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Shakira’s “Dai Dai” brings the singer back to the U.K.’s Official Physical Singles chart after an absence of more than a decade and a half.

It’s not the purchase price that’s the biggest obstacle, but rather the continuing costs.

Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway has invested in plenty of dividend stocks over the years. Dividend stocks remain popular among investors as they allow you to create a passive income stream at a low cost. 

“Dividend stocks deliver regular payments to investors and can be an essential part of portfolios,” according to Charles Schwab’s investing education team. 

This is precisely what Chevron is doing for Berkshire Hathaway right now.

Between Chevron’s rising payout and Berkshire’s massive stake, the arrangement now sends more than half a billion dollars into Buffett’s coffers every year. 

Berkshire’s colossal Chevron dividend payday

Berkshire Hathaway owns 84,375,856 shares of Chevron. At Chevron’s current annual dividend of $7.12 per share, the stake generates roughly $601 million in cash every year, paid out in quarterly installments.

With CVX stock trading near $206 a share this week, Berkshire’s Chevron position is worth close to $17.3 billion. 

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Berkshire trimmed part of its Chevron holding earlier in 2026, selling around $8 billion worth of stock.

Even after that sale, Chevron remains one of Buffett’s largest energy bets, sitting alongside Occidental Petroleum in Berkshire’s portfolio.

Chevron is a Dividend Aristocrat 

Chevron has raised its dividend for 39 straight years, growing the payout at roughly a 6% compound annual rate over the past 15 years, Chevron chairman and CEO Mike Wirth said at the company’s annual strategic conference.

Wirth told analysts:

“We increased our dividend during COVID when some of our peers cut their dividends.”

The CEO pointed to the dividend streak as proof of the company’s commitment to steady payouts through market cycles.

Related: BofA just turned on Exxon in favor of Chevron

That track record earns Chevron a spot among the S&P 500 dividend aristocrats, a group of companies that have raised dividends for at least 25 consecutive years.

In the second quarter of 2026, Chevron reported $19.7 billion of cash flow from operations excluding working capital and $15.4 billion of adjusted free cash flow.

By comparison, quarterly dividend expense was about $3.5 billion, indicating a payout ratio of 20%. 

Chevron also cut debt by more than $8 billion during the quarter and hit its $3 billion cost reduction target six months ahead of schedule.

Mike Wirth, CEO of Chevron is focused on dividend growthBloomberg/Getty Images

CVX stock dividend ratios investors should know

Annual dividend: $7.12 per share

Dividend yield: 3.47% 

Payout ratio: 20% of FCF

Consecutive years of dividend increases: 39

10-year dividend growth rate: 5.2%

Payment frequency: quarterly, with the next payment due Sept. 10, 2026

What Wall Street thinks about CVX stock

Analysts remain mostly upbeat on Chevron even after its 2026 rally. 

Barclays analyst Betty Jiang kept an Overweight rating on the shares, telling clients that Chevron’s guidance underscores significant free cash flow expansion with room for more growth in 2027. 

Morgan Stanley analyst Devin McDermott has also raised his price target while keeping an Overweight rating on the stock.

Carillon Tower Advisers, in its first quarter 2026 investor letter, said Chevron has significant exposure to spot commodity prices, a factor the firm sees as a key driver behind the stock’s performance this year.

Why dividend stocks matter for portfolios

Dividends have made up about one quarter of the S&P 500’s total returns over the past 50 years, according to research from American Century Investments. 

The firm notes that dividend-paying stocks can also help diversify a portfolio and reduce volatility, particularly when share prices stall out for long stretches.

Schwab makes a similar case with numbers. 

A hypothetical $10,000 investment in an S&P 500 index fund at the end of 1993 would have grown to more than $182,000 by the end of 2023 with dividends reinvested, compared with only $102,000 if those dividends were never reinvested.

That is the math working in Chevron’s favor. 

A $601 million yearly dividend check will not move the needle much for a conglomerate the size of Berkshire Hathaway. 

But it explains why a longtime dividend grower like Chevron still earns a spot in some of the most selective portfolios on Wall Street, including Buffett’s own.

Related: How much to invest in AT&T stock for $1,000 in annual dividends

After 45 years in business, a beloved restaurant chain has suddenly cut its footprint in half, closing locations after saying the cost of operating them was no longer sustainable.

The move leaves the longtime brand with just two restaurants and marks a major pullback for a company that built its reputation around breakfast, brunch, and baked goods, earning a loyal following among locals and tourists.

The closures come as restaurant operators across the country navigate higher costs and customers becoming more selective about dining out.

