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As companies mature, they often choose to implement a dividend as a way to directly reward shareholders. On the other hand, smaller up-and-coming companies will want to put all the dry powder possible into their ideas to make them succeed.

Coca-Cola (KO -0.52%), Procter & Gamble (PG 0.23%), and Sherwin-Williams (SHW 0.58%) are three industry-leading companies that have been around for over 100 years. Their track records have earned them spots among the 30 components in the Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI 0.65%).

Dividends have been an integral part of their capital allocation plans for decades. And because all three companies have steadily grown their earnings over time, they have also been able to increase their quarterly dividends.

Investing $15,000 into each stock could help you generate over $1,000 in passive dividend income per year. Here’s why all three dividend stocks are great buys in October.

Image source: Getty Images.

This beverage behemoth is also a passive income powerhouse

Coca-Cola was one of the few stocks that held up when the market was tanking in response to tariff woes and geopolitical uncertainty in April. That same month, it hit an all-time high. But since then, Coke has been steadily falling while the S&P 500 (^GSPC 0.59%) has been gaining. And after a hot start to the year, Coke is now underperforming the Dow and the S&P 500.

^SPX data by YCharts

Coke’s fundamentals remain intact. The company is generating solid organic growth and diversifying its beverage lineup by leaning into healthier options. Coca-Cola Zero Sugar and Diet Coke are performing well, and Coke is shifting from high-fructose corn syrup to cane sugar in the U.S.

Coke has the beverage lineup, supply chain (through its bottling partnerships), and brand power to adapt to changing consumer preferences. In the meantime, the stock has gotten much cheaper, sporting a 23.6 price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio compared to a 10-year median P/E of 27.7.

Coke yields 3.1%, making it a solid source of passive income. And it has raised its dividend for 63 consecutive years, earning it a coveted spot on the list of Dividend Kings.

P&G is a great value for long-term investors

P&G is in a similar boat to Coke. It has great brands, but consumers are getting hit hard by inflation and cost-of-living pressures.

In June, P&G announced plans to cut 7,000 jobs and exit certain brands and markets as part of a restructuring effort. In July, it announced that its chief operating officer, Shailesh Jejurikar, would take over as CEO on Jan. 1, 2026. These major shakeups, paired with relatively weak results and guidance, may be why P&G is hovering around a 52-week low at the time of this writing.

P&G has essentially three levers it can pull to grow its earnings. It can sell higher volumes of products, it can raise prices, and it can repurchase stock, which increases earnings per share. Volume growth is the most sustainable option because it has fewer limits compared to price increases, which are subject to consumer constraints. And there’s only so much free cash flow P&G generates to buy back its stock (it usually reduces its share count by 1% to 2% per year).

Unfortunately, P&G has been relying heavily on price increases in recent years. And consumers are pushing back, as P&G’s organic growth has drastically slowed.

PG data by YCharts

P&G now sports a P/E ratio of 23.4 and a forward P/E of 21.8 compared to a 10-year median P/E of 25.5. Like Coke, P&G is a Dividend King with a high yield at 2.8%. It’s a great buy for risk-averse investors looking for a reliable source of passive income who don’t mind giving the company time to restructure.

Sherwin-Williams’ recent pullback is a buying opportunity

The paint and coatings giant had been a steady market outperformer to the point where it earned its spot in the Dow last year, replacing commodity chemical giant Dow Inc. But Sherwin-Williams’ stock has underperformed the major indexes this year largely due to high interest rates, which are impacting many of its end markets.

Sherwin-Williams benefits from increases in consumer spending and economic growth. Higher borrowing costs have been a drag on the housing market and home improvement projects, as evidenced by Home Depot‘s lackluster earnings growth over the last couple of years.

Still, Sherwin-Williams has the makings of an excellent dividend stock for long-term investors. It has 46 consecutive years of dividend raises, but its yield is just 0.9% because the stock price has outpaced its dividend growth rate — gaining 352% over the last decade, which is even better than the S&P 500’s 244% increase.

