Market News

The costs associated with owning a Florida condo have exploded. A combination of insurance increases, special assessments and limited financing options have elevated costs and sparked a wave of sales, flooding the market and straining prices. Condo prices in the state of Florida overall have fallen between 1% and 6% each month annually since July 2024.

A household in the top 0.1%—roughly 133,000 households each worth at least $46.3 million—accumulated an average $3.4 million a year since the third quarter of 1990, in 2024 dollars. In comparison, the wealth of the rest of the top 1%—roughly 1.2 million households each worth at least $11.2 million—grew by an average $450,000 per household, per year.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average shed almost 1,000 points on Monday and is headed for its worst April performance since 1932. The S&P 500’s performance since Inauguration Day is now the worst for any president up to this point in data going back to 1928.

While the U.S. may import more manufactured goods than it exports, it runs a large trade surplus in financial services. The overall U.S. trade surplus for financial services in 2024 was about $130 billion.

While Google remains the top way travelers prepare for their trips, a growing subset of consumers is turning to artificial intelligence to help them research and plan out their stays. Specifically, they’re experimenting with AI platforms known as large language models, or LLMs. The most popular of these platforms are ChatGPT, Gemini and Llama. Travelers can ask these LLMs to create a travel itinerary for them, and they can add details to their requests to further narrow their results.

Some 49 million options contracts changed hands each day in 2024, up from 19 million contracts in 2019. And as the size of the market has grown, individual investors’ slice of it has, too: They made up 29% of all options activity at the end of last year, up from 23% at the beginning of 2020.

In the U.S., the richest 10% have 36.3% of their total assets in stocks and mutual funds, with real-estate comprising 18.7% of their total assets.

In the first quarter of 2025, businesses leased about 115 million square feet of office space, a 13% increase from the fourth quarter of 2024 and the most since the middle of 2019.

The Barclays high-yield bond capitulation signal jumped 34 percentage points since the end of March to 91%, its highest level since October 2023, when Treasury yields surged on inflation fears. When the gauge hits 100%, the market is in full capitulation. That has happened five times this century: during the 2008-09 financial crisis; the 2011 European debt crisis; when oil prices plummeted in 2016; the start of the pandemic in 2020; and when interest rates surged in 2022.

Inflation cooled last month, with a year-over-year measure of underlying prices falling to its lowest level in four years.