SUCCESS

Uber and Nvidia aim to launch autonomous ride-hailing in up to 28 cities in less than two years.

If you own an S&P 500 fund, you probably think the choice doesn’t matter much. They all hold the same 500 stocks. They all track the same index. They all deliver roughly the same returns.You’d be wrong.The most popular S&P 500 fund in the world, the one you likely know by name, carries a cost that most investors never examine. It’s not a hidden fee buried in fine print. It’s right there on the fact sheet. Yet most people glance past it because the fund’s fame creates a false sense of value.A fresh analysis from Morningstar explains exactly where that cost sits, why it compounds over decades, and which alternatives give you more of your own money back. The difference is small in any single year. Over a career of investing, it’s anything but.SPY charges more than three times what its closest rivals doThe SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust, known as SPY, is the oldest ETF in America. State Street launched it in January 1993. It now holds roughly $698 billion in total assets, according to Yahoo Finance data.SPY charges an expense ratio of 0.0945%. That sounds tiny. But Vanguard’s S&P 500 ETF (VOO) charges just 0.03%. Fidelity’s 500 Index Fund (FXAIX) charges 0.015%. State Street’s own SPDR Portfolio S&P 500 ETF (SPYM) undercuts SPY, too.More Dividend stocks:Tim Cook quietly hands Apple investors a surprise pay raiseNancy Pelosi sells $1M of struggling dividend stockVerizon’s $20 billion acquisition resets dividend outlookBecause every S&P 500 fund holds identical stocks, the cheapest fund almost always delivers the best long-term performance, Morningstar reports. Through February 2026, SPYM had the best 10-year annualized return among S&P 500 trackers. SPY did not.Why SPY costs more, despite tracking the exact same indexSPY’s higher fee is a relic of its structure. The fund is organized as a unit investment trust (UIT), not a standard ETF. That legal structure, established in 1993, limits State Street’s ability to optimize the fund the way competitors can.The UIT wrapper prevents SPY from reinvesting dividends between quarterly payouts. Modern ETFs like VOO reinvest immediately. That lag creates a small performance drag, especially in rising markets.What SPY’s structure means for your returns:SPY cannot reinvest dividends in real time. VOO and IVV can.SPY’s expense ratio is more than 3x higher than VOO’s.SPY’s unit investment trust structure is locked. It cannot be changed.State Street launched SPYM as a cheaper alternative under a modern ETF structure.SPY survives on something else entirely: trading volume. Its dollar-volume was more than eight times that of VOO over the three months through February 2026, Morningstar found. Institutional traders and market makers need that liquidity. Long-term investors like you do not.

SPY charges an expense ratio of 0.0945%, higher than its competitors.TIMOTHY A. CLARY/Getty Images

