BUSINESS

Viognier, Marsanne, and Roussanne show up across the Rhône in whites that are textured, balanced, and easy to pair with food.

The Nvidia CEO laid out a five-layer framework for AI infrastructure in his first standalone blog post in months, pushing back against the narrative that AI will destroy jobs.

Hyperliquid will introduce portfolio margin for real trading accounts, letting users offset risk across positions and support larger trades with less collateral.

Aramco’s CEO warns of “catastrophic consequences” for the oil market if the effective closure of the Straits Of Hormuz were to remain for an extended period. He was unenthusiastic about prospects for the U.S. Navy escorting tankers in transit.

Wall Street’s biggest bank is not telling investors to panic. But it is telling them to brace for more turbulence before things get better.Mislav Matejka, JPMorgan’s head of global equity strategy, warned in a note to clients that equities could face additional short-term weakness before stabilizing, as geopolitical tensions continue to drive a wave of risk reduction across markets.The note, which landed as the S&P 500 slipped and the Nasdaq fell more than 2% in 2026 so far, carries a carefully measured message: the pain is real, but it is also temporary.Days or weeks, not monthsThe key phrase in the note is the timeline. JPMorgan expects the current episode of market stress to last days or weeks, not months. That framing matters because it shapes how investors should respond.Rather than positioning defensively for a prolonged downturn, the bank is telling clients to watch for oversold conditions and stretched positioning to clear. Once that happens, JPMorgan sees the selloff flipping into a buying opportunity.More Dividend stocks:Tim Cook quietly hands Apple investors a surprise pay raiseNancy Pelosi sells $1M of struggling dividend stockVerizon’s $20 billion acquisition resets dividend outlook”Rising Iran-related tensions are not a signal to exit equity markets, but a buying opportunity,” the bank said, with Matejka recommending investors look to add positions during the weakness rather than reduce them.The two near-term risks he flaggedJPMorgan was direct about where the pressure is coming from in the short term. The bank flagged oil and bonds as the two variables most likely to keep markets on edge before any stabilization takes hold.On oil, JPMorgan acknowledged prices could spike further in the near term following the Hormuz disruption. But the bank was also careful to note that the move so far is smaller in scale than what markets absorbed during the Russia-Ukraine war in 2022. That comparison is meaningful: if markets survived that shock, the current one may prove more manageable than headlines suggest.The pass-through to consumers, however, is already visible. U.S. gasoline prices have jumped 10 to 15% according to the note, a development that tends to hit consumer confidence quickly before it shows up in official inflation data.Where JPMorgan sees opportunity emergingJPMorgan’s note was not all caution. The bank pointed to specific pockets of the market it expects to benefit once the current wave of selling clears and positioning resets.Sectors and markets JPMorgan highlighted as opportunitiesIndustrials — a sector JPMorgan has consistently favored heading into 2026, with hedge funds already building positionsSemiconductors — beaten down alongside the broader tech selloff but fundamentally intact per the bank’s viewConsumer discretionary — oversold relative to underlying consumer spending dataEmerging markets and the eurozone — areas JPMorgan has favored as alternatives to a crowded U.S. equity tradeOversold hyperscalers and AI laggards — the bank noted the tech repricing is largely complete, limiting further downsideThe broader context: fundamentals still intactWhat underpins JPMorgan’s relatively calm read on the situation is its assessment of the macro backdrop. The bank’s base case assumes the Iran conflict will not escalate into sustained infrastructure damage or a prolonged Hormuz closure.

JP Morgan says short-term pain is likely. Platt/Getty Images

Under that scenario, the bank sees oil fundamentals remaining soft once tensions ease, with the price spike proving temporary rather than structural. Earnings delivery for 2026 remains solid in JPMorgan’s models, and the growth and inflation tradeoff is still described as supportive.JPMorgan also noted that much of the repricing in tech and AI-related stocks has already happened, which limits how much further that part of the market can fall from here.Brace for impact, then buy the dipJPMorgan’s message is disciplined and specific. More short-term pain is likely. The window is days or weeks. And when markets find a bottom, possibly as soon as this week or next, the bank wants its clients positioned to capture the rebound rather than sitting on the sidelines waiting for the all-clear.The risk, as always, is that the conflict deepens beyond JPMorgan’s base case. But for now, the bank’s call is clear: use the weakness, do not flee from it.Related: JPMorgan revamps Nvidia stock price target for rest of 2026