Sherwin-Williams has an excellent business model. It sells its products through its own retail stores, online, and partnerships with retailers like Lowe’s Companies. It also has a sizable coatings business and industrial and commercial paints business. Coatings are used to protect surfaces across various industries, including automotive, aerospace, and marine.

Add it all up, and Sherwin-Williams is a great buy in October.

Quality companies at attractive valuations

Coke, P&G, and Sherwin-Williams may not light up a growth investor’s radar screen. But all three companies pay growing, ultra-reliable dividends.

Coke and P&G have discounted valuations compared to their historical averages, whereas Sherwin-Williams is roughly in line with its 10-year median valuation.

Add it all up and these are three picks ideally suited for investors looking to round out their portfolios with non-tech-focused ideas.

XRP (XRP -0.18%), the third-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, has been one of the more popular cryptocurrencies in the market since Donald Trump was elected president last November, and it has benefited immensely from the administration’s pro-crypto policies. When the administration installed a new leader at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the SEC eventually dropped an appeal in a long-standing lawsuit against Ripple, the company behind XRP.

That removed an overhang on XRP and allowed the company to move forward with its plans for a spot XRP exchange-traded fund (ETF), and the expansion of the Ripple ecosystem, which XRP plays a key role in.

Image source: Getty Images.

The technical strength of XRP’s network also may allow it to disrupt international payments. Ripple continues to bridge the gap between mainstream financial institutions/institutional traders and the crypto world. The mainstream players are now more likely to try new things with fewer regulatory risks.

Ripple’s CEO, Brad Garlinghouse, has said he thinks that XRP could steal significant volume from SWIFT, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications. Financial institutions use this messaging system globally to send payment instructions to one another. Cryptocurrencies like XRP could provide banks with instant liquidity, allowing them to hold fewer reserves and pre-fund fewer international accounts, providing them with more liquidity and capital flexibility of their own.

If you’d invested $500 in XRP five years ago

Due to XRP’s technical strength, ties to Ripple, and the end of the SEC lawsuit, XRP has been a big winner for investors who saw the opportunity five years ago and managed, perhaps, to invest just $500.

XRP Price data by YCharts

As you can see above, a $500 investment in XRP five years ago would be worth over $5,850 today for a total return of over 1,000%. Consider that the broader benchmark S&P 500 index has returned over 100% in the past five years, which is quite strong, but still not nearly as good as XRP’s performance.

Is a recovery story in the works for Wolfspeed (WOLF -7.88%)? After all, the next-gen semiconductor maker says it’ll soon emerge from Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection with a much cleaner balance sheet; it also faces a promising market for the silicon carbide and gallium nitride products in which it specializes.

Perhaps it might even recoup some of the significant losses its shares have incurred over the years.

A dimming light

Across a five-year stretch, a $500 investment in what’s now Wolfspeed would have withered to only $16.42. This, combined with the company entering bankruptcy proceedings, has made it something of a meme stock.

Image source: Getty Images.

Wolfspeed pivoted its business in 2021, changing its name (from Cree) and eschewing the light-emitting diode (LED) products that had been its main focus since the 1993 founding.

Instead, it embraced technology based on the aforementioned materials, which promise greater efficiency and speed than conventional silicon solutions. Promise isn’t fusing with reality, however, as demand in the crucial yet ultracompetitive electric vehicle (EV) components space hasn’t been as strong as hoped.

The company consistently books bottom-line losses, with its generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) net shortfall nearly quadrupling in its most recently reported quarter to $669 million from the year-ago frame’s less than $175 million. Net revenue also declined, sliding to $197 million from under $201 million.

Emerging from the den of bankruptcy

One piece of good news is that, earlier this month, Wolfspeed received approval for its plan of reorganization to emerge from bankruptcy. It reached an agreement with creditors to slice outstanding debt by around 70%, or approximately $4.6 billion, leading to a roughly 60% reduction in interest payments.

The considerable downside for current stock investors is that Wolfspeed’s existing equity will be eliminated, with current shareholders receiving a collective figure of merely 3% to 5% of new common stock.

So Wolfspeed’s future is cloudy at best, and it hardly looks like today’s investors will be tomorrow’s gainers. I feel this stock is too risky for a buy just now.

