Even when his calls miss, Michael Burry’s reputation keeps Wall Street watching his every move. Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images
Michael Burry earned a whopping $800 million by shorting the U.S. housing market ahead of the 2008 financial crisis. Whether the famed investor has made comparable money since then is far less clear. Still, his reputation endures. Investors continue to closely track his high-profile bets, hoping to ride his coattails to similar gains.
Burry ran the hedge fund Scion Asset Management and now publishes commentary through a weekly newsletter, though he discloses little about performance. He has also repeatedly deleted and reactivated his X account over the years, but remains active on the platform, where he has roughly 1.6 million followers and frequently posts cryptic market takes.
His celebrity status was cemented by the 2015 film The Big Short, which turned Burry into a household name. That visibility has granted him a level of credibility few investors retain for so long, even when their predictions miss the mark.
“People like superstars, and they love to listen to folks who they think are smart and successful,” Tom Sosnoff, founder of investment media network Tastylive, told Observer. “He is a personality and a contrarian. He is interesting and pretty famous in the world of finance. Love him or not, people listen to him.”
While Burry’s early success is well documented, his performance since then is harder to evaluate. As a hedge fund manager, he is only required to disclose limited information through quarterly filings such as 13Fs, which reveal long equity positions but not short positions, derivatives or overall performance. As a result, the full picture of his gains and losses remains largely opaque.
There have been claims that Burry has made more than $1 billion in total trading profits, but those figures have never been independently verified, and his fund has never been publicly audited.
Nvidia and Palantir in the crosshairs
Despite the uncertainty around his track record, Burry’s words still move markets. His recent bearish bets against Nvidia and Palantir have drawn particular attention, with Burry arguing that both sit at the center of an A.I.-driven market bubble.
On Nov. 3, regulatory filings revealed that Scion had placed roughly $1.1 billion in bearish options positions tied to those companies. The structure of the trade—largely long-dated put options—gives him time for the thesis to play out rather than requiring an immediate downturn.
“His timing was very good,” said Sosnoff. “He pretty much got short Nvidia near the top (around $200), and it’s now down 10 percent to 15 percent. It’s a good call.”
Palantir, which represents Burry’s largest short at roughly $912 million, has not fallen as sharply. The stock is down about 7.8 percent from its Nov. 3 level. Still, because the position is structured with options expiring in 2027, some analysts say it’s far too early to judge.
“His logic is extremely good, and he has over a year to be right,” David Trainer, CEO of A.I.-driven investment research firm New Constructs, told Observer.
Trainer, a former hedge fund manager, also backed Burry’s broader critique of A.I. hyperscalers, arguing that companies such as Oracle and Microsoft are using aggressive accounting practices, particularly around GPU depreciation, to flatter earnings.
“These companies are definitely using questionable billing and receivables to make their earnings look better,” said Trainer. “I can’t say if Burry has been right or wrong in previous trades, but I think he has made some money. “This time [with the A.I. Bubble], he seems right.”
The cult of the contrarian
Not everyone is convinced. Matthew Tuttle, CEO of Tuttle Capital Management and a frequent contrarian himself, said Burry’s post-2008 track record is far less impressive than his reputation suggests.
“When you look at the calls Burry has made since 2008, they have not been good,” he told Observer. “He has said ‘this is going to crash and that is going to crash’ many times since, and he hasn’t been right.”
Still, big bearish bets tend to attract attention precisely because they go against the grain.
“Any time someone makes a major down call, there’s a fascination with it as long [bullish] calls are always okay because the market always goes up,” said Tuttle.
That dynamic helps explain why hedge fund stars can remain influential long after their best trades are behind them.
“If I’m the main character in a movie and in a book like Burry and have been right in a big way, that buys me a lot of getting things wrong,” added Tuttle.
The same dynamic applies to other market personalities such as Robert Kiyosaki, Peter Schiff and CNBC’s Jim Cramer, whose reputations often outlast their accuracy.
“Robert Kiyosaki is constantly calling a bear market, and he is wrong, and Peter Schiff has been calling gold up for a long time,” said Tuttle. In Schiff’s case, it eventually worked—but more because of timing and luck than brilliance.
“When you say gold is going to go up every year, and one year it does well, does that make you a genius? I would argue it doesn’t,” he added.
Fame as financial fuel
Wall Street is full of one-hit wonders whose early success grants them enduring influence.
“Most of the time, they don’t risk their money,” said Sosnoff. “If they have one big win one year, they’re set. Their reputation is made.”
John Paulson, who famously made $15 billion betting against subprime mortgages, fits that mold, as do figures like Ralph Acampora, who called the 1990s bull market, and Paul Tudor Jones, who predicted the 1987 crash.
Other famous short sellers have stumbled. Jim Chanos, known for shorting Enron, closed his Kynikos fund in late 2023 after his Tesla bet went wrong. Bill Ackman lost roughly $1 billion betting against Herbalife in 2018, despite previously scoring a massive win betting against mortgage insurers during the financial crisis.
Ultimately, fame often matters more than accuracy.
“We live in a world where celebrities (movie, social media) have megaphones, and Michael is a celebrity because of the movie,” NYU Stern professor Aswath Damodaran told Observer. “Put simply, I will wager that most people who follow his advice (good or bad) are doing so because they liked the movie, think he is Christian Bale or like Batman, rather than because they read his treatises on Nvidia or Palantir. “
That doesn’t mean Burry lacks insight. “Michael actually is a good macro thinker and often willing to break away from the herd,” Damodaran added. “But so are many other smart investors who never get noticed.”
