Finance

Long-time market bull David Zervos is worried the Federal Reserve is overlooking how the artificial intelligence boom will impact the jobs market.
“We could actually have a pretty strong growth economy. Your AI story… [is] something really pretty spectacular. But the job growth side of it is not nearly as comfortable as you would like it to be,” he told CNBC’s “Fast Money” this week. “That’s a dilemma for the Fed.”

Zervos, a CNBC contributor, alluded to the central bank’s full employment and price stability mandate.
“Imagine a world maybe where we’re [the economy] growing at three and a half or four [percent.] Things are really good, but the unemployment rate keeps ticking up,” he said.
Zervos, who has been considered one of the potential candidates to ultimately replace Fed Chair Jerome Powell, contends the central bank should be more focused on the labor market right now than inflation.
“The smartest AI guys I know, the guys who have made the money in the largest amounts, and you know them. You have them on these shows. They’ve been saying for a while [that] they’re early in all the stocks,” he said. “These are the people that are telling me in meetings we’re going to lose three to five million jobs in the next three to four years. Maybe even faster.”

Join us on Thursday, December 11th for a front-row seat to the ultimate holiday trading experience with Melissa Lee and the “Fast Money” traders, live from the Nasdaq Marketplace. Get your tickets now: cnbcevents.com/fastmoneylive

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It’s a partnership designed to give retail investors more access to a rapidly expanding asset class: Private credit.
Simplify Asset Management and VettaFi launched the actively managed Simplify VettaFi Private Credit Strategy ETF (PCR) on Wednesday.

“The role of private credit in the portfolio is something that has historically only been available to very high-net investors and institutional investors,” Simplify Managing Director Paisley Nardini told CNBC’s “ETF Edge” this week.
According to Nardini, the new ETF’s strategy is unique because it’s not going to be the traditional private credit that includes lockups and high fees.
“This is an efficient liquid vehicle that’s going to provide indirect exposure to the BDCs [business development companies] or the closed-end funds that are investing in these companies,” she said. “You can get access to a direct, liquid play on private credit through an ETF like PCR.”
Nardini points to the private credit boom as a catalyst for the decision to team up with VettaFi. She contends the asset class’ ability to provide an income stream can be a valuable tool for retail investors, too.
“One of the main benefits and reasons we’ve seen this rush… is that it can provide low to even high, double-digit type income and distribution yield,” Nardini added.

The Simplify VettaFi Private Credit Strategy ETF is based on an index developed by VettaFi.
“There’s a quality and a liquidity screen that’s part of this process. So, we’re continuing to call the universe and make sure that it’s appropriate, and it’s accessible for investors,” said Todd Rosenbluth, the firm’s head of research, said in the same interview.
And he anticipates the new offering will grab investors’ attention.

Private credit vs. bitcoin

“We recently at VettaFi did a survey for advisors as to how they were looking to diversify their portfolio, and what was compelling to me was more people chose private credit than digital assets,” Rosenbluth said. “So, more people were interested in getting exposure to the ETF wrapper through something that is very hard to find right now as opposed to bitcoin.”
He views private credit a portfolio diversifier — suggesting an allocation of 5% to 10%.
As of Friday’s close, the Simplify VettaFi Private Credit Strategy ETF is virtually flat since its Wednesday debut.

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Investor interest continues to increase for portfolio diversification beyond stocks and bonds, with gold hitting new record prices and bitcoin adoption growing.
As the Fed begins what could be a longer rate-cutting cycle, investing in these alternatives without sacrificing yield has become more important.
Wall Street and fund managers, most recently BlackRock, are responding with covered call strategies in the precious metals and crypto categories, but experts warn these income overlays limit upside return and require a tradeoff with traditional safe-haven benefits.

Gold keeps trading up to new record high prices. Bitcoin, while struggling to break out above recent record levels above $100,000, continues to find more mainstream adoption. But both the classic market safe-haven and its more risky new crypto rival are doing something other than just move up and to the right on the chart for investors: within some exchange-traded funds, they are also generating income.
Investors want exposure to alternative assets that do not move in lockstep with stocks and bonds. That comes at a time when stocks are also at record prices, and returns are concentrated in a handful of mega-cap tech stocks that now represents roughly 40% of the S&P 500. Bonds, meanwhile, have traded with greater volatility than their historical role in a classic 60-40 portfolio would suggest, and that has left investors less comfortable with fixed-income as a traditional component of portfolio diversification strategy.

