BUSINESS

The stock market is trading sideways following Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh’s speech at Jackson Hole. I think investors can take advantage of market volatility by buying these 3 stocks on the dip.

No. 1: nVent Electric plc (NVT)

On August 24, nVent Electric plc (NVT) revealed its plans to acquire Maverick Power, a data center equipment maker, in a deal valued at $1.75 billion. Data centers have become one of Maverick Power’s biggest customers due to persistent demand for reliable power.

The acquisition is a strategic one for nVent Electric (NVT) and is expected to boost the company’s offerings to its data center customers. You may recall that nVent Electric develops cooling systems for data centers, as well as designs electrical solutions that connect and protect equipment, infrastructure and processes.

So, nVent Electric will now provide more complete system-level solutions for data centers.

The acquisition is also anticipated to add to the company’s top line. Thanks to a big backlog, Maverick Power was expected to make about $700 million in revenue this year.

The acquisition is expected to be complete in the fourth quarter. In the meantime, NVT remains a good buy on dips.

My stock grading system rates nVent as a B.

No. 2: Astronics Corporation (ATRO)

Astronics (ATRO) provides in-flight entertainment and connectivity, cabin lighting, airflow controls, emergency systems, powered seats, and other products. Its customers include commercial airlines, military aircraft and vehicles, business and VIP aircraft, mass transit systems and the space industry.

One of three stocks Louis Navellier believes can be bought on dips is Astronics, an aerospace services company.Jackyenjoyphotography / Getty Images

And demand remains strong.

Astronics’ backlog surged to a record $780.6 million in the second quarter of fiscal year 2026. It was the third straight quarter of record backlogs. The company also reported record second-quarter bookings of $306.2 million.

Related: Louis Navellier has blunt message on Nvidia’s reign before earnings

Second-quarter revenue rose 27% year-over-year to a record $260 million, beating estimates of $245.3 million. Earnings soared 125.8% year-over-year to $0.70 per share, compared to $0.31 per share a year ago. Analysts expected earnings of $0.61 per share, so Astronics posted a 14.8% earnings surprise.

Given the strong demand, Astronics expects to set more records in the coming quarters.

Wall Street agrees. Analysts have raised third-quarter earnings estimates over the past three months. Third-quarter earnings are now forecast to increase 47% year-over-year to $0.72 per share. Revenue is expected to grow 26.5% year-over-year to $267.39 million. As you know, positive analyst revisions typically precede future earnings surprises. ATRO is a buy below $90.

My stock grading system rates Astronics Corp as an A.

No. 3: Eurodry Ltd. (EDRY)

Shipping rates remain elevated. And the ongoing tensions in the Middle East, especially between the U.S. and Iran over the Strait of Hormuz, could keep tanker rates high for the foreseeable future. But oil tankers are not the only ships benefiting from higher rates.

Dry bulk shipping rates have also risen to three-year highs this year. Demand for large cargo ships has risen, while the supply of available ships remains tight. Eurodry provides shipping services through a fleet of 11 dry bulk vessels, mainly transporting large bulk goods such as iron ore, coal and grains. It also carries minor bulk goods like bauxite, phosphate and fertilizers. Demand for iron ore and bauxite has been especially strong this year.

That strong demand showed up in the second-quarter results. Revenue jumped to $17.7 million, up from $11.3 million in the second quarter of 2025. Adjusted earnings totaled $6.9 million, or $2.44 per share. That compares with a loss of $1.10 per share a year ago.

Analysts expected earnings of just $1.26 per share, so Eurodry posted a 93.7% earnings surprise. After that big surprise, analysts more than doubled their third-quarter earnings estimates. They now expect earnings of $2.06 per share, compared with a loss of $0.23 per share in the third quarter of 2025.

Eurodry is also preparing for demand to stay strong. The company plans to add two Ultramax vessels in 2027 and two Kamsarmax vessels in 2028. Once those ships join the fleet, Eurodry will have more than one million deadweight tons of total carrying capacity.