The real dollar cost of picking the wrong S&P 500 fundA 0.06 percentage-point fee gap may sound trivial. It is not, once you let compounding do the math over a full investing career.How fees stack up on a $100,000 investment over 30 years:SPY at 0.0945%: roughly $2,835 paid in fees aloneVOO at 0.03%: roughly $900 paid in feesFXAIX at 0.015%: roughly $450 paid in feesThat’s before accounting for the return drag. When you pay more, you compound less. Over three decades, the gap between SPY and FXAIX grows beyond fees alone because every dollar lost to expenses is a dollar that never earns a return.This is not an argument against SPY for day traders. If you’re moving in and out of positions within hours, SPY’s deep liquidity saves you money on bid-ask spreads. But if you’re buying and holding for retirement, you’re paying a premium for a feature you’ll never use.ETFs vs. mutual funds in taxable accountsFees matter everywhere. But the vehicle type matters most in a taxable brokerage account. If you invest outside a 401(k) or IRA, the tax treatment of your S&P 500 fund deserves close attention.ETFs use an in-kind creation and redemption process that generally avoids triggering capital gains distributions. Morningstar notes that none of the four major S&P 500 ETFs have paid capital gains in the past 10 years.Related: Vanguard Dividend ETF quietly outperforms amid market panicThe taxable account decision tree:Taxable brokerage: Choose an ETF (VOO, IVV, or SPYM). The tax efficiency edge is real and measurable.IRA or 401(k): The vehicle type barely matters. ETFs and mutual funds perform nearly identically when distributions are reinvested.Capital gains: Mutual fund S&P 500 options distribute small but nonzero capital gains. You owe taxes on those, even if you never sold a share.Fidelity 500 Index (FXAIX) is available to any investor with no minimum. It charges just 0.015%. If your retirement plan offers it, you already have one of the cheapest options available anywhere.Morningstar’s top S&P 500 fund picks for long-term investorsMorningstar ranked S&P 500 trackers by expense ratio, tracking error, and long-term performance. The lowest fee almost always won. Here are the standouts for different investor types.For brokerage and IRA accounts:Vanguard S&P 500 ETF (VOO): 0.03% expense ratio. Gold-rated by Morningstar.iShares Core S&P 500 ETF (IVV): 0.03% expense ratio. Neck-and-neck with VOO on volume.SPDR Portfolio S&P 500 ETF (SPYM): among the lowest fees. Best 10-year annualized return through Feb. 2026.Fidelity 500 Index (FXAIX): 0.015%. The cheapest mutual fund option for any investor.For employer 401(k) plans:Many 401(k) plans offer institutional share classes with razor-thin fees. If your plan includes a low-cost S&P 500 fund, that’s likely your best option. Check the expense ratio on your plan’s fund fact sheet before making changes.The bigger risk hiding inside every S&P 500 fundFees are one problem. Concentration is another. Every market-cap-weighted S&P 500 fund carries the same portfolio tilt: The top 10 holdings now represent roughly 36% to 40% of total assets.Morningstar analyst Brendan McCann noted that technology stocks make up about 35% of the index, higher than during the dot-com bubble peak. That’s not a design flaw. It’s simply what the market looks like right now. But it means your “diversified” fund is more concentrated than you might expect.What this concentration means for you:A sharp sell-off in mega-cap tech stocks (Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon) would hit every cap-weighted S&P 500 fund hard.Equal-weight alternatives like Invesco S&P 500 Equal Weight ETF (RSP) spread exposure more evenly, but historically lag in bull markets.In 2022, when tech fell sharply, the equal-weight approach outperformed by nearly 8 percentage points.If you own an S&P 500 fund and believe you’re fully diversified, look at the top-10 holdings list. You may be more exposed to a handful of companies than you realize.How to pick the right S&P 500 fund for your situationYou don’t need to overthink this. The differences between top-tier S&P 500 funds are small. But small differences compound over time. Here’s a practical framework.Your decision checklist:Start with the expense ratio: Below 0.05% is excellent. Above 0.10% means you’re overpaying relative to peers.Check whether you’re in a taxable or tax-advantaged account. In a taxable account, ETFs beat mutual funds on tax efficiency.Look at your 401(k) lineup. If your employer offers an institutional S&P 500 fund at 0.01 to 0.03%, stick with it.Ignore trading volume unless you’re an active trader. Liquidity premiums help traders, not retirement savers.Don’t switch existing holdings just to save 0.03%. The tax hit from selling may exceed years of fee savings.Morningstar makes one point clearly: Among top-tier funds, the differences are slight. But if you’re starting fresh or adding new money, choosing the cheapest fund is the single most reliable way to improve long-term returns.One popular “free” fund that isn’t what it seemsFidelity ZERO Large Cap Index Fund charges a 0.00% expense ratio. That sounds unbeatable. But there’s a catch. The fund does not actually track the S&P 500, but follows a proprietary Fidelity index.Morningstar flagged a meaningful gap. When the S&P 500 gained 28.7% in one year, the Fidelity ZERO fund returned 26.7%. That’s a 2-percentage-point shortfall. Morningstar called it “an unpleasant surprise for those who had not been paying attention.”Here’s the lesson to note: A 0.00% expense ratio doesn’t help if the underlying index delivers inferior returns. Always check what benchmark a fund actually tracks before assuming it’s equivalent to the S&P 500.Related: A 15% pullback is coming — Here’s where to buy the dip

Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav stands to walk away with up to $1 billion, depending on how quickly the sale to Paramount closes.