Even with less confidence in bonds, investors still want the steady income distributions associated with fixed-income. Attaching income overlays to non-yielding alternative such as gold and bitcoin is one way to satisfy these investor demands.
“If your goal is to provide a hedge against volatility in the equity and bond market, then gold can provide a bit of a safe haven. If you’re looking for reward opportunities, bitcoin has been very rewarding,” said Todd Rosenbluth, VettaFi’s head of research, on CNBC’s “ETF Edge.”
“If you’re looking for diverse ways to get income, then these covered call strategies that are here have become increasingly popular,” he added.
The latest sign that Wall Street thinks this approach can work came this week, when the world’s largest asset manager, BlackRock, also the biggest ETF company through its iShares family, filed for a bitcoin premium income ETF.
Simplify Asset Management was one of the first to test this approach. Its Simplify Gold Strategy Plus Income ETF (YGLD) and Simplify Bitcoin Strategy PLUS Income ETF (MAXI) give exposure to gold or bitcoin futures and add an options strategy on top to generate income.

“For clients who are funding this from a bond portfolio, they don’t have to sacrifice on that income potential,” Paisley Nardini, managing director and head of multi-asset solutions at Simplify, said on “ETF Edge.”

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Performance of gold and bitcoin in 2025.

Some financial advisors have made the case that as the 60-40 portfolio fails to provide investors what it had in previous decades, larger allocations will be going to cryptocurrencies.
In terms of investor adoption, these ETFs remain relatively small. And compared to the traditional exposure to these alternatives, it’s not even close.
The Simplify Bitcoin Strategy PLUS Income ETF has a little over $51 million in assets under management, according to VettaFi. The iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF (IBIT), which is its largest holding (about 83% of the fund), has roughly $85 billion in assets.
YGLD has approximately $44 million in assets, according to VettaFi. Traditional gold ETFs remain far larger. SPDR Gold Trust (GLD), for example, has approximately $120 billion in assets under management, according to VettaFi, while SPDR Gold Mini Shares Trust manages over $20 billion in assets.
NEOS Investments’ NEOS Gold High Income ETF (IAUI) also aims to offer monthly income by combining exposure to gold with enhanced returns from selling covered call options. IAUI has assets of over $115 million, according to VettaFi.
Performance- and yield-wise, the gold and bitcoin income ETFs diverge. Simplify’s bitcoin income fund, MAXI, has posted a year-to-date return of 12%, versus 17% for the iShares core bitcoin ETF, IBIT, according to ETFAction.com data. But it has generated a trailing 12-month yield of over 43%. The Simplify gold income fund, YGLD, has a year-to-date return of 69%, versus roughly 42% for the SPDR GLD ETF. Its trailing 12-month yield is right around 5%.
Still, Rosenbluth said the approach is an indication that investors are rethinking portfolio construction. BlackRock’s decision to offer an ETF in the bitcoin income space will only serve to further confirm there is interest in the market in finding new ways to invest in these alternatives.
Gold has long been treated as a safe haven while bitcoin has been used as a risky diversifier. Adding income overlays changes those roles, Rosenbluth said, but caters to the growing demand. The income overlay can blunt performance qualities that make gold attractive, and cap the return upside that draws investors to bitcoin. However, Rosenbluth said it may appeal to some investors, particularly retail investors seeking high yields.
“When you see a high level of income kicking off a strategy, that’s what captures investors attention, especially at the retail level,” Nardini said on “ETF Edge.”
The income approach, using covered call options, has exploded in popularity in the ETF space outside the gold and bitcoin context, with equity income funds like JPMorgan’s JEPI leading a new approach to stock investing, while other new ETFs are combining exposure to a select group of stocks, such as Warren Buffett’s picks, with an income payment, or the portfolio of Bill Ackman with a similar income component.
Rosenbluth added that bringing these strategies into an ETF structure reflects the growing adoption of ETFs as a go-to approach to market exposures. “I think there’s just an ease of use. It’s a more efficient way of accessing the market and using ETFs as the vehicle to do so,” Rosenbluth said. More

Chinese stocks, once deemed univestable by many, are luring both local and foreign investors impressed by recent returns.
The Shanghai Composite hit a decade high earlier this month.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index is also up 30% in 2025, on pace for its biggest annual advance since 2017.

