overbought in the near term. He suggested a bitcoin hedge. MSTR BTC.CM= YTD mountain Bitcoin and MicroStrategy in 2024 "Lack of enthusiasm for the once high flying asset class is one of the factors that led us to maintain a more defensive, risk off bias of late," he said in a Wednesday note. "Many of the crypto related equities such as MARA , COIN , & RIOT have acted the same. That is beside one … as MSTR rallied back to the highs over the past few weeks." "On a relative basis vs....

Federal Reserve Board Chairman Jerome Powell holds a press conference following a two-day meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee on interest rate policy in Washington, U.S., September 18, 2024. REUTERS/Tom BrennerTom Brenner | ReutersFalling interest rates are usually good news for banks, especially when the cuts aren't a harbinger of recession.That's because lower rates will slow the migration of money that's happened over the past two years as customers shifted cash out of checking accounts and into higher-yielding options like CDs and money market funds.When the Federal Reserve cut its benchmark rate by half a percentage point last month, it signaled a turning point in its stewardship of the economy and telegraphed its intention to reduce rates by another 2 full percentage points,...

AMD launched a new artificial-intelligence chip on Thursday that is taking direct aim at Nvidia's data center graphics processors, known as GPUs.The Instinct MI325X, as the chip is called, will start production before the end of 2024, AMD said Thursday during an event announcing the new product. If AMD's AI chips are seen by developers and cloud giants as a close substitute for Nvidia's products, it could put pricing pressure on Nvidia, which has enjoyed roughly 75% gross margins while its GPUs have been in high demand over the past year.Advanced generative AI such as OpenAI's ChatGPT requires massive data centers full of GPUs in order to do the necessary processing, which has created demand for more companies to provide AI chips.In the past few years, Nvidia has dominated the majority of ...