Veteran journalist says 'The Magnificent Seven is over'

Financial journalist Allan Sloan, a seven-time winner of business journalism's highest honor, the Loeb Award, says in his latest piece for Barron's that no investment strategy works forever, and that time is now up on the Magnificent Seven stocks. Sloan notes that during the first seven months of 2025, NVidia and Microsoft accounted for more than half of the gain of the entire Standard & Poor's return, but that Apple "was totally rotten and knocked 18 percent off the S&P's return." His point is that most of the seven stocks that have been driving the market for the last few years "are now hitting below their weight," and the top stocks are now losing ground as a group to the index/market itself.

Todd Rosenbluth, head of research at VettaFi, makes a high-income fund that invests in options on bitcoin -- and that yields a whopping 27 percent -- his ETF of the Week. The fund is relatively new and just topped $500 million in assets, and Rosenbluth says it can be an allocation choice for investors who might otherwise avoid cryptocurrency because they want investments that produce income.

In the Market Call, Cole Smead, portfolio manager at Smead Capital Management, talks about the firm's approach to value investing and what is standing out during a period where he says market leadership is going through a rotation.