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A federal holiday doesn’t always mean an empty grocery store parking lot.

This year, Columbus Day falls on Monday, Oct. 12, 2026, giving many federal workers a three-day weekend.

And whether you’re using that extra time to stock the kitchen or you suddenly realize you’re missing something for dinner, Kroger shoppers should still be able to make a grocery run.

With holiday shopping, everyday deals, and a weekend to cater, big retailers like Kroger remain shoppers’ best bet to shop for that last-minute item.

Is Kroger open on Columbus Day 2026?

Most Kroger stores are expected to be open on Columbus Day.

Kroger has not announced a companywide Columbus Day closure for Oct. 12.

Store hours, however, vary by location, so shoppers should check Kroger’s official store locator before heading out.

Many Kroger locations open early in the morning and remain open into the evening, but there isn’t one operating schedule that applies to every store.

Pharmacies can also follow different hours from the supermarket itself.

That’s particularly important on holidays, when a grocery store may remain open while its pharmacy operates reduced hours or closes.

Pharmacy hours at Kroger already vary: the pharmacy closes at 8 pm, while the grocery store is open late until 11 pm during regular operating hours.

Kroger is open on Columbus Day.neiu20001 / Getty Images

Kroger changes its operating hours for some holidays

Kroger does publish special hours when major holidays affect its schedule.

That makes checking the schedule important, even when a Kroger supermarket isn’t closing for an entire holiday.

Kroger usually closes only on Christmas Day, whereas on holidays like Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, and New Year’s Eve, it closes early depending on the location.

With over 2,700 stores under different banners, Kroger has been working hard to become a one-stop shop for its customers. 

It has also been leveraging technological advancements in artificial intelligence to make shopping easier and less time-consuming.

And add to it availability on most holidays, it makes life easier for every kind of shopper- from the planner to the procrastinator. 

Related: Albertsons, Dollar General can’t match Walmart’s grocery prices

Jeff Bezos’ fortune surged by an estimated $102 billion in September 2026, pushing his net worth to $370 billion as of early October 2026, according to Forbes’ top 10 richest ranking.

That jump pushed him past Alphabet co-founder Larry Page to become the second-richest on the list, his highest position since May 2025.

The gain is one of the largest single-month wealth jumps Forbes has recorded for Bezos, and none of it came from Amazon stock movements or corporate deal-making.

The $102 billion surge is attributable to two private companies that Bezos owns, and neither has shares available on any public stock exchange.

Also Read: Jeff Bezos just named Amazon’s next big pillar

Blue Origin and Prometheus handed Bezos a private-market windfall

Blue Origin, the aerospace company Bezos founded in 2000, recently opened its first outside funding round at a $130 billion pre-money valuation, with Coatue Management expected to lead the round with a $4 billion commitment, Bloomberg reported.

Bezos is personally contributing an additional $2 billion to the round, deepening his position in a company he already fully owned before any outside capital came in, CNBC noted.

Before this round, Bezos held full ownership of Blue Origin, meaning the valuation applies directly to his personal balance sheet, according to Forbes.

That single revaluation increased his net worth by tens of billions of dollars, even though no shares were sold or traded on the open market.

The second driver is Prometheus, an industrial AI startup that Bezos co-leads with Vik Bajaj, former chief scientific officer of Verily, as co-CEO and co-founder.

Prometheus closed a $12 billion Series B funding round at a $41 billion valuation in June 2026, Axios reported.

Forbes estimated that Bezos holds a 20% stake in Prometheus, valuing his stake at roughly $8.2 billion at the current valuation.

How Bezos’ fortune shifted from Amazon stock to private-company stakes

Bezos’ wealth has been tied to Amazon since he founded the company in 1994 and took it public three years later in its landmark offering.

He currently holds an 8% stake and has sold more than $49 billion of Amazon stock since the company’s initial public offering, according to the Forbes ranking.

His private-company stakes now represent the fastest-growing segment of his fortune, outpacing the Amazon shares that once defined his position on the ranking.

Blue Origin and Prometheus together account for more than a third of his current net worth, a concentration that did not exist a year ago.

Tom Callahan, CEO of Nasdaq Private Market, wrote in the firm’s Secondary Scene 2026 Outlook that the biggest fortunes of this generation are increasingly being built away from public exchanges.

Some of the most consequential wealth creation of our era is happening in the private markets.