MacKenzie Scott’s donations this year centered heavily on education. Taylor Hill/FilmMagic
MacKenzie Scott keeps her giving largely out of the public eye—allowing recipients to decide whether to disclose funding amounts, awarding mostly unsolicited grants, and acknowledging her philanthropy only through annual or semi-annual online posts. The one thing that isn’t subtle about her donations? Their size.
Scott gave a staggering $7.2 billion in 2025, the philanthropist revealed in a blog post earlier this month. The annual update brings her total giving over the past six years to more than $26 billion. It also places her just behind fellow billionaires Warren Buffett and Bill Gates in lifetime philanthropic giving.
Scott, whose estimated $30 billion net worth is largely tied to her Amazon stake from her former marriage to Jeff Bezos, pledged in 2019 to donate the bulk of this fortune to charity. If this year’s totals are any indication, she is accelerating toward that goal: her 2025 giving far outpaced the $2.6 billion and $2.1 billion she donated in 2024 and 2023, respectively.
“This dollar total will likely be reported in the news, but any dollar amount is a vanishingly tiny fraction of the personal expressions of care being shared into communities this year,” Scott wrote in her blog post. She pointed to the $471 billion donated to U.S. charities in 2020, nearly a third of which came from gifts under $5,000, as evidence of the power of collective philanthropy.
Of the nearly 200 organizations supported by Scott in 2025, roughly 120 were repeat grantees. The largest single grant went to Forests, People, Climate (FPC), a collaborative charitable effort focused on reversing tropical deforestation, which received $90 million—boosting its total funding to more than $1 billion. “Now is the time for climate philanthropy to take action with vision and courage: to embrace the potential of forests and back the bold leaders best suited to protect them,” said Lindsey Allen, executive director of FPC, in a statement announcing the gift earlier this month.
The second-largest donation went to another environmental organization, Ocean Resilience & Climate Alliance, while a slew of other major gifts flowed toward education. She donated $70 million to both UNCF and Thurgood Marshall College Fund, which support historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), and also gave $63 million each to Prairie View A&M University, Morgan State University and Howard University. Other notable education-focused recipients included the Hispanic Scholarship Fund and Native Forward Scholars Fund, which received $70 million and $50 million, respectively.
As a result, education emerged as the largest beneficiary of Scott’s 2025 giving, accounting for 18 percent of the total. Organizations focused on economic security and funding and regranting each received 13 percent, while environmental causes accounted for 12 percent. Additional funding went to groups working in equity and justice, democratic processes, health, and arts and culture.
Besides the sheer scale of her philanthropy, Scott’s approach stands out for its unrestricted nature, giving grantees full control over how funds are used. That flexibility has been widely welcomed, according to a recent study from the Center for Effective Philanthropy, which found that nearly 90 percent of surveyed organizations reported improved long-term financial sustainability as a result of Scott’s donations. The median grant size was $5 million.
Scott has attributed her generosity to the kindness she has received from others. “Whose generosity did I think of every time I made every one of the thousands of gifts I’ve been able to give?” she wrote. “It was the local dentist who offered me free dental work when he saw me securing a broken tooth with denture glue in college. It was the college roommate who found me crying, and acted on her urge to loan me a thousand dollars to keep me from having to drop out in my sophomore year.”
The roommate, Jeannie Tarkenton, later founded Funding U, a lending company offering loans to low-income students without the need for co-signers. Scott has since earmarked funds for the company, she noted in her recent blog post, describing how she “[jumped] at the chance to be one of the people who supported her dreams of supporting students just as she had once supported me.”
Scott’s financial contributions to Funding U will take the form of an investment rather than a donation. Alongside her philanthropic giving, she announced last year that she plans to pursue for-profit investments in “mission-aligned ventures” aimed at addressing challenges such as affordable housing and access to health care.
Robinhood is known for propogating memestock mania, making its founders billionaires, and changing how Americans invest. But a model of corporate governance and succession planning? Well, add it to the list. The company’s carefully planned CFO transition that underscores how far the company has come—from a scrappy startup navigating hypergrowth and market turbulence to an S&P 500 firm focused on durable, disciplined execution.
The Menlo Park, Calif.-based fintech and trading platform, which offers traditional asset and cryptocurrency trading, announced in November that CFO Jason Warnick is retiring. He will move into an advisory role in the first quarter of 2026 and remain with the company until Sept. 1, 2026, as Shiv Verma, SVP of finance and strategy and treasurer, steps into the top finance job. Fortune recently sat down with the duo at Robinhood’s Washington, D.C., office to delve into how they orchestrated the handoff—and what they learned along the way.
Today Robinhood has a fully built-out finance organization and a place in the S&P 500. In 2024, the company earned $2.95 billion in total net revenues and annual net income of $1.41 billion. This marked Robinhood’s first year of GAAP profitability year since going public in 2021. Robinhood is growing fast—its revenue is already approaching half the size of mid-tier financial firms like T. Rowe Price and Broadridge.
But when Warnick joined the company in late 2018 after two decades at Amazon, the finance function was barely a dozen people. Verma had been hired as treasurer weeks earlier, plus there were a handful of accountants, and one finance contractor.
