Bitcoin crashes, but odds turn darker as MSTR, RKLB lead crypto-stocks bloodbath
Source link
Large- and mega-cap U.S. REIT stocks with market capitalizations from $10B to more than $200B, have generally held up better than their smaller peers, but several major names still carry weak Momentum Grades between D and C-.
Telecom tower REITs
Published on
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has given the green light to develop a prediction market app, according to the New York Times, as Meta moves to capitalise on one of the fastest-growing sectors in tech and finance.
The app is currently being referred to as Arena internally and would let users earn points for correctly predicting the outcomes of events such as sports results, political developments and stock market moves but without any real money changing hands, at least initially.
It would operate independently of Meta’s existing social platforms, though those could funnel users towards it, according to the reporting.
A prediction market is essentially a financial exchange where people buy and sell contracts or bets tied to the outcome of real-world events.
Each contract is a simple yes-or-no question, such as whether a certain candidate will win an election, a team will come out first in a championship or if a major political figure will pass by a certain date.
On Polymarket and Kalshi, the two most popular prediction market platforms, users buy contracts that pay out $1 if they are right and nothing if they are wrong.
As more people trade those contracts, the price reflects the market’s probability of the event occurring. If a bet is worth 40 cents, there’s a 40% chance of it happening, according to the people who have placed bets.
Fans of prediction markets argue the mechanism produces more accurate forecasts than polls or political analysts because participants have real money on the line.
The two dominant platforms in the space are Polymarket and Kalshi, which together generated around 85–90% of the roughly $44 billion (€40bn) in total trading volume recorded in 2025.
Polymarket, founded in 2020 by New York University dropout Shayne Coplan, operates globally on the blockchain. In October 2025, the New York Stock Exchange’s parent company invested $2 billion (€1.8bn) in the platform, in a major sign that Wall Street was taking the sector seriously.
Kalshi, founded in 2018 by two MIT graduates, spent years winning regulatory approval before launching as the first prediction market sanctioned by the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).
The turning point came in October 2024, when a US court ruled Kalshi could legally offer election contracts 32 days before the presidential election. Monthly trading volume has since surged from less than $5 billion (€4.6bn) in September 2025 to around $24 billion (€21.8bn) in April 2026, overtaking the roughly $14 billion (€12.7bn) wagered monthly through legal or traditional US sportsbooks.
Donald Trump Jr. becoming an investor in Polymarket and a paid adviser to Kalshi, while federal regulators adopted a more permissive stance, also helped fuel the boom.
The boom has not come without controversy and legal cases have mounted, with a former special forces soldier getting arrested over allegations he used insider knowledge of a US operation to capture Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro to place a winning trade on Polymarket worth around $400,000 (€365,000).
Some US states have begun suing the platforms, arguing they are running illegal gambling operations without proper licences. The Trump administration has responded by suing the states that have moved to ban prediction markets, creating a messy legal standoff between federal and state authority.
A New York Times review found that Polymarket published hundreds of false and misleading social media posts, while Politico uncovered a campaign to pay influencers to praise the platform’s supposed accuracy.
Whether Meta’s gamified, cashless version of the concept can avoid those pitfalls or will simply serve as a gateway to them remains unclear.
Published on •Updated
One of Europe’s largest military equipment producers, KNDS, rolled out long-awaited details of its initial public offering (IPO), aiming for a dual listing in Paris and Frankfurt in the coming weeks.
The IPO could value KNDS, the maker of Leopard and Leclerc tanks, at between €12bn and €15bn, according to the Financial Times, potentially making it one of Europe’s largest defence listings in recent years.
The listing comes at a time when European military budgets are surging, driven by the war in Ukraine and doubts over the reliability of the US as a security guarantor.
The company declined to comment on the precise date, but CEO Jean-Paul Alary told reporters the offering was expected within weeks.
According to Alary, the move comes as the continent enters what he called a new era of defence and security, with armed forces modernising rapidly and rebuilding the land-warfare capabilities run down during decades of lower spending.
According to Reuters, the firm has now formally launched the IPO process, which is expected to take place in mid-July.
The announcement comes days after Germany unveiled plans to acquire a 40% stake in KNDS, saying the move would secure long-term influence over a company it considers strategically important to European security and defence.