It’s been an amazing past 10 years for Arista Networks (ANET -7.42%). Although it wasn’t clear for the first several years following its 2004 launch that a newcomer could successfully compete with networking giant Cisco Systems, its clever improvement to existing networking technology (the company’s switches and routers are largely software-based, and therefore can be custom-programmed and updated) have made Arista’s solutions a very popular option.

And shareholders have been well rewarded for their foresight and patience.

First fueled by cloud computing, and then artificial intelligence

What would a $10,000 investment in Arista Networks back in mid-September 2015 be worth today? The graphic below shows its growth. With an average annualized return of about 42% per year, this position would now be worth $356,280.

Data by YCharts

Most of this gain would have been realized in just the past three years, driven by the rapid growth of artificial intelligence data centers that require high-performance networking solutions. Even prior to that, however, Arista was well equipped to capitalize on an expanding cloud computing market.

A repeat is unlikely, but…

Can ANET do the same again over the course of the coming 10 years? Never say never. But it seems unlikely.

The size of this gain is largely rooted in the sheer newness of AI, which forced the hurried purchase of any and all solutions capable of making artificial data centers function as needed. However, this explosive phase of the movement is now in the rear-view mirror.

Don’t dismiss this stock’s remaining upside potential, though. While the mathematical pace of AI’s relative growth will almost certainly slow from here, Global Market Insights still expects the worldwide artificial intelligence hardware market to grow at an average annual rate of 18% through 2034. The flexibility of its software-based networking solutions leaves Arista Networks well-positioned to capture at least its fair share of this growth.

Uber Technologies (UBER -0.48%) might be a household name these days, with its global reach supporting strong brand recognition. However, it’s taken shareholders on a volatile journey since its initial public offering more than six years ago. For instance, the stock declined 18% in 2021, followed by a 41% drop in 2022.

But Uber’s stock chart has been moving up and to the right in recent years. If you’d invested $10,000 in the company’s shares five years ago, not long after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, here’s how much you’d have today.

Image source: Getty Images.

Driving in the fast lane

After the pandemic hit, Uber’s business, at least on the mobility side, was decimated. Its delivery operations picked up the slack. Since then, however, the company has been thriving, and investors have reaped the rewards.

In the past five years, Uber shares have soared 174% (as of Sept. 5). Had you bought $10,000 worth of stock in early September 2020, you’d be staring at a position valued at $27,400 today. This gain comes even though Uber trades 7% below its all-time high from July.

Business is booming

In the latest quarter (Q2 2025 ended June 30), Uber reported gross bookings of $46.8 billion. This figure was up a remarkable 359% compared to exactly five years before. The company’s user base has also expanded significantly. Unsurprisingly, these trends have lifted revenue and operating income to new heights.

Even after such a stellar performance, the shares don’t look expensive, as they trade at a forward price-to-earnings ratio of 23.5. Investors should consider buying the stock, although it’s best to set realistic expectations. Don’t anticipate another 174% gain between now and 2030.

In the late 2010s, it felt like a daily occurrence that new cryptocurrencies were arriving onto the scene. From meme tokens to stablecoins, the variety of newly launched cryptos holding their initial coin offerings was considerable.

Today, things have quieted down considerably, yet Ethereum (ETH 0.03%) remains one cryptocurrency that remains at the forefront of investors’ radars. In fact, the price of Ethereum has risen more than 32% since the start of the year.

But how have investors fared who bought Ethereum when the crypto frenzy started to taper off in 2020? Below, I’ll take a closer look at what a $10,000 investment five years ago would be worth today.

Image source: Getty Images.

The price of Ethereum has soared into the ether

Thanks to an explosion of interest in decentralized finance, the price of Ethereum soared through 2021. In that one year alone, the price of the crypto rose more than 408%.

Due, in part, to rising inflation and, to a larger extent, a growing skepticism for cryptocurrencies after the collapse of crypto exchange FTX, the market’s appetite for Ethereum dwindled in the following year, and the price of Ethereum plunged 67% in 2022.