In talking with Warnick and Verma, both based on the West Coast, they conveyed a startup-like vibe at the company: informal, not at all stuffy, and open to ideas and debate, and at times, laughter. “I actually told him it’s not too late if he wants to change his mind,” Verma quipped of Warnick’s pending retirement. “I’ll miss him as friend.”
Verma considers himself as super analytical. “I’m a math guy; a former bond trader,” he said. But what he learned from Warnick is the ability to delegate. Otherwise, you can “start at six in the morning and go till midnight,” he said. “And I have a three month old at home.”
“His wife is certainly upset with me, right?” Warnick quipped. “She loves Jason; she’s not such a fan of the timing,” Verma parried back. “Although, she is genuinely happy for both of us,” he added.
The camaraderie between Warnick and Verma began as members of a team, led by Robinhood CEO Vladimir Tenev, that navigated the company through some rough waters. In March 2020, Robinhood suffered a major app outage on one of the biggest up days in market history, leaving users unable to trade as the Dow surged, Warnick recalled.
“We weren’t engineers, and you can feel kind of helpless,” he said. But he and Verma quickly concluded that their role was not to fix code but to triage stakeholders. That meant calling bankers, investors, and board members in real time and being as transparent as possible, Warnick said. That groundwork, he believes, helped Robinhood raise billions of dollars in early 2021, when meme-stock volatility and surging volumes again stressed the platform. The capital raise was aimed at strengthening the company’s financial position and supporting its rapid growth at the time, Warnick said.
Building a successor by design
This transition was years in the making, something you might expect at a 100 year old Fortune 500 firm but not necessarily a nimble disruptor. “We’ve been joined at the hip for seven years,” Verma quips. But over those seven years, Warnick steadily expanded Verma’s remit—from treasury to finance, then investor relations, corporate development, benchmarking and customer strategy, and partnerships. Along the way, Verma hired a dedicated treasurer and a VP of finance, often at Warnick’s urging, to allow him to step back and concentrate on higher-leverage decisions.
That deliberate scope expansion mirrored Warnick’s own progression at Amazon, where his responsibilities grew, eventually culminating in oversight of a 500-person finance organization and a role as chief of staff to the CFO. At Robinhood, the same model meant that by the time the transition was announced, Verma was already managing more than half the finance organization and acting as a central node across the business. He has attended every board meeting since Robinhood went public, co-presented earnings, and regularly joined audit and risk committee sessions.
Verma describes the last seven years as a compressed Silicon Valley lifecycle: early buildout, pandemic-era hypergrowth, the GameStop frenzy and IPO, followed by a sharp selloff. In 2022, Robinhood cut roughly 30% of its workforce and shifted to a general manager model. “We’ve come a long way,” Verma said, “to a very skilled public company.”
The most important skill of a CFO
Today CFOs are expected to own the numbers, but also act as core strategist, digital leader, and enterprise change agent. Earlier in his career, Warnick said he was once asked by a mentor, What do you think is the most important aspect of a CFO’s job? He answered, capital allocation.
“That’s important; that’s what drives future returns for the company,” he recalls his mentor telling him. “But you don’t get to allocate the capital yourself.” The most important skill a CFO has, Warnick said, is influencing the ultimate decision-maker—the CEO. “So our job is to bring data and finance into the discussion and influence the outcome,” he said. “And I think that that is one area where Shiv just shines.”
Verma spends a lot of time with Tenev, the board, and cross-functional leaders in engineering, legal, compliance, and risk, focusing on the decisions that matter most for Robinhood’s long-term trajectory, he said.
For the finance leaders, what looks like succession planning was arguably really the foundation of a solid mentorship. “He’s still my first call when I’m struggling with something,” Verma said of Warnick.
As for Warnick’s retirement plans, they are still being fleshed out, but will include travel with his wife, as they are now empty nesters. One thing’s for sure: if Verma wants some advice, he’s only a phone call away.
The founder of Arts Economics discusses how globalization, new wealth demographics and online sales are reshaping the balance of power in the art world. Paul McCarthy, Courtesy of Arts Economics
Clare McAndrew, featured on this year’s Art Power Index, has done what many thought impossible: she quantified the art market. As the founder of Arts Economics and author of the annual Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report, McAndrew has become the industry’s de facto oracle, translating the art world’s opaque dynamics into data points, patterns and insights. When her report lands each spring, its results ripple across the market—from charting the health of global sales, identifying emerging regions and revealing the settlement behind the numbers.
Over two decades, McAndrew has redefined how the art trade understands itself, applying the rigor of economics to a sector often governed by instinct and perception. Her analyses have shown how concentrated wealth, demographic change and globalization have remodeled the market’s power structures, and how resilience increasingly comes from its peripheries, not its peaks.
This past year was a pivotal one for the global art economy, marked by softening sales at the top end, a surge of activity in the sub-$50,000 segment and a generational shift driven by Gen Z and women collectors. New technologies, direct-to-artist sales and global diversification are transforming the market’s infrastructure, she reports, while also questioning how the boundaries of art are defined as luxury goods and collectibles enter the fold. McAndrew has emerged as an economist who helps markets evolve by revealing how confidence, perception and access shape value in ways that pure data cannot.
What do you see as the most transformative shift in the art world power dynamics over the past year, and how has it impacted your own work or strategy?
