MORT holds shares in mortgage real estate investment trusts, companies that borrow at short-term rates and invest in mortgage-backed securities or originate real estate loans. The income MORT distributes comes from the dividends paid by the underlying mREITs to their shareholders.
The fund blends high yield corporate bonds, senior loans, and debt tranches of U.S. collateralized loan obligations (CLOs) into a single actively managed portfolio, aiming to deliver income that beats the broad bond market while keeping volatility lower than any single segment on its own.
Heat looks like validation, and validation looks like safety. It is hard to ignore a sector when customers start leaning forward at the same time investors do. Still, the more cycles I have lived through in competitive technology businesses, the more I see heat as an optical illusion. It sharpens whatever is easiest to notice and blurs the underlying mechanics that determine who or what holds control.
From its IPO in 2016 to its peak in late 2024, the stock gained more than 4,000% as it regularly put up revenue growth of 20% or more, and delivered strong profit margins as well. The stock also benefited from a premium valuation. However, over the last year, The Trade Desk has collapsed. The adtech stock has fallen 83% from its peak in late 2024 as the business has slowed to its weakest growth rate ever, except for a brief dip during the pandemic.
Hedge funds and other money managers spent $2.8 billion on alternative data in 2025, according to a new report from consultancy Neudata, a 17% jump from the year before. It's more than double what asset managers spent on alternative data in 2021, which includes a wide range of non-traditional information sources. The report projects that the total spend on alternative datasets could jump to more than $23 billion in the consultancy's bull case in 2030 and just under $8 billion in the bear case.
Aggressively invest in high-yielding stocks and reinvest the dividends continuously until you consider retirement. After all, each reinvested dividend payout buys you more income-producing shares without any out-of-pocket expenses. Better, by doing so, you're compounding the earnings and expediting the growth of your portfolio.
Preferred shares represent a hybrid form of ownership. They're classified as equities for accounting and capital structure purposes. However, this asset's cash flows resemble debt. Holders receive fixed or floating dividends that must be paid before common shareholders see a cent, giving these securities a senior position in the payout hierarchy.
The ETF holds 50 positions, but the top two dominate in a way that makes the rest almost incidental. Johnson & Johnson carries a 25.4% weight, and Eli Lilly and Company sits at 21.4%. Together they account for roughly 46.8% of the entire fund.
Passion can work for or against you in a business model. Your goal? Make it work for you. First, I think we tend to categorize individuals with passion into the enigmatic genius entrepreneur who hits it big or takes the leap with the smallest of chances for success, only to watch them absolutely crush it.
Markup is how much you add to your cost to get your selling price. If something costs $10 and you sell it for $15 , you added $5. That's a 50 percent markup on your cost. Where people get confused is that markup isn't the same as margin, even though the terms get used interchangeably all the time. Margin measures profit as a percentage of the selling price, and markup measures it based on your costs. Same dollar, different percentages.
The emergence of so-called "agentic AI," systems that can perform tasks independently and support decisions, plays a central role in this. Two-thirds of respondents believe that there is currently more hype surrounding agentic AI than previous technological developments. At the same time, three-quarters are still discovering how this technology can be used effectively. According to Basware CEO Jason Kurtz, the time for experimentation is over; executives expect concrete results.
The Schwab U.S. Small-Cap ETF (NYSEARCA:SCHA) has delivered a 5.5% return YTD, tracking the broader small-cap market's trajectory. The fund's defining advantage is cost efficiency, at a scant 0.04% annual expense ratio ranks among the lowest in the small-cap category, allowing investors to compound returns without significant fee drag eating into performance over time. Recent coverage has been mixed. MSN positioned SCHA as an "attractive option" given its low costs and past performance.
When bond investors chase yield, they often overlook the engine that drives total returns: price appreciation from interest rate movements. The iShares MBS ETF (NYSEARCA:MBB) demonstrates this dynamic perfectly. While its 4% yield attracts income seekers, the fund has benefited from mortgage-backed securities price movements in recent periods. What MBB Actually Does MBB provides exposure to agency mortgage-backed securities, the bonds backed by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Ginnie Mae. These aren't the risky subprime mortgages from 2008. They carry implicit or explicit government guarantees, eliminating credit risk. What remains is interest rate sensitivity and prepayment risk.
"Every morning the opening screen on my Bloomberg is what's going on with CDS spreads on Oracle debt," Morgan Stanley Wealth Management CIO Lisa Shalett told Fortune in October, seeming to speak for a market that was increasingly worried about the bursting of a bubble in artificial intelligence (AI).