Finance

It may be a strategic time to pivot away from this year’s Big Tech winners.
Bob Elliott, who runs Unlimited Funds, suggests building portfolios designed to withstand a slowing economy over the next six months should be a priority.

“You’re talking about positions long bonds, long gold and short the U.S. dollar,” the firm’s CEO and chief investment officer told “ETF Edge” this week. “That’s a very non-consensus view that is also favored by some of the smartest financial minds in the world [and] in the hedge fund community.”
Elliott’s firm Unlimited Funds uses proprietary technology to create accessible alternative investment strategies, including four Unlimited ETFs.
According to Elliott, stock and bond market investors are pricing in a near-perfect scenario over the short and medium term. He thinks President Donald Trump’s tariffs and an inflation acceleration could expose market vulnerabilities.
“Being able to flexibly respond to the policy environment as it evolves… is really important in terms of building a portfolio and getting away from the long-only mega cap tech stock mindset and get to something that’s flexible that can navigate through this sort of environment,” said Elliott.
Meanwhile, Strategas Securities’ Todd Sohn thinks underperformers have potential for upside as earnings season gets underway.

“The bar is so low for some of these defensive companies,” the firm’s technical strategist said in the same interview – noting it’s “basement bottom pickings.”
Sohn’s contrarian ideas include health care.
“There’s been a mass exodus of outflows from health care sector ETFs,” he said. “Folks are scared of the administration. I get that, but I wonder if you can start to nibble in certain areas.”

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Healthcare ETF

Bitcoin ‘here to stay’

Sohn also finds bitcoin an attractive play right now. The House of Representatives is looking at a series of bills tied to cryptocurrencies this week.
“We’re about three months off the S&P 500 low back on April 8. The leading category, I like to dig a little level deeper here, has been crypto. Investors are just latching on to this move in crypto,” he said. “I think investors are realizing it’s an asset that’s here to stay.”
After hitting an all-time high on Monday, bitcoin fell and was below $117,000 as of Tuesday evening.

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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang praised China’s AI models a day after the U.S. chipmaker said it expected to resume sales of a key product to China.
“More than 1.5 million developers in China build on Nvidia today to bring their innovations to life,” he said.
He was speaking Wednesday at the opening ceremony of a supply chain expo in Beijing and is scheduled to hold a press conference later in the day.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attends a roundtable discussion at the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris on June 11, 2025.
Sarah Meyssonnier | Reuters

BEIJING — Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang praised China’s generative artificial intelligence models, a day after the U.S. chipmaker said it expected to resume sales of a key AI chip to the country soon.
“Models like DeepSeek, Alibaba, Tencent, MiniMax, and Baidu Ernie bot are world class, developed here and shared openly [and] have spurred AI developments worldwide,” Huang said. He was speaking Wednesday at the opening ceremony of a supply chain expo in Beijing. He is scheduled to hold a press conference later in the day.

“More than 1.5 million developers in China build on Nvidia today to bring their innovations to life,” he said.
China-developed DeepSeek shocked global investors in January with an AI model that undercut OpenAI on development and operating costs. It’s not clear how DeepSeek managed to develop the model under broad U.S. chip restrictions on China, but the startup’s parent, High-Flyer, reportedly stockpiled Nvidia chips.
Nvidia on Tuesday said it expected to resume its H20 chip shipments to China soon following assurances from the U.S. government. The company was forced to halt the sales in April due to new U.S. requirements at the time.

U.S. chip restrictions nearly halved Nvidia’s share in China, Huang said in May. Due to the U.S. export controls on China, the company said it missed out on $2.5 billion in sales during the April quarter, and will likely take another $8 billion hit in the July quarter, pegging its quarterly sales at $45 billion.
Huang has warned that Chinese telecoms giant Huawei stands to benefit from U.S. AI chip curbs on exports to the Asian country.

Jensen is on his third trip to China this year, according to reports going back to January.
In the global race for AI, Chinese companies Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu have all rushed to release their own AI models despite limited access to training chips. OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot is also not officially available in China.

Praise for open-source approach

Huang on Wednesday also praised Chinese companies for taking an open-source approach to AI, meaning developers can access the underlying code for free. Notably OpenAI in the U.S. has not yet taken this approach. Alibaba-backed startup Moonshot last week released a new open source model called Kimi K2 that claims to beat OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude on certain coding metrics.
“China’s open-source AI is a catalyst for global progress, giving every country and industry a chance to join the AI revolution,” Huang said. He added that open-source technology is also “key” for AI safety and enables international cooperation on standards.
Huang also described how AI “powers” Chinese consumer tech such as Tencent’s WeChat social media app, Alibaba’s Taobao shopping app, ByteDance’s Douyin short-video app and Meituan’s “super convenient” delivery.
The latest U.S. government restrictions on Nvidia had followed tighter export controls over the last three years that prevent American companies from selling advanced semiconductors to China over concerns that the tech will support the development of Beijing’s defense sectors.
Huang has pushed back against concerns that China’s military would use U.S. technology, and emphasized global access was needed for the country to remain a world leader in AI, according to an interview with CNN that aired Sunday.
Following U.S.-China trade talks in London last month, the U.S. has started to ease some restrictions on high tech exports to China, while Beijing has resumed some issuance of licenses that allow its companies to export critically needed rare earths to the U.S.
– CNBC’s Dylan Butts contributed to this report. More