France, which currently owns 50% of KNDS, is expected to reduce its stake to 40%.
The remaining 20% of the company is set to be floated on the stock market, with France and Germany each retaining 40% stakes following the transaction.
According to the Financial Times, the shares are expected to be marketed primarily to institutional investors amid strong demand for European defence stocks.
Once the listing is completed, KNDS shares will begin trading on Euronext Paris and the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, giving investors direct exposure to one of Europe’s largest land-defence manufacturers.
KNDS was created in 2015 through the merger of Germany’s Krauss-Maffei Wegmann and France’s Nexter.
The rapid emergence of the rival adds to the pressure on Rheinmetall, Europe’s largest ammunition maker and KNDS’s main competitor in subsectors such as land systems.
The Düsseldorf-based group, whose shares have shed roughly a quarter of their value this year, had itself reportedly hoped to buy into KNDS, only to be shut out by the governments’ intervention.
To make matters worse, Berlin announced it would scrap Rheinmetall’s multi-billion-euro F126 frigate programme, which would have been Germany’s largest warship order since the Second World War, in favour of smaller vessels from rival builder TKMS.
Rheinmetall, which had been poised to take over the project, fell 13% in early trading on Wednesday due to the news.
The squeeze also coincides with regulatory scrutiny at home.
Germany’s Monopolies Commission has warned that defence procurement is concentrated among a small number of suppliers, potentially weakening competition and driving up costs.
Calling for reforms to procurement rules, commission chairman Tomaso Duso said competition was “the fundamental pillar of Europe’s economic order” and should play a greater role in the defence sector.
A listed KNDS will give investors a direct yardstick against which to measure Rheinmetall’s order momentum and margins.
Additional sources • AFP
The clock is running down on the most consequential deadline the crypto sector has faced in Europe.
From the start of July, the transitional window under the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) closes for good, and companies that have not secured authorisation must either stop serving European customers or wind down altogether.
MiCA is the EU’s first comprehensive law for the crypto industry, bringing exchanges, brokers and digital wallet providers under the kind of formal oversight that has long applied to banks and other financial firms.
It replaces a fragmented mix of national rules with a single rulebook spanning all 27 member states: a company licensed in one EU country earns a “passport” to operate across the bloc, but in return it must meet standards on how much capital it holds, how it is run, how it safeguards customers’ funds and how it prevents money laundering.
“What emerges is a genuine single market replacing the old patchwork of 27 national regimes,” Yamal Kalaf, co-founder of MiCAR Whitepapers Europe, which advises crypto businesses on MiCA authorisation, told Euronews.
Since the core rules took effect at the end of 2024, existing operators have been allowed to keep operating under older national registrations, but that concession was temporary.
The scale of the looming shake-out is striking.
According to the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), which confirmed in April that there would be no extension, only around 210 firms had obtained full authorisation by May, out of more than 1,200 that previously held national crypto registrations across the EU.
That points to a conversion rate of well under a fifth, leaving the vast majority of the old market without a licence as the cut-off arrives in a few days.
Speaking to Euronews, Roshan Dharia, CEO of distressed-investment firm Echo Base, explained that “the low conversion rate suggests that a meaningful portion of the market has concluded that obtaining and maintaining a MiCA licence is not economically viable within its current operating model.”
National regulators have warned that firms operating beyond the deadline without the new licence face enforcement action. France’s markets watchdog has also cautioned that continuing without authorisation could expose companies to criminal prosecution.
ESMA has told unlicensed providers to prepare orderly wind-downs, including transferring customer assets to authorised platforms or self-custody wallets, and to notify clients in advance so they can move funds safely.
“What we will see after 1 July is a smaller, more institutional market with real passporting. That is not a market in retreat. That is a market growing up,” Miguel Zapatero, Head Counsel at Crossmint, told Euronews.
Crossmint is a crypto infrastructure provider whose licensed rails let developers build wallets, custody and payment products.
Plenty of familiar names have already cleared the bar.
Coinbase has been authorised in Ireland and Kraken in Ireland and Luxembourg. At the same time, the banking app Revolut secured its licence from Cyprus’s regulator late last year, allowing it to offer crypto services across the EU.
