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As an avid mountain biker, I’ve learned a lot about when to push and when to rest. Here’s how it helped me grow a national brand.

Oracle has expanded in recent years from providing database software management to cloud computing, which has been its biggest contributor to sales. In its fiscal 2026 year, the tech giant posted net income of $17 billion on revenue of $67 billion, with its cloud business accounting for just a little more than half of the top line. One of Oracle’s biggest services is OCI Generative AI, which is used for developing and operating generative AI applications.Oracle’s profit has increased in recent years to record levels, and the company has used some of that money to pay back shareholders. Here’s how much dividends it has paid back to shareholders, and what its payout ratio and dividend yield are.Oracle dividend quick facts*Current quarterly payout:$0.50 per shareCurrent annual payout: $2.00 per shareYield: 1.4%Payout Ratio: 34%Frequency: QuarterlyNumber of dividend increases: 8*Based on Oracle’s July 9, 2026 stock price, fiscal 2026 earnings and dividends.How often does Oracle pay dividends?Oracle pays a cash dividend on a quarterly basis. The company’s fiscal year runs from June 1 to May 31, and the payments are made in July, October, January, and April.Related: Does Meta pay dividends? Its yield and payouts explainedWhen did Oracle start paying dividends?Oracle was founded in 1977, but it only started paying dividends more than three decades later. Its first dividend payment was on May 8, 2009, at 5 cents a share. For fiscal 2010, the tech giant paid an annual dividend of 20 cents, on net income of $1.21 a share. That put its payout ratio, which is total annual dividend per share divided by total earnings per share, at 17%. The dividend payments came as profits continued to rise. Net income in fiscal 2009 was $5.59 billion, up more than fourfold from $1.29 billion in 1999.How much dividends does Oracle pay?For its first quarterly dividend, Oracle paid 5 cents a share, in May 2009. Since then, Oracle has raised its dividend typically every two years — for a total of eight times — and has even paid out special dividends. Two years after the first payment, the quarterly dividend was raised by a penny, to 6 cents. In August 2013, the dividend was doubled to 12 cents a share. In April 2015, the dividend rose by a quarter to 15 cents, and two years later by 4 cents to 19 cents. In April 2019, it rose by 5 cents to 24 cents, and in April 2021 by a third to 32 cents. In April 2023, the dividend rose by a quarter to 40 cents, and again by the same amount in April 2025 to 50 cents.More on dividends:Apple’s dividend explained: Yield, history & moreAmazon’s dividends & stock splits: What you need to knowHow much does Home Depot pay in dividends? 

Oracle founder Larry Ellison, shown here in the Oval Office of the White House on February 3, 2025, is Oracle’s largest individual shareholder. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images

Who benefits the most from Oracle’s dividend?Large shareholders, especially company founders, tend to benefit the most from dividend payments. Larry Ellison, a company founder who also serves as Oracle’s executive chair and chief technology officer, owned 1.158 billion shares, or 40.6% of common stock, as of September 2025, according to the company’s 2025 proxy statement. Based on fiscal 2025 dividends of $1.70 a share, Ellison would have been paid $1.97 billion. What is Oracle’s payout ratio?In fiscal 2026, Oracle paid a total of $2 a share in dividends, and posted net income of $5.83 a share. That payout ratio was 34% That seems to be generous compared to other tech companies, which have been investing earnings back into their businesses. Nvidia, the leader in making hardware for use in artificial intelligence, had a payout ratio of 0.8% in 2025.What is Oracle’s dividend yield?Oracle’s 12-month dividend yield was 1.4% in early July 2026. That’s based on the 12-month dividend payment of $2 for fiscal 2026, and its July 9 share price of $144.22. By comparison, Nvidia had a 12-month dividend yield of 0.49%.Related: Alphabet’s dividend history, yield & future prospects explained

The Department of Homeland Security claimed hours after the deadly shooting that the victim had “weaponized” his vehicle “in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer.”

Few genres of film have been as much of a gamble for Disney as its live-action remakes. Criticism of the latest is so harsh that it raises questions of whether it would have been better made with AI.