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon says he doesn’t get the appeal of stablecoins, but he also can’t afford to stay on the sidelines.
Last month, JPMorgan announced it will launch a more limited version of a stablecoin that only works for JPMorgan clients; a true stablecoin would presumably be more universally accepted.
“We’re going to be involved in both JPMorgan deposit coin and stablecoins to understand it, to be good at it,” Dimon said.
Citigroup and Bank of America executives have also said they would get involved.

Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, leaves the U.S. Capitol after a meeting with Republican members of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee on the issue of de-banking on Feb. 13, 2025.
Tom Williams | Cq-roll Call, Inc. | Getty Images

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon says he doesn’t get the appeal of stablecoins, but he also can’t afford to stay on the sidelines.
It’s the message Dimon gave Tuesday when asked during an earnings conference call about whether his company, the largest and most influential U.S. bank, was exploring the payment technology.

Stablecoins, as the name suggests, are a type of cryptocurrency designed to maintain a steady value that are usually pegged to a fiat currency like the U.S. dollar. Last month, JPMorgan announced it will launch a more limited version of a stablecoin that only works for JPMorgan clients; a true stablecoin would presumably be more universally accepted.
“We’re going to be involved in both JPMorgan deposit coin and stablecoins to understand it, to be good at it,” Dimon said. “I think they’re real, but I don’t know why you’d want to [use a] stablecoin as opposed to just payment.”
Dimon, 69, is one of the most vocal opponents of certain cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. But his bank is a juggernaut in the global payments industry, helping move nearly $10 trillion daily, and so it makes sense that it would explore stablecoins at a time when the regulatory framework for the technology has opened up.
Failing to do so could cede ground to fintech players who are looking to recreate elements of the regulated financial ecosystem, Dimon said Tuesday.
“You know, these guys are very smart,” Dimon said of his fintech competitors. “They’re trying to figure out a way to create bank accounts, to get into payment systems and rewards programs, and we have to be cognizant of that. And the way to be cognizant is to be involved.”

Citigroup, BofA coins?

Stablecoins could offer a potentially faster and cheaper form of payment over traditional banking rails including ACH and SWIFT, which are decades-old systems that typically take days to settle.
Citigroup executives said Tuesday that the bank was “looking at the issuance of a Citi stablecoin” among several ways to play in the space. The biggest opportunity is around tokenized deposits and in providing custody for crypto assets, they said.
Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan has also said his firm would get involved in stablecoins.
One way could be for traditional banks to collaborate through the jointly owned Early Warning Services. That would be similar to the way they banded together to offer Zelle for instant peer-to-peer payments as a way to defend turf against PayPal and Block’s Cash App.
When asked Tuesday about a possible collaboration among banks, Dimon declined to give a specific answer.
“That’s a great question, and we’ll leave it remaining as a question,” Dimon said. “You can assume we’re thinking about all that.”
— With reporting from CNBC’s Jesse Pound.

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After Adolf Hitler’s troops rolled into France in 1940, many feared the imminent destruction of Europe and its economy. British investors did not. In the year following the invasion, London’s stockmarket rose; indeed, by the end of hostilities, British companies had delivered real returns to shareholders of 100%. The plucky investors must have seemed mad at the time, but they were proved right and made handsome profits. More

After Adolf Hitler’s troops rolled into France in 1940, many feared the imminent destruction of Europe and its economy. British investors did not. In the year following the invasion, London’s stockmarket rose; indeed, by the end of hostilities, British companies had delivered real returns to shareholders of 100%. The plucky investors must have seemed mad at the time, but they were proved right and made handsome profits. More

Here’s what the company reported: Earnings of $5.24 a share
Revenue of $45.68 billion vs $44.06 billion estimate

Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase, speaking on CNBC’s Squawk Box outside the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Jan. 22nd, 2025.
Gerry Miller | CNBC

JPMorgan Chase on Tuesday topped analysts’ estimates on better-than-expected revenue from fixed income trading and investment banking.
Here’s what the company reported:

Earnings: $5.24 a share, may not compare with $4.48 a share LSEG estimate
Revenue: $45.68 billion vs $44.06 billion estimate