When Hou Yujie isn’t convincing customers to rent traditional Chinese clothing for photos at the country’s famous Forbidden City, she and her friends are checking stocks.
Hou recently put 10% of her money in the market. In just a few days, she earned one month’s salary — and she’s thrilled. 

“Interest rates for bank deposits are so low I don’t even want to bother,” Hou said at her shop outside the Beijing tourist site. “Stocks are a hot topic right now.”
Chinese stocks, once deemed univestable by many, are luring both local and foreign investors impressed by recent returns. The Shanghai Composite hit a decade high earlier this month. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index is also up 30% in 2025, on pace for its biggest annual advance since 2017 — when it soared nearly 36%.

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Shanghai Composite since 2015

Government signals are encouraging investors to jump in.  
“There is a change of policy intention because of the deflationary pressure is getting more and more prominent,” said Hao Hong, CIO at Lotus Asset Management. “The policymakers felt that they need to do something to refocus the government work on economic growth rather than minimize risk.”
Chinese investors date the start of the rally, nicknamed the “9.24 performance,” to Sept. 24, 2024 — when the country’s central bank governor and other top financial chiefs held a rare coordinated press briefing, announcing measures to support the economy and the stock market.

The authorities held a similar media briefing Monday, declaring China’s capital markets are expanding their “circle of friends” thanks to renewed interest by overseas investors.
For the first time in four years, Cathie Wood’s Ark Investment Management funds reopened positions this week in Alibaba, according to a daily trading report.
The government is also trying to push in more institutional money to make Chinese markets a store of wealth like U.S. stocks. Regulators have mandated insurers and state mutual funds– traditionally on the sidelines— to increase their holdings of equities.
Not only are Chinese retail investors taking cues from the government. They also have few other investment options.

Chinese stock investor Hou Yujie at her store renting traditional Chinese clothes near the Forbidden City in Beijing. September 18, 2025.

Retail investor push

After a massive stock crash a decade ago, ordinary Chinese citizens have generally been wary of putting money in the stock market because they have been burned. But with the property sector in a protracted slump and restrictions on investments outside the country still tight, more are looking at the stock market again. Easing tensions in the U.S.-China trade war and Chinese progress in AI and chips have also boosted sentiment.
“AI and drones have been developing fast in China. I hear there is great potential for those stocks,” Hou said.
But transforming the mindset of everyday Chinese still could take a while.
“Many of the retail investors still believe that it’s a gamble. It’s a casino. No one believes that it’s a long term investment. It’s very different from the U.S.,” Hong said.
Unlike in the U.S. where retail investors account for about 20% of trade, China’s average investors drive 90% of daily trading, according to HSBC data.
That means the Chinese stock boom could quickly turn to bust.
“As soon as I hear or sense the market going down, I’ll grab my money and run for my life,” Hou laughed.
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London-based payments platform Checkout.com says it’s launching a share buyback program for employees at a $12 billion valuation.
The internal valuation represents a significant decline from the $40 billion assigned to Checkout.com in a 2022 funding round.
Several other fintech firms have opted to allow employees to sell shares instead of going public, including Stripe and Revolut.

Guillaume Pousaz, CEO and founder of payment platform Checkout.com, speaking at the annual Web Summit technology conference in Lisbon, Portugal, in 2022.
Horacio Villalobos | Getty Images

LONDON — Fintech unicorn Checkout.com is giving staff a way of cashing in their shares: buying them out.
The London-headquartered payments platform said Friday that it plans to launch a share buyback initiative for employees to “provide them with a path to liquidity.”

The share buyback program is based on a new internal valuation of $12 billion, Checkout.com said. Although internal, the valuation marks a significant drop from its last fundraising round — Checkout.com was valued at $40 billion in a $1 billion funding round in 2022.
The company previously lowered its internal valuation to $11 billion in 2022, and then again to $9.35 billion in 2023. Checkout.com says it regularly monitors the value for its employees in its share incentive program.
The fintech competes with payment service providers such as Stripe, Adyen and PayPal. The company processes billions of dollars in transactions every year for the likes of eBay, IKEA and Sainsbury’s.

Such share sales have proven an increasingly popular way for startups to offer longtime employees and other investors liquidity, particularly as tech companies stay private for longer amid a multi-year decline in initial public offerings.
Checkout.com says it is now on track to exceed a target of 30% core net revenue growth this year and is forecasting $300 billion in annual e-commerce payment volume.