So, Eurodry is well-positioned to keep benefiting from strong dry bulk demand and elevated charter rates. Buy EDRY below $54.

My stock grading system rates EuroDry as an A.

For more information about my stock grading system, click here. 

Related: Louis Navellier sends urgent data center message as moratorium worry mounts

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Presented by BoxIdentity and permissions are no longer enough to secure enterprise AI agents. They govern what an agent can reach, not how it behaves once it starts working on its own, and an autonomous agent can turn legitimate access of enterprise data into unintended action in seconds. That gap is pushing enterprise AI security from just governing access toward a layered approach that includes governing execution, says Heather Ceylan, chief information security officer at Box.”Access controls and permissions are the foundation, but the challenge is they were designed for humans,” Ceylan says. “Permissions are still the foundation, but you have to think about how the agents get their permissions scoped as well.”Access controls were built for a slower, more forgiving world, where a human employee with lingering permissions to a decade-old folder will rarely go looking for any data inside it, or even remember they have access at all. But an agent will explore all of its permissions, operating at a scale no person can match and surfacing forgotten misconfigurations and stale permissions far faster than a human ever could. Identity and scoped permissions remain the first layer of any credible defense, however, because agents raise the stakes, clean access hygiene is more valuable than ever.A steady drip of incidents in recent months underlines the potential for major damage, where models have slipped the sandboxes they were supposed to stay contained within, reached systems they weren’t scoped to touch, or read content they were not permitted to access. While the specifics vary, the overarching threat remains the same: an agent found a path through the data that it could reach, and took it.Access controls alone can’t secure autonomous AI agentsComplications crop up when agents are handed broad standing permissions to match broad workflows. An agent might legitimately need to call fifty tools across twenty different actions over the life of a task, reading and writing folders that span every department in the company. But granting all of that access at once inflates the blast radius of possible damage to data and content if a single step goes wrong. A stronger permissions model provides access only in the moments that it’s needed, Ceylan says. “You need permissions that change based on what the agent has been asked to do, when it needs to take that action,” she explains. “If it’s taking one step and only needs two tools, it should be scoped to only those two. When you narrow permissions to the task in front of the agent, the number of ways any given step can misfire shrinks with it.”From governing access to governing executionTight security is also no longer tied to whether an agent has access to specific data, but whether it should take a specific action on a specific step, which is the difference between a standing access grant and a bounded one. In other words, an agent may hold legitimate rights to a finance folder but still have no business writing four thousand of those files to a new location, even if it’s told to do so. “An employee with access to payroll data they were never meant to keep could be instructed to pull the payroll records and write them to a public shared folder, publishing the entire company’s compensation in a single move,” she says. “Every access check passed, but the behavior still has catastrophic consequences.”Prompts alone can’t reliably govern agent behavior because instructions can change, agents can absorb injected instructions, or they can be steered by files they read along the way. Durable controls need to live one level down, with the tool calls themselves, as well as the content those calls act on. Deciding in advance what an agent is permitted to execute, regardless of how its prompt is manipulated, keeps behavior inside fixed bounds that no clever input can talk it out of.Legacy content platforms weren’t built for AI agentsMost of what an agent touches inside a company is unstructured content, including contract, policies, customer records — the accumulated files that make up the overwhelming majority of corporate data. Much of it still sits in systems that were designed for human filing habits: network drives, aging ECM platforms, and many SaaS tools. Those systems were built to ask the question, does this person have permission? and they answer it with folder-level access that hasn’t been audited for years. The legacy platforms don’t have metadata for an agent to reason over or classification for an enforcement layer to act on, and their logs aren’t detailed enough to show what an agent read. Bolting an AI connector onto that stack doesn’t fix any of it, it just hands agents the same blind spots, only at machine speeds, Ceylan says. “Every agent action eventually resolves to content,” Ceylan says. “If the content layer can’t tell you what it’s holding, who it belongs to, and what should never leave it, there’s nothing underneath your controls.”How to decide which AI actions need human approvalTwo years ago, everyone assumed security would always mean including humans in the loop. Building and living with agents has changed that assumption, Ceylan says, and Box now sorts actions into three tiers: fully autonomous actions, monitored actions and high-risk actions that require human approval.Fully autonomous, reserved for actions that are reversible, bounded, logged, and free of untrusted input, and where a mistake doesn’t cost too much. Monitored actions, once a team has built enough confidence in an agent and paired it with alerting and rollback that can catch and undo a problem in flight. Irreversible, high-risk actions that are always routed through a person — for instance, when an agent that wants to delete a large number of files or wipe the primary folder in a structure. Each team must calibrate the lines between these layers to match its own risk tolerance. Box’s approach is to put controls in the platform rather than the workflow, enforcing protections such as data classification, labeling and expiration without requiring a human checkpoint for every action.”The right configuration should be enforced at the outset, instead of blocking an action at the end,” Ceylan says.Building trust in AI agents through behavior over timeAn organization can make an access decision once, but trusting an agent’s behavior should only happen over time, observing how the agent runs, collaborates, and builds on the outputs of other agents. Published frameworks tend to lag the technology, or are too abstract to implement; instead Box works from a smaller set of principles: tightly scoped agent identities and actions, clear expectations about what can be rolled back, three approval tiers, and a way for teams to test and iterate quickly. “The sanctioned path has to be the fast path, because when teams aren’t given a safe way to experiment, they tend to route around the controls entirely,” Ceylan says. “A security leader’s job is to offer a way to move quickly without stepping outside the guardrails.”Sustaining trust in an agent depends on being able to see how it actually behaves. But traditional monitoring tools weren’t built for the job; the behavioral baselines that underpin user and entity behavior analytics were calibrated to human activity, and suspicious agent behavior doesn’t necessarily look like human activity.And while establishing a useful agent baseline begins with logging, many agents start out as experiments, so their actions never make it into logging infrastructure. Plus, important signals are rarely individual easily flagged actions, but chains of activities across systems, as one agent’s output becomes another’s input, while the detections for that pattern are still being designed. Governing agents, then, requires visibility not just into what they can access, but what they actually do, and that visibility has to live where the content does.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.