Sales in the art market for many years have been driven by an intense focus on a very small number of artists at the high end, which has escalated their prices, while creating higher barriers to entry for new artists and a winner-take-all type market scenario, where the works of the most famous artists are demanded the most, while emerging artists and the galleries and businesses that support them find it harder to generate sales and build careers. Alongside this, as most of what the mainstream media reports on is the multi-million dollar sums paid for this very small number of artists’ works, new buyers are led to believe that the art market is out of their reach, and that you can only get a quality work of art if you have a budget of over $1 million or so, when in fact there are so many other less publicized artists and works available at much lower prices.
These really high-priced sales were critical in driving the recovery of the market from the pandemic, particularly sales of ultra-contemporary and contemporary art, which outperformed other segments by a significant margin. However, a significant shift over the last year is that these are the two areas that have now slowed down the most. The segment of artworks sold for over $10 million has softened both in terms of volumes and value, and some of the bigger businesses have come under more pressure than some of the smaller ones. While this might not radically transform the market’s power dynamics overnight, it has at least shifted the focus away from that very narrow high end and the tiny share of artists it supports. Although some of the recent narrative around the market has been negative—focusing on a lack of eight- and nine-digit sales—there have actually been a growing number of transactions taking place, albeit at lower price levels, which is a positive development.
As the art market and industry continue to evolve, what role do you believe technology, globalization and changing collector demographics will play in reshaping traditional power structures?
My latest report on global collecting highlights the increasingly significant presence of female artists in the market and the growing influence of women as collectors, facilitated in part by shifts in the distribution and growth of wealth. Our research also uncovered the growing dominance of young Gen Z collectors, who were the most active across many of the fine art and collectibles segments. As wealth shifts towards these segments (including large vertical and horizontal transfers of inherited wealth), their preferences will become more dominant and how they want to buy and engage with the market will have a greater impact.
In terms of globalization, one of the key factors supporting the current size and ongoing development of the market is its increasingly global infrastructure, with sales of art literally all around the world and the emergence of a number of new art markets developing over the last 20 years in Asia, the Middle East, Africa and other regions. The global distribution of the art market has altered substantially.
From the 1960s, when Paris lost its central position in the art market, the U.S. dominated sales alongside the U.K., with London and New York accounting for at least three-quarters of the market during the 1980s and 1990s. One of the biggest changes came around 2004/2005 when China emerged as a global player, and with a huge boom in sales there while the rest of the world was suffering in the fallout from the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), making it (temporarily) the biggest market in the world in 2011 (albeit by a small margin). This was made all the more remarkable by the fact that until the death of Mao in 1976, it had been illegal to even own or exchange works of art in China. This injection of sales and the much more global nature of the art market have really protected its aggregate value from downside risks and helped it bounce back much quicker from crises and recessions.
In the market recession in the early 1990s, when it was so solely dominated by the U.S and Europe, it took almost 15 years for the market to get back on its feet, but post-GFC and post-Covid, the bounce back has been much quicker as sales are diversified across so many different regions and segments.
Looking ahead, what unrealized opportunity or unmet need in the art ecosystem are you most excited to tackle in the coming year, and what will it take to make that vision a reality?
There are so many interesting questions to look into about where the market is going, but from a methodological point of view, for my research, one of them I’m trying to focus on going forward relates to defining the boundaries of the market.
I have concentrated most of my research on the traditional art businesses (auction houses and dealers), but there are now a lot more agents involved in the market—artists are selling more directly, with disintermediation enabled through social media and online selling, collectors selling directly to each other, plus other platforms and agents outside of galleries and auction houses. How we account for and measure these sales will become increasingly important in understanding the activity in the sector as a whole, especially when we’re trying to assess its economic and social impact.
There are also continuing changes in what’s being sold in the “art” market, with an expanding range of collectibles and luxury products being sold by dealers and at auction houses, or even within “art”—new digital mediums and channels for accessing these works. The traditional mediums still dominate by value for now, but that could change in the future, and how we measure and expand those boundaries will be a continuing focus for my research in collaboration with academics and experts in the art market over the next few years.
What inspired you to want to bring greater transparency and reliability to a field often described as opaque, mysterious or relationship-driven?
When I first started out, my earliest reports focused on artists, looking at ways they could build better careers (or even just earn a viable income) and how government policies might help or hold them back. I uncovered early in this research that one of the best ways for them to succeed financially was to have a healthy and active market for their work, so my research pivoted to the art trade.
It became clear from working with dealers and auction houses that when they were approaching governments asking for help or changes in regulations to boost the trade, the first questions they would get asked were things like how big is the market, and how many people does it employ. There was a glaring lack of any of this objective industry benchmarking data to answer those questions, which inspired me to try to fill those gaps.
While there is some good, large-scale public data on auctions and exhibitions, many of the transactions in the market are private, so we have to use a very mixed methodological approach, relying heavily on surveys, sentiment testing and other qualitative research methods (alongside quantitative analysis) to build a better picture of the market.
I have increasingly embraced the importance of more qualitative methods and subjective expertise, which is quite different than when I came out of academia and believed that quants, data and econometric modelling could solve most of the market’s problems.All of the metrics and analytical tools that have been developed in the last decade or two in the art market are very useful, as is the increasing amount of data available, but their practical applications in guiding specific decisions have real limits, especially for collectors. There is still nothing really to replace the much more subjective advice you might get from an artist or dealer or advisor to guide the choice of one work over another, so expertise and relationships are still important.
After years of analyzing cycles of boom, correction and resilience, what have you learned about how confidence and optimism—or lack thereof—shape the art market differently than traditional financial markets?