Every driver knows the pattern, even without a chart to prove it. When crude oil spikes, the number on the station sign seems to jump before you finish your commute. When crude falls, the savings take the scenic route.Economists call it rockets and feathers: Pump prices rocket up and float down.There is a reason the pattern persists. Stations run on thin margins while wholesale costs climb, then rebuild them when costs fall and the street price lags behind. That widening spread on the way down is where much of the retail fuel business earns its keep.Washington usually grumbles about the lag and moves on. Presidents have complained about pump prices for 50 years, and the feathers have floated at their own pace anyway.This summer, the complaint department has teeth. Crude oil has been sliding for weeks as the Iran conflict winds down, and the White House has decided the float-down period is over. On Tuesday, June 30, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent went on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends” and put the nation’s gasoline retailers on notice, warning that the administration is tracking pump prices and expects the crude savings to reach drivers before the country’s 250th birthday on Saturday, July 4.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned gasoline retailers that the administration is tracking pump prices.Joe Lamberti / Getty Images

What Bessent told gas stations about pump pricesBessent aimed his warning at the entire retail fuel chain, from stations owned by oil majors such as Exxon Mobil (XOM) and Chevron (CVX) to independents and international convenience chains. He urged them all to “be good actors, especially in the 250th anniversary, because we’re watching,” according to Fox Business.The warning came with homework attached. The Treasury built a chart showing how quickly pump prices tracked crude on the way up, and “we’re going to hold them accountable on the other side,” Bessent said, per Mediaite.More Oil & Gas:As Middle East tensions explode, oil and gas prices resetGas-price questions remain even with end to Iran conflict in sightJPMorgan sends blunt verdict on oil, economyThe pressure did not start with him. A day earlier, President Donald Trump demanded that retailers begin targeting roughly $2.50 a gallon, arguing prices remain far too high with oil near $68 a barrel. “If Retailers don’t do this, big problems lie ahead!” Trump wrote on Truth Social, according to Reuters.The president also declared that price gouging is illegal and would not be tolerated, a signal that the administration views enforcement as a live option rather than a talking point.Bessent went further on the margin question. Stations padded their take during the run-up and probably booked record profits on fuel retailing, he argued, adding that it is now “time to do something for the American people,” the Guardian reported.This is not his first shot across the bow, either. Bessent warned in May that Treasury would work to keep retail gas stations honest on the way down, just as they moved fast on the way up.The difference now is specificity. There is a chart, a date, and a president publicly counting down.Related: Bessent drops a bombshell on Iran oil, dollarWhy gas prices fall slower than crude oilThe frustration is easy to understand once you line up the numbers. Crude has given back most of its war premium, yet the pump is still catching up.When I stacked the American Automobile Association’s (AAA) weekly readings against the crude chart, the asymmetry Bessent is complaining about was sitting right there in the data.The national average climbed from $2.98 a gallon on Feb. 26 to a peak of $4.56 on May 21, according to AAA.West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude traded near $71.51 a barrel during Bessent’s interview, down from wartime levels that regularly topped $95, according to Mediaite.The pump average had eased to $3.91 a gallon by June 25, its fifth straight weekly decline, according to AAA.A record 72 million Americans are expected to travel over the July 4 holiday, according to the Guardian.Stations will tell you the lag is structural. The fuel sitting in an underground tank was bought at last week’s wholesale price, and owners who slashed margins during the spike lean on the way down to make the year’s numbers work.There is also the business model itself. Fuel margins are famously thin in normal times, often measured in cents per gallon, and the profitable stretch that follows a crude selloff is how many operators survive the lean ones.Retail prices even ticked up on days crude tumbled this spring, a disconnect that showed up in TheStreet’s May coverage of the crude selloff.The administration’s counterargument is the chart. If prices could follow crude up within days, the thinking goes, they can follow it down just as fast, and every week of lag comes straight out of drivers’ wallets.What the July 4 price fight means for driversHere is what the fight is worth in actual dollars. My math on a standard 15-gallon fill-up says the slide from May’s $4.56 peak to $3.91 already saves a driver about $9.75 per tank. Getting to Trump’s $2.50 target would save another $21 on top of that.Nobody who follows this market expects $2.50 by Saturday. Based on my read of two decades of pump data, crude in the low $70s has typically lined up with a national average in the low $3 range, not the mid $2s, and summer blends plus holiday demand both push the other way.Presidents have also tried this lever before. Joe Biden publicly ordered stations to cut prices in the summer of 2022, and the average fell that autumn for reasons that had far more to do with crude and recession fears than with any statement.The stakes reach past the pump, too. Gasoline is one of the most visible prices in the economy, it feeds directly into headline inflation, and every week it stays elevated complicates life for a Federal Reserve still weighing rate cuts. Cheaper fill-ups would hand the White House an economic win and a political one at the same time.Still, the political deadline is real. A record travel weekend, wall-to-wall anniversary messaging, and a president naming a specific price target add up to the most direct White House pressure campaign on fuel retailers in years.Watch two numbers between now and the holiday. The first is AAA’s national average, which has fallen for five straight weeks and needs to keep shedding roughly a dime a week for the administration to claim the warning worked. AAA updates that figure daily, so nobody has to take anyone’s word for it.The second is crude itself. If oil keeps drifting toward Trump’s $68 reference point while the pump average stalls, the watching stops being a talking point and starts becoming a case file.Either way, the feathers just picked up a tailwind.Related: OPEC, Saudi Arabia share a signal on where oil is headed