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 dealThere’s something that feels good about pulling all the heavy layers of winter bedding off and dressing the bed for spring. It’s a perfect time to introduce breathable fabrics like cotton and microfiber so we can sleep comfortably during the warmer months. If you’ve never owned a quilt, it’s a perfect pick for springtime, and we found a deal on a set that’s so inexpensive you’ll think we made a typo.Amazon is selling the Wong’s Bedding 3-Piece Boho Quilt Set for just $20. Not only does it have the stylish bohemian look, but it comes with the quilt and two matching shams, meaning each item in this set is just $6.66. It’s the lowest price in 30 days as well, so if you want to get new bedding at a great price, this is the deal to get.Wong’s Bedding 3-Piece Boho Quilt Set, $20 at Amazon

Courtesy of Amazon

Why do shoppers love it?Maximalism has been gaining popularity among home design trends for several years now, tossing the once-popular “millennial gray” out the window in favor of bolder colors and brighter designs. Bohemian style is a gentle variation of this trend, embracing lots of color but typically featuring finer details. This quilt fits perfectly into that aesthetic, utilizing plum purple, burnt orange, and pure white in its pattern. It has a soft, easy look and can be paired with many different colors of sheets, although we’re betting a burnt orange sheet set would really make it pop.While the $20 sale is only for the purple, this quilt set is available in nine colors. Seven of them are on sale for slightly higher prices, but with the priciest set topping out at $41, they’re all still pretty affordable. Care is easy as well, as you can machine-wash this set. The manufacturer recommends washing in cold water, tumble drying on low, and avoiding the use of bleach.Details to knowColors: Nine.Material: Microfiber.Sizes: Queen and king are available for the purple $20 set, while full is available for the navy blue and yellow.Related: Walmart is selling a $540 pair of Adirondack rocking chairs for $250More than 200 shoppers have given this quilt set a five-star rating, saying that it’s beautiful, soft, and easy to care for. “This quilt has the colors and patterns that go perfectly with the William Morris style that I just designed for my living room,” one wrote. “It looks great as a decorative sofa cover. I was also delighted with the good quality, which is more than I expected to get for such a reasonable price.”A second shopper wrote, “This quilt is so pretty. It is lightweight enough to sleep with all year round. I washed it before using it, and the colors did not fade or bleed.”Shop more deals Dinjoy Floral Patchwork Quilt Set, $30 at AmazonDobuyly Patchwork Quilt Set, $29 (was $39) at AmazonWong’s Bedding Queen Bedding Set, $29 (was $31) at AmazonFor just $20, the Wong’s Bedding 3-Piece Boho Quilt Set is one of the best bedding deals we’ve seen in a while. Give your bed a new look without breaking the bank.

