Speaking at a Mizuho event, the Strategy (MSTR) executive chairman said the formation of banking credit pairing with digital credit will be the catalyst for the next bull market.
BUSINESS
Recap: ‘The Boys’ Season 5, Episode 1 – Homelander Is Unhinged And Unhappy
“The Boys” Season 5 is finally here with a jam-packed first episode that includes major developments.
Employees Are Secretly Using AI at Work. Here Are 3 Ways Leaders Can Encourage More Transparent Use.
Companies are experiencing the rise of the quiet AI workforce — employees who are actively using AI to be more productive and effective, but doing so under the radar.
Moody’s and S&P endorsed a freight merger built on a $5 billion bet
When two major credit rating agencies agree on a deal’s direction, the financial world pays close attention to what comes next. Moody’s and S&P Global Ratings both upgraded Echo Global Logistics’ outlook from stable to positive within days of each other. The upgrade followed Echo’s completed acquisition of ITS Logistics, a deal that created a combined $5.2 billion freight platform.Neither agency changed Echo’s underlying debt rating, which remains in deep non-investment-grade territory at B3 and B-. But the synchronized shift in outlook signals something you should understand if you follow the freight, logistics, or corporate debt markets. Both agencies see improved earnings, stronger cash flow, and a clearer path to financial stability for the combined company.The question for you as an investor or individual tracking economic signals is straightforward and worth exploring more carefully. Can a highly leveraged logistics company use a major acquisition to climb out of speculative-grade debt and into stronger territory?Echo Global and ITS Logistics combined into a $5.2 billion freight powerhouseEcho Global Logistics, a Chicago-based third-party logistics provider owned by private equity firm The Jordan Company, completed its acquisition of ITS Logistics on March 25, 2026. The combined entity generated roughly $5.2 billion in revenue in 2025, making it one of North America’s largest tech-enabled logistics providers, according to Echo’s press release.Related: Moody’s warning on private credit is the loudest one yetITS Logistics, headquartered in Reno, Nevada, brought capabilities to the table that Echo previously lacked in its core service portfolio. Those include an industry-leading drop-trailer and trailer pool program with 5,000 trailers, dedicated capacity solutions, and container management. It’s also contributed drayage capabilities and omnichannel fulfillment solutions that serve shippers handling complex delivery networks nationwide.“By combining ITS’ differentiated logistics capabilities with Echo’s technology and scale, we are well-positioned to bring even greater value to our customers,” ITS CEO Scott Pruneau said in the company’s press release.S&P and Moody’s both see a clearer financial path for Echo after the dealS&P Global Ratings affirmed Echo’s B- issuer credit rating but upgraded the outlook to positive, signaling a potential upgrade within a year. The acquisition will modestly improve Echo’s credit metrics, driven by ITS’s EBITDA contribution and a favorable funding mix, according to the S&P report.S&P projects Echo’s debt-to-EBITDA ratio will decline to the low 6X area within 12 months, a meaningful improvement for investors. The combined company posted a 2025 ratio of 6.8X, compared to Echo’s standalone leverage of 7.1X in 2025, S&P Global estimated, as reported by FreightWaves.That improvement stems from new business wins at ITS and the full-year contribution from Echo’s August 2025 acquisition of Freightsaver, a California-based 3PL.”Joining Echo represents a significant next chapter for ITS… Both organizations share a strong commitment to service, innovation, and operational excellence. By combining ITS’ differentiated logistics capabilities with Echo’s technology and scale, we are well-positioned to bring even greater value and expanded solutions to our customers,” said Pruneau.Moody’s matched that sentiment by raising its own outlook to positive while affirming the B3 corporate family rating on Echo’s debt. The agency cited its expectation that Echo and ITS’s combined freight offerings will deliver earnings growth and improved debt metrics. Both companies grew their freight volumes in 2025 despite broader market softness, Moody’s noted in its analysis.
