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The Green Bay Packers used their second round pick on cornerback Brandon Cisse Friday night.

Ambitious entrepreneurs like Elon Musk take on risk when pursuing new ventures. While the CEO of Tesla isn’t in the same position as many investors who are simply saving for their long-term goals, there are lessons investors can take away from Musk’s pursuits.
Extreme risk-taking does not make sense for most everyday investors, and you don’t have to get into speculative investments or launch a startup to reach your long-term financial goals. Here’s what you can take away from Musk’s approach to risk, and four moves to avoid.

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What Elon Musk gets right about risk
Musk and other visionary entrepreneurs have highly ambitious goals, such as flying to space. As a result, it’s important that they acknowledge uncertainty and plan around it. They create timelines, test out small projects and ensure they have the proper resources to move forward until their visions become realities.
Entrepreneurs and investors can go broke by putting their time and money into the wrong ventures, or without proper planning. While you hear about Tesla and Musk’s other ventures — such as SpaceX and xAI — being successful, there are many other speculative businesses and assets that collapse within a few years. It’s important to keep that risk in mind when pursuing new investment opportunities.

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Risky mistakes investors should avoid
Investors looking to save up for a down payment, send their children to college or retire are operating with much different finances and risk tolerances than entrepreneurs like Musk. Here are four moves they should avoid, especially as they near retirement.
1. Putting too much risk in one investment
There’s a reason financial experts say not to put all your eggs in one basket. Going all-in on a single publicly-traded company, for instance, can lead to a disaster for your finances if that stock tanks. Instead, investors should diversify their portfolio across many different types of assets, such as stocks (including those from various sectors, and of large and small and domestic and international companies) bonds and cash.
Buying index funds is a low-cost way to get diversification and competitive returns. Younger investors may be able to take on more risk than their older counterparts who are nearer to retirement and have shorter time horizons.
2. Using options and leverage
Options and leverage amplify your portfolio’s movements. While you can generate supercharged returns, you also risk increasing your losses.
For most investors, it makes sense to avoid these risky assets. However, if you have done your research and want to invest with options and leverage, limit your exposure. For example, you may cap your exposure to 2-5% of your overall portfolio.

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3. Letting headlines dictate your portfolio
Musk uses social media to bring more attention to his businesses, but it’s not good for long-term investors to stay up to date with all of the noise. Financial advisors often say investors should only buy stocks they feel comfortable holding for at least a few years. That way, it’s easier to stick with scheduled portfolio check-ins than reacting to every media headline.
You can also write rules that constitute when you will buy and sell holdings. For instance, a 10% rally for the S&P 500 may warrant trimming and reallocating some of your assets. Other investors may feel the need to buy more stocks when the broader market is in a correction.
4. Ignoring potential costs
Big risks like options and margin can sting right away, but there are also subtle risks like inflation and long-term care that cause some people to outlive their savings.
Being too focused on growth opportunities can cause investors to skip on the essentials, such as setting up an emergency savings account, having strong insurance policies and creating an effective withdrawal plan to minimize their taxes and preserve their nest egg.

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A handful of stocks now drive an outsized share of the U.S. market, and most investors carry the same worry into every rebalancing decision. The concern is simple and nearly universal among long-term investors who have watched these names dominate market returns for two straight years.That collective worry has shaped retirement allocations and ETF flows across two intense years of market debate over concentration risk in the index. A new Vanguard analysis has just challenged the assumption underlying that fear, and its conclusion may force you to rethink your tech allocation.Why Vanguard says the Magnificent 7 label is misleadingVanguard published the analysis on April 7, 2026, taking direct aim at the assumption that the Magnificent 7 act as a single market trade. Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla generated a combined 2025 revenue of $2.2 trillion across very different end markets, according to Vanguard.Their business lines span advertising, cloud infrastructure, smartphones, electric vehicles, social platforms, AI chips, and even physical grocery store operations, according to Vanguard. Each of those segments responds differently to interest rates, consumer demand, regulatory pressure, and capital spending cycles in any given year.“They share a label, not a business model,” said Rodney Comegys, chief investment officer of Vanguard Capital Management and head of Global Equity. That line sets up the entire counterargument to the concentration panic gripping much of the market in early 2026.What each Magnificent 7 company sells todayThe label flattens companies that look very different once you study where each dollar of revenue lands across their reported segments each year.How Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft generate revenueAmazon pulls roughly two-thirds of revenue from its digital marketplace, about a quarter from cloud services, and the rest from advertising, according to Vanguard.Apple draws about half its sales from iPhones, a quarter from media and streaming, and the rest from computers and wearables, according to Vanguard. Microsoft earns roughly 40% from consumer and office software, a third from back-end infrastructure, with the rest from gaming and consulting, according to Vanguard.Where Alphabet, Meta, Nvidia, and Tesla make their moneyAlphabet still relies on search advertising for the bulk of its revenue, while Meta builds nearly all of its profit from social platform ads. NVIDIA sells AI chips into data centers, while Tesla sells electric vehicles and energy storage to consumers and commercial fleets across multiple regions. Those breakdowns matter because exposure to ads, hardware cycles, and enterprise spending each carry a different risk profile in any given quarter.How AI spending is dividing the 7The AI buildout has put unequal pressure on each of these companies in ways that Wall Street has only started to fully reflect in valuations. AI hyperscalers will spend about $670 billion on capex in 2026, roughly 96% of cash flow, compared to approximately 40% in 2023, according to Bank of America strategist Michael Hartnett. That burden falls heaviest on Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta, Bank of America told Investing.com. Apple and Tesla face very different cash flow dynamics because their core revenue streams tie directly to consumer hardware and electric vehicle sales.NVIDIA sits on the other side of the trade entirely, selling the chips that power most of the AI capex flowing through the hyperscalers.