Founded in 1981 in New York City’s Manhattan neighborhood, the company began as a small bakery-kitchen before growing into a well-known restaurant brand. Its homemade preserves and homebaked goods helped establish a loyal following, eventually turning the business into a fixture of the city’s dining scene. The business is currently managed by RBM Restaurant Group, which also owns Docks Oyster Bar.

Sarabeth’s closes half of its restaurants

Sarabeth’s has closed two of its New York City restaurants, leaving the breakfast chain with only two locations.

The impacted restaurants include:

Sarabeth’s Park Avenue South: 381 Park Ave S.

Sarabeth’s Greenwich Village: 100 W Houston St.

The company attributed the closures to the financial challenges of operating the two locations.

“Unfortunately, despite everything that was working well, the economics of running these two locations are no longer sustainable,” Sarabeth’s wrote in a statement shared on Instagram.

The Park Avenue South restaurant opened in February 2013, while the Greenwich Village location opened in November 2024. Both locations have now permanently closed.

The company will continue operating its Upper West Side restaurant at 423 Amsterdam Ave and its Central Park South location at 40 Central Park S.

Sarabeth’s closes two restaurants in New York City.Alexander Spatari / Getty Images

Why Sarabeth’s is closing locations

Sarabeth’s restaurant closures come as operators continue to contend with higher costs and consumers becoming more selective about where they spend their money.

Food away from home increased 3.4% over the 12 months ending July 2026, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Menu prices have also continued to rise. According to the National Restaurant Association, menu prices rose 0.3% in July and were 3.4% higher than a year earlier.

Those elevated prices are creating a difficult environment for restaurants. Operators have to absorb increases in food, labor, rent, and other expenses while also trying to persuade customers that dining out is worth the higher price.

Restaurant traffic has also remained under pressure. Circana data showed restaurant traffic declined 0.3% in 2025 compared to the previous year, although traffic increased 0.5% during the fourth quarter.

That combination of higher operating costs and uneven consumer demand has made individual restaurant locations increasingly important to the industry’s financial performance.

For chains with multiple restaurants, locations that generate insufficient sales relative to their operating costs can become difficult to justify even when the broader brand remains viable.

Sarabeth’s decision to close two restaurants illustrates that dynamic. The company did not announce that it was shutting down entirely; instead, it is reducing its New York footprint while continuing to operate two of its longtime locations.

Rival breakfast chains close restaurants

Sarabeth’s is not the only breakfast-focused restaurant brand to pull back its footprint as operators navigate a challenging environment.

Several other breakfast and brunch chains have closed restaurants in recent months, underscoring the pressure facing operators across the segment.

Here’s some of my previous coverage of restaurant closures:

Maple Street Biscuit Company: Cracker Barrel sold the brand in July 2026, along with 35 restaurants, and closed its remaining 16 locations after previously shuttering more than a dozen.

Breakfast Republic: Closed three San Diego restaurants in August 2026.

Denny’s: Closed between 70 and 90 restaurants in 2025.

The shutdowns don’t necessarily signal that consumers have stopped eating out. Instead, they highlight how restaurant companies are increasingly evaluating individual locations based on their economics as costs rise and customer traffic remains uneven.

For Sarabeth’s, that means continuing with a smaller New York City footprint while preserving two locations that remain part of its long-running restaurant operation.

Related: Popular breakfast chain closes more restaurants

Cisco Systems gave investors plenty to like in its fiscal fourth-quarter report, but the market’s reaction showed how high expectations have become for one of 2026’s strongest AI infrastructure trades.

Cisco Systems (CSCO) reported record quarterly revenue and stronger-than-expected earnings, while management laid out another year of double-digit growth. The stock still fell sharply after the report and closed Aug. 18 at $112.90, leaving shares well below the $123.88 price used in Bank of America’s latest research note.

BofA analyst Tal Liani sees an opportunity in that disconnect. Liani reiterated a Buy rating and $150 price target on Cisco in a note given to TheStreet, arguing that broad networking demand and growing AI revenue could leave room for further upside.

The target now implies roughly 33% upside from Cisco’s Aug. 18 closing price.

Cisco’s networking business is gaining momentum

Cisco reported fiscal fourth-quarter revenue of $17.3 billion, up 18% from a year ago, while adjusted earnings reached $1.22 per share. Networking revenue jumped 28% to $9.8 billion as customers continued spending on data center and AI infrastructure.

Orders were even stronger. Total product orders rose 35%, while networking orders climbed 40%. Cisco said product orders still increased 25% when hyperscaler customers were excluded, giving investors another sign that demand is spreading beyond the largest cloud companies.