For these firms, the new rules promise a reward as unlicensed rivals retreat, the survivors stand to absorb their departing customers.
“MiCA is a genuine regulatory identity shift, not a registration exercise,” Gal Arad Cohen, partner at law firm S. Horowitz & Co, told Euronews.
The most prominent casualty so far may be Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange.
According to Reuters, which cited two people familiar with the matter, Binance is set to lose permission to serve EU clients because its licence application to Greece’s market regulator, the Hellenic Capital Market Commission, is poised to be rejected.
Without approval in any member state, the exchange would be unable to operate across the bloc from July onwards.
Speaking to Euronews, Patrick Mollard, CEO at Fipto, a blockchain-based payments company for businesses, referred to the Binance case by stating that “scale earns you no shortcut to a licence, and that is precisely the point.”
Binance has pushed back, saying it has worked constructively with regulators for 18 months and believes its application met MiCA’s requirements. The company added that it understood the Greek authority had completed its review and found the filing compliant.
The company has promised a further update before 30 June.
The episode has also reputedly taken on a political dimension.
French crypto publication The Big Whale reported, citing unnamed sources, that ECB President Christine Lagarde had opposed Binance’s bid for a Greek MiCA licence.
Euronews could not independently verify the report, and neither the ECB nor the Greek government has publicly commented on the allegations.
The Big Whale also reported that Binance is exploring a potential MiCA application in France after the setback in Greece, a claim that neither Binance nor French regulators have publicly confirmed.
Binance did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Euronews.
Beyond the biggest names, the deadline is expected to push smaller crypto apps and brokers towards licensed custody providers. Rather than building their own MiCA-compliant systems, many are likely to rely on authorised firms to hold customer assets.
“We will see consolidation and transfer of clients as the deadline will not be met by all currently operating entries,” Floortje Nagelkerke, partner at law firm Norton Rose Fulbright, explained to Euronews.
The result, analysts suggest, will be a smaller, more concentrated European market, with fewer players, higher barriers to entry and a clear advantage for those holding a licence, but stronger consumer protections.
“People who hold crypto in the EU after 1 July will, on balance, hold it on safer rails,” Miguel Zapatero, Head Counsel at Crossmint, concluded.
anton5146/E+ via Getty Images
The FIFA World Cup has yet to provide a meaningful boost to U.S. economic activity, with business surveys, card spending data, and airline passenger traffic showing little evidence that the tournament is supporting demand, according to Pantheon Macroeconomics.
June business
honglouwawa
Alphabet (GOOGL) will join the Dow Jones Industrial Average, replacing Verizon Communications (VZ), effective Monday, June 29, 2026, further expanding mega-cap tech presence in the blue-chip average.
Dow Jones Industrial Average constituent Honeywell International (HON) is expected to complete
kyoshino/E+ via Getty Images
The Mortgage Bankers’ Association compiles various mortgage loan indexes. The purchase applications index measures applications at mortgage lenders.
The current account, on a quarterly basis, measures the U.S. international balance in goods and services
Earnings Call Insights: KB Home (KBH) Q2 2026
Seeking Alpha’s Disclaimer: This article was automatically generated by an AI tool based on content available on the Seeking Alpha website, and has not been curated or reviewed by humans. Due to inherent limitations in using AI-based tools, the accuracy, completeness, or timeliness of such articles cannot be guaranteed. This article is intended for informational purposes only. Seeking Alpha does not take account of your objectives or your financial situation and does not offer any personalized investment advice. Seeking Alpha is not a licensed securities dealer, broker or US investment adviser or investment bank.
Former Pfizer executive David Denton steps into the CFO role amid a bruising stock decline.
Nike Inc. said Tuesday it has hired David Denton as its next chief financial officer, tapping the former Pfizer Inc. finance chief to help stabilize a company navigating one of the most difficult stretches in its history.
Denton will join the Beaverton, Oregon-based sportswear giant as Executive Vice President and CFO effective Aug. 17. Matthew Friend, who has held the role since April 2020, will step down on that date and remain in the role through Sept. 4.
The announcement did little to reassure investors. Nike shares fell 4.5% to close at $42.38 Tuesday, leaving the stock down 33% year to date. The company has been grappling with slowing sales and eroding market share to nimbler rivals such as On Running and Hoka.
