Financial Mindset

Prediction markets are deepening their foothold in Major League Baseball. On Thursday, Novig, an up-and-coming trading platform, announced a multi-year deal with the New York Mets to become the team’s exclusive prediction market partner. The Mets are the first MLB team to strike such a deal, with Novig’s branding set to be integrated across the team’s ecosystem. Novig, which launched in January 2024, is backed by Pantera Capital and seeks to carve out a place in the fast-growing prediction market sector dominated by the likes of Polymarket, Kalshi, and Robinhood. Novig declined to disclose additional deal terms, including the contract’s length and the sponsorship’s value.  MLB did not respond to questions about whether it plans a league‑wide prediction market designation or will keep agreements limited to individual teams. Fans will see Novig signage throughout Citi Field, on the jumbotron, and during game broadcasts, a Novig spokesperson told Fortune . Mets fans...

Between tariffs, trade disputes, and the closure and reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, “disruption” has moved from being a buzzword to a permanent fixture in the CEO lexicon. Asia is one of the world’s most dynamic regions in the world. Its demographic scale, industrial depth, and technological capabilities puts it at the centre of future growth. According to the IMF , it drives 60% of global growth. But even as trade continues to flourish, CEOs can’t escape geopolitics. Asian businesses are navigating the simultaneous effects of fuel price shocks, power shortages, and grid instability. Fragmentation in the form of armed conflicts, tariff disputes and the dissolution of trade blocs is at an all-time high. Geopolitical competition is reshaping trade and investment decisions, as governments try to control key inputs and technologies. Therefore, CEOs can’t avoid disruption either. Instead, they need to figure out how to excel within it. Corporate executives need to assume th...

Microsoft said its Azure cloud business surpassed $100 billion in annual revenue in its recently-ended fiscal year, cheering investors in the company even as the broader market plunged on worries over AI spending and U.S. inflation. Cloud growth in Microsoft’s fiscal fourth quarter increased 43% percent year-over-year, providing a boost to overall quarterly revenue of $90 billion , above analyst estimates of $87.7 billion. Azure, the core of Microsoft’s cloud business, surpassed $100 billion in annual revenue for the first time ever this fiscal year, rising 33% over last year’s $75 billion, Microsoft said. The gain helps cement Microsoft’s Azure as a leading cloud giant behind Amazon Web Services, and as one of the most prominent providers of the infrastructure undergirding the AI era.  Shares of Microsoft rose more than 8% in after-hours trading, following a broad market selloff in regular trading Wednesday after the U.S. Federal Reserve held interest rates s...

A diary played an unusual role in a  contentious Senate hearing Wednesday  – musings from Dr. Anthony Fauci, a scientist who became a leading voice in the U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Sen. Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, for years has accused Fauci, the longtime top  infectious disease official  at the National Institutes of Health, of lying about the origins of the coronavirus. In previous hearings, the now-retired Fauci denied the accusation,  calling it “preposterous.”  On Wednesday, he  invoked the Fifth Amendment  in declining to answer more questions. But Paul drew public attention to the latest proceeding by releasing more than 1,000 pages of a long-running diary that Fauci kept – entries that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told Fox News his agency extracted from government computers and provided to the GOP-led committee. Paul drew on selected excerpts to argue that Fauci’s “private record tells a d...

Smaller, less digitized Southeast Asian markets are adopting AI-native systems faster than mature economies—partly because they don’t have to deal with the baggage of legacy infrastructure. “Southeast Asia holds a lot of market potential because it’s very hungry for innovation,” Verena Siow, SAP’s new APAC chief, tells Fortune in an interview at the firm’s Singapore office. “The economies which had a later start are looking to leapfrog into the latest and greatest tech.” Southeast Asia, home to young, digitally-savvy populations and a rising middle class, offers fertile ground for leapfrogging, a phenomenon where countries bypass traditional stages of development and move directly towards newer technologies and business models.    For European software giant SAP, this has translated into burgeoning interest in its business AI propositions. “Companies in this region tend to have fewer resources and smaller IT departments, so they’re looking to move straight t...

Dr. Anthony Fauci  on Wednesday repeatedly invoked  the Fifth Amendment  and declined to answer dozens of questions from senators in a Republican-led committee hearing about his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. The decision, at least for now, shielded Fauci from answering questions that could expose him to accusations of lying under oath. Though he received  a pardon  in early 2025 from Democratic President Joe Biden, some Republicans pursuing a yearslong campaign for his arrest had suggested he could still face charges for any perjury committed during Wednesday’s hearing. The scientist, who helped lead the nation’s COVID-19 response, was subpoenaed to testify under oath by Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who has long had an antagonistic relationship with Fauci. In response to angry, sometimes mocking, questions from Republican senators, Fauci  declined to answer  more than 100 times, injecting new drama into partisan divides that have  fes...

Jensen Huang says AI is going to kill tasks, not jobs—a distinction that could define whether the future of work brings mass unemployment or a new wave of growth and opportunity. Speaking at Y Combinator’s Startup School in San Francisco over the weekend, Huang didn’t mince words about the effect AI will have on the labor market. “Many tasks will be automated away,” he said in a video published Monday by the famed Silicon Valley startup accelerator. “Every single job will change, and there’ll be a whole bunch of new jobs.” And yet the Nvidia CEO made clear that tasks are not the same thing as jobs. As such, he pushed back on the narrative of a white-collar bloodbath that some high-profile AI leaders have predicted. Instead, Huang argues, AI will bring more jobs, not fewer. “The narrative about AI destroying jobs is exactly backwards,” he said. “AI automates tasks away, but it doesn’t necessarily eliminate jobs.” As companies continue adopting AI, however, the nu...