Confidence is critical in the art market, and it relates to one of its most important features—that it is essentially supply-driven. Even if there is really strong demand around, there will only ever be a limited number of total works available on the market at any particular point in time, for all deceased artists, but for living artists too, where there are limits on how much they can really “make to order” in the short run. Rather than being driven by the costs of production or the availability of inputs, art prices are driven by their scarcity value—the factor that increases their relative price based on their low or fixed supply. And because of this scarcity in the market, prices for certain works can catapult up to really high levels when they come onto the market, as buyers try to grasp the really limited opportunities to acquire them.
Things like commodities are traded virtually every second, but in the art market, it’s much slower, and many works have a long market cycle. It can be 20 to 40 years before a work appears again, and some never do. The fact that opportunities to purchase certain works are so limited adds to the scarcity value, and works that are fresh to market or have been kept in private collections for years, for example, can spark a frenzy of interest and generate huge prices when they come up for sale. Increased supply (works coming up for sale) can have a positive, upward effect on prices (and the value of aggregated sales), which is obviously very different from other asset markets where increases in supply drive prices downward.
What this means is that vendor confidence and optimism about the market is key—how potential sellers view the state of the market and whether or not they should put works up for sale really often determines what happens as much as or more than prevailing demand.
On the secondary art market, supply is often generated by some exogenous event (like one of the famous “d’s”—divorce, disaster, death or debt), but where there’s a choice on the timing of the sale, it will often be down to perceptions of the strength of the market. The market can literally talk itself in and out of cycles to some extent.
The top end of the art market is increasingly polarised, with a very small number of artists capturing a large share of value. What risks does this concentration pose for the long-term resilience of the broader market?
This has been an ongoing issue in the market with an intense focus on a very small number of artists at the high end, which has driven up their prices, while creating higher barriers to entry for new artists and a winner-take-all type market scenario. One way to reduce risk and search and validation costs for those buyers unfamiliar with the market is to only purchase well-recognized works or those by really famous artists.
By doing that, you’re basically relying on the established preferences of previously successful buyers who have already bought that artist’s work, reducing their risks and insecurities about relying on your own taste in making the right choice. Collectively, these risk-reducing techniques tend to reinforce the “superstar phenomenon” in the art market, whereby the works of the most famous artists (living or dead) are demanded the most and achieve by far the highest prices in the market, while emerging artists face ever higher hurdles in gaining entry. This isn’t new, and it’s not only in the art market.
In the 1980s, American economist Sherwin Rosen pioneered the study of the economics of superstars and believed that some superstar artists or ‘masters’ reached their position justly because they were more talented, but the differences in their talent versus those less successful were much less than the differences in success. He also felt that some were, in fact, no more talented than their less-recognized peers, but their greater success was driven by the need of consumers for common tastes and culture or to “consume as others are consuming.” The problem associated with the superstar ethos in the art market is not just that it drives up prices, but also that it can deprive other artists of the opportunity to work by concentrating demand.
Alongside this, a lot of the media focus on art is just on the multi-million dollar sums paid for a very small number of artists, so a lot of new buyers can think that the art market is out of their reach, and that you can only get a quality work of art if you have a budget of over $1 million or so, when in fact there’s a huge range of prices and great works available at much lower levels.
I have been looking, in my research, on collecting at the parallel issue in the infrastructure of wealth. In the art market, like other luxury goods, discretionary purchasing power is enabled by greater wealth, and that in turn empowers growth in sales. Over the last couple of years, more wealth has been concentrated in the top 1 percent of society and greater wealth inequality is often linked to stronger purchasing in luxury markets across regions and over time. A higher concentration of wealth in the top percentiles has been a key factor driving strong sales and rising prices at the top of the art market in the past.
While this is most obviously linked to more purchasing by the wealthiest in society, who are more active in luxury markets, inequality can also shift demand in lower wealth tiers. In some cases, more unequal societies can create heightened status competition and anxiety as people become more sensitive to their position in the social and economic hierarchy. This can lead to greater ‘conspicuous consumption’ among those in lower-wealth tiers too, as people try to keep up, or bridge the gap, by imitating the lux spending habits of the wealthy. While this can boost sales in the lower end of art and other luxury markets, it has a range of potentially negative complications, not least being more consumer borrowing and debt accumulation.
As inequality becomes more pronounced, it can also lead to giving up, rather than keeping up, if the perception of upward mobility seems less hopeful or just less attractive. In the extreme, increases in inequality could endanger the market’s potential for long-term development. If consumers in wealth tiers below the very top engage less—or never even start collecting—the market could narrow further and value concentrate more at the top, and this is a segment that recent years have shown to be highly susceptible to wider risks and growth limitations.
On a positive note, while the aggregate figures show that the market has declined by value for two years, the most positive developments have been the growth of sales at the lower and more affordable ends of the market, with the number of artworks sold for prices in the sub-$50,000 expanding, and evidence of success by both dealers and auction houses in reaching new buyers, giving the market a broader and more diversified base for sales. This doesn’t really get focused on, though, in the press, which tends to only look at the big figures, which are so skewed by the tiny, narrow high end.
With the rise of digital channels, new collectible categories and luxury products entering the ‘art’ market—and younger collectors looking beyond traditional fine art, do you have plans to adapt your research and reporting frameworks to capture these newer forms of value and transaction?