CEO Elliott Hill, who took the helm in late 2024, has been working to arrest the slide, but a full recovery has proven elusive.
Whether Denton’s expertise can generate a turnaround remains to be seen. He previously served as CFO and Executive Vice President at Pfizer since May 2022. Before that, he held the same title at Lowe’s Cos. from 2018 to 2022. He also spent two decades at CVS Health Corp., including as CFO during the company’s evolution into a diversified health. In all, he brings more than 30 years of finance and operating leadership across large, complex public companies.
Denton, in a prepared statement, called Nike “one of the world’s great brands.”
“I’m excited to partner with Elliott and the leadership team to support the company’s priorities, invest with discipline, and help deliver sustainable long-term value,” he said.
Hill framed the transition as a strategic inflection point. “This is a natural moment for a leadership transition as we move from foundational actions to sustained growth through our Sport Offense operating model,” he said.
Friend joined Nike in 2009 and rose through roles including CFO of the Nike Brand and VP of Investor Relations before assuming the top finance post. Nike expanded his responsibilities in late 2025 to include Global Sales and Direct-to-Consumer functions.
Prior to Nike, he worked in investment banking at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.
Nike expects to report fourth-quarter and fiscal year 2026 results on June 30. Analysts anticipate earnings of $0.12 per share on revenue of $10.85 billion, compared with 14 cents per share and $11.1 billion in the prior-year period — a stark illustration of how far the company still has to go. Results will include a one-time benefit from tariff refunds that were not previously factored into the guidance.
Contact the author: anoto@gfmag.com
Earnings Call Insights: FedEx (FDX) Q4 2026
Seeking Alpha’s Disclaimer: This article was automatically generated by an AI tool based on content available on the Seeking Alpha website, and has not been curated or reviewed by humans. Due to inherent limitations in using AI-based tools, the accuracy, completeness, or timeliness of such articles cannot be guaranteed. This article is intended for informational purposes only. Seeking Alpha does not take account of your objectives or your financial situation and does not offer any personalized investment advice. Seeking Alpha is not a licensed securities dealer, broker or US investment adviser or investment bank.
Cerebras Systems tumbles as margin worries outweigh OpenAI deal
Source link
Here are the major earnings after the close Wednesday
Source link
FabrikaCr
Investors turned to defensive stocks on Tuesday as a sell-off in the tech sector accelerated. The selling in stocks seen as AI beneficiaries led some investors to take shelter in consumer staples names. Household prodicts giant Procter & Gamble (
Amy Sparwasser/iStock via Getty Images
Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Bernie Moreno (R-OH) urged Congress to boost the payroll tax cap to save Social Security benefits, according to an op-ed piece published by the New York Times on Tuesday.
As the law currently stands, the payroll
Published on
SpaceX shares closed at $154.63 on Monday, down around 16% on the day. That leaves them within touching distance of the $150 at which the shares first changed hands when public trading opened, the level set once underwriters finished building the order book, though still some way above the $135 price at which the IPO itself was struck.
The slide has erased more than $600 billion (€524.2bn) in market value over three trading days, dragging the company down from a peak that had lifted it past Amazon and, fleetingly, Microsoft, in terms of market capitalisation.
Its valuation now sits just above $2 trillion (€1.74tn), below Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), making it the seventh most valuable company in the world.
The retreat unwinds a remarkable opening run.
After the open at around $150 on 12 June, shares climbed to almost $226 by 16 June, a gain of roughly two-thirds before the company had published a single set of results as a public firm.
Currently, SpaceX is trading over 30% lower than the intraday high of around $226 and only 3% higher than the opening price.
That rally always rested on a thin pool of freely traded shares and lofty expectations for its AI ambitions, leaving it exposed to a sharp reversal once sentiment turned.
The latest leg down on Monday coincided with SpaceX’s first move into the corporate debt market.
The company announced an inaugural offering of senior unsecured notes, with people familiar with the plans reportedly putting the target at around $20 billion (€17.4bn).
The proceeds are earmarked chiefly to repay a bridge loan taken on during its merger with Elon Musk’s AI venture xAI earlier this year, with the remainder going to general corporate purposes.