A $1.18 billion preferred stock raise, roughly equivalent to 16,800 BTC, signals a shift away from common stock as dividend obligations top $1 billion.

Today’s gold prices see the precious metal move up from yesterday.
Here are today’s gold futures prices and a quick snapshot of where gold was yesterday, as well as overall trends:

Gold futures open today, Mar. 17: $5,021.30 per per troy ounce
Gold futures closed yesterday, Mar. 16: $5,002.20 per troy ounce
Percent change: Up 0.38%
Last five-day change: Gold has decreased 4.21% in the last five days.

Note: These prices fluctuate during the day.

Where People Are Buying Gold

American Hartfold Gold – Get an free investor kit, plus see if you qualify for $25,000 in free silver
American Silver & Gold – Free account set up, free insured shipping and free storage for up to 5 years
Explore gold exposure with a gold ETF — Public’s investing app can do this for you

Gold as part of your portfolio
Gold has historically underperformed the stock market. However, over the past two years, the tables have turned. In both 2024 and 2025, the precious metal gained 28% and 65%, respectively. Over the same period, the S&P 500 gained 25% and 18%, respectively.
But gold should not be viewed as part of a short-term strategy. Rather, it has made its name as a buy-and-hold asset. (See Money’s guide to how to buy gold for more detail.) Because of its weak correlation with the stock market, over time gold has served as a hedge, insulating portfolios against inflation, market volatility and falling interest rates.
For long-term investors who are looking to diversify their holdings, allocating between 5% and 10% of their capital to alternative investments — including safe-have assets like gold — can help reduce overall portfolio risk while providing supplemental upside potential to traditional equity investments.

Where People Are Buying Gold

American Hartfold Gold – Get an free investor kit, plus see if you qualify for $25,000 in free silver
American Silver & Gold – Free account set up, free insured shipping and free storage for up to 5 years
Explore gold exposure with a gold ETF — Public’s investing app can do this for you

How to invest in gold
For those interested in adding gold to their portfolios, there are a number of pathways to achieve that. Physical gold ownership can complement a retirement savings plan through gold IRAs — we vet the best ones monthly, which you can read here.
Money has also carefully scrutinized numerous online gold dealers that provide free and insured shipping, buyback commitments and secure storage at IRS-approved depositories.
But investing in gold does not require ownership of the physical metal. Investors who are more comfortable with equity markets can gain exposure through gold exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and mutual funds.
While gold-backed ETFs and physical gold do not generate yield, the stocks of some gold mining companies pay dividends. Investing in companies — such as AngloGold Ashanti, for example — can provide investors with gold’s appreciation potential as well as income.
 

