Breakaway Brokers

If you were Nvidia Corp. Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang and you were laying out a few sector-shifting artificial-intelligence trends that could take shape over the coming months and years.

Nvidia Corp. has agreed to acquire artificial intelligence startup Hugging Face in a transaction valued at about $13 billion.

The recent IPO of SpaceX and the anticipated IPOs of Anthropic and OpenAI are focusing attention on how to invest following a liquidity event. Here, we discuss several important decision points.

The future of financial planning is not about advisors becoming therapists. It is about advisors becoming better facilitators of meaningful, structured conversations that lead to better decisions. You don’t have to start with perfect skills. Start with a better process.

There are ways to learn how to work with difficult people. I have a process I call ARTICA that I teach to help you shift your approach when someone is being difficult. Their behavioral style isn’t going to change, so you need to be the one to think of a different approach to see if you can shift yours. In turn, they might change their approach.

Nvidia Corp. is not only tightening its grip on artificial intelligence, it’s also absorbing the companies fighting to keep the industry open and decentralized. On the same day the chip giant announced quarterly revenue that had doubled and would continue rising next year, sending its shares up 7%, news broke that it has reportedly agreed to spend $13 billion on Hugging Face, a platform for open-weight AI models.

The irony is that the advisors who most need to delegate are the ones who find it hardest. You need to stop being the hero of every story. There are four reasons why, and every one of them is a story you tell yourself.

I was recently asked how to instill accountability and urgency in this next generation. Set expectations and offer guidance. Remember, this is a generation that largely grew up not speaking to other people and definitely not calling anyone.

When a typical business finds its supply chain costs have risen, it will absorb the increase to keep its customers happy. Nvidia isn’t a typical business. It enjoys gross profit margins of 75% and commands between 70% and 90% of the global market for artificial-intelligence chips.

Amazon.com Inc.’s Andy Jassy has begun making an audacious boast during conference calls this year. Though his company remains a top Nvidia Corp. customer, it’s also one of the world’s largest makers of data center chips in its own right.

Agentic AI won't scale until it owns the meeting cycle—not by replacing advisors or acting without oversight, but by maintaining operational continuity: assembling context, preserving memory, and driving approved actions through to completion.

I’m always asked for scripts. You don’t want a script. You want to be natural and approach clients in a manner that fits you. Practice, practice, practice until it seems natural and comfortable. Authentic is always best.

More than a decade ago, hundreds of US garage entrepreneurs were working on shoestring budgets to develop drones with dreams of scaling the new technology. Then China’s DJI introduced a small, inexpensive drone with a stable built-in camera.

SpaceX has completed a $60 billion acquisition of artificial intelligence coding startup Cursor, a key part of Elon Musk’s bid to gain ground on rivals Anthropic PBC and OpenAI.

After 10 years, we understand that not every conflict has a clean answer. Advisors value feeling heard and supported through difficult situations. Over time, we’ve learned that genuine engagement and thoughtful communication build more trust than rushing toward incomplete answers.

I recently spent a week working with advisors and team members on a variety of things, all human-element related. The financial business is one of numbers and quantifiable results, but we all know it is much more than this. This week’s column will encapsulate my aha moments from this week.

The outlook for Boeing Co. to earn copious cash flow is bright. It just turned free-cash-flow positive in the second quarter after years of losses, and the company already has its sights on cash earnings of $10 billion a year. This is driven almost entirely by a rebound of commercial aircraft production.

South Korea expects to deploy more than 1 trillion won ($707 million) of fresh capital into a new sovereign wealth fund targeting AI and other strategic industries next year, joining a global push by governments to mobilize investment and gain an edge in high-tech sectors.

Outlining clear expectations for success — desired outcomes that are both quantifiable and qualitative. It means setting objectives to meet these desired outcomes every week and then checking in to see to see if they met them.

Investment firms for billionaires hailing from the US, Europe and Asia are driving a wave of deals for robotics AI businesses, defying fears about a bubble in the machine-learning sector.

Sequoia Capital led a $1 billion funding round for Valar Atomics Inc. that the nuclear startup says will help it shift from demonstrating small reactors to producing them in volume.

In the race to win a coveted role on the next mega US IPO and manage the ensuing riches, Wall Street’s wealth advisers are ramping up lending to founders and entrepreneurs based on the soaring values of their private companies.

Investors overwhelmingly recognize the value of financial planning, but a substantial planning gap remains. The desire for guidance is there. Access remains the challenge.

The combination of succession planning — where the lead advisor wants to have a successful and well-funded retirement and the successors want to get paid for taking over — along with the riches of the market over the last few years are all adding up to significant unrest within many teams.

In the coming years, more investors will expect financial planning to be a key part of the services they receive from advisors. To be prepared, advisors will need technology to help streamline added workflows, as well as the expertise of certified financial planners to support their clients long term.

Registered investment advisors (RIAs) are increasingly adopting artificial intelligence (AI) tools that automatically transcribe and summarize client calls. While these technologies may offer efficiency gains, they introduce significant legal and compliance risks. This article discusses the intersection of AI transcription tools with state wiretapping laws, privacy considerations, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) requirements, and the evolving litigation landscape.