The bank said that second-quarter earnings fell 17% to $14.9 billion, or $5.24 a share, from the year-earlier period, when it had a $7.9 billion gain on Visa shares. Even when backing out a $774 million income tax benefit that boosted per share earnings by 28 cents, JPMorgan topped estimates for the quarter.
Revenue fell 10% to $45.68 billion, though the comparison with a year ago was also impacted by the bank’s Visa stake.
CEO Jamie Dimon touted his bank’s results and ability to boost dividends and repurchase shares while repeating his frequent warnings about the risks from U.S. trade policy, overseas conflict and rising fiscal deficits.
“The U.S. economy remained resilient in the quarter,” Dimon said in the release. “The finalization of tax reform and potential deregulation are positive for the economic outlook. However, significant risks persist – including from tariffs and trade uncertainty, worsening geopolitical conditions, high fiscal deficits and elevated asset prices.”
JPMorgan’s trading operations were able to benefit from turbulent conditions in the quarter as President Donald Trump roiled markets with his push to overhaul global trade agreements.

The bank said fixed income trading revenue jumped 14% to $5.7 billion, topping the StreetAccount estimate by roughly $500 million, thanks to activity in currencies, rates and commodities. Equities trading revenue jumped 15% to $3.2 billion, matching the estimate.

IB rebound

Investment banking fees rose 7% to $2.5 billion on higher debt underwriting and advisory activity, roughly $450 million higher than the StreetAccount estimate.
While investment banking activity “started slow” in the quarter amid the confusion of Trump’s April 2 trade announcements, activity gained as the quarter went on and markets recovered, Dimon said.
That explains how investment banking results improved so much from guidance given at the bank’s annual investor conference in May, when it said that revenue there was headed for a “mid-teens” percentage decline.
JPMorgan’s results in the quarter were also helped by a $2.8 billion provision for credit losses, which is better than the $3.14 billion expected by analysts.
The bank boosted its guidance around net interest income to roughly $95.5 billion, or about $1 billion more than an earlier forecast. NII is a key measure of bank profitability that is the difference between what a bank pays for deposits and what it earns on investments and loans.
Citigroup and Wells Fargo also topped analyst estimates on Tuesday, while Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley are scheduled to report Wednesday.
This story is developing. Please check back for updates. More

The Federal Reserve has brought in its inspector general to review a building expansion that has drawn fire from the White House, according to a source familiar with the issue.
“We’ve got a real problem of oversight and excess spending,” Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council, said Monday on CNBC.

Construction on the Marriner S. Eccles Federal Reserve building in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, June 25, 2025.
Al Drago | Bloomberg | Getty Images

The Federal Reserve has brought in its inspector general to review a building expansion that has drawn fire from the White House, according to a source familiar with the issue.
Fed Chair Jerome Powell asked for the review, following blistering criticism of the project, initially pegged at $2.5 billion but hit by cost overruns that have brought accusations from President Donald Trump and other administration officials of “fundamental mismanagement.”

“The idea that the Fed could print money and then spend $2.5 billion on a building without real congressional oversight, it didn’t occur to the people that framed the Federal Reserve Act,” Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council, said Monday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” “We’ve got a real problem of oversight and excess spending.”
The inspector general serves the Fed and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and is responsible for looking for fraud, waste and abuse. Powell’s request was reported first by Axios.
In a letter posted to social media last week, Russell Vought, head of the Office of Management and Budget, also slammed the project, which involves two of the Fed’s three Washington, D.C., buildings including its main headquarters known as the Eccles Building.

Vought, during a CNBC interview Friday, likened the building to the Palace of Versailles in France and charged that Powell was guilty of “fiscal mismanagement” at the Fed.
For its part, the central bank has posted a detailed frequently asked questions page on its site, highlighting key details and explaining why some of the specifications were changed or “scaled back or eliminated” at least in part due to higher-than-expected construction costs.

“The project also remediates safety issues by removing hazardous materials such as asbestos and lead and will bring the buildings up to modern code,” the page explains. “While periodic work has been done to keep the buildings occupiable, neither building has seen a comprehensive renovation since they were constructed.”
The Fed is not a taxpayer-funded institution and is therefore not under the OMB’s supervision. It has worked with the National Capital Planning Commission in Washington on the project, but also noted on the FAQ page that it “does not regard any of those changes as warranting further review.”
In separate comments, former Fed Governor Kevin Warsh, speaking Sunday on Fox News, called the renovation costs “outrageous” and said it was more evidence the central bank “has lost its way.” Warsh is considered a strong contender to succeed Powell when the latter’s term as chair expires in May 2026.
Clarification: This article has been updated to clarify that Warsh’s comments originally aired on Fox News.