The Magnificent 7 may share a label, but their profits come from very different engines, and that split is starting to matter more than ever.gorodenkoff/Getty Images

Why the Mag 7 stocks rarely move in lockstepReturns vary widely from quarter to quarter, even when the broader market trades within a tight, predictable range. Tesla and Meta have shown the largest swings of the seven by some distance over the past five years, The Motley Fool noted. Apple and Microsoft have moved with smaller, steadier fluctuations over the same stretch of quarters and earnings cycles.That dispersion matters because it weakens the assumption that a single stumble in the group automatically drags the others down. A weak quarter for Tesla does not signal automatic trouble for Apple or Microsoft heading into their next earnings reports.Each name carries its own demand cycle, regulatory exposure, and capital spending plan to defend against rivals each year.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 $110The pattern is clear when you compare quarterly returns from late 2020 through the end of 2025 across the seven names. Several names suffered steep declines in 2022 before rebounding at very different rates the following year, according to Vanguard.By late 2025, the spread between the best and worst performers in the group remained meaningfully wide across multiple quarters. For long-term investors, that spread carries the practical value of the Vanguard finding when shaping portfolio decisions in 2026.If the seven stocks already trade with meaningfully different rhythms, the concentration risk you fear sits partly diversified inside the group itself. The label may be doing more harm than good when investors map out their next allocation move across mega-cap tech.Why concentration risk looks different up closeThe Magnificent 7 now make up roughly 33.7% of the S&P 500 as of April 14, 2026, according to The Motley Fool. That share rose from 12.5% in 2016, driven by sustained outperformance and an AI buildout that has accelerated since 2023.Many strategists have used that single number to argue that the index has become dangerously narrow and exposes investors to hidden risk. Vanguard pushes back without dismissing the concern, arguing that index-level concentration looks different once you account for the underlying business diversity of the seven companies.“The diverse revenue sources matter because they show that the Magnificent Seven’s business models span different end-users and markets…. Differences in business models also mean differences in risk-factor exposures, which helps explain why their stock prices do not move entirely in lockstep,” said Erich Pingel, analyst in Vanguard Investment Strategy Group.Comegys also wrote that the group’s commercial and market success runs alongside meaningful differentiation at the company level, according to Vanguard. He added that the differentiation makes it unlikely all seven will disappear or experience significant drawdowns at the same time across business cycles.How to weigh concentration risk before your next investing moveThe honest answer is that concentration inside the S&P 500 remains a real risk, even with the differentiation Vanguard highlights in its analysis. The seven stocks fell about 41.3% in 2022, while the broader index fell 19.4%, roughly twice as hard, according to The Motley Fool.Concentrated exposure cuts both ways, with sharper rallies in good years and deeper drawdowns when investor risk appetite shifts away from growth. Instead of asking whether all seven will collapse together, the better question is which of the seven faces the biggest fundamental risk in 2026. That kind of stock-by-stock thinking is what Vanguard is nudging long-term investors toward, even inside the safety of a low-cost index fund.Related: Vanguard debunks a deep-rooted retirement belief

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The S&P 500 closed above 7,000 for the first time in history on April 15, and it’s kept climbing from there. If you have cash on the sidelines, you’re probably asking the same question investors ask every time markets hit new records: Is it a bad time to buy?