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Management expects that strength to carry into the new fiscal year. Cisco guided for first-quarter revenue of $18 billion to $18.2 billion and adjusted earnings of $1.32 to $1.34 per share, while full-year revenue is expected to rise to as much as $73.4 billion.

That broader strength sits at the center of BofA’s bullish view.

Liani noted that ex-hyperscaler order growth accelerated from 19% in the fiscal third quarter to 25% in the fourth quarter. Orders from Cisco’s four largest hyperscalers grew more than 100%, according to the note.

BofA believes those trends support Cisco’s decision to double its core growth outlook for fiscal 2027 to 10% from an earlier 5% estimate.

Cisco Systems reported record quarterly revenue and stronger-than-expected earnings, while management laid out another year of double-digit growth.SOPA Images via Getty Images

BofA thinks Cisco’s AI target could be conservative

Cisco booked $4 billion of AI infrastructure orders from hyperscalers during the fourth quarter, lifting full-year orders to $9.3 billion. The company generated about $4 billion in AI infrastructure revenue during fiscal 2026 and expects that figure to reach $7.5 billion in fiscal 2027.

BofA thinks that target could leave room for upside.

Related: Elon Musk’s $900 billion SpaceX stake is built on more than rockets

The bank expects stronger networking revenue as recent orders convert into sales and sees fiscal 2027 AI orders materially exceeding the $9 billion level reached this year. Improving momentum in Cisco’s security business could provide another boost as the company moves beyond pricing changes associated with Splunk.

BofA raised its fiscal 2027 adjusted earnings estimate to $5.08 from $4.77 and lifted its fiscal 2028 estimate to $5.47 from $5.21.

Cisco itself expects fiscal 2027 revenue of $72.2 billion to $73.4 billion, with adjusted earnings between $5.05 and $5.11 per share.

Cisco still has a margin problem to watch

The bullish demand outlook comes with a trade-off. Cisco’s adjusted gross margin slipped to 66.3% in the fourth quarter from 68.4% a year earlier as faster hardware growth changed the company’s sales mix.

BofA expects gross margin to fall to roughly 64.5% in fiscal 2027, about 150 basis points below the Street’s outlook. Strong hardware sales and a greater cloud mix could keep pressure on profitability, even as revenue accelerates.

Valuation also leaves less room for mistakes. Liani estimates Cisco trades near 25 times calendar 2027 enterprise value to free cash flow, well above its five-year average of roughly 16 times.

BofA still believes the demand cycle can outweigh those concerns. With orders accelerating inside and outside the hyperscaler market, Cisco may have more growth ahead than its fiscal 2027 targets currently suggest.

Related: Cisco stock flashes rare technical signal 

Rob Strechay, until recently managing director and principal analyst at theCUBE Research, has joined VentureBeat as our first Lead Analyst and a founding analyst of VentureBeat Research. His arrival is the next step in a deliberate move at VentureBeat toward deeper specialization: analysis built for the technical decision-makers — the directors, VPs, CIOs, and CTOs — who are evaluating, buying, and deploying enterprise AI.The enterprise AI stack is being rewritten in real time, and the decision-makers I talk with are starved for objective, defendable data. Rob Strechay has the mix of technical rigor and operating experience needed to dissect the architecture behind the next phase of enterprise AI deployment.The questions enterprise technology leaders are asking have changed. As organizations move past experimentation with generative AI toward production deployment, they want to know how to orchestrate multi-vendor environments, where the security gaps in their agentic pipelines sit, and how to fix the utilization problems draining their infrastructure budgets. Answering those questions requires more depth than news coverage alone provides, and that is the gap this research offering is built to fill.An analyst who has sat on every side of the tableStrechay brings nearly three decades of experience as a practitioner, product executive, and industry analyst. Before becoming an analyst, he was an executive at numerous startups, including Zerto; he joined Amazon Web Services to help build a new analytics service; and he held executive roles across enterprise infrastructure. He later served as a senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group and most recently as managing director and principal analyst at theCUBE Research and SiliconANGLE, where he hosted executive interviews and analyzed the evolution of cloud, data, and AI infrastructure.Strechay will initially focus his coverage on cloud infrastructure, advanced data infrastructure, platform engineering and DevOps orchestration and observability, and the intersection points where AI and enterprise security collide.Already at work: GPU utilization and the VB Pulse surveysStrechay has already been contributing to VentureBeat’s research. In May he published an analysis of enterprise GPU utilization, examining the compute waste sitting inside enterprise AI infrastructure, and he provided a substantive review of our AI Infrastructure & Compute survey before it went into the field.His infrastructure-level focus complements the research engine VentureBeat has built around its monthly VB Pulse surveys, which track five areas of enterprise AI adoption: agentic orchestration, agent reliability and evals, agentic security and identity, AI infrastructure and compute, and context layers, including retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Our June report on agentic orchestration, drawn from a survey of 145 enterprises, found that two-thirds of those enterprises had hedged their AI model strategy rather than committing to a single provider — a posture whose value the June outage of Anthropic’s Claude models made plain.VB In Conversation: The first vehicleA core vehicle for this expanded research footprint will be a deepening of VentureBeat’s existing VB In Conversation video interview series, which Strechay will host. Rather than high-level industry overviews, the series will bring architectural blueprints, actual deployment barriers, and back-end infrastructure realities to light through in-depth technical interviews with the architects and product leaders behind leading enterprise AI systems — an unvarnished look at which tools perform under production-grade pressure.”VentureBeat has built an audience of enterprise builders and technology buyers that any analyst would want to serve,” Strechay said. “My goal is to use deep empirical metrics and VentureBeat’s proprietary tracking data to help enterprise buyers and the people building for them make sound platform and infrastructure decisions during the most disruptive transition enterprise technology has seen.”The expanded VB In Conversation series will appear on VentureBeat and on VentureBeat’s YouTube channel, alongside Rob’s written analysis on the site. Enterprise practitioners who want to take part in our monthly VB Pulse surveys, or arrange an analyst briefing with Rob, can reach the research team here.

