Finance

Central bankers have avoided celebrations and declarations of victory. They know full well that consumers and firms, stung by the highest inflation since the 1970s, would not appreciate them. In private, though, many are elated. The sharpest rise in borrowing costs in decades, dubbed “the great tightening” by the IMF, appears to have worked better than anyone expected. Global inflation has retreated to more comfortable levels. Better still, this has been achieved without a sharp rise in joblessness or a recession. More

Central bankers have avoided celebrations and declarations of victory. They know full well that consumers and firms, stung by the highest inflation since the 1970s, would not appreciate them. In private, though, many are elated. The sharpest rise in borrowing costs in decades, dubbed “the great tightening” by the IMF, appears to have worked better than anyone expected. Global inflation has retreated to more comfortable levels. Better still, this has been achieved without a sharp rise in joblessness or a recession. More

Stock picking may be the key to getting exposure to small caps.
Rob Harvey, who’s behind the Dimensional U.S. Small Cap ETF, uses an actively managed approach to buying the group. He’s trying to avoid small caps that are underperforming and dragging down the index.

“There’s no reason to hold companies that really are scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of profitability,” the firm’s co-head of product specialists told CNBC’s “ETF Edge” this week. “You remove those from your small cap universe, [and] you can do a lot for boosting returns.”
The Russell 2000, which tracks small caps, is up more than 12% so far this year. Meanwhile, the broader S&P 500 is up about 23% in the same time frame.
As of Thursday, the fund’s top holdings were Sprouts Farmers Market, Abercrombie & Fitch, Fabrinet, according to the Dimensional Fund Advisors website. However, its top holding is cash and cash equivalents, which accounts for 1.13% of the fund.
Ben Slavin, who’s global head of ETFs for BNY Mellon notes investors are looking for more actively managed products to screen out small cap laggards.
“Investor sentiment has shifted towards small caps, and you see that in the numbers, in terms of where investors are putting their dollars, from a flow standpoint,” said Slavin. “These types of strategies are benefitting.”
As of Friday’s close, the Dimensional U.S. Small Cap ETF is underperforming the Russell 2000 by more than one percent this year.

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Earlier this year, cybersecurity firm Wiz rejected a $23-billion acquisition bid from Google.
Roy Reznik, Wiz’s co-founder and vice president of research and development, said the company has received some “very flattering” offers from investors.
“We’ve already broken a few records as a private company, and we believe we can also break a few more records as an independent public company as well,” Reznik said.
Wiz is hoping to achieve $1 billion in annual recurring revenue in 2025 — a key condition the company wants to meet before going public.

LONDON — Cybersecurity firm Wiz is seeking to hit $1 billion of annual recurring revenues next year, the company’s billionaire co-founder Roy Reznik told CNBC, adding that the firm will go public “when the stars align.”
Wiz makes software that connects to cloud storage providers like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure and scans for everything it stores in the cloud, helping organizations identify and remove risks in their cloud environments. It was founded by four Israeli friends while they served in 8200, the intelligence unit of Israel’s army, and most of Wiz’s engineering personnel are still based in Tel Aviv, Israel.

Earlier this year, the company rejected a $23-billion acquisition bid from Google, which would have marked the tech giant’s largest-ever takeover. At the time, Wiz CEO Assaf Rappaport said the startup was “flattered” by the offer, but would remain an independent company and aim to list instead.
Speaking with CNBC at Wiz’s new office space in London, Reznik said that the company has received offers from “many people that want to get their hands on Wiz stock” — but that, while “very flattering,” the firm still thinks it can do it alone by going public.
“We’ve already broken a few records as a private company, and we believe we can also break a few more records as an independent public company as well,” Reznik said.
Four-year-old Wiz has raised $1.9 billion in venture capital to date, including $1 billion secured this year in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Thrive Capital at a valuation of $12 billion.

In 2022, Wiz said it had reached $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), up from just $1 million in 18 months. At the time, the startup said it was “the fastest software company to achieve this feat.”

Reznik, who is the vice president of research and development at Wiz, said the firm now hopes to double from the $500 million of ARR it achieved this year and hit $1 billion in ARR in 2025, which CEO Rappaport cited as a key condition before the company goes public.

UK expansion

Wiz has been expanding its presence internationally, with a particular focus on Europe, from where it sources 35% of its revenues. Last month, the firm opened its first European office in London.