Every few years, a piece of open-source software arrives that rewires how the industry thinks about computing. Linux did it for servers. Docker did it for deployment. OpenClaw — the autonomous AI agent platform that went from niche curiosity to the fastest-growing open-source project in history in a matter of weeks — may be doing it for software itself. Nvidia CEO and co-founder Jensen Huang made his position plain at GTC 2026 this week: “OpenClaw is the operating system for personal AI. This is the moment the industry has been waiting for — the beginning of a new renaissance in software.” And Nvidia wants to be the company that makes it enterprise-ready.At its annual large GTC 2026 conference in San Jose this week, Nvidia unveiled NemoClaw, a software stack that integrates directly with OpenClaw and installs in a single command. Along with it came Nvidia OpenShell, an open-source security runtime designed to give autonomous AI agents — or “claws”, as the industry is increasingly calling them — the guardrails they need to operate inside real enterprise environments. Alongside both, the company announced an expanded Nvidia Agent Toolkit, a full-stack platform for building and running production-grade agentic workflows.The message from Jensen Huang was unambiguous. “Claude Code and OpenClaw have sparked the agent inflection point — extending AI beyond generation and reasoning into action,” the Nvidia CEO said ahead of the conference. “Employees will be supercharged by teams of frontier, specialized and custom-built agents they deploy and manage.” Watch my video overview of it below and read on for more:Why ‘claws’ — and why it matters that Nvidia is using the wordThe terminology shift happening inside enterprise AI circles is subtle but significant. Internally, teams building with OpenClaw and similar platforms have taken to calling individual autonomous agents claws — a nod to the platform name, but also a useful shorthand for a new class of software that differs fundamentally from the chatbots and copilots of the last two years.As Kari Briski, Nvidia’s VP of generative AI software, put it during a Sunday briefing: “Claws are autonomous agents that can plan, act, and execute tasks on their own — they’ve gone from just thinking and executing on tasks to achieving entire missions.”That framing matters for IT decision-makers. Claws are not just assistants. They are persistent, tool-using programs that can write code, browse the web, manipulate files, call APIs, and chain actions together over hours or days without human input. The productivity upside is substantial. So is the attack surface. Which is precisely the problem Nvidia is positioning NemoClaw to solve.The enterprise demand is not hypothetical. Harrison Chase, founder of LangChain — whose open-source agent frameworks have been downloaded more than a billion times — put it bluntly in a recent episode of VentureBeat’s Beyond the Pilot podcast: “I guarantee that every enterprise developer out there wants to put a safe version of OpenClaw onto onto their computer or expose it to their users.” The bottleneck, he made clear, has never been interest. It has been the absence of a credible security and governance layer underneath it. NemoClaw is Nvidia’s answer to that gap — and notably, LangChain is one of the launch partners for the Agent Toolkit and OpenShell integration.What NemoClaw actually does — and what it doesn’t replaceNemoClaw is not a competitor to OpenClaw (or the now many alternatives). It is best understood as an enterprise wrapper around it — a distribution that ships with the components a security-conscious organization actually needs before letting an autonomous agent near production systems.The stack has two core components. The first is Nvidia Nemotron, Nvidia’s family of open models, which can run locally on dedicated hardware rather than routing queries through external APIs. Nemotron-3-Super, scored the highest out of all open models on PinchBench, a benchmark that tests the types of tasks and tools calls needed by OpenClaw. The second is OpenShell, the new open-source security runtime that runs each claw inside an isolated sandbox — effectively a Docker container with configurable policy controls written in YAML. Administrators can define precisely which files an agent can access, which network connections it can make, and which cloud services it can call. Everything outside those bounds is blocked.Nvidia describes OpenShell as providing the missing infrastructure layer beneath claws — giving them the access they need to be productive while enforcing policy-based security, network, and privacy guardrails.For organizations that have been watching OpenClaw’s rise with a mixture of excitement and dread, this is a meaningful development. OpenClaw’s early iterations were, by general consensus, a security liability — powerful and fast-moving, but essentially unconstrained. NemoClaw is the first attempt by a major hardware vendor to make that power manageable at enterprise scale.The hardware angle: always-on agents need dedicated computeOne aspect of NemoClaw that deserves more attention than it has received is the hardware strategy underneath it. Claws, by design, are always-on — they do not wait for a human to open a browser tab. They run continuously, monitoring inboxes, executing tasks, building tools, and completing multi-step workflows around the clock.That requires dedicated compute that does not compete with the rest of the organization’s workloads. Nvidia has a clear interest in pointing enterprises toward its own hardware for this purpose.NemoClaw is designed to run on Nvidia GeForce RTX PCs and laptops, RTX PRO workstations, and the company’s DGX Spark and DGX Station AI supercomputers. The hybrid architecture allows agents to use locally-running Nemotron models for sensitive workloads, with a privacy router directing queries to