Prometheus is at the center of that shift. The AI startup accounts for a smaller share of Bezos’s wealth than Blue Origin, but it is the venture that pulled him back into day-to-day company-building.

Jeff Bezos’ fortune is shifting beyond Amazon as private-company stakes in Blue Origin and Prometheus reshape the billionaire’s wealth.Chris Jackson / Getty Images

Prometheus marks Bezos’ return to hands-on company-building

Prometheus marked an unusual career step for Bezos, who left Amazon’s chief executive role in 2021 to become executive chairman.

The startup employs about 150 people and is developing what Bezos and Bajaj describe as an “artificial general engineer,” Axios reported.

The system uses artificial intelligence to accelerate the design and manufacturing of physical products, compressing timelines that currently span years.

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“The cycle from dream, to manufacturing at rate, to having it out in the world can be very long,” Bezos told Axios.

He pointed to jet engine redesigns as an example, noting that adding 10% more thrust to an existing engine can take a full decade.

Investors, including JPMorgan, BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, DST Global, and Arch Venture Partners, all backed the Series B round. Bezos was the single largest contributor to Prometheus’s earlier $6.2 billion Series A round, making him its most committed backer, Axios confirmed.

The company has not yet demonstrated a commercial product or announced a paying customer, despite its rapid valuation growth.

Bezos has emphasized that the startup operates independently because “it deserves a dedicated team that is obsessed with this one thing,” he told Axios.

What Bezos’ addition signals about where wealth is built now

The scale of Bezos’s September gain reflects a structural shift that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) quantified in its 2025 Office of the Advocate for Small Business Capital Formation staff report. 

The report found that U.S. private companies raised $840 billion in the year ending June 30, 2025, compared with $1.5 trillion by public companies over the same period, excluding pooled investment vehicles. 

The SEC’s Q3 2025 Private Fund Statistics report put aggregate private fund gross asset value near $27 trillion. In his March 2026 remarks at the Investment Management Private Markets Roundtable, SEC Chairman Paul Atkins framed this kind of scale as the “responsible retailization” of private markets. 

That framing followed the White House’s August 2025 executive order, titled “Democratizing Access to Alternative Assets for 401(k) Investors,” which directed the Department of Labor to review pathways for defined-contribution plans to access alternative assets. 

The gap between institutional and retail participation in the market segment holding Bezos’ newest wealth sits at the center of that federal policy work.

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The spread between France’s 10-year government bond and Germany’s equivalent reached its widest last week in available Bloomberg data, dating back to 1990.

A 10-year Treasury yield above 5.3% gives investors a compelling reason to ask whether stocks are still worth the risk. Higher bond yields raise the return available from government debt, and they can pressure stock valuations, particularly for growth stocks whose expected profits sit further in the future.

Yet the headline S&P 500 performance can obscure a more divided market: Mark Malek, chief investment officer at Siebert Financial, says smaller companies, the equal-weight S&P 500, and many sectors were already feeling the strain. Malekm sat down with TheStreet’s Caroline Woods to apply his 35 years of market experience to current market environment — one in which both stock prices and bond yields are near record highs.

Malek’s approach to today’s market is not to abandon stocks or buy every technology pullback. Instead, he aims to separate companies that can finance an artificial intelligence buildout from their own cash flow and broad operating businesses from companies that need more debt, more favorable rates, or uninterrupted spending to justify their valuations.

This differentiation makes Nvidia and Microsoft relevant even in a higher-yield environment, while turning earnings season and forward guidance into a tougher test for the rest of the growth market.

For investors weighing stocks against Treasuries, the decision comes down to the source of a company’s growth, the risks that could interrupt it, and the price paid for that opportunity.

Why higher Treasury yields can hurt stocks beneath the S&P 500

The usual relationship between stocks and bonds is straightforward. When Treasury yields rise, investors can earn more from relatively low-risk investments. That can make stock shares look less appealing, especially growth stocks whose valuations depend heavily on earnings expected years from now. Malek said the effect was already visible beneath the large companies that dominate the S&P 500.

That distinction matters because a capitalization-weighted index gives the largest companies the greatest influence over its daily moves. A handful of giant technology companies can keep the S&P 500 resilient even while a wider group of stocks declines. An equal-weight version of the index gives each member the same starting weight, so it can offer a different view of market participation.

Malek does not argue that growth stocks are immune to rates. He argues that unusually strong business growth can offset some of the pressure from higher yields. The key word here is “some.” Investors who buy a stock solely because it belongs to the artificial intelligence trade may be taking on a risk that is no longer hidden by broad enthusiasm for the sector.