The debut bond sale follows the investment-grade credit ratings awarded last Friday by all three major agencies, Moody’s at Baa1, Fitch at BBB+ and S&P Global at BBB, which open the door to cheaper borrowing and a wider pool of institutional lenders.
In documents tied to the offering, SpaceX also disclosed a cash position of roughly $100.8 billion (€88bn) as of 19 June, much of it raised in the IPO, alongside $29.1 billion (€25.4bn) of long-term debt.
That mix of vast cash reserves and fresh borrowing so soon after a record flotation has unsettled some investors, who see the rapid fundraising as a sign of heavy spending ahead as SpaceX scales its AI and data centre plans.
Opting for debt rather than new shares does, however, spare existing shareholders further dilution, preserving their economic stake while the company funds its expansion.
The bank names former Dream Sports executive and investment banker Raj Rathi to lead M&A business in India.
Citigroup Inc. has appointed veteran investment banker Raj Rathi as its new head of mergers and acquisitions in India, effective this month. The appointment comes as Citi deepens its advisory capabilities to capture opportunities in the Asian market.
Rathi’s hiring follows several high-profile additions to the bank’s regional investment banking team. Citi recently lured Bhavin Shukla from JPMorgan Chase & Co. to serve as managing director and head of Infrastructure Investment Banking for Japan, North and South Asia, and Australia. Last year, Citi hired Vikram Chavali from Goldman Sachs Group as its Asia-Pacific head of Global Asset Managers.
Rathi was hired from Dream Sports, the multibillion-dollar parent company of fantasy gaming giant Dream11, where he served as head of Strategy and Corporate Development and oversaw the deployment of about $150 million across multiple strategic transactions.
Citi’s moves underscore a trend in which global banks are recruiting seasoned corporate executives to navigate complex digital infrastructure, the energy transition, and cross-border capital flows. Its recent high-profile transactions in the region include advising United Spirits Ltd. on the sale of its 100% stake in the Royal Challengers Bengaluru cricket team and steering Chinese appliance giant Haier Group through the sale of its 49% stake in Haier India to a consortium backed by Bharti Enterprises and Warburg Pincus.
Before his corporate development role at Dream Sports, Rathi spent five years as an executive director at J.P. Morgan, focusing on technology investment banking. He covered the technology, fintech, and consumer internet sectors, executing deals totaling about $35 billion in transaction value.
His career also included positions at Guggenheim Partners and Guggenheim Securities’ investment banking division, as well as at Ernst & Young, where he focused on financial due diligence and transaction advisory services for institutional clients, following early corporate development experience at Sutherland.
This article appears in the June 2026 issue of Global Finance Magazine.
As the European Union tries to fight its record-high €1 billion deficit per day with China, the bloc’s leaders are increasingly pointing to the problem of currency manipulation, which they say Beijing is using to make products even cheaper on the EU market – which is already flooded with Chinese imports.
“An artificially low currency is an advantage for those who want to improve their economic competition positions,” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said after the European Council summit on 19 June.
The matter of the Chinese currency and its management was also high on the agenda of last week’s G7 summit in France.
The signs are that this is a new front in Europe’s trade battle against Beijing. To understand why the devaluation of the yuan (or renminbi) matters, here are three things to know.
According to a report by the Haut Commissariat à la Stratégie au Plan, a French government advisory body, the undervaluation of the yuan is estimated at around 20-25 percent.
“While there is no universally recognised method for determining unequivocally whether a currency is significantly overvalued or undervalued, the assessment that the renminbi (RMB) is significantly undervalued is now widely shared, including among international institutions,” the report said.
In theory, China’s trade surpluses should naturally create demand for the yuan, leading to an appreciation of the currency, but it is not the case.
However, the devaluation of the yuan might not be the direct result of central bank intervention. Alicia Ferro Herrera, an expert at the Brussels-based think tank Bruegel, told Euronews that China prevents its currency from appreciating faster by not bringing all of its export revenues back to the mainland.
“They stay in Hong Kong and they are not converted into RMB,” she said.
The EU deficit with China hit a record-high €359.9 billion in 2025. That same year marked the first time that all EU member states had a trade deficit with Beijing, including Germany, the EU’s largest economy.
“This is simply not sustainable,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said last Friday.