frontier cloud models when higher capability is needed — without exposing private data to those external endpoints.It is an elegant solution to a real problem: many enterprises are not yet ready to send customer data, internal documents, or proprietary code to cloud AI providers, but they still need model capability that exceeds what runs locally. NemoClaw’s privacy router architecture threads that needle, at least in principle.What claws actually look like in the enterprise Before evaluating the platform, it helps to understand what a claw doing real work looks like in practice. Two partner integrations announced alongside NemoClaw offer the clearest window into where this is heading.Box is perhaps the most illustrative case for organizations that manage large volumes of unstructured enterprise content. Box is integrating Nvidia Agent Toolkit to enable claws that use the Box file system as their primary working environment, with pre-built skills for Invoice Extraction, Contract Lifecycle Management, RFP sourcing, and GTM workflows. The architecture supports hierarchical agent management: a parent claw — such as a Client Onboarding Agent — can spin up specialized sub-agents to handle discrete tasks, all governed by the same OpenShell Policy Engine.Critically, an agent’s access to files in Box follows the exact same permissions model that governs human employees — enforced through OpenShell’s gateway layer before any data is exchanged. Every action is logged and attributable; no shadow copies accumulate in agent memory. As Box puts it in their announcement blog, “organizations need to know which agent touched which file, when, and why — and they need the ability to revoke access instantly if something goes wrong.”Cisco’s integration offers perhaps the most visceral illustration of what OpenShell guardrails enable in practice. The Cisco security team has published a scenario in which a zero-day vulnerability advisory drops on a Friday evening. Rather than triggering a weekend-long manual scramble — pulling asset lists, pinging on-call engineers, mapping blast radius — a claw running inside OpenShell autonomously queries the configuration database, maps impacted devices against the network topology, generates a prioritized remediation plan, and produces an audit-grade trace of every decision it made. Cisco AI Defense verifies every tool call against approved policy in real time. The entire response completes in roughly an hour, with a complete record that satisfies compliance requirements. “We are not trusting the model to do the right thing,” the Cisco team noted in their technical writeup. “We are constraining it so that the right thing is the only thing it can do.”An ecosystem play: the partners behind the stackNvidia is not building this alone. The Agent Toolkit and OpenShell announcements came with a significant roster of enterprise partners — Box, Cisco, Atlassian, Salesforce, SAP, Adobe, CrowdStrike, Cohesity, IQVIA, ServiceNow, and more than a dozen others — whose integration depth signals how seriously the broader software industry is treating the agentic shift.On the infrastructure side, OpenShell is available today on build.nvidia.com, supported by cloud inference providers including CoreWeave, Together AI, Fireworks, and DigitalOcean, and deployable on-premises on servers from Cisco, Dell, HPE, Lenovo, and Supermicro. Agents built within OpenShell can also continuously acquire new skills using coding agents including Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor — with every newly acquired capability subject to the same policy controls as the original deployment.Separately, Nvidia announced the Nemotron Coalition — a collaborative initiative bringing together Mistral AI, Perplexity, Cursor, and LangChain to co-develop open frontier models. The coalition’s first project is a base model co-developed with Mistral that will underpin the upcoming Nemotron 4 family, aimed specifically at agentic use cases.What enterprise leaders should be watchingThe NemoClaw announcement marks a turning point in how enterprise AI is likely to be discussed in boardrooms and procurement meetings over the next twelve months. The question is no longer whether organizations will deploy autonomous agents. The industry has clearly moved past that debate. The question is now how — with what controls, on what hardware, using which models, and with what audit trail.Nvidia’s answer is a vertically integrated stack that spans silicon, runtime, model, and security policy. For IT leaders evaluating their agentic roadmap, NemoClaw represents a significant attempt to provide all four layers from a single vendor, with meaningful third-party security integrations already in place.The risks are not trivial. OpenShell’s YAML-based policy model will require operational maturity that most organizations are still building. Claws that can self-evolve and acquire new skills — as Nvidia’s architecture explicitly enables — raise governance questions that no sandbox can fully resolve. And the concentration of agentic infrastructure in a single vendor’s stack carries familiar platform risks.That said the direction is clear. Claws are coming to the enterprise. Nvidia just made its bet on being the platform they run on — and the guardrails that keep them in bounds.

Multiple companies including Aurora, Kodiak, and Waabi plan to deploy autonomous fleets on the streets of Texas, Arizona and beyond.

This means Phantom can act as a non-custodial interface connecting users to registered derivatives platforms, removing the need for broker registration under specific conditions.

Faherty, a premium costal-casual American fashion brand, is launching its international expansion with a new store in Biarritz, France.

The Philadelphia Phillies’ Johan Rojas tested positive for a surprising compound before Major League Baseball decided on a punishment.