Subsequently, a variety of factors have contributed to the price of Ethereum repeatedly rising and falling. Most recently, for example, the price of Ethereum ripped higher last month after Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell intimated that interest rates could drop before the end of the year.

There have been some downturns in the price of Ethereum over the past few years, but overall, the crypto has skyrocketed in price. Investors who bought $10,000 in Ethereum on Sept. 4, 2020 have seen their positions grow to $132,740 five years later.

Does Ethereum represent a good buying opportunity today?

While Ethereum has provided long-term investors with impressive gains over the past five years, there are plenty of reasons to suspect that there’s much more room for the crypto to run higher. Investors must carefully consider their risk tolerances before buying Ethereum, as volatility is sure to persist.

It has been a remarkably strong decade for the S&P 500. In fact, a $1,000 investment in the low-cost Vanguard S&P 500 ETF (VOO -0.35%) a decade ago would be worth about $4,100 today, assuming you reinvested all of your dividends. That is an annualized return of about 15%.

Why has the S&P 500 had such a strong decade?

It’s worth noting that a decade ago, the S&P 500 had already more than tripled from the 2009 financial crisis lows. So, adding a 310% total return on top of that is no small feat.

VOO Total Return Price data by YCharts

The short explanation is that while most sectors have performed quite well, the bulk of the stellar performance has been largely fueled by large-cap technology stocks. After all, the trillion-dollar megacap tech stock wasn’t a thing back then, and now there are eight of them. To illustrate this, consider the five largest holdings of the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF and how each one has performed over the past decade:

Data source: yCharts, Vanguard. Percentages of assets as of 7/31/2025.

Think about this. The worst performer of the five largest megacap tech stocks in the S&P 500 outperformed the overall index by more than 250 percentage points over the past decade.

Image source: Getty Images.

Historically, the S&P 500 has delivered annualized returns in the 9% to 10% range over long periods, so it’s fair to say that this has been an incredibly strong decade for S&P 500 investors. And while there’s no way to predict what might happen over the next 10 years, it wouldn’t be realistic to expect 15% annualized returns over the long run forever.

Bill Ackman is one of the most closely followed investment managers on Wall Street. His Pershing Square Capital Management hedge fund holds just a handful of high-conviction positions, and he typically holds those positions for the long run.

Ackman is often forthcoming with the biggest moves in his portfolio. He’ll usually disclose new trades through his social media accounts or monthly updates to his hedge fund investors. But Pershing Square’s quarterly 13F filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) can provide a full accounting of the hedge fund’s portfolio of publicly traded U.S. stocks.

Ackman made a couple of big moves last quarter, and now holds roughly 58% of the portfolio in just three companies.

Image source: Getty Images.

1. Uber (20.6%)

Ackman made a massive investment in Uber Technologies (UBER -2.28%) at the start of 2025, accumulating 30.3 million shares for Pershing Square. That immediately made the stock the hedge fund’s largest position, and it’s only grown bigger since. Uber shares are up 57% so far in 2025 as of this writing.

Uber continues to see strong adoption for both its mobility and delivery service. Total users climbed to 180 million last quarter, up 15% year over year, and it saw a 2% increase in trips per user. Delivery gross bookings climbed 20% year over year and produced strong EBITDA margin expansion. As a result, the company saw adjusted EBITDA growth of 35% year over year.

But the threat of autonomous vehicles is weighing on Uber stock. Ackman believes self-driving cars will benefit Uber in the long run, as it operates the network required for connecting vehicles with riders. That kind of network effect is hard to replicate, giving Uber a competitive advantage and a significant stake in the autonomous vehicle industry. To that end, the company has already partnered with 20 different companies, including AV leader Alphabet‘s (GOOG 0.56%) (GOOGL 0.63%) Waymo.

Shares of Uber currently trade for about 1.2 times its gross bookings over the past year. But with expectations for growth in the high teens, that puts it down closer to a 1 multiple. That’s historically been a good price to pay for the stock. In more traditional valuation metrics, its stock price is 3.9 times forward revenue expectations. Its enterprise value of $206 billion as of this writing is less than 24 times 2025 adjusted EBITDA expectations. Even after its strong performance in 2025, Uber shares still look about fairly valued.