If those growth rates can continue then in fact they can out ski the avalanche right of these higher yields.
Mark Malek, when asked whether higher yields can coexist with rising growth stocks

Malek’s image captures the tension. A company with fast and durable earnings growth may be able to overcome a higher discount rate in investors’ valuation models. A company with less certain growth may not. The market’s response also depends on confidence: Investors who grow uncomfortable with rate headlines can sell even businesses whose long-term outlook has not materially changed.

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Why earnings season matters more for richly valued technology stocks

The next major test is earnings season. Malek said a growth-led market can keep advancing if companies continue to produce the growth investors expect, but a big earnings miss or weak forward guidance can quickly change the conversation. Forward guidance is management’s outlook for future revenue, spending, demand, or profits, and it often matters as much as the reported quarter for a highly valued stock.

A warning from a chief financial officer about higher costs, slower demand, or larger capital expenditures can carry outsized weight when valuations are already elevated. Capital expenditures, often shortened to CapEx, are a company’s investments in long-lived assets such as data centers, servers, and equipment. Large AI-related spending plans can support suppliers, but they can also worry investors if the spending appears likely to outrun near-term returns.

That is why Malek described a pullback as a potential buying opportunity rather than an automatic one. He said investors can no longer use what he called “peanut butter and jelly mathematics,” meaning a blanket decision to buy the entire growth complex.

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A declining share price can reflect a marketwide fear that does not alter a company’s prospects, or it can signal that the company’s underlying investment case has weakened. Those are different situations.

For long-term, buy-and-hold investors, the useful question is whether a company’s growth story remains intact after a selloff.

A decline driven by broad concerns about AI spending or interest rates may be worth closer study if the company has a strong balance sheet, reliable cash flow, and several ways to generate revenue. A decline following weaker guidance, mounting debt, or a fading competitive edge calls for more caution.

How Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle fit different AI risk tiers

Malek’s framework begins with a company’s ability to fund its own ambitions. He placed Microsoft and Amazon in his first tier of AI companies because they have substantial cash flow, strong balance sheets, and major business lines beyond the current AI investment cycle.

That flexibility does not eliminate risk. Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta Platforms are still committing significant resources to AI infrastructure. But Malek’s point is that they can slow spending, lean on other revenue sources, or absorb a period of lower returns more easily than a company whose strategy relies more heavily on borrowed money.

He put Oracle in a riskier second tier because he sees its AI buildout as more dependent on leverage (using debt to finance its investments). Debt can boost returns when a strategy works, but it also makes a company more sensitive to interest rates and to any shortfall in the expected payoff from that investment. Malek said investors should seek a higher expected return when accepting that added risk.

Malek declined to name third-tier companies, describing them generally as newer, more speculative businesses. That restraint is useful. A fast-growing market often encourages investors to treat every company connected to a popular theme as if it has the same financial resources and staying power. It does not.

The practical screen is to ask whether a company can withstand a delayed payoff from AI spending without needing a favorable financing environment.

How to find AI infrastructure companies with pricing power

Artificial intelligence investing extends beyond chip designers and cloud platforms. Malek pointed to Caterpillar, Vertiv, and Eaton as established industrial companies that have benefited from the infrastructure buildout. He said Caterpillar was up 50% year to date, Vertiv was up almost 60%, and Eaton was up 40% at the time of the conversation.

The underlying investment idea is to identify the pressure points within the AI ecosystem. Data centers need power, cooling, equipment, construction capacity, memory, and other inputs. A company that supplies an essential product can have price power, meaning it can charge more without immediately losing demand if customers have few workable alternatives.

Related: JPMorgan just put a different spin on the stock market selloff

Caterpillar illustrates how an existing holding can gain a new source of demand. Malek said Siebert Financial had owned the industrial company for years because it viewed Caterpillar as a well-run business that historically moved with construction spending and economic expansion, including growth in Asia. Its role in AI-related infrastructure was an added tailwind rather than the original reason for owning it.

Investors should still distinguish between a company with a long-lived competitive position and a company benefiting from a particularly strong part of the investment cycle. Equipment demand can be robust while data-center construction accelerates, then cool if customers reduce CapEx. That possibility does not make infrastructure suppliers poor investments, but it does make the durability of demand a central question.