“I think the talent here is amazing, and the ecosystem is amazing,” Reznik told CNBC. “We have always been very much involved in Europe — and specifically the U.K. — and I feel like it’s a natural evolvement of Wiz to double down even more here in London and the U.K.”
The U.K. represents a major growth opportunity when it comes to cybersecurity, Reznik said, adding that recent events like the cyberattack on National Health Service hospitals and an incident affecting Transport for London have “roof topped” the level of interest in the kinds of products Wiz offers.
“The cloud market is going to reach $1 trillion over the next next few years,” Reznik, who moved from Israel to the U.K. just three months ago, told CNBC. “This year is going to be around $700 million, while security is just 4% out of that, I would say. So that makes it a $30 billion market, which is huge.”
Speaking about the U.K. market, Reznik said: “We see a lot of interest here. Many of the largest banks and retailers, are Wiz customers. But we’re also seeing a huge potential for growth.”
Wiz’s customers include online retailer ASOS and digital bank Revolut as customers in the U.K. More

ETF Strategist

Exchange-traded funds have become popular with investors, but haven’t gained much ground in workplace retirement plans.
Some of the key benefits of ETFs are irrelevant in a 401(k) context, experts said.
There are also some structural roadblocks, such as technology infrastructure and third-party fees, they said.

Momo Productions | Digitalvision | Getty Images

While many investors have flocked to exchange-traded funds, they haven’t gained much ground with 401(k) plan participants.
Exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, debuted in the early 1990s and have since captured about $10 trillion.

Mutual funds hold about $20 trillion, but ETFs have chipped away at their dominance: ETFs hold a 32% market share versus mutual fund assets, up from 14% a decade ago, according to Morningstar Direct data.
“ETFs are becoming the novel structure to be used in wealth-management-type accounts,” said David Blanchett, head of retirement research at PGIM, Prudential’s investment management arm.
However, that same zeal hasn’t been true for investors in workplace retirement plans, a huge pot of largely untapped potential for the ETF industry.

At the end of 2023, 401(k) plans held $7.4 trillion, according to the Investment Company Institute, or ICI, and had more than 70 million participants. Other 401(k)-type plans, such as those for workers in universities and local government, held an additional $3 trillion, ICI data shows.
But hardly any of those assets are in ETFs, experts said.

“There’s a lot of money [in workplace plans], and there’s going to be more,” said Philip Chao, a certified financial planner who consults with companies about their retirement plans.
“It’s the final frontier [for ETFs], in the sense of trying to capture the next big pool of money,” said Chao, the founder of Experiential Wealth, based in Cabin John, Maryland.
More from ETF Strategist:Warren Buffett’s S&P 500 bet paid offHow a tax increase may affect your brokerage accountWhat to do with RMDs when you don’t need the money
About 65% of 401(k) assets were invested in mutual funds at the end of 2023, according to ICI data. The group doesn’t report a corresponding statistic for ETFs.
A separate report from the Plan Sponsor Council of America, a trade group representing employers, suggests ETFs hold just a tiny fraction of the remaining share of 401(k) assets.
The PSCA report examines the relative popularity of investment structures, such as mutual funds and ETFs, across about 20 types of investment classes, from stock funds to bond and real estate funds, in 2022. The report found that 401(k) plans used ETFs most readily for sector and commodity funds — but even then, they did so just 3% of the time.

Key benefits are ‘irrelevant’

Mutual funds, collective investment trust funds and separately managed accounts held the lion’s share of the 401(k) assets across all investment categories, PSCA data shows.
Such investment vehicles perform the same basic function: They’re legal structures that pool investor money together.
However, there are some differences.
For example, ETFs have certain perks for investors relative to mutual funds, such as tax benefits and the ability to do intraday trading, experts said.
However, those benefits are “irrelevant” in 401(k) plans, Blanchett said.
The tax code already gives 401(k) accounts a preferential tax treatment, making an ETF advantage relative to capital gains tax a moot point, he said.
Blanchett said 401(k) plans are also long-term accounts in which frequent trading is generally not encouraged. Just 11% of 401(k) investors made a trade or exchange in their account in 2023, according to Vanguard data.