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As parents continue to feel pressures on their household budgets, increasingly skipping specialty clothing stores in favor of one-stop shopping at big-box giants like Target and Walmart, another children’s apparel retailer is closing stores. 

Industry data confirms this shift, revealing that mass merchants now capture 80% of planned spending in the back-to-school category, according to Deloitte.  

This shift in consumer spending habits, paired with the shrinking malls data, including projection from Capital One Shopping suggesting that up to 87% of traditional shopping malls could close over the next decade, has forced a number of mall clothing retailers to shut a number of underperforming locations. 

A mall staple The Children’s Place has shuttered hundreds of locations in recent years as part of a major restructuring plan to shed costly real estate, and legacy specialty chain, Carter’s, has started its wave of planned closures in 2025. 

Carter’s closes 29 stores in the first two quarters of 2026 as sales grow. helen89 / Getty Images

Carter’s closes 29 stores in the first two quarters of 2026 

Founded in 1865, Carter’s grew from a modest Massachusetts knitting mill into North America’s largest children’s clothing maker by continually expanding its footprint and acquiring legacy brands like OshKosh B’gosh. 

Over 161 years of its existence, Carter’s nurtured generations of parent loyalty with its offering and prices. Now, the kids’ clothing giant is strategically closing certain locations in an effort to stay at the top of its game. 

During the first two quarters of fiscal 2026, Carter’s opened 4 stores and closed 29 stores in the United States, according to its Form 10-Q filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).  

As of July 4, 2026, Carter’s had 1,042 company-operated retail stores in North America. 

Carter’s is closing stores, but shoppers are still buying

Carter’s shrinking store footprint does not necessarily mean shoppers are abandoning the brand. The company reported a 5.1% increase in comparable U.S. sales in the second quarter of 2026, marking its fifth consecutive quarter of positive comparable-sales growth.