The historical data says the opposite.

What Happens When You Invest at All-Time Highs

Peter Mallouk, CEO of Creative Planning, recently shared a chart from Charlie Bilello that cuts through the fear. It measures S&P 500 total returns from September 1989 through April 2026, comparing returns after new all-time highs to returns on every other day.

Here’s what investors who bought at all-time highs got, on average:

1 year later: 13.6% return (vs. 11.9% on other days)

3 years later: 46% return (vs. 39% on other days)

5 years later: 82% return (vs. 74% on other days)

Money invested at record highs didn’t just keep pace with money invested on normal days. It outperformed.

Why This Happens

New all-time highs feel like a warning sign. The logic seems obvious: If the market is at a peak, the next move must be down.

The historical record tells a different story. Markets hit new highs because earnings are growing, the economy is expanding, or both. Those conditions tend to persist. One new high is usually followed by more new highs, not a crash.

The S&P 500 has already hit dozens of new records in 2026, stacking on top of the 37 all-time highs it posted in 2025. Each of those highs, at the moment it happened, felt like “the top” to some investors. None of them were.

The Real Risk Is Sitting in Cash

Every year, the market sets new records, and a new group of investors decides to wait for a pullback before putting money to work. Some of them wait for years.

While they wait, two things work against them. Markets continue climbing, making the “correction” they’re waiting for feel further and further away. And even when a correction does come, it often doesn’t drop back to the levels that originally scared them.

Cash sitting in a checking account loses purchasing power to inflation every year. A savings account earning 4% roughly keeps up with inflation, but doesn’t build real wealth. The stocks you were afraid to buy have historically returned close to 10% per year over long periods.

Money expert Clark Howard has long said that time in the market beats timing the market. The Bilello data is one more piece of evidence that waiting for the “right” moment tends to cost investors more than it saves them.

What To Do if You Have Money To Invest

If you have a lump sum you’ve been holding back, you have two reasonable choices.

Invest it all at once. Research from Vanguard found that lump sum investing beats dollar-cost averaging about two-thirds of the time, because markets trend up over long periods and earlier money has more time to compound.

Dollar-cost average over several months. If putting it all in today would keep you up at night, split it into equal pieces and invest on a schedule. You’ll give up some expected return for peace of mind, and you’ll still be in the market.

The worst option is the one many people default to: waiting for a clearer signal that never comes.

Final Thoughts

New all-time highs aren’t a reason to stay out of the market. The data since 1989 shows they’ve actually been above-average entry points for long-term investors.

If your timeline is five years or longer, the question isn’t whether the market will pull back at some point. It will. The question is whether you’ll be invested long enough to participate in the recovery. Investors who stay in the market through the full cycle have consistently outperformed those who attempt to wait for the perfect moment.

For most people, the perfect moment to invest is when you have the money.
The post Should You Be Scared of Investing at All-Time Highs? appeared first on Clark Howard.

This week, Polymarket and Kalshi confirmed multiple cases of insider trading on their platforms — the most high-profile being the arrest of Gannon Ken Van Dyke, a U.S. special forces soldier, in connection with Polymarket trades on the January capture of former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
The largest prediction market companies say they are pursuing disciplinary action in insider trading cases and cooperating with law enforcement as well as regulators, but they have said nothing about refunding everyday people who unwittingly traded in compromised markets.
Using direct knowledge of military plans, prosecutors allege, Van Dyke made over $400,000 betting just over $33,000 in the following event markets:

“Maduro out by January 31, 2026?”
“Trump invokes War Powers against Venezuela by January 31?”
“U.S. Forces in Venezuela by January 31, 2026?”
“Will the U.S. invade Venezuela by January 31, 2026?”

As of Friday afternoon, Polymarket had not added any notes on these markets’ pages about refunds, nor had it shared information about refunds on X or Discord, where it typically posts updates. The company did not respond to Money’s requests for comment.
On X, several users asked whether Polymarket will give bettors their money back in markets affected by insider trading or manipulation.
“So you’re going to refund the bets right? Since the contest and odds were illegally compromised,” one user asked, responding to a Polymarket tweet about the Van Dyke case.
“What happens now? Does Polymarket refund?” another individual wrote Thursday.
That second post was actually referencing Paris weather markets that were allegedly exploited by a man who used a heating device (like a hair dryer) to influence temperature readings at Charles de Gaulle airport. Those markets were:

“Highest temperature in Paris on April 6?”
“Highest temperature in Paris on April 15?”