The currency-market carry trade is back — and bigger than it’s been in many years.

The Federal Reserve likely will take back all the 2025 ‘insurance cuts’ or not raise interest rates at all, according to RBC Wealth Management.

Trump Accounts opened for business on July 4. Babies born between 2025 and 2028 can get $1,000 from the federal government, which can be invested in a low-cost S&P 500 index fund, and the money will grow until adulthood.

You can debate the merits of the accounts themselves. Money expert Clark Howard already has. His advice is simple: “Take the free money.” But he recommends against adding your own contributions because he believes there are other places you can put that money that offer greater tax advantages. You can read his full breakdown in our Trump Accounts guide.

Politics aside, Trump Accounts give millions of American children the one investing advantage no adult can ever buy back: time.

That head start is the lesson everyone should take from Trump accounts. Let’s look at the math.

Scenario 1: $1,000 and Nothing Else

Say the government’s $1,000 goes in at birth and nobody ever touches the account again. No birthday contributions, no grandparents chipping in. Just $1,000 earning the stock market’s long-term average return of about 10% a year.

At age 18, the account holds about $5,560. Respectable, but nobody’s retiring on it.

Now leave it alone until age 60. That same $1,000 grows to roughly $304,000. Leave it there till full SS retirement age of 67 and you’d have $593,000

The first 18 years turned $1,000 into $5,560. The next 42 years turned $5,560 into $304,000, and the final 7 years ADDED $289,000. Compounding is slow at first and dramatic at the end.

Scenario 2: Add $500 a Year, Then Stop Forever

Now suppose the family adds $500 a year until the child turns 18 and never contributes another dime. That’s about $42 a month, totaling $9,000 out of pocket over the full 18 years.

At age 18, the account holds about $28,360.

At age 60, with no further contributions, it’s worth about $1.55 million. At age 67, it’s over $3 million.

The total principal invested across both sources is $10,000. The $1,000 seed plus $9,000 from the family. Everything else is growth. And nearly all of that growth happens after the contributions stop.

You can use our investment growth calculator to run your own numbers.

The Investing Lesson of Trump Accounts

The real story of Trump Accounts isn’t the politics, the rules or even the free $1,000. It’s that time is one of the keys to success in investing, and you can’t get more of it than starting at age zero.

Every big number in this article came from the same ingredient. Not a hot stock pick, not perfect timing, just ordinary market returns stacking on top of each other for decades. A child born this year has more of those decades ahead than any adult can buy at any price.

Final Thoughts

If your child is eligible to receive the $1,000 government seed money or matching grants from employers or philanthropists, take advantage of it and let that money start compounding. However, Clark believes there are better places than Trump Accounts for many families to make ongoing contributions.

The bigger lesson applies no matter where you invest. Whether it’s a Trump Account, a 529 plan or a Roth IRA for a teen, starting early gives compound growth its greatest advantage.

Choosing the right account matters. But getting money invested while someone is young may matter even more. Decades of compounding can turn relatively modest contributions into life-changing wealth.
The post The Biggest Investing Lesson From Trump Accounts appeared first on Clark Howard.