Yes, I’m going to be starting new research on the secondary collectibles market that I’m hoping to publish in 2026. It’s a huge market and there’s strong evidence of an expansion in interest in this area over the last few years, especially with young collectors. In my recent research on HNW collectors, about 60 percent of their spending by value over the last year was on fine art, and 40 percent was on collectibles. For Gen Z collectors, just over half of the average spend was collectibles, and their levels were more than five times any other generation group on things like collectible luxury handbags and sneakers.
While some of the diversification in spending might be a reaction to the uncertain environment we’ve been in, it’s also part of a longer-term shift in what people buy, but also how they access the market. Within the art market, we’ve seen a big advance in digital sales following the pandemic, with e-commerce increasing from 9 percent of total sales by value in 2019 to 25 percent in 2020. Although this did settle back a little, the change seems to be more permanent, with a share of 18 percent last year, below the peak, but still double the share of 2019 or any year prior to that. It’s interesting as this is coming alongside greater art fair attendance and gallery exhibition visits compared to prior to the pandemic, so while collectors still want to visit exhibitions and see works in person, when targeting a specific work to purchase, they have become increasingly comfortable with doing so online.
Online channels are key entry points to the market for new buyers too. They have been consistently identified as the main source of new buyers for auction houses, and almost half of the sales dealers made online in 2024 were to new buyers. The expansion of the volume of transactions over the last few years has been facilitated by greater reach through e-commerce, despite the fact that the highest-value sales remained offline.
Outside the traditional art market, there are also more sales taking place directly with artists, on artist-based platforms and between other private agents. Dealers are still the most used channels for buying art in the surveys we conducted on HNW collectors, but there was a big gain in direct sales with artists, with over a third having bought directly from the online, through social media or through a visit to their studios.
Behind every “Pay now” button sits an increasingly complex financial stack designed to remove friction and prevent failure. Unsplash+
Not long ago, going cashless felt novel. Today, tapping a card—or clicking “Pay now”—barely registers. Expectations have shifted quickly, and by 2025, consumers largely assume payments will run themselves. The commercial pressure is real: merchants lose an estimated $18 billion per year to abandoned carts, and every failed transaction costs roughly $12 in direct and indirect losses. Any extra step introduces friction, and any decline erodes revenue and trust.
Embedded payments are designed to address both problems. They sit beneath the surface of digital products, removing friction and allowing payments to function as a native feature rather than a separate event. When designed well, the customer barely notices the transaction at all, yet the underlying infrastructure is doing far more work than it appears. The new baseline is simple: the payment disappears into the product.
Payments without banks—at least from the user’s point of view
Today’s customer does not expect to interact with a bank. They expect the transaction to complete instantly and intuitively. Behind a single button press, however, a cascade of systems activates at once. Issuers verify credentials. Acquirers interpret the merchant request. Fraud engines run risk assessments. If lending, foreign exchange or tokenization are involved, additional layers come online.
All of this has to happen in milliseconds. When it does, the commercial impact is tangible. Companies using embedded finance report two- to five-times higher customer lifetime value and up to 30 percent lower acquisition costs. Simplified payment flows increase conversion, reduce friction and open new revenue streams. In some models, a well-built embedded payments experience can add approximately $70 per customer per year.
Reliability is the second, less visible benefit. When a basket is full and a customer is ready to pay, the system must complete the transaction. A failure at checkout does more than lose a single sale. It damages confidence, often sends customers to a competitor and, in many cases, ends the relationship altogether.
Why every company is becoming a payments company
Embedded payments now sit far outside the fintech sector itself. Most users do not consciously register the change, but nearly every major digital service already relies on them.
Marketplaces once depended on manual reconciliations and delayed settlements. Today, embedded financial services manage escrow, seller payouts, instant transfers and even on-platform lending. Tax and compliance checks run automatically in the background. What looks like a simple transaction is, in reality, a network of coordinated financial processes running in parallel.
“Buy now, pay later” is one of the most visible outcomes of this shift. A single click can trigger an installment plan without redirecting the user or breaking the checkout flow. That convenience increases affordability and lifts conversion, explaining why adoption spread so quickly.
The creator economy has moved just as fast. Viewers can instantly tip or subscribe to a streamer, with funds settling to the creator’s card in near real-time. Lower friction translates directly into higher earnings, helping drive a sector projected to grow from $30 billion in 2024 to roughly $284 billion by 2034.
Physical environments, like sports venues, are also adapting, recognizing the commercial value. Long queues reduce spending. Cashless stadiums reduce wait times and increase transaction throughput and drive higher per-fan spend. Payments have become a core part of the fan experience itself.
Even vehicles are becoming payment endpoints. According to Parkopedia, 100 percent of U.S. drivers and 93 percent of German drivers say seamless in-car payments improve their overall experience. Cars, in effect, are evolving into connected payment devices.
The reality check: rapid progress coupled with uneven regulation
Despite these advances, embedded finance brings real challenges. Global regulation remains fragmented. Requirements vary country by country, and in the U.S., state by state. A payment model compliant under California’s Digital Financial Assets Law may still require a money transmitter license in Washington state. These inconsistencies make it difficult to deliver a truly uniform experience at scale.
There is also a behavioral dimension. When credit, subscriptions and financial commitments are embedded deeply inside apps, some users can lose visibility into what they have agreed to. Overspending becomes easier, and platform lock-in more likely. Convenience has introduced a new category of consumer risk that regulators are still working to address.