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Alibaba-backed startup Moonshot released late Friday night its Kimi K2 model as a low-cost, open source large language model, with a focus on coding capabilities.
Moonshot claimed Kimi K2 surpassed Claude Opus 4 on two benchmarks, and had better overall performance than OpenAI’s coding-focused GPT-4.1 model, according to several industry metrics.
Coincidentally, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced early Saturday that there would be an indefinite delay of its first open-source model yet again due to safety concerns.

An AI sign at the MWC Shanghai tech show on June 19, 2025.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images

BEIJING — The latest Chinese generative artificial intelligence model to take on OpenAI’s ChatGPT is offering coding capabilities — at a lower price.
Alibaba-backed startup Moonshot released on late Friday night its Kimi K2 model: a low-cost, open source large language model — the two factors that underpinned China-based DeepSeek’s industry disruption in January. Open-source technology provides source code access for free, an approach that few U.S. tech giants have taken, other than Meta and Google to some extent.

Coincidentally, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced early Saturday that there would be an indefinite delay of its first open-source model yet again due to safety concerns. OpenAI did not immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment on Kimi K2.

One of Kimi K2’s strengths is in writing computer code for applications, an area in which businesses see potential to reduce or replace staff with generative AI. OpenAI’s U.S. rival Anthropic focused on coding with its Claude Opus 4 model released in late May.
In its release announcement on social media platforms X and GitHub, Moonshot claimed Kimi K2 surpassed Claude Opus 4 on two benchmarks, and had better overall performance than OpenAI’s coding-focused GPT-4.1 model, based on several industry metrics.
“No doubt [Kimi K2 is] a globally competitive model, and it’s open sourced,” Wei Sun, principal analyst in artificial intelligence at Counterpoint, said in an email Monday.

Cheaper option

“On top of that, it has lower token costs, making it attractive for large-scale or budget-sensitive deployments,” she said.

The new K2 model is available via Kimi’s app and browser interface for free unlike ChatGPT or Claude, which charge monthly subscriptions for their latest AI models.
Kimi is also only charging 15 cents for every 1 million input tokens, and $2.50 per 1 million output tokens, according to its website. Tokens are a way of measuring data for AI model processing.
In contrast, Claude Opus 4 charges 100 times more for input — $15 per million tokens — and 30 times more for output — $75 per million tokens. Meanwhile, for every one million tokens, GPT-4.1 charges $2 for input and $8 for output.
Moonshot AI said on GitHub that developers can use K2 however they wish, with the only requirement that they display “Kimi K2” on the user interface if the commercial product or service has more than 100 million monthly active users, or makes the equivalent of $20 million in monthly revenue.

Hot AI market

Initial reviews of K2 on both English and Chinese social media have largely been positive, although there are some reports of hallucinations, a prevalent issue in generative AI, in which the models make up information.
Still, K2 is “the first model I feel comfortable using in production since Claude 3.5 Sonnet,” Pietro Schirano, founder of startup MagicPath that offers AI tools for design, said in a post on X.
Moonshot has open sourced some of its prior AI models. The company’s chatbot surged in popularity early last year as China’s alternative to ChatGPT, which isn’t officially available in the country. But similar chatbots from ByteDance and Tencent have since crowded the market, while tech giant Baidu has revamped its core search engine with AI tools.
Kimi’s latest AI release comes as investors eye Chinese alternatives to U.S. tech in the global AI competition.
Still, despite the excitement about DeepSeek, the privately-held company has yet to announce a major upgrade to its R1 and V3 model. Meanwhile, Manus AI, a Chinese startup that emerged earlier this year as another DeepSeek-type upstart, has relocated its headquarters to Singapore.
Over in the U.S., OpenAI also has yet to reveal GPT-5.
Work on GPT-5 may be taking up engineering resources, preventing OpenAI from progressing on its open-source model, Counterpoint’s Sun said, adding that it’s challenging to release a powerful open-source model without undermining the competitive advantage of a proprietary model.

Grok 4 competitor

Kimi K2 is not the company’s only recent release. Moonshot launched a Kimi research model last month and claimed it matched Google’s Gemini Deep Research ‘s 26.9 score and beat OpenAI’s version on a benchmark called “Humanity’s Last Exam.”
The Kimi research model even got a mention last week during Elon Musk’s xAI release of Grok 4 — which scored 25.4 on its own on the “Humanity’s Last Exam” benchmark, but attained a 44.4 score when allowed to use a variety of AI tools and web search.
“Kimi-Researcher represents a paradigm shift in agentic AI,” said Winston Ma, adjunct professor at NYU School of Law. He was referring to AI’s capability of simultaneously making several decisions on its own to complete a complex task.
“Instead of merely generating fluent responses, it demonstrates autonomous reasoning at an expert level — the kind of complex cognitive work previously missing from LLMs,” Ma said. He is also author of “The Digital War: How China’s Tech Power Shapes the Future of AI, Blockchain and Cyberspace.”
— CNBC’s Victoria Yeo contributed to this report. More