Positive outlooks from S&P Global Ratings and Moody’s signal Echo’s strengthening finances, improved leverage, and growth potential after the ITS acquisition integration success.Maskot/Gettyimages
Echo’s revenue projected to jump from $2.7 to $3.9 billion in brokering aloneS&P Global projects Echo’s freight brokering revenue will climb from $2.7 billion to $3.9 billion, a $1.2 billion increase driven largely by ITS, according to FreightWaves. Roughly $900 million of that growth comes from ITS’s higher-margin drop-trailer capabilities, which generate 30% higher gross margin per load than traditional brokering. For you, as someone tracking this sector, that margin differential is the kind of structural advantage that credit agencies reward with upgraded outlooks. S&P also forecasts Echo’s EBITDA will rise by $114 million to reach $247 million, reflecting the significant earnings contribution from ITS. Free cash flow projections shifted from a concerning $10 million standalone estimate for 2026 to approximately $30 million post-acquisition. By 2027, S&P expects that figure to reach roughly $50 million, providing Echo with financial breathing room it did not have before this deal.More Dividend stocks:Down 23%, is this Warren Buffett dividend stock undervalued?Vanguard Dividend ETF quietly outperforms amid market panic156-year-old energy giant to pay $17 billion in dividends as oil spikes to $110Echo’s previous standalone free cash flow estimate of $10 million could have considerably weakened the company’s liquidity position. Debt refinancing undertaken as part of the acquisition, combined with ITS’s operational contributions, fundamentally changed Echo’s trajectory. This kind of cash flow improvement is often the difference between a company that treads water and one that steadily reduces debt.The Jordan Company, which acquired Echo in 2021 for approximately $1.3 billion, has backed several acquisitions, including Freightsaver and Fastmore Logistics. S&P expects Echo’s financial policy to continue to include opportunistic acquisitions, which could lead to increased leverage in future cycles. That acquisition appetite is something you should weigh carefully if you hold or are considering exposure to Echo’s publicly traded debt.The freight brokerage industry is consolidatingEcho’s acquisition of ITS is part of a larger wave of consolidation reshaping the $346 billion U.S. third-party logistics industry in 2026, IBISWorld data shows. The U.S. freight brokerage market alone is projected to grow from $19.68 billion in 2025 to $30.17 billion by 2031, according to Mordor Intelligence.Buyers view 2026 as a favorable year to acquire companies with specialized strengths, given the availability of capital and attractive valuations. More acquisitions will produce companies offering broader services and running more efficient networks, pressuring smaller players to specialize, UPS Supply Chain Solutions noted.Echo’s debt remains deep in speculative territory, and the risks are realDespite the positive outlook upgrade, you should understand that Echo’s B3 and B- ratings sit six notches below investment grade. Both ratings fall in the “highly speculative” category, meaning the company carries significant default risk relative to stronger competitors. C.H. Robinson, by comparison, holds a BBB+ rating from S&P, eight notches higher than Echo’s current standing in debt markets.S&P has also signaled that Echo will likely pursue additional acquisitions, which could push leverage back up and delay credit improvement. The freight market remains challenging, with Echo’s EBITDA margins typically running between 3% and 5% across cycles in recent years. If broader freight conditions weaken further, the combined company’s financial flexibility could tighten before anticipated improvements materialize.Key takeaways for investors and supply chain professionalsBoth Moody’s and S&P upgraded Echo’s outlook to positive after the ITS acquisition, but neither changed the underlying debt rating.S&P expects Echo’s debt-to-EBITDA ratio to drop to the low 6X range within 12 months, down from a 7.1X standalone figure.Free cash flow is projected to jump from $10 million to $30 million in 2026 and $50 million in 2027 under the combined structure.Echo’s brokering revenue is expected to grow from $2.7 billion to $3.9 billion, with ITS’s drop-trailer program driving higher margins.The combined entity still carries significant speculative-grade risk, and further acquisitions could increase leverage again in the near term.What the credit agency endorsement signals about freight’s next chapterThe synchronized positive outlooks from both Moody’s and S&P are not a guarantee of a future upgrade, but they do tell you something meaningful. Both agencies believe the combined Echo-ITS platform has the scale, revenue diversity, and capability to improve its credit profile over time. Moody’s noted that the combined market position and cross-selling opportunities should support above-market growth when freight conditions improve.For you, whether you’re evaluating high-yield debt or choosing logistics partners, this deal matters beyond the credit rating alone. The freight brokerage industry’s shift toward technology-enabled, full-service platforms means fewer but larger players will control your shipping options. Echo’s bet on ITS is a direct play on that trend, and two of the world’s most credible credit watchdogs gave it a cautious endorsement.Related: Bank mergers are on the rise: Your bank could be next
Latest Gen Z Spend Trend: Trading Down To Glow Up
As Gen Z trades down on essentials and splurges on self-care, brands face a new reality of weaker loyalty and shifting priorities.