What comes next
Despite these constraints, the trajectory is clear. By 2026, payment systems will increasingly route transactions autonomously, selecting optimal paths without human intervention. Tokenized credentials will improve accuracy and reduce fraud. Machine learning will take on a greater share of real-time decision-making.
The boundary between financial and non-financial services will continue to blur. Payments will sit underneath most digital products by default. Customers will not think about them, and that invisibility will be the measure of success. The infrastructure fades from view, but its impact on revenue, retention and experience only grows stronger.
Alpesh Patel is a Strategic Partnership Director at Cartex, a new-gen fintech marketplace. He is a senior executive with over 25 years of experience in fintech, cryptocurrency, card issuing, and payments sectors in the UK and globally.
Ellenbecker Investment Group raised its position in iShares Core U.S. Aggregate Bond ETF (NYSEARCA:AGG – Free Report) by 8.5% in the third quarter, according to its most recent Form 13F filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission. The fund owned 648,841 shares of the company’s stock after acquiring an additional 50,564 shares during the quarter. iShares Core U.S. Aggregate Bond ETF makes up about 9.6% of Ellenbecker Investment Group’s holdings, making the stock its 3rd biggest holding. Ellenbecker Investment Group’s holdings in iShares Core U.S. Aggregate Bond ETF were worth $65,046,000 at the end of the most recent reporting period.
Other institutional investors and hedge funds also recently added to or reduced their stakes in the company. Ally Invest Advisors Inc. increased its stake in iShares Core U.S. Aggregate Bond ETF by 5.5% in the 2nd quarter. Ally Invest Advisors Inc. now owns 163,385 shares of the company’s stock valued at $16,208,000 after purchasing an additional 8,493 shares in the last quarter. Caldwell Trust Co purchased a new position in shares of iShares Core U.S. Aggregate Bond ETF in the second quarter valued at $10,566,000. Brown Advisory Inc. raised its stake in shares of iShares Core U.S. Aggregate Bond ETF by 27.1% during the 2nd quarter. Brown Advisory Inc. now owns 263,824 shares of the company’s stock worth $26,171,000 after buying an additional 56,205 shares during the last quarter. Aspect Partners LLC boosted its position in shares of iShares Core U.S. Aggregate Bond ETF by 8.5% in the 2nd quarter. Aspect Partners LLC now owns 43,231 shares of the company’s stock worth $4,289,000 after buying an additional 3,405 shares in the last quarter. Finally, Asset Allocation Strategies LLC increased its holdings in iShares Core U.S. Aggregate Bond ETF by 41.8% during the 3rd quarter. Asset Allocation Strategies LLC now owns 83,358 shares of the company’s stock valued at $8,357,000 after acquiring an additional 24,580 shares in the last quarter. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 83.63% of the company’s stock.
iShares Core U.S. Aggregate Bond ETF Trading Down 0.0%
Shares of AGG opened at $99.80 on Tuesday. iShares Core U.S. Aggregate Bond ETF has a 12-month low of $95.74 and a 12-month high of $101.35. The stock has a market cap of $134.30 billion, a P/E ratio of 124.57 and a beta of 0.25. The company has a 50-day moving average of $100.42 and a two-hundred day moving average of $99.58.
IShares are index funds that are bought and sold like common stocks on national securities exchanges as well as certain foreign exchanges. iShares are attractive because of their relatively low cost, tax efficiency and trading flexibility. Investors can purchase and sell shares through any brokerage firm, financial advisor, or online broker, and hold the funds in any type of brokerage account.
Further Reading
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In a world of geopolitical rivalry, supply-chain vulnerability and rising costs, competitiveness has become a strategic balancing act. Unsplash+
Competitiveness is not a new concept. It is likely embedded in our DNA, much like other fundamental instincts such as cooperation, survival, reproduction and mobility. What has changed over time is its geographical scope: once local, then national, competitiveness has now become global. That shift has fundamentally transformed how we understand prosperity, business, work and everyday life.
At its core, competitiveness is the ability to solve problems better than others. “Better” may mean cheaper, faster or, most importantly, with greater added value for the user. Competitiveness applies to everyone. A plumber is competitive if he fixes your sink quickly and reliably; a doctor if she cures you efficiently; a company if it consistently creates value and earns a profit. Historically, competitiveness was constrained by geography. A local plumber could not repair a sink in Beijing. But globalization has changed that equation. Today, even small, locally rooted companies may be tempted—or forced—to compete far beyond their original markets. Within a few decades, barriers to trade, communication and capital flows have fallen dramatically, opening global markets to firms of all sizes and origins.
The golden age of competitiveness
The era of openness can be dated quite precisely. It began on December 18, 1978, when Deng Xiaoping announced China’s open-door policy. That decision triggered a four-decade-long expansion of the global economy that lasted until the Covid-19 pandemic struck. During this period, unique in human history, it became possible to travel, communicate, invest and conduct business in virtually every country.
For companies, access to previously closed markets meant the possibility of supplementing an export strategy with direct investments. Such a change also implied greater knowledge of local markets, legislation, government policies, customers and value systems. Globalization rewarded scale, specialization and efficiency.
This period of openness also promoted multilateralism. Conflicts, at least in principle, were managed through international institutions rather than unilateral force. As President Reagan once observed, “Peace is not the absence of conflict, but the ability to cope with conflict by peaceful means.”
Vulnerability steps in
While this period delivered remarkable economic growth, it also produced structural vulnerabilities. Globalization encouraged specialization and, in turn, specialization created dependency. Certain nations came to dominate strategic minerals, key technologies or critical manufacturing capacities that could not easily be replaced.