The global luxury industry, which has been grappling with three years of lackluster sales, may gain some relief as wealth generated by artificial-intelligence companies and their trillions of dollars of initial public offerings finds its way into fancy fripperies.

When clients, specifically, feel they matter to their advisor, they engage more deeply in the planning process, follow through on recommendations, refer more frequently, and build lasting relationships that transcend market volatility.

to come

Wealth management firms are aware of the looming retirement wave and have put real effort into mitigating it through recruiting, training, succession planning, and technology to modernize the advisor workflow. But what’s truly at risk of being lost is the judgment that senior advisors have accumulated over decades

President Xi Jinping used the rise of China’s AI models to stake his claim on shaping the technology’s global rules, even as their growing power stirs security concerns in Washington and Beijing alike.

Apple Inc. is again the biggest company in the world after wresting the title from Nvidia Corp., which has held it since May 2025.

The labor gap is creating pressure on firms to do more with their existing teams, and AI is giving those teams the tools to actually do it. Here is how firms achieve double-digit growth using AI, even while navigating a workforce transformation they cannot fully control.

For this week’s column, in the wake of the holiday celebrating our country’s independence, I’ll share some independent thinking for advisors to implement, whether it be with their teams, in their practice or with their clients. I’ll keep it brief in the hopes you will find one or two things that resonate.

The Federal Aviation Administration is resurrecting the dream of passengers flying faster than the speed of sound after it recently proposed lifting a ban on supersonic flights over land, which has been in place for more than five decades.

Widowhood does not happen on paper. It happens in the middle of grief, changing income, tax questions, family expectations, housing decisions, administrative demands, and a profound shift in identity. The math may still work, but the human operating system has changed. And that is why advisors need to stress test — not only for portfolio survival, but for survivor usability.

After years of working with advisors and studying client behavior, the reasons clients leave come down to three core patterns. They are predictable. They are preventable. And they almost always trace back to a conversation that never happened in the first meeting.

I have spent the better part of my career watching how organizations manage access to sensitive data — who has it, who should have it, and how long it takes anyone to notice when those two things stop matching. In financial services, that gap tends to be measured in months.

The US industrial robot industry is characterized by low growth and highly customized projects. Artificial intelligence holds out the hope to change that, especially when it comes to robots that can move and work safely around humans.

With the artificial intelligence race moving so rapidly, even a momentary lag can be costly. Alphabet Inc.’s Google is learning this the hard way: The search giant rapidly caught up with

The firms that operate rigorous vendor evaluation will compound two advantages simultaneously: They buy the right tools now, and their advisors trust them when the next generation of AI arrives. In a decade that will be defined by the industry's capacity to do more with fewer people, that trust is a strategic asset.

Acquiring a book of business is one of the fastest ways an independent advisor can grow AUM, expand a client base, and build long-term enterprise value. It is also one of the most financially consequential decisions you will ever make — and most advisors approach it underprepared.

Meta Platforms Inc. is developing plans for a cloud infrastructure business that will sell access to AI computing power and models, setting up a new vector of competition with industry leaders like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

If your heart and mind tell you to go looking for someone older because that’s going to fit your culture more effectively, by all means search in that direction. Just don’t give up on younger, next-generation team members without making sure you have given them every opportunity to succeed.

European firms in critical sectors like nuclear energy and quantum computing are flocking to the US, despite efforts by European authorities and bourses to make the region’s markets more appealing and accessible.

That gap — between believing you are excellent and being able to prove it — is the central problem this article addresses. And solving it is precisely what “The 80/20 Manifesto” was written to do.

I have run sales teams, developed sales teams, trained salespeople and trained advisors for many years. Education is your best bet, but if people are focused on growth at all costs, sometimes they aren’t in a position to really listen.

Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman proclaimed a wizard for guiding a then-record US economic expansion, only to see his luster dimmed by the financial crisis that erupted less than two years after he stepped down, has died. He was 100.

I was asked by an advisory firm to speak to their clients at their recent client event. I was able to share the “Five Secrets of Human Behavior,” and all attendees received my similarly named book. In today’s column, I’ll outline these secrets and share why they matter from a leadership perspective.

Compliance risks happen when AI-enabled workflows expand faster than their governance model. It becomes a blind spot when AI solutions are built faster than the organization’s ability to map them against the right regulatory, operational, and data-governance controls.

SpaceX shares jumped on Tuesday, putting the firm on track to overtake Amazon.com Inc. as the fifth largest publicly traded company in the world just days after its blockbuster debut.

Most couples who argue about money are arguing from different money scripts – the deeply held beliefs about money that each partner formed long before the relationship began. Uncovering and understanding those scripts, individually and together, may be one of the more useful things a couple can do.

Things change fast in artificial intelligence. One minute corporate desk jockeys are competing to use AI coding and reasoning tools as much as possible, the next their bosses are complaining about budgets being pulverized and start rationing usage.

The jury is still out on whether SpaceX is primarily a rocket company, as its name suggests, or actually more of a telecom provider or artificial intelligence play. Its expected valuation doesn’t help resolve the confusion.

The initial public offering for SpaceX is poised to generate billions of dollars in profits for the fortunate few investors who got in early on Elon Musk’s rocket, satellite and artificial intelligence company.