For Our Most Engaged Readers: This Week’s Top Stock Picks

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Tomorrow marks Bitcoin Pizza Day, the curious anniversary of the first recorded purchase made with bitcoin. On twenty two May twenty ten programmer Laszlo Hanyecz swapped what was then forty dollars worth of digital coins for two Papa John’s pizzas. He says he is still content with the trade. The rest of us glance at the present value of those coins and feel a mild stomach cramp.

While crypto fans prepare to toast their pizzas, equity markets have turned cold. The S and P and the Nasdaq each slipped four tenths of a percent, ending a string of steady gains. The Russell eked out a breath of green but risk was out of fashion everywhere else. Defensive corners such as consumer staples, utilities, and healthcare held up, while financial shares and shopper favourites sagged. Bond yields moved higher, a reminder that risk oƯ moods rarely travel in straight lines.

Away from screens and tickers a quieter contest is taking place on the nation’s snack shelves. Meat sticks, once the domain of road stops and wrestling posters, have turned into a three billion dollar habit. Brands won back shoppers by leaning into alt diets, cleaner labels, and simple packaging. The pivot worked. Better for you meat sticks rose fifty four percent year on year while every other meat snack category stayed flat. The lesson is as old as marketing. If you are going to sell salty protein in a tube, let buyers believe it is helping the gym clock rather than hindering it.

Property moves too, even when the ticker tape stays blank. Pacaso, a company built around co owned vacation homes, has reserved the symbol PCSO and talks openly about an eventual public oƯ ering. The venture has already cleared one billion dollars in luxury transactions, claims a gross profit that passed one hundred ten million since twenty twenty and counts SoftBank among its backers. Retail investors can still obtain shares directly through the company’s Regulation A round until twenty nine May. Full terms sit behind the oƯ er link if you choose to dig through the fine print.

Wall Street’s newest plaything is not a meme stock at all but UnitedHealth. A year after the shooting of its former chief executive the insurer’s shares have become the most argued over code on retail trading boards. Option volume jumped more than eightfold in the week ending nineteen May. Many buyers appear to be betting on a rebound for a business that once moved only when actuaries adjusted their spreadsheets. Volatility oƯ ers thrills and bruises in equal measure. Choose your seat accordingly.

Quantum computing rarely earns a footnote in a mainstream brief but D Wave broke through yesterday. The firm released its Advantage two system to customers as a cloud service. Shares leapt. D Wave sells time on these machines rather than the machines themselves, an approach closer to power utility contracts than to hardware retail. Watch the usage data rather than the product launch party.

If mid cap exposure sounds more tangible than qubits there is a reminder from State Street that four hundred mid sized companies live inside the original MDY exchange traded fund. Williams Sonoma and Chewy may not reinvent physics but they do ship products you can hold in one hand and that still counts for something.

Elsewhere Moderna won approval for its Covid shot in seniors and high risk patients, Lucid surprised with a sudden ten percent climb while it still lacks a permanent chief, and Warby Parker rallied on a new partnership with Google. Regeneron reached for gene data by buying a slice of twenty three and Me, Elon Musk insisted Tesla sales have already recovered despite evidence to the contrary, and Victoria’s Secret adopted a poison pill to keep an activist billionaire at bay. TariƯ s are already reshaping supply chains. Smartphone shipments from China fell seventy two percent last month.

That covers the present ground. If the tune of the market does not suit you today, perhaps the Jacksons’ musical lecture on tokens and rent will. A link waits here for anyone who wants to hear academic aliens sing about passive income.

Value lies where attention lingers. Choose your clicks wisely.