Enterprise AI teams are giving agents more freedom at the same moment their confidence in automated testing is collapsing.Half of enterprises have deployed an AI agent or LLM feature that passed internal evaluations and yet still caused a customer-facing failure — one in four more than once — according to the June 2026 VB Pulse survey of 157 qualified enterprise respondents at companies with 100 or more employees.The sample is self-selected rather than a probability sample, so the findings should be read as directional, not precise.But enterprises are not responding by slowing automation: 66% of respondents already permit some production deployment without human review or are building systems intended to do so within the next 12 months. Only 5% say they fully trust the automated evaluations that would make those release decisions.That mismatch is the evaluation gap: the autonomy ceiling is rising faster than the assurance beneath it. It also fits a broader thesis that will be explored at VB Transform 2026: enterprises ship agents first, while the control layers around identity, evaluation, cost, context and orchestration are arriving later. The next year will be a retrofit cycle, with buyers shifting budget toward the systems that make agentic deployments governable and dependable.Why a passing evaluation is not a working agentTraditional software testing usually asks whether a defined input produces an expected output. Agent testing is harder because the system may choose its own sequence of steps, call tools, retrieve data, alter state and respond differently from one run to the next.An agent can make several individually plausible decisions and still reach the wrong result. It may retrieve the correct account but update the wrong field. It may draft a valid refund request but send it without approval. It may call five tools successfully before a sixth step leaks sensitive information or leaves a workflow incomplete.The survey shows enterprises already recognize this limitation. The most common reason for distrusting automated evaluation is poor alignment with real-world outcomes, cited by 29% of respondents. Bias or inconsistency follows at 21%, lack of explainability at 18%, and data leakage or privacy concerns at 17%.That hierarchy matters. Enterprises are saying the score often does not predict what happens when a customer, employee or business process encounters the agent in production — not that automated scoring is too slow or expensive.NIST makes a similar point in its Generative AI Profile: measurements gathered in controlled environments may not transfer cleanly to deployment because behavior changes with prompts, users, context and operating conditions. Its guidance calls for field testing, post-deployment monitoring and clear processes for escalating failures.Capability is not consistencyA single successful run proves that an agent can complete a task. It does not prove that it will complete the task reliably.Anthropic’s guidance on agent evaluation distinguishes between measuring whether a system succeeds at least once across repeated attempts and whether it succeeds every time. That distinction is essential for customer-facing or operational workflows. A model that occasionally produces an excellent answer may still be unacceptable if the same task fails unpredictably on the next attempt.Enterprise teams should therefore treat repeatability as a first-class metric. That means running the same scenario multiple times, varying phrasing and context, testing tool failures, and measuring whether the final business outcome remains correct even when the route changes.The evaluation set also has to evolve. Every production incident should become a permanent regression test. Customer escalations, failed tool calls, incorrect approvals and data-handling mistakes should feed back into the pre-deployment suite rather than remaining isolated support cases.Autonomy should expand by risk, not by ambitionThe survey does not imply that every agent action should require a person. Human review cannot scale across millions of low-consequence decisions.But zero-human operation should be earned by demonstrated reliability and bounded by the consequences of failure.Low-risk actions such as drafting internal summaries or categorizing documents can tolerate broader autonomy. Financial transactions, customer communications, code deployment, access-control changes and data deletion need stricter thresholds, repeated consistency tests, policy checks, rollback mechanisms and clear human escalation paths.The risk isn’t evenly distributed by company size, either. Larger enterprises — those with 2,500 or more employees — are moving toward zero-human deployment fastest, at 70% versus 64% for smaller companies, and they’re also shipping more agents that go on to fail a customer, at 54% versus 48%. That is the warning for enterprise leaders. Removing the human from the loop does not remove uncertainty. Without stronger assurance, it converts uncertainty into an automated production decision.The market will keep pushing toward greater autonomy because the economic incentive is real. The organizations best positioned won’t be those that remove people fastest — they’ll be the ones that treat repeatability and regression testing as seriously as deployment speed.

CD rates are at a standstill, but that could change after the next Fed meeting, or the one after that.