Like the other four markets, there were no notes on the Polymarket site Friday about refunds for traders who bet on the weather in Paris these two days.
In its terms of service, Polymarket briefly explains its strict policy toward refunds: “Contracts such as the Contracts available on the Platform are highly experimental, risky, and volatile. Transactions entered into in connection with the Contracts are irreversible, final and there are no refunds,” it reads.
According to PolymarketGuide, a community-maintained site, Polymarket sometimes issues refunds “when a market is released with faulty rules, posted too late, removed before resolution or its rules change after launch.” The guide adds: “In rare cases, Polymarket may decide to make users whole when a market resolves incorrectly.”
Notices about refunds are typically posted in a Polymarket Discord channel called “market-updates.” Refunds have been issued in dozens of markets in the month of April alone, according to customer support messages in the channel. But none of them are the markets mentioned above.
On Wednesday, Kalshi announced fines and sanctions in three separate insider trading cases of candidates for Congress betting on their own primaries. Kalshi did not respond to Money’s request for comment about the possibility of refunds for traders who used those markets.

More from Money:
Prediction Markets Have an Insider Trading Problem. Are They Still Worth the Gamble?
Prediction Markets 101: Read This Guide Before You Start Placing Bets
Online Sports Betting Is Gaining Popularity — at the Expense of Traditional Investing