2. Brookfield Corp (19.7%)

Ackman built a position in diversified asset manager Brookfield Corporation (BN -0.08%) over the last five quarters, adding to it each quarter since Pershing Square’s initial purchase in the second quarter of 2024. As a result, the stock is now the hedge fund’s second-largest position.

Brookfield saw its distributable earnings excluding carried interest and gains from selling investments climb 13% on a per-share basis last quarter. The company expects to produce distributable earnings growth of 21% per year from 2024 through 2029.

A huge growth driver for Brookfield is its Wealth Solutions segment, which grew total insurance assets to $135 billion as of the end of June. Its annualized earnings are now $1.7 billion.

The business is growing quickly. Just two years ago, insurance assets totaled $45 billion. Management expects the growth to continue with assets topping $300 billion by 2029. At that point, the segment will be the conglomerate’s largest contributor to distributable earnings.

Management is using its free cash flow to buy back shares and invest in new assets. This could further increase distributable earnings per share above its guidance for 21% organic growth over the next few years. Shares currently trade for less than 20 times management’s expectations for 2025 distributable earnings, offering compelling value for investors.

3. Alphabet (17.9%)

Ackman first bought shares of Alphabet in early 2023, shortly after the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. While many saw the growth of generative AI as a major threat to Alphabet’s Google, Ackman thought the market overreacted, offering a bargain price for the stock. While he trimmed the position a bit in 2024, he’s added back to it over the first two quarters of 2025, preferring the Class A shares (which come with voting rights).

Alphabet has produced strong financial results in 2025. Its core advertising business climbed 10% year over year last quarter, with particularly strong results from Google Search (up 12%). That speaks to the company’s efforts to incorporate generative AI into its search business with features like AI Overviews and Google Lens. The former has increased engagement and user satisfaction, according to management, while the latter lends itself to high-value product searches.

Alphabet has seen tremendous results in its Google Cloud business, which supplies compute power to AI developers. Sales increased 32% year over year, with operating margin expanding to 22% for the business. Overall, Google Cloud accounted for 43% of the total increase in Alphabet’s operating earnings last quarter, despite its relatively small size compared to the Search business.

That said, the company faces potential regulatory challenges to its business. The Department of Justice has ruled that it operates an illegal monopoly. The company is awaiting a ruling on required remedies, which could include divesting its Chrome browser or a ban on contracts positioning Google as the default search engine in other browsers.

As a result, Alphabet shares trade for less than 21 times forward earnings expectations. That’s the lowest multiple among the “Magnificent Seven” stocks and a great price for one of the leading AI companies in the world.

For years, ExxonMobil Corp (XOM 0.82%) was stuck in limbo. In 2007, for instance, Exxon stock traded at roughly $85 per share. In 2016, nearly a decade later, shares still traded at roughly $85 per share.

The past five years, however, have been very different. Exxon shareholders have crushed the market. You may be surprised to learn just how much a $1,000 investment would have become since the summer of 2020.

ExxonMobil shareholders are very happy about the last 5 years

As one of the largest oil stocks in the world, Exxon is heavily dependent on the prevailing price of oil. Five years ago arguably marks the nadir of the oil price collapse that occurred due to uncertainty surrounding the ongoing global pandemic. In April of 2020, oil prices fell as low as $20 per barrel! By August of that year, prices had already rebounded to around $40 per barrel, but that was still one-third below pre-pandemic levels.

Today, oil prices hover just above $60 per barrel due to rising costs and geopolitical tensions. Today’s price level is roughly 50% higher than it was five years ago, but Exxon’s stock price has risen significantly more.

Source: Getty Images

If you had invested $1,000 into Exxon stock in August 2020, you’d have around $3,460 today. That figure includes dividend income — an important consideration given Exxon currently pays a dividend yield of 3.5%. Over the same time period, a $1,000 investment in the S&P 500 would have grown into just $2,000.