How Halle Bailey And Director Kat Coiro Crafted ‘You, Me & Tuscany’— A Fresh Women-Led Rom-Com
Sometimes the wrong place is where you need to be to discover yourself. That’s the case for actress and singer Halle Bailey’s character, Anna, in Universal Pictures’ newest and highly anticipated, buzzy rom-com, You, Me & Tuscany, which was shot in picturesque Tuscany, Italy.
Macy’s is selling an 8-piece comforter set for $33 — its lowest price of the season
TheStreet aims to feature only the best products and services. If you buy something via one of our links, we may earn a commission.Why we love this dealSpring has sprung and we’re enjoying all of the benefits of the new season. In addition to warmer and sunnier days, we can’t forget about all of the spring sales happening right now. Macy’s is one of them, and it’s having its Biggest Spring Sale with some of the lowest prices of the season. From now through Sunday, Apr. 12, you can get up to 60% off everything from bracelets to quilt sets.If new bedding is on your radar, the Hazel 8-Piece Reversible Comforter Set can spruce up your bed this spring. It’s on sale now for only $33, and even comes with a bed skirt that can hide any underbed clutter. The set was originally $100, but thanks to the big sale, it’s 67% off.Hazel 8-Piece Reversible Comforter Set, $33 (was $100) at Macy’s
Courtesy of Macy’s
Shop at Macy’sWhy do shoppers love it?It’s amazing what a new bed set can do, especially with something like this Macy’s set that comes with eight pieces. It’s a bed-in-a-bag, which includes a comforter, two shams, a bed skirt, a flat sheet, a fitted sheet, and two pillow cases. It comes with everything you need and more to upgrade your bed this spring. And while all the pieces are essential to a complete bed, the bed skirt has to be our favorite. Not all comforter sets come with one, even though it’s stylish and practical. For starters, it makes a bed look instantly more elevated. It also does a great job at concealing bed frames, underbed storage, or clutter.But that’s not all there is to rave about. The comforter and shams have a reversible design, which makes it feel like you have two sets in one. On one side, there’s a charming floral pattern that has a cottagecore feel. On the other, there’s a solid soft burnt orange color. Plus, the comforter offers medium-warmth, which is ideal for year-round use. The set’s matching sheets are also a major win. For starters, a lot of comforter sets don’t come with sheets, and if they do, they’re often simple and white. This set is a gorgeous blue-green color that matches the pattern perfectly.Related: Target is selling a $350 storage cabinet for $90 with 5 compartments and both open and hidden storageDetails to knowSizes: Twin, full, and queen.Material: Polyester.Comes with: A comforter, two shams, a bed skirt, a flat sheet, a fitted sheet, and two pillow cases.”This is the second set like this that I have purchased from Macy’s, and it is nice to get everything matching in one set,” one shopper said. They added that it’s perfect for their guest room. Other reviewers highlighted how “beautiful” and “comfortable” the set is, with another shopper noting how “soft and cozy” it is. Shop more dealsSeventh Studio Seashell Reversible 3-Piece Quilt Set, $22 (was $60) at Macy’sRoyal Luxe Down Alternative Comforter, $25 (was $130) at Macy’sAiden Striped 8-Piece Comforter Set, $33 (was $100) at Macy’sA complete bed-in-a-bag for just $33 is a deal you don’t want to miss, which is all the more reason to add the Hazel 8-Piece Reversible Comforter Set to your cart before the sale ends.