Why NVIDIA has a different long-term case than Micron Technology

Micron Technology shows both the appeal and the risk of investing in an AI bottleneck. Malek said the company was up 270% year-to-date at the time of the interview and still called it a buy because memory is an important component of the AI ecosystem. He also emphasized that Micron Technology is not a permanent holding, in his view, because a slowdown in AI CapEx could sharply affect it.

Micron is very much a buy now, right? Because they control a very important part of the ecosystem.
Mark Malek, when asked whether Micron Technology remained a buy after its year-to-date rally

Malek’s preference, if forced to choose one, was Nvidia. His reasoning was innovation. Nvidia can keep reinforcing its competitive moat, a durable advantage that makes it harder for competitors to take business if it continues to develop new products and capabilities ahead of rivals. He contrasted that possibility with suppliers whose demand may be more cyclical, meaning more closely tied to swings in economic activity or capital spending.

That does not mean Nvidia’s growth can continue at the same pace forever. In fact, Malek explicitly said it would slow.

The distinction is between a company that keeps creating new reasons for customers to buy and a company that depends more heavily on a specific stage of the buildout. Investors considering either stock should decide whether they are seeking a long-term innovator, a potentially powerful but more cyclical supplier, or a mix of both.

Why banks can reveal changes in consumer health

Technology is not the only part of the market worth watching. Malek said financial companies had emerged from a difficult period marked by unstable interest rates and weaker deal flow. Deal flow refers to the volume of potential transactions in areas such as corporate financing and acquisitions. He cited improving M&A, trading, and wealth management conditions as reasons financial stocks had performed well.

Even so, Malek said he was holding rather than buying financial stocks ahead of bank earnings. He wants management teams to address the outlook for deal flow, M&A, capital markets activity, and wealth management. Net interest income, the difference between what a bank earns on loans and investments and what it pays for funding, also matters, but Malek said it was not his only focus.

Large banks can provide an early read on the consumer because they see credit-card use, loan performance, and signs of repayment stress. Malek named JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo as institutions that can help investors assess whether consumers are continuing to spend or are beginning to struggle with credit. He said he has repeatedly worried about consumer weakness and has been wrong so far, because consumers have continued to spend.

His concern helps explain his caution toward consumer discretionary stocks, companies that sell items and services households can postpone when budgets tighten. Malek said he has stayed away from the sector and would watch for broader repricing if consumer health deteriorates. That is a view to monitor against bank results, not a claim that consumer spending has already cracked.

How long-term, buy-and-hold investors can weigh stocks against Treasuries

A 5.3% Treasury yield is a real alternative to stocks, particularly for investors who value predictable income and can commit money for a long period. Malek acknowledged that the broad S&P 500 earnings yield was probably below the 5.3% Treasury yield. Earnings yield is a company’s or index’s earnings divided by its market price, and it offers one way to compare the market’s current earnings power with bond yields.

Malek nevertheless argued that selected stocks could still offer greater upside because their earnings may grow faster. He said expected S&P 500 earnings growth for the next quarter was in the mid-to-high 20% range and that estimates had been edging higher. Those expectations are forecasts, not guaranteed results, and investors should treat them as a reason to examine companies closely rather than as a reason to dismiss bond risk.

For long-term, buy-and-hold investors, the choice should reflect the role each asset plays in a portfolio. Treasuries can offer known income if held to maturity. Stocks can offer greater potential return, but they also carry the risk of price declines, disappointing earnings, and changing valuations.

Malek’s stock-first preference depends on finding companies with strong fundamentals and an investment case that remains open.

The takeaway for investors choosing stocks or Treasuries

Malek’s framework is a reminder that a strong index can conceal important differences among companies. Higher Treasury yields can pressure the wider market while businesses with exceptional earnings prospects remain resilient. The response is not to assume that every AI-linked stock will overcome those pressures. It is to examine balance-sheet strength, cash flow, dependence on debt, exposure to the CapEx cycle, and the company’s ability to maintain a competitive moat.

Investors who prefer the certainty of a 5.3% Treasury yield may reasonably choose that path. Investors seeking equity growth should be prepared to be more selective, listen closely to earnings guidance, and reassess a position when the facts behind the investment change.

Malek’s approach is to stay invested while attractive opportunities remain available, while remaining ready to pivot if those opportunities close.

Related: AI’s biggest business opportunity may not look like AI
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For most of the AI boom, one kind of chip got all the attention. Graphics processors trained the big models, Nvidia sold them, and the older hardware makers took a back seat for years.