During Operation Lunar Peek in November 2024, attackers gained unauthenticated remote admin access — and eventual root — across more than 13,000 exposed Palo Alto Networks management interfaces. Palo Alto Networks scored CVE-2024-0012 at 9.3 and CVE-2024-9474 at 6.9 under CVSS v4.0. NVD scored the same pair 9.8 and 7.2 under CVSS v3.1. Two scoring systems. Two different answers for the same vulnerabilities. The 6.9 fell below patch thresholds. Admin access appeared required. The 9.3 sat queued for maintenance. Segmentation would hold.”Adversaries circumvent [severity ratings] by chaining vulnerabilities together,” Adam Meyers, SVP of Counter Adversary Operations at CrowdStrike, told VentureBeat in an exclusive interview on April 22, 2026. On the triage logic that missed the chain: “They just had amnesia from 30 seconds before.”Both CVEs sit on the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog. Neither score flagged the kill chain. The triage logic that consumed those scores treated each CVE as an isolated event, and so did the SLA dashboards and the board reports those dashboards feed.CVSS did exactly what it was designed to do. Score one vulnerability at a time. The problem is that adversaries do not attack one vulnerability at a time.”CVSS base scores are theoretical measures of severity that ignore real-world context,” wrote Peter Chronis, former CISO of Paramount and a security leader with Fortune 100 experience. By moving beyond CVSS-first prioritization at Paramount, Chronis reported reducing actionable critical and high-risk vulnerabilities by 90%. Chris Gibson, executive director of FIRST, the organization that maintains CVSS, has been equally direct: using CVSS base scores alone for prioritization is “the least apt and accurate” method, Gibson told The Register. FIRST’s own EPSS and CISA’s SSVC decision model address part of this gap by adding exploitation probability and decision-tree logic. Five triage failure classes CVSS was never designed to catchIn 2025, 48,185 CVEs were disclosed, a 20.6% year-over-year increase. Jerry Gamblin, principal engineer at Cisco Threat Detection and Response, projects 70,135 for 2026. The infrastructure behind the scores is buckling under that weight. NIST announced on April 15 that CVE submissions have grown 263% since 2020, and the NVD will now prioritize enrichment for KEV and federal critical software only.1. Chained CVEs that look safe until they aren’tThe Palo Alto pair from Operation Lunar Peek is the textbook. CVE-2024-0012 bypassed authentication. CVE-2024-9474 escalated privileges. Scored separately under both CVSS v4.0 and v3.1, the escalation flaw filtered below most enterprise patch thresholds because admin access appeared required. The authentication bypass upstream eliminated that prerequisite entirely. Neither score communicated the compound effect.Meyers described the operational psychology: teams assessed each CVE independently, deprioritized the lower score, and queued the higher one for maintenance.2. Nation-state adversaries who weaponize patches within daysThe CrowdStrike 2026 Global Threat Report documented a 42% year-over-year increase in vulnerabilities exploited as zero-days before public disclosure. Average breakout time across observed intrusions: 29 minutes. Fastest observed breakout: 27 seconds. China-nexus adversaries weaponized newly patched vulnerabilities within two to six days of disclosure.”Before it was Patch Tuesday once a month. Now it’s patch every day, all the time. That’s what this new world looks like,” said Daniel Bernard, Chief Business Officer at CrowdStrike. A KEV addition treated as a routine queue item on Tuesday becomes an active exploitation window by Thursday.3. Stockpiled CVEs that nation-state actors hold for yearsSalt Typhoon accessed senior U.S. political figures’ communications during the presidential transition by chaining CVE-2023-20198 with CVE-2023-20273 on internet-facing Cisco devices, a privilege escalation pair patched in October 2023 and still unapplied more than a year later. Compromised credentials provided a parallel entry vector. The patches existed. Neither was applied.Sixty-seven percent of vulnerabilities exploited by China-nexus adversaries in 2025 were remote code execution flaws providing immediate system access, according to the CrowdStrike 2026 Global Threat Report. CVSS does not degrade priority based on how long a CVE has gone unpatched. No board metric tracks aging KEV exposure.That silence is the vulnerability.4. Identity gaps that never enter the scoring systemA 2023 help desk social engineering call against a major enterprise produced more than $100 million in losses. No CVE was assigned. No CVSS score existed. No patch pipeline entry was created. The vulnerability was a human process gap in identity verification, sitting entirely outside the scoring system’s aperture.”A pro needs a zero day if all you have to do is call the help desk and say I forgot my password,” Meyers said.Agentic AI systems now carry their own identity credentials, API tokens, and permission scopes, operating outside traditional vulnerability management governance. Merritt Baer, CSO at Enkrypt AI, has argued on record that identity-surface controls are vulnerability equivalents belonging in the same reporting pipeline as software CVEs. In most organizations, help desk authentication gaps and agentic AI credential inventories live in a separate governance silo. In practice, nobody’s governance.5. AI-accelerated discovery that breaks pipeline capacityAnthropic’s Claude Mythos Preview demonstrated autonomous vulnerability discovery, finding a 27-year-old signed integer overflow in OpenBSD’s TCP SACK implementation across roughly 1,000 scaffold runs at a total compute cost under $20,000. Meyers offered a thought-experiment projection in the exclusive interview with VentureBeat: if frontier AI drives a 10x volume increase, the result is approximately 480,000 CVEs annually. Pipelines built for 48,000 break at 70,000 and collapse at 480,000. NVD enrichment is already gone for non-KEV submissions.”If the adversary is now able to find vulnerabilities faster than the defenders or the business, that’s a huge problem, because those vulnerabilities become exploits,” said Daniel Bernard, Chief Business Officer at CrowdStrike.CrowdStrike on Thursday launched Project QuiltWorks, a remediation coalition with Accenture, EY, IBM Cybersecurity Services, Kroll, and OpenAI formed to address the vulnerability volume that frontier AI models are now generating in production code. When five major firms build a coalition around a pipeline problem, no single organization’s patch workflow can keep pace.Security director action planThe five failure classes above map to five specific actions.Run a chain-dependency audit on every KEV CVE in the environment this month. Flag any co-resident CVE scored 5.0 or above, the threshold where privilege escalation and lateral movement capabilities typically appear in CVSS vectors. Any pair chaining authentication bypass to privilege escalation gets triaged as critical regardless of individual scores.Compress KEV-to-patch SLAs to 72 hours for internet-facing systems. The CrowdStrike 2026 Global Threat Report breakout data, 29-minute average and 27-second fastest, makes weekly patch windows indefensible in a board presentation.Build a monthly KEV aging report for the board. Every unpatched KEV CVE, days since disclosure, days since patch availability, and owner. Salt Typhoon exploited a Cisco CVE patched 14 months earlier because no escalation path existed for aging exposure.Add identity-surface controls to the vulnerability reporting pipeline. Help desk authentication gaps and agentic AI credential inventories belong in the same SLA framework as software CVEs. If they sit in a separate governance silo, they sit in nobody’s governance.Stress-test pipeline capacity at 1.5x and 10x current CVE volume. Gamblin projects 70,135 for 2026. Meyers’s thought-experiment projection: frontier AI could push annual volume past 480,000. Present the capacity gap to the CFO before the next budget cycle, not after the breach that proves the gap existed.