US equities notched another strong year in 2025, but market capitalization mattered. Mid-cap stocks struggled to keep pace with both their large- and small-cap peers. The Morningstar US Mid Cap Index’s 10.1% return for the year trailed the Morningstar US Large Cap and Morningstar US Small Cap indexes’ 19.8% and 12.2% gains, respectively. While some funds have been able to distinguish themselves, others have been challenged. Let’s look at three well-regarded mid-cap blend funds that have struggled. Boston Trust Walden SMID Cap WASMX eked out a 0.3% gain in 2025, worse than 93% of its mid-cap blend Morningstar Category peers and well off the Morningstar US Mid Cap Index’s 10.1% return. The fund’s risk-conscious, team-based approach still stands out in the category, though. Longtime lead manager Kenneth Scott stepped off the strategy at the end of 2025 but passed leadership to comanager Richard Williams in mid-2024. Williams’ two comanagers alleviate key-person risk. The team’s focus on quality and valuation lets stock selection drive returns. The fund, which has a Morningstar Medalist Rating of Silver, keeps position sizes below 2.5% and sector deviations within 5 percentage points of the Russell 2500 Index. The team’s emphasis on durable companies has been a headwind when riskier, lower-quality stocks have been in vogue. Still, the fund has been less volatile than many peers over time, which has bolstered its risk-adjusted results; its Sharpe ratio eclipsed 59% of peers over the past decade. Last year was challenging for Bronze-rated Davenport Equity Opportunities DEOPX, especially after the US tariff announcements in early April. Its 2.6% retreat in 2025 trailed 97% of rivals and the benchmark by 12.7 percentage points. Still, this fund remains compelling.George Smith and Chris Pearson have comanaged the fund together since 2013, with Smith listed since its inception at the end of 2010. The experienced duo oversees a research-intensive approach, digging deep into company fundamentals to identify those with strong management teams, competitive business models, and compelling valuations. It culminates in a high-conviction portfolio of 20–40 stocks (29 as of December 2025) that the managers intend to hold for the long term. They typically lean more toward companies with above-average earnings growth, contributing to a slight growth tilt that has nudged the fund into the mid-cap growth area of the Morningstar Style Box at times. Long-term performance has been more attractive. An 11.2% return since Jan. 1, 2011, fell in the category’s top quartile but underperformed the benchmark’s 12.0%.Bronze-rated JPMorgan SMID Cap Equity PECAX dropped 3.0% in 2025 compared with the 9.1% and 10.1% gains for the average peer and benchmark, respectively, making it a year to forget. Stock-picking within industrials and consumer discretionary was the primary detractor from returns over the past two years. This difficult period has also weighed on long-term performance. Since the separate account’s 2016 inception through February 2026, its 7.0% return fell in the category’s worst decile and lagged the benchmark by 5.1 percentage points.We still believe in this fund’s skilled team and disciplined approach, though, despite its recent results. Comanagers Don San Jose and Dan Percella lead a compact team of four analysts. They took the reins of the mutual fund in 2020 after leading the separate account version of this strategy since 2016, but they have worked together on other strategies since 2008. The team seeks profitable businesses with attractive valuations and proven management teams. It also looks for stocks that can expand their margins over time, believing they will boost earnings, cash flow, and eventually their share prices.This article first appeared in the February 2026 issue of Morningstar FundInvestor. Download a complimentary copy of FundInvestor by visiting this website.