New framework lets AI agents rewrite their own skills without retraining the underlying model
One major challenge in deploying autonomous agents is building systems that can adapt to changes in their environments without the need to retrain the underlying large language models (LLMs).Memento-Skills, a new framework developed by researchers at multiple universities, addresses this bottleneck by giving agents the ability to develop their skills by themselves. “It adds its continual learning capability to the existing offering in the current market, such as OpenClaw and Claude Code,” Jun Wang, co-author of the paper, told VentureBeat.Memento-Skills acts as an evolving external memory, allowing the system to progressively improve its capabilities without modifying the underlying model. The framework provides a set of skills that can be updated and expanded as the agent receives feedback from its environment.For enterprise teams running agents in production, that matters. The alternative — fine-tuning model weights or manually building skills — carries significant operational overhead and data requirements. Memento-Skills sidesteps both.The challenges of building self-evolving agentsSelf-evolving agents are crucial because they overcome the limitations of frozen language models. Once a model is deployed, its parameters remain fixed, restricting it to the knowledge encoded during training and whatever fits in its immediate context window.Giving the model an external memory scaffolding enables it to improve without the costly and slow process of retraining. However, current approaches to agent adaptation largely rely on manually-designed skills to handle new tasks. While some automatic skill-learning methods exist, they mostly produce text-only guides that amount to prompt optimization. Other approaches simply log single-task trajectories that don’t transfer across different tasks.Furthermore, when these agents try to retrieve relevant knowledge for a new task, they typically rely on semantic similarity routers, such as standard dense embeddings; high semantic overlap does not guarantee behavioral utility. An agent relying on standard RAG might retrieve a “password reset” script to solve a “refund processing” query simply because the documents share enterprise terminology.”Most retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems rely on similarity-based retrieval. However, when skills are represented as executable artifacts such as markdown documents or code snippets, similarity alone may not select the most effective skill,” Wang said. How Memento-Skills stores and updates skillsTo solve the limitations of current agentic systems, the researchers built Memento-Skills. The paper describes the system as “a generalist, continually-learnable LLM agent system that functions as an agent-designing agent.” Instead of keeping a passive log of past conversations, Memento-Skills creates a set of skills that act as a persistent, evolving external memory.These skills are stored as structured markdown files and serve as the agent’s evolving knowledge base. Each reusable skill artifact is composed of three core elements. It contains declarative specifications that outline what the skill is and how it should be used. It includes specialized instructions and prompts that guide the language model’s reasoning. And it houses the executable code and helper scripts that the agent runs to actually solve the task.Memento-Skills achieves continual learning through its “Read-Write Reflective Learning” mechanism, which frames memory updates as active policy iteration rather than passive data logging. When faced with a new task, the agent queries a specialized skill router to retrieve the most behaviorally relevant skill — not just the most semantically similar one — and executes it.After the agent executes the skill and receives feedback, the system reflects on the outcome to close the learning loop. Rather than just appending a log of what happened, the system actively mutates its memory. If the execution fails, an orchestrator evaluates the trace and rewrites the skill artifacts. This means it directly updates the code or prompts to patch the specific failure mode. In case of need, it creates an entirely new skill.Memento-Skills also updates the skill router through a one-step offline reinforcement learning process that learns from execution feedback rather than just text overlap. “The true value of a skill lies in how it contributes to the overall agentic workflow and downstream execution,” Wang said. “Therefore, reinforcement learning provides a more suitable framework, as it enables the agent to evaluate and select skills based on long-term utility.”To prevent regression in a production environment, the automated skill mutations are guarded by an automatic unit-test gate. The system generates a synthetic test case, executes it through the updated skill, and checks the results before saving