“We are relentlessly focused on growth and innovation, particularly with the impact of AI and the expected rise of agentic commerce,” said Guillaume Pousaz, the company’s CEO and founder, in a press release.
Several other private fintechs have opted to allow employees to sell shares in recent months.
In February, Stripe announced a tender offer allowing early investors and employees to sell shares at a valuation of $91.5 billion. Revolut, meanwhile, earlier this month offered staff the chance to sell shares on the secondary market at a $75 billion valuation.
WATCH: CNBC and Statista name the top UK fintechs of 2025 More

FundSeeder is a platform founded by “Market Wizards” author Jack Schwager and Emanuel Balarie that searches for under-the-radar trading talent worldwide and provides them with capital to scale.
“There are lots of great traders globally that are completely unknown,” Schwager said.

Champpixs | Istock | Getty Images

Brian Lovern started his career pointing at storm systems on a green screen as a local TV weatherman in western Kentucky. More than two decades later, he was staring at natural-gas price charts, turning forecasts into profits, producing annual returns upwards of 100%.
Lovern, 49, had made the unusual jump from broadcast meteorology to Wall Street, working on weather desks at hedge funds and investment banks. But trading wasn’t part of the job.

“On the trade floors, in most cases, that’s not going to happen,” he said in an interview. “They kind of frown upon weather guys who trade.”
So in 2016, he started trading his own money. For four years, Lovern ran a strategy that combined his expertise in weather models with fundamentals like daily gas production and export flows. He scored his best year in 2018 with a 140% gain.
“It’s one thing to have the data and say, ‘this is what it shows.’ But interpreting it, and being able to make a good determination of how that data is going to change—that’s really where the money is,” he said.
His success didn’t go unnoticed. Lovern was identified as one of the top traders by FundSeeder, a platform founded by “Market Wizards” author Jack Schwager and Emanuel Balarie that searches for under-the-radar trading talent worldwide and provides them with capital to scale.
Finding ‘Wizards’
Schwager, a longtime trader in his own right and market historian best known for his “Market Wizards” book series, which profiled some of the most successful traders of the past half-century, including Paul Tudor Jones and Stanley Druckenmiller.

His books are required reading for many aspiring traders, making his endorsement a rare seal of legitimacy for investors outside Wall Street’s traditional pipelines.
“There are lots of great traders globally that are completely unknown,” Schwager said in an interview. “They don’t know anybody in the finance industry. They have no connections. They may be in an undeveloped or partially developed country, but they’ve been trading very successfully.”
Among the thousands of accounts FundSeeder has reviewed, Lovern stood out as one of the top performers. Earlier this year, the firm backed him with $3 million to scale his strategy. FundSeeder has also seeded a 35-year-old energy derivatives trader in the U.K., Adam Williams, with $10 million in March, and even funded a dentist in Europe who trades markets on the side.
Global casting call
FundSeeder is now expanding with the launch of the FundSeeder Accelerator, which aims to do for traders what Y Combinator did for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs: provide infrastructure, mentorship, and, crucially, capital to scale.
“It’s a global casting call for the next top fund manager,” Balarie, senior vice president of business development at RQSI, which bought FundSeeder last year. “We don’t believe that Wall Street as a monopoly on the best traders. The problem is not the lack of trading talent, but it’s really the barriers to entry that prohibits these traders.”
The financial backing could be critical for emerging managers who are trying to raise funds.
“There’s kind of a chicken and egg problem in hedge funds — you need money to raise money,” Williams said. “If we were to approach investors, let’s say we just started with $4 million, it will be significantly more difficult for people to write larger checks because they don’t want to be a certain percentage of the fund.”
Traders selected for FundSeeder Accelerator will present their strategies at an industry conference in Miami early 2026. More

The American Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO, and Reporters Without Borders are seeking board materials, communications and policies related to the suspension of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” 
The groups argue that the decision was driven by threats from federal regulators and broadcast affiliates, rather than a business calculation in shareholder interests.