That script began to wobble by early June. Agentic AI started pulling those older names higher, while GPU-focused Nvidia lagged the broader chip rally.

Now that trade has fresh momentum. The S&P 500 closed at an all-time high on Oct. 6, one day after the Nasdaq Composite did the same, and tech led the rally once again.

Also read: Bank of America resets AMD price target after major milestone

Muse gives AMD its trillion-dollar moment

Meta unveiled Muse on Sept. 8 as a personal agent that users can interact with like a chat companion.

It is built to be more proactive and longer-running than a typical chatbot. Each one runs on a dedicated virtual machine in Meta’s cloud with its own built-in browser, and the company offers a free tier alongside two paid plans.

Wall Street noticed quickly. On Sept. 10, JPMorgan analyst Doug Anmuth upgraded Meta to Overweight from Neutral and pointed to Muse as part of a growth path that reaches beyond advertising.

By then, the agent had already climbed as high as fourth on the U.S. App Store. That was only its second day, according to TechCrunch.

Then the excitement spilled into chips. On Sept. 21, as Muse topped Apple’s U.S. App Store charts, AMD shares rose nearly 10%. The company’s market value moved past $1 trillion for the first time. It became the fourth U.S. chipmaker to get there, after Nvidia, Broadcom, and Micron.

The gains have kept coming. AMD is up 32% over the past month and Intel 21%, leaving the megacap tech names behind, according to CNBC.

OpenAI has since rolled out a personal agent of its own, called Dots. CPUs are back in the conversation as an important part of the infrastructure needed to keep long-running agents working in the background.

AMD chief executive Lisa SuBloomberg / Getty Images

Why agents lean on the CPU

The logic is simple enough. An agent does not just answer a question. It runs complex, multi-step tasks on its own.

AMD CEO Lisa Su made the point in July. She said AI is no longer just a GPU story and that agentic systems need significant CPU resources for orchestration, data handling, and coordination, as reported by TheStreet.

The products themselves back her up. Ask Muse what it runs on, and it says an AMD-based computer. Dots likewise gets its own cloud computer. Benchmarks and the agents’ own answers suggest that Muse’s virtual computer uses two processor cores, and Dots uses nine.

Analysts were sketching this out months before Muse arrived. “We are constructive on CPU demand as the industry moves to inference and agentic AI which need more CPUs,” Citi analyst Atif Malik wrote in a research note in May, when he raised his price target on Intel, according to TheStreet.

AMD also has a direct line into Meta. The social media company signed on as a lead customer for AMD’s next-generation Venice CPUs under a deal covering up to 6 gigawatts of compute. A meaningful chunk of Meta’s data center build-out is now flowing straight to AMD.

Wall Street redraws its CPU math

Raymond James analyst Simon Leopold got ahead of the move. On Aug. 25, he upgraded AMD to Strong Buy and built his case on server CPUs, a corner of the market that tends to get less attention than graphics chips. “AMD’s growth should enable it to overtake Intel during 2027,” he wrote, according to CNBC.

He was not the first bull. Cantor Fitzgerald analyst C.J. Muse lifted his AMD price target to $700 from $500 on June 29 and kept an Overweight rating, according to investing.com.

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Intel has its own supporters. Bank of America analyst Vivek Arya called the emergence of agentic AI “a powerful demand accelerant” and argued it gives Intel a fresh path back into the AI conversation. The bank projected Intel’s server CPU revenue could top $40 billion by the end of the decade.

Intel chief executive Lip-Bu Tan put it more bluntly. “Right now, the demand is very high for my CPU,” he said.

Even so, the big banks are split on the stock. Bank of America and Citi turned bullish, while Wells Fargo kept an Equal Weight rating, reflecting a more cautious view of how much upside remained in the shares.

What could cool the trade

The first risk is price. When Leopold made his call in August, AMD already traded at roughly 41 times projected earnings. Reaching his $641 target meant crossing a trillion-dollar market value. The agentic AI adoption behind his server CPU forecast could also roll out more slowly than today’s models assume.

The second is that GPUs are hardly fading. Nvidia’s market value was closing in on $6 trillion on Oct. 6, a threshold no company has ever reached. Its shares are up 30% this year, helped by a strong revenue outlook and a bigger share buyback.

The third is that AMD’s seat inside these agents is not locked in. A Meta spokesperson said the company designed its system to use whatever kind of CPU is available.

For now, the personal agent boom is lifting the fortunes of AMD and Intel together.

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