According to the Haut Commissariat au Plan report, the undervaluation of the yuan plays a large part in keeping Chinese products competitive; as things stand, they are assessed by EU industry to be around 30-40 percent cheaper than European equivalents.
However, Ferro Herrera pointed out that the inflation differential also plays a great part.
“My estimate is that the inflation differential and its accumulation in Europe since the invasion of Ukraine explains about three quarters of the loss in external competitiveness,” she said.
In his remarks last Friday, Merz suggested the EU begin dialogue with China on the currency issue.
“We have to talk about this topic with each other,” he said. “It is in the interest of both sides.”
The German chancellor cited the 1985 Plaza Agreement, which saw the US, Japan, West Germany, the UK and France agree to depreciate the US dollar against the Japanese yen and the Deutsche Mark. The goal was to head off a protectionist turn from the US as its trade deficit deepened.
Merz also referred to the European Monetary System, which before the adoption of the euro relied on exchange-rate bands to limit currency fluctuations.
“That was a system where countries could coordinate through exchange-rate corridors,” he said.
Conversely, Ferro Herrera points out that the US did not push for any such negotiation when economic imbalances were discussed during the G7 last week.
In her view, Europe should monitor China’s export prices for major sector-by-sector deviations, since this is an important sign of overcapacity, as negative price growth occurs when goods cannot be sold.
As the financial world remembers the former Fed chair, economists weigh his massive macroeconomic legacy.
Alan Greenspan, the second-longest serving chairman of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, has died just months after his 100th birthday.
Known as “The Maestro,” Greenspan helmed the Fed under five U.S. presidents, from August 1987 until January 2006. He managed the central bank through two market crashes, two recessions, and various financial crises. Through it all, the U.S. economy experienced significant macroeconomic expansion, rising asset prices, and a dramatic shift in corporate finance.
Early in his tenure, Greenspan intervened to mitigate the impact of the 1987 stock market crash, a move known as the “Greenspan put.” The monetary policy lowered interest rates and injected liquidity, stabilizing the economy, restoring investor confidence, and mitigating financial shocks. However, Fed intervention also incentivized investors to take excessive risks, fueled speculative bubbles such as the 1990s dot-com bubble, and led to market expectations of future interventions.
The Greenspan put is a bit of an illusion, Kenneth Rogoff, professor of Economics at Harvard University and former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, wrote in an email exchange.
“When markets collapse, the interest rate required to maintain stable inflation will typically also temporarily collapse,” Rogoff wrote. “His biggest mistakes were in regulatory policy, where he had too much faith in financial market innovation and too hands-off an attitude towards regulation. We are now, in the second year of the [second] Trump administration, repeating that mistake.”
“He was a great central banker who helped lead his country through two decades of prosperity,” said Ben Bernanke, a Distinguished Fellow in Residence at Brookings Institution and Greenspan’s successor at the Fed, in a statement. “I always found him generous with his time and insights. We are still learning from him, even if he is no longer with us.”
Don Kohn, a senior fellow at Brookings and former Fed governor and vice chair, remembered Greenspan encouraging Fed staff and fellow policy makers to voice new ideas and analytical insights while asking them to find the weak points in the hypotheses he put forward.
“But those ideas, insights, and challenges need to be backed by evidence and solid reasoning,” he wrote in a post on Brookings’ website. “Once when he asked me what I thought we should be doing on policy, I started my response with, ‘My gut tells me…’ He quickly cut me off: ‘That’s not your gut, Don, that’s your experience and knowledge.’”
Greenspan’s willingness to experiment to lower the unemployment rate, which peaked at 7.4% in 1992, drew many admirers.
“He pushed it lower than the conventional wisdom had ever thought possible, and discovered that it was possible to have more Americans in work without sparking inflation,” Justin Wolfers, professor of Economics and Public Policy at the University of Michigan, wrote in an email exchange. “Hundreds of thousands more people found work, and their families could afford a better life because he showed that there’s nothing natural about what many economists had called the natural rate of unemployment.”
Although Wolfers did not agree with all of Greenspan’s decisions, he noted that “his intellectual courage and devotion to the public good were never in doubt. He lived a big life and made a difference.”
Contact the author at rdaly@gfmag.com