the changes to the global library.By continuously rewriting and refining its own executable tools, Memento-Skills enables a frozen language model to build robust muscle memory and progressively expand its capabilities end-to-end.Putting the self-evolving agent to the testThe researchers evaluated Memento-Skills on two rigorous benchmarks. The first is General AI Assistants (GAIA), which requires complex multi-step reasoning, multi-modality handling, web browsing, and tool use. The second is Humanity’s Last Exam, or HLE, an expert-level benchmark spanning eight diverse academic subjects like mathematics and biology. The entire system was powered by Gemini-3.1-Flash acting as the underlying frozen language model.The system was compared against a Read-Write baseline that retrieves skills and collects feedback but doesn’t have self-evolving features. The researchers also tested their custom skill router against standard semantic retrieval baselines, including BM25 and Qwen3 embeddings.The results proved that actively self-evolving memory vastly outperforms a static skill library. On the highly diverse GAIA benchmark, Memento-Skills improved test set accuracy by 13.7 percentage points over the static baseline, achieving 66.0% compared to 52.3%. On the HLE benchmark, where the domain structure allowed for massive cross-task skill reuse, the system more than doubled the baseline’s performance, jumping from 17.9% to 38.7%.Moreover, the specialized skill router of Memento-Skills avoids the classic retrieval trap where an irrelevant skill is selected simply because of semantic similarity. Experiments show that Memento-Skills boosts end-to-end task success rates to 80%, compared to just 50% for standard BM25 retrieval.The researchers observed that Memento-Skills manages this performance through highly organic, structured skill growth. Both benchmark experiments started with just five atomic seed skills, such as basic web search and terminal operations. On the GAIA benchmark, the agent autonomously expanded this seed group into a compact library of 41 skills to handle the diverse tasks. On the expert-level HLE benchmark, the system dynamically scaled its library to 235 distinct skills. Finding the enterprise sweet spotThe researchers have released the code for Memento-Skills on GitHub, and it is readily available for use.For enterprise architects, the effectiveness of this system depends on domain alignment. Instead of simply looking at benchmark scores, the core business tradeoff lies in whether your agents are handling isolated tasks or structured workflows.”Skill transfer depends on the degree of similarity between tasks,” Wang said. “First, when tasks are isolated or weakly related, the agent cannot rely on prior experience and must learn through interaction.” In such scattershot environments, cross-task transfer is limited. “Second, when tasks share substantial structure, previously acquired skills can be directly reused. Here, learning becomes more efficient because knowledge transfers across tasks, allowing the agent to perform well on new problems with little or no additional interaction.”Given that the system requires recurring task patterns to consolidate knowledge, enterprise leaders need to know exactly where to deploy this today and where to hold off.”Workflows are likely the most appropriate setting for this approach, as they provide a structured environment in which skills can be composed, evaluated, and improved,” Wang said.However, he cautioned against over-deployment in areas not yet suited for the framework. “Physical agents remain largely unexplored in this context and require further investigation. In addition, tasks with longer horizons may demand more advanced approaches, such as multi-agent LLM systems, to enable coordination, planning, and sustained execution over extended sequences of decisions.”As the industry moves toward agents that autonomously rewrite their own production code, governance and security remain paramount. While Memento-Skills employs foundational safety rails like automatic unit-test gates, a broader framework will likely be needed for enterprise adoption.”To enable reliable self-improvement, we need a well-designed evaluation or judge system that can assess performance and provide consistent guidance,” Wang said. “Rather than allowing unconstrained self-modification, the process should be structured as a guided form of self-development, where feedback steers the agent toward better designs.”
Yuga Labs settles Bored Ape NFT lawsuit, ending fight over alleged copycat tokens
The settlement avoids a trial and ends the dispute over the RR/BAYC NFTs, which claimed to parody Bored Ape Yacht Club, one of the most recognizable NFT brands.
These products could get hit hardest by Trump’s new Iran tariff threat
Imports from China could face new duties if President Trump follows through with a tariff threat related to providing weapons to Iran.