Presented by 1PasswordAdding agentic capabilities to enterprise environments is fundamentally reshaping the threat model by introducing a new class of actor into identity systems. The problem: AI agents are taking action within sensitive enterprise systems, logging in, fetching data, calling LLM tools, and executing workflows often without the visibility or control that traditional identity and access systems were designed to enforce. AI tools and autonomous agents are proliferating across enterprises faster than security teams can instrument or govern them. At the same time, most identity systems still assume static users, long-lived service accounts, and coarse role assignments. They were not designed to represent delegated human authority, short-lived execution contexts, or agents operating in tight decision loops. As a result, IT leaders need to step back and rethink the trust layer itself. This shift isn’t theoretical. NIST’s Zero Trust Architecture (SP 800-207) explicitly states that “all subjects — including applications and non-human entities — are considered untrusted until authenticated and authorized.” In an agentic world, that means AI systems must have explicit, verifiable identities of their own, not operate through inherited or shared credentials.”Enterprise IAM architectures are built to assume all system identities are human, which means that they count on consistent behavior, clear intent, and direct human accountability to enforce trust,” says Nancy Wang, CTO at 1Password and Venture Partner at Felicis. “Agentic systems break those assumptions. An AI agent is not a user you can train or periodically review. It is software that can be copied, forked, scaled horizontally, and left running in tight execution loops across multiple systems. If we continue to treat agents like humans or static service accounts, we lose the ability to clearly represent who they are acting for, what authority they hold, and how long that authority should last.”How AI agents turn development environments into security risk zonesOne of the first places these identity assumptions break down is the modern development environment. The integrated developer environment (IDE) has evolved beyond a simple editor into an orchestrator capable of reading, writing, executing, fetching, and configuring systems. With an AI agent at the heart of this process, prompt injection transitions aren’t just an abstract possibility; they become a concrete risk. Because traditional IDEs weren’t designed with AI agents as a core component, adding aftermarket AI capabilities introduces new kinds of risks that traditional security models weren’t built to account for. For instance, AI agents inadvertently breach trust boundaries. A seemingly harmless README might contain concealed directives that trick an assistant into exposing credentials during standard analysis. Project content from untrusted sources can alter agent behavior in unintended ways, even when that content bears no obvious resemblance to a prompt. Input sources now extend beyond files that are deliberately run. Documentation, configuration files, filenames, and tool metadata are all ingested by agents as part of their decision-making processes, influencing how they interpret a project. Trust erodes when agents act without intent or accountabilityWhen you add highly autonomous, deterministic agents operating with elevated privileges, with the capability to read, write, execute, or reconfigure systems, the threat grows. These agents have no context, no ability to determine whether a request for authentication is legitimate, who delegated that request, or the boundaries that should be placed around that action. “With agents, you can’t assume that they have the ability to make accurate judgments, and they certainly lack a moral code,” Wang says. “Every one of their actions needs to be constrained properly, and access to sensitive systems and what they can do within them needs to be more clearly defined. The tricky part is that they’re continuously taking actions, so they also need to be continuously constrained.”Where traditional IAM fail with agents Traditional identity and access management systems operate on several core assumptions that agentic AI violates:Static privilege models fail with autonomous agent workflows: Conventional IAM grants permissions based on roles that remain relatively stable over time. But agents execute chains of actions that require different privilege levels at different moments. Least privilege can no longer be a set-it-and-forget-it configuration. Now it must be scoped dynamically with each action, with automatic expiration and refresh mechanisms.Human accountability breaks down for software agents: Legacy systems assume every identity traces back to a specific person who can be held responsible for actions taken, but agents completely blur this line. Now it’s unclear when an agent acts, under whose authority it is operating, which is already a tremendous vulnerability. But when that agent is duplicated, modified, or left running long after its original purpose has been fulfilled, the risk multiplies.Behavior-based detection fails with continuous agent activity: While human users follow recognizable patterns, such as logging in during business hours, accessing familiar systems, and taking actions that align with their job functions, agents operate continuously, across multiple systems simultaneously. That not only multiplies the potential for damage to a system but also causes legitimate workflows to be flagged as suspicious to traditional anomaly detection systems. Agent identities are often invisible to traditional IAM systems: Traditionally, IT teams can more or less configure and manage identities operating within their environment. But agents can spin up new identities dynamically, operate through existing service accounts, or leverage credentials in ways that make them invisible to conventional IAM tools.”It’s the whole context piece, the intent behind an agent, and traditional IAM systems don’t have any ability to manage that,” Wang says. “This convergence of different systems makes the challenge broader than identity alone, requiring context and observability to understand not just who acted, but why and how.”Rethinking security architecture for agentic systemsSecuring agentic AI requires rethinking the enterprise security architecture from the ground up. Several key shifts are necessary:Identity as the control plane for AI agents: Rather than treating identity as one security component among many, organizations must recognize it as the fundamental control plane for AI agents. Major security vendors are already moving in this direction, with identity becoming integrated into every security solution and stack.Context-aware access as a requirement for agentic AI: Policies must become far more granular and specific, defining not just what an agent can access, but under what conditions. This means considering who invoked the agent, what device it’s running on, what time constraints apply, and what specific actions are permitted within each system.Zero-knowledge credential handling for autonomous agents: One promising approach is to keep credentials entirely out of agents’ view. Using techniques like agentic autofill, credentials can be injected into authentication flows without agents ever seeing them in plain text, similar to how password managers work for humans, but extended to software agents.Auditability requirements for AI agents: Traditional audit logs that track API calls and authentication events are insufficient. Agent auditability requires capturing who the agent is, whose authority it operates under, what scope of authority was granted, and the complete chain of actions taken to accomplish a workflow. This mirrors the detailed activity logging used for human employees, but must adapt for software entities executing hundreds of actions per minute.Enforcing trust boundaries across humans, agents, and systems: Organizations need clear, enforceable boundaries that define what an agent can do when invoked by a specific person on a particular device. This requires separating intent from execution: understanding what a user wants an agent to accomplish from what the agent actually does.The future of enterprise security in an agentic world As agentic AI becomes embedded in everyday enterprise workflows, the security challenge isn’t whether organizations will adopt agents; it’s whether the systems that govern access can evolve to keep pace. Blocking AI at the perimeter is unlikely to scale, but neither will extending legacy identity models. What’s required is a shift toward identity systems that can account for context, delegation, and accountability in real time, across both humans, machines, and AI agents. “The step function for agents in production will not come from smarter models alone,” Wang says. “It will come from predictable authority and enforceable trust boundaries. Enterprises need identity systems that can clearly represent who an agent is acting for, what it is allowed to do, and when that authority expires. Without that, autonomy becomes unmanaged risk. With it, agents become governable.”Sponsored articles are content produced by a company that is either paying for the post or has a business relationship with VentureBeat, and they’re always clearly marked. For more information, contact sales@venturebeat.com.

Barclays says the chasm between winning and losing stocks in 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine was huge. Here are their style picks.

Changing Social Security to a flat benefit for all would put both workers and the poor at risk.