The former morgue manager of the university’s medical school illegally took and sold body parts that had been donated for scientific research.

Retailers have spent years collecting information about their customers.

They know what shoppers buy, how frequently they shop, where they live, what they browse online and, in many cases, how they respond to promotions. 

That data can be enormously valuable. It can help retailers stock stores, personalize marketing offers, and determine which products to put on sale.

But there’s a line that increasingly worries consumers, and it’s using that information to determine how much an individual shopper pays.

New Jersey has now decided that line has been crossed.

Governor Mikie Sherrill signed the Fair Price Protection Act in July, making New Jersey the third state to enact legislation restricting surveillance pricing. 

Maryland and Connecticut passed similar laws earlier this year.

The New Jersey law prohibits grocery stores and third-party grocery delivery platforms from using personal data to set individualized prices for groceries and other covered products. 

Electronic shelf labels are part of the controversy

These days, more stores use electronic shelf labels to replace paper tags with wireless screens that update instantly. That makes surveillance pricing even easier to pull off. 

New Jersey is also imposing a one-year moratorium on new electronic shelf labels as experts study the impact. Retailers that already use these systems, however, can continue to do so.

Of course, retailers may have legitimate reasons to want to use these systems. 

Electronic shelf labels can make price changes faster, reduce the labor involved in changing thousands of paper tags, and potentially reduce errors.

The concern is what retailers might eventually do with that capability.

A digital label can change with a keystroke. That raises obvious questions about whether retailers could eventually move toward pricing that changes based on information about a given shopper.

Shutterstock

This could become a much bigger retail issue

New Jersey’s action is significant because it’s part of a rapidly developing patchwork of state laws.

Maryland’s law focuses on food retailers and delivery services, while Connecticut’s measure takes a broader approach covering retail sellers. 

But taken together, the three states’ rules could create a potentially complicated environment for national retailers. And things could get even more complex if more states follow suit.

A company operating stores in dozens of states may eventually have to build pricing systems that comply with several different sets of rules. And if more states follow New Jersey, retailers may have to reconsider how they use customer data across their entire businesses.

Of course, the concept of prices changing to meet demand isn’t new. Airlines typically jack up prices during holiday weekends, and ride-sharing platforms like Uber use surge pricing to raise rates when driver supply is low and rider demand is high.

But surveillance pricing is fundamentally different.

“Dynamic pricing has been around for decades, and most shoppers grudgingly accept it,” John Andrews, founder of shopper-marketing company Collective Bias, told Retail TouchPoints. “Surveillance pricing is newer, quieter, and it breaks the basic fairness assumption that the price tag is the price tag.”

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To put it another way, with dynamic pricing, all consumers are forced to pay more. With surveillance pricing, only some consumers might pay more. That’s where New Jersey is now drawing a line.

And with Maryland and Connecticut already on board, this may be less of a New Jersey experiment and more of an early warning for the entire retail industry.

Related: Major supermarket chain closing more stores

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How much will the U.S. need to pay to convince the world to keep lending it money?