However, the latest results came with important caveats. Nearly all of Carter’s operating income jump came from a one-time $128 million government refund of previously paid tariffs, not from stronger underlying profitability; stripped of that refund, adjusted operating income rose to $18.1 million from $11.8 million in the same period of 2025. 

 The company also narrowed its full-year outlook, and its stock fell more than 8% on the news as investors looked past the refund.

Carter’s Q2 2026 at a glance:

Comparable U.S. sales up 5.1%

Fifth consecutive quarter of positive comparable sales 

Operating income increased to $139.8 million, compared to $4.0 million in the second quarter of 2025, driven largely by a $128 million one-time tariff refund, and partially offset by new, ongoing tariff costs.

Returned $18 million to shareholders through dividends in the first half of fiscal 2026

Narrowed full-year outlook Source: Carter’s Q2 press release 

Carter’s already announced 150 closures 

Carter’s was also profitable in 2025, reporting net sales of $2.898 billion, up 2% from $2.844 billion in 2024, according to its fourth-quarter earnings release.

“2025 was a year of meaningful progress in stabilizing our business while responding to significant new tariffs. We took actions to right-size our cost structure and we launched several important initiatives to improve the productivity of our merchandise assortments and store fleet,” stated then-CEO Douglas C. Palladini.

In the third quarter of 2025, Carter started a cost-cutting program which includes a plan to close 150 stores, with closures spreading into 2028. 

“Regarding productivity, we are addressing our cost structure across several fronts. On our last earnings call, we announced a portfolio optimization strategy to improve fleet productivity, including plans to close approximately 150 lower margin stores in North America through 2028,” Palladini said during the fourth-quarter earnings call. 

In 2025, Carter’s closed around 35 stores as leases expired, with roughly 100 total closures expected for the year. 

Despite these closing initiatives, Carter’s has found a way to continue to reach customers widely across the country. 

Carter’s keeps betting on its exclusive lines at Target, Walmart 

As parents continue to shop for value deals, and increasingly seek not only the most affordable retailers but also the most convenient shopping experience, Carter’s has found a way to meet those needs. 

More than 20 years ago, in early 2000s Carter’s began launching store-exclusive lines to expand its reach through major mass retailers, such as Walmart and Target. The retailer has continued that practice offering several exclusive lines for major retailers, including e-commerce giant Amazon. 

Exclusive Carter’s lines for major retailers: 

Target: Just One You by Carter’s – Designed exclusively for Target stores and online, offering lower-priced multipacks, layette items, and sleepwear.

Walmart: Child of Mine by Carter’s – Distributed exclusively through Walmart locations and website, providing budget-friendly everyday baby apparel.

Amazon: Simple Joys by Carter’s – Created exclusively for Amazon to capture high-volume online shopping.

Through these collaborations with retail giants, Carter’s isn’t losing customers entirely because of massive closures, as parents are simply buying Carter’s products while grocery shopping at nearby Target. 

Thanks to these partnerships, Carter’s can focus on its cost-cutting strategy which includes closing  high-rent standalone stores. 

Related: Another outdoors retailer closing stores

Consumers continue to cut back on apparel and other discretionary purchases 

Apparel ranks among the highest categories for planned consumer spending cuts. McKinsey consumer survey found net spending intent for apparel plummeted to –24, compared to just –1 during the same period last year. 

 “Consumers reported plans to pull back across a broad range of discretionary purchases. Of the 22 categories in our survey, pet care services was the only one with net spending intent at zero or above; every other category was negative,” reads the report. 

Nearly three-quarters (72%) of consumers say they still have room to cut spending on discretionary categories such as dining, beauty and personal care, and apparel, according to the latest EY-Parthenon Consumer Sentiment Survey.

These cutbacks are happening as more than half (54%) of Americans report saving no money in June 2026, while one in five households spent more than they earned and relied on savings or debt to help cover expenses.

“For retailers, demand remains intact but increasingly selective, making value, affordability and clear differentiation more important than ever,” stated Will Auchincloss, EY-Parthenon Americas retail sector leader. 

Related: 29-year-old casual dining chain closes 4 locations after acquisition