JIMMY KIMMEL LIVE! “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” airs every weeknight at 11:35 p.m. ET and features a diverse lineup of guests that include celebrities, athletes, musical acts, comedians and human interest subjects, along with comedy bits and a house band.
Randy Holmes | Disney General Entertainment Content | Getty Images

A group of Disney investors is demanding access to company records, alleging that the entertainment giant’s handling of late-night host Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension reflected political pressures rather than the best interests of shareholders.
In a letter sent Wednesday to CEO Bob Iger, lawyers representing the American Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO, a federation of labor unions, and Reporters Without Borders said they are seeking board materials, communications and policies related to the suspension of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” 

The investor groups argue that the decision was driven by threats from federal regulators and broadcast affiliates, rather than a business calculation to benefit shareholders.
“Disney’s stock suffered significant declines in response to the abrupt suspension, which appeared to be in response to political threats,” the investors wrote in the letter, which was first reported by Semafor.
Disney shares fell 3.3% from Sept. 17, the day after Kimmel was suspended, through this past Monday. Kimmel was pulled from the air after his Sept. 15 monologue addressing the politicization of the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. The host returned to ABC on Tuesday, though affiliates representing about a quarter of U.S. households, including Nexstar and Sinclair stations, didn’t carry the program.

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Disney stock from 9/17

The investors seek board minutes, internal communications, affiliate agreements and analyses of the financial impact of the suspension.
“There is a credible basis to suspect that the Board and executives may have breached their fiduciary duties of loyalty, care, and good faith by placing improper political or affiliate considerations above the best interests of the Company and its stockholders,” the investors said in the letter.

One of the lawyers representing the investors is Roberta Kaplan, best known for winning writer E. Jean Carroll’s defamation case against Donald Trump.
“A bedrock of the United States and the key to our survival as the world’s oldest democracy is freedom of speech,” Kaplan said in a statement to CNBC. “The government cannot and should not threaten to punish someone simply because it does not like what they have to say. And while large media companies have been at the front lines, they too should not succumb to unconstitutional threats or blackmail.”
— CNBC’s Dan Mangan contributed reporting. More

Light, a Danish financial software startup, told CNBC it has raised $30 million in a Series A funding round led by Balderton Capital.
Founded in 2022, Light’s software uses artificial intelligence to automate businesses’ accounting, bookkeeping and financial reporting.
The startup recently opened an office in London and is planning to open one in New York to meet U.S. demand

Light uses artificial intelligence to automate companies’ finance and accounting functions.

Danish startup Light is the latest in a series of European tech firms raising cash as venture capitalists search for the next big thing in artificial intelligence.
Founded in 2022, Light develops software that uses AI to automate various functions that exist within businesses’ finance teams, including accounting, bookkeeping and financial reporting.

The Copenhagen-headquartered company told CNBC that it had raised $30 million in a Series A funding round led by Balderton Capital, an early investor in fintech unicorns Revolut and GoCardless.
Atomico, Cherry Ventures, Seedcamp and Entrée Capital also invested in the round, along with angel investors including Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf and Meta board member Charlie Songhurst.
Light plans to use the cash to “double down on the commercial side” of the business, Jonathan Sanders, Light’s CEO and co-founder, told CNBC. The startup recently opened an office in London and says it is planning to open one in New York to meet U.S. demand.

Light isn’t the only startup out there using AI to streamline companies’ finance and accounting processes.
Pigment, a business planning and forecasting platform designed to be more user-friendly than Microsoft Excel, last year raised $145 million at a valuation north of $1 billion. More recently, accounting software startup Pennylane raised 75 million euros ($88.4 million), doubling its valuation to 2 billion euros.

Currently, the market for software that helps companies manage their finances is dominated by industry behemoths like Microsoft, Oracle and SAP. However, these systems can often be cumbersome, requiring specialists to “tinker around the edges for a year or two just to make it work,” according to Sanders.
“We service fast-growing, fast-scaling companies who need a system where they can expand really fast,” Sanders told CNBC. Light’s customers include Lovable, the buzzy Swedish AI firm recently valued at $2 billion, and Sana Labs, which is being acquired by Workday for $1.1 billion.

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Sanders said AI can rapidly transform how companies handle their finances. “The future of numbers is text,” he says. For example, rather than sifting through company policies to find a team’s meal allowance, this can be automated by an AI agent that has access to the relevant documents.
Moving forward, Light wants to focus on large, enterprise-level customers that struggle with “broken processes and workflows,” according to Sanders. “No human team can continuously analyze, reconcile and update thousands of pages of policies for coherence,” he told CNBC.
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