Additionally, in workplace retirement plans, there’s a decision-making layer between funds and investors: the employer.
Company officials choose what investment funds to offer their 401(k) participants — meaning investors who want ETFs may not have them available.
There may also be technological roadblocks to change, experts said.
The traditional infrastructure that underpins workplace retirement plans wasn’t designed to handle intraday trading, meaning it wasn’t built for ETFs, Mariah Marquardt, capital markets strategy and operations manager at Betterment for Work, wrote in a 2023 analysis. Orders by investors for mutual funds are only priced once a day, when the market closes.
There are also entrenched payment and distribution arrangements in mutual funds that ETFs can’t accommodate, experts said.
Mutual funds have many different share classes. Depending on the class, the total mutual fund fee an investor pays may include charges for many different players in the 401(k) ecosystem: the investment manager, plan administrator, financial advisor and other third parties, for example.
That net mutual fund fee gets divvied up and distributed to those various parties, but investors largely don’t see those line items on their account statements, Chao said.
Conversely, ETFs have just one share class. They don’t have the ability the bundle together those distribution fees, meaning investors’ expenses appear as multiple line items, Chao said.
“A lot of people like to have just one item,” Chao said. “You feel like you’re not paying any more fees.”
“It’s almost like ignorance is bliss,” he said. More

Robinhood Legend includes advanced charting tools for users.
The brokerage firm also said it will soon add futures trading and index options to its mobile platform.
The new additions for Robinhood are another example of the firm looking to expand beyond its roots as a convenient platform for small-dollar traders.

In this photo illustration, the Robinhood Markets, Inc. logo is displayed on a smartphone screen.
Rafael Henrique | Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

Retail brokerage firm Robinhood is launching a new tool for more sophisticated traders as it looks for additional avenues for growth.
The firm introduced Robinhood Legend, a desktop-based platform for active traders. The offering includes advanced charting tools for users who want to do detailed analysis of stocks.

“In looking at the landscape of trading tools and by talking with active traders, we realized there is frustration with legacy offerings,” Steve Quirk, chief brokerage officer at Robinhood, said in a press release.
“Specifically, moving back and forth between apps or charting platforms can be cumbersome and time consuming. So we set out to reimagine what a modern, intuitively designed active trading platform should look like, and built Robinhood Legend from the ground up so traders can do what they need in one place,” Quirk said.
Beyond the launch of Legend, Robinhood also said it will soon add futures trading and index options to its mobile platform. Customers must be granted approval to trade futures contracts, according to the press release, and futures and index options will eventually be added to Legend as well.
The new additions for Robinhood are another example of the firm looking to expand beyond its roots as a convenient platform for small-dollar traders. The firm’s rise coincided with the “meme stock” phenomenon in early 2021 as retail trading boomed in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic.

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Robinhood shares, all-time

Since then, Robinhood has been steadily adding new offerings, including a credit card for Robinhood Gold subscribers and a digital wallet to hold cryptocurrencies.

“We’ve done very well on mobile historically among younger people and folks that primarily invest and trade on mobile. But about half of the market is on desktop web, where you have more real estate on the screen, you can do more sophisticated things like have charts and data in the same interface. And so we weren’t really a player in that space,” Robinhood CEO and co-founder Vlad Tenev said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
Robinhood said that it had $139.7 billion in assets under custody at the end of the second quarter, along with 11.8 million monthly active users. For the comparable quarter in 2021, near the height of the GameStop mania, Robinhood reported $102 billion in assets but 21.3 million monthly active users. The firm’s next earnings report is scheduled for Oct. 30.
Shares of Robinhood are up more than 100% so far this year.
The announcements on Thursday were part of HOOD Summit, a conference for Robinhood’s customers. More

For American policy wonks, the final stretch of the presidential election has given rise to a new parlour game. What is the next tax that Donald Trump will promise to cut? The Republican candidate has trotted out a range of pledges, from no taxes on overtime work to no taxes on retirement benefits. Last week alone he proposed three new exemptions, including making interest on car loans tax-deductible. It is easy to figure out what Mr Trump hopes to gain. Yet the economic implications are dispiriting: not just a bigger fiscal deficit but a much messier tax code. More

In a war with Israel, Iran would need money. Not just to buy weapons and keep its economy afloat, but to re-arm militias such as Hamas and Hizbullah. Many assume that, after years of sanctions, it would struggle. They are wrong. Every year Iran funnels tens of billions of dollars from illicit oil sales to bank accounts all over the world. This huge, secret treasure was used to fund Hamas’s attack on Israel a year ago, swarms of Russian drones in Ukraine and Iran’s own nuclear programme. It has already seeded many crises—and could soon fuel the mother of them all. More