China’s trade surplus has exceeded $1 trillion. This has been driven by expanding exports in critical minerals such as rare earths, renewable energy technologies like solar and wind, biotechnology and automobiles. For example, in 2001, China began investing in electric vehicle technologies, aiming to enhance competitiveness in an area where it struggled to match the U.S., Germany and Japan in traditional internal combustion engine and hybrid vehicle manufacturing. In 2009, with the support of financial subsidies from the Chinese government, fewer than 500 electric vehicles were sold. However, by 2022, following over $29 billion in tax breaks and subsidies since 2009, China sold more than 6 million EVs, accounting for over half of the global EV market. Projections suggest that by 2025, China will have sold well over 11 million electric vehicles.
With domestic consumption accounting for just 39 percent of China’s GDP, compared to roughly 70 percent in the U.S. and Europe, exports, in part, fill the production gap. The result is mounting international trade tension.
The empires strike back
Today, the U.S., China and Europe together account for over 60 percent of global GDP. What’s more, they are also political, technological and military powers. In 2025, the U.S. and China account for nearly half of global defense spending. Military procurement has become one of the fast-growing business sectors worldwide, rising by 9 percent to a total of $2.7 trillion in 2024.
Thus, the empires are back. As Henry Kissinger wrote in his book Diplomacy, “Empires are not interested in an international system; they want to be the international system.” Multilateralism is under strain, and geopolitical confrontation is increasingly replacing cooperative governance.
The politicization of conflict
The proliferation of tariffs and industrial policies is rightly alarming. However, these tools often mask another reality: access to markets is threatened. Or at least it is subject to political interference. “Geo-economy” is the new policy. It means transforming economic strength into political and diplomatic goals.
In the past, conflicts between nations largely centered around employment and economic fairness, and were resolved within multilateral frameworks such as the World Trade Organization. Today, international disputes increasingly invoke national security. The recent cases involving Huawei and TikTok in the U.S. illustrate this shift. When security is invoked, debate becomes more emotional, less evidence-based and firmly sovereign. Each nation claims the final say.
How does a fractured world economy function?
A fractured economy does not imply deglobalization. The world economy will remain interconnected, but its rules will no longer be universal. For example, transaction platforms such as SWIFT for payments or global credit card networks may no longer be universally accepted. Instead, countries will increasingly develop parallel institutions to retain control.
At the same time, multilateral institutions have not disappeared, and some will continue to operate to the greatest extent possible. According to the World Trade Organization, a majority of global trade still operates under multilateral agreements. Despite pressure from the U.S., non-American trade accounts for 86 percent of global commerce.
Alternatively, bilateral agreements continue to expand rapidly, either between economic blocs, such as the European Union and Mercosur, or between countries. China continues to forge bilateral agreements, notably with many nations in the Global South.
Between multilateralism and bilateralism lies a third model: ad hoc coalitions. These involve limited groups of countries aligning around defense policy, economic strategy or shared values. Examples include Europe’s SAFE program and the Coalition of the Willing, which bring together countries concerned about military security in Europe. Their aim is to make decisions and implement them quickly without being hampered by the need for broad consensus.
What strategies for companies in 2026?
Navigating this environment is extraordinarily complex. Companies must contend with several layers of political interference, market disruptions and profound technological change, from teh electrification of the economy to the rise of A.I. Nevertheless, four strategic axes are emerging for 2026.
Diversification. Companies are reducing excessive dependence on a limited number of suppliers, markets or customers. It is a quiet revolution taking place under the radar, but with a profound impact on nations and companies alike. China is redirecting its business towards Europe and the Global South while companies worldwide seek alternative energy and technology partners. Managing vulnerability has become a strategic imperative.
Resilience. The world will not stop interfering with corporate strategies. Thus, even if the future is more unpredictable, decisions must still be made, often under uncertainty and risk. Resilience is the capacity to adapt quickly as conditions change. As Carl von Clausewitz noted, “Strategy is the evolution of a central idea through continually changing circumstances.”
Reliability. In a fractured economy, a company’s competitiveness also depends on strengthening confidence in its relationships with business partners. When the environment is in turmoil, a few things, precisely, should not change. Trust is one of them. Reliability implies transparency and efficiency. The ease of doing business is critical. As Peter Drucker said: “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently something that nobody needs.”
Pricing power. In 2026, operating costs will inevitably rise. Political barriers and national priorities leave limited room for cost reduction. Price increases often become unavoidable. Competitiveness, then, depends on a firm’s ability to convince customers that value justifies price. Warren Buffett’s advice remains apt: “Price is what you pay; value is what you get.”
Optimism for 2026?
Business leaders must remain optimistic—whether by choice or necessity. Their primary role is to solve problems and motivate people toward success. Nostalgia, however comforting, is not a strategy. The world of 2026 will not return to a reassuring past. Nor does it have to be worse. It will simply be different. When Mark Twain was asked what he thought after listening to an opera by Richard Wagner, he replied: “It’s not as bad as it sounds.”
That, perhaps, is the most realistic mindset for planning 2026.
Stephane Garelli is Professor Emeritus at IMD and the University of Lausanne, the founder of the World Competitiveness Center, and a former managing director of the World Economic Forum and the Davos Annual Meetings. His latest book,World Competitiveness: Rewriting the Rules of Global Prosperity is published by Wiley.