XOM Total Return Level data by YCharts

Much of this outperformance stems from Exxon’s continued investments throughout the last bear market. With greater access to capital, the company was able to invest at rock bottom prices, highlighting the company’s capital advantage and savvy leadership. Exxon’s CEO called these strategic moves “counter-cyclical investments” — an appropriate term for a business that can deploy capital at every stage of a cyclical industry.

If you catch an asset early in its adoption curve, you don’t need to be perfect to do really well. On that note, five years ago, Solana (SOL -3.61%) was a fledgling smart contract network with more ambition than market share. Had you invested $1,000 then, it would be worth roughly $55,000 on August 27, 2025, or around 5,620% more than what you started with.

That kind of growth, despite skepticism and severe setbacks, is why investors pay attention to the Solana blockchain today. Let’s break down its path and examine its future prospects.

Image source: Getty Images.

The last five years were amazing for investors — but extremely difficult too

Today, Solana trades a little above $204 per coin. On Aug. 27, 2020, just shortly after its mainnet beta went live in early 2020, its price was about $3.44.

The price action over the last five years was not a straight line upward. In fact, as coins go, this one was an extremely difficult investment to hold. Most investors probably would have cracked and sold their coins at one moment in particular.

The FTX bankruptcy hit in November 2022, obliterating all positive sentiment in the crypto sector overnight, and sharply disrupting the supply dynamics around coins associated with the exchange.

Solana was especially hard hit because FTX was heavily promoting it, and owned a stake equivalent to roughly 10% of its total market cap at the time. The exchange had also issued wrapped tokens on the chain, which many users and decentralized finance (DeFi) projects were using as collateral. When the assets backing those tokens were revealed to be missing, they went to zero and took down a significant portion of the Solana ecosystem on the way.

Between the end of November 2021 and a year later, Solana lost 93% of its value.

Even so, by January 2025, Solana’s DeFi total value locked (TVL) had pushed back above $10 billion for the first time since before the collapse, a sign that builders and users had returned.

But why did capital come back after seeing the coin’s value evaporate nearly overnight?

The chain’s core pitch to investors, users, and developers remains its high throughput and low fees, which are both significant advantages for consumer-facing activity. Recent usage data supports that reality, with millions of daily active wallet addresses and tens of millions of daily transactions at periods of peak demand.

Will the next five years rhyme?

Solana’s near-term upside will likely be driven by where it already shows product-market fit. But don’t expect a repeat of its past bull run.

Start with DeFi and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Even after the 2022 to 2023 crypto winter, NFT sales on Solana have remained active. For 2024 as a whole, Solana ranked third in NFT sales at roughly $1.4 billion, an indication that participation persisted through the broader recovery.

But the bigger story is probably in the rise of a certain kind of fungible crypto token: tokenized stocks.

Such assets are simply stocks that are tracked and traded on the blockchain instead of on the traditional markets. Currently, there’s nearly $500 million in value stored on the chain’s tokenized equities. If the asset tokenization trend continues, and it probably will, that sum could balloon significantly over the coming years, attracting a lot of new value to the chain and generating revenue for the network when investors trade their tokenized stocks.

Another new catalyst is the emergence of on-chain AI agents, small programs that can reason over tasks and transact with decentralized applications (dApps) or smart contracts on a user’s behalf. If agent-mediated activity scales, Solana is well placed to capture it. There’s not much hope for the emerging AI agent segment to power the same scale of returns that Solana experienced over the last five years, but it could still make the coin’s value increase substantially if it takes off.

So, is it worth buying some Solana and holding it for the next five years? Absolutely. Just keep your expectations in check, and be aware that it’s very possible for the coin to experience another wild ride like it has since 2020.

One of the most popular exchange-traded funds (ETFs) on the stock market is the Invesco QQQ Trust (QQQ 0.70%). It mirrors the Nasdaq-100, an index that tracks the 100 largest companies on the Nasdaq stock exchange (excluding financial names such as banks and insurance companies). It is the second-most traded ETF in the U.S. based on average daily volume.

Over the past decade, QQQ has also been one of the best ETFs for investors to hold. Had you put $1,000 in the ETF 10 years ago (using Aug. 25, 2015, as the starting point), it would be worth over $5,800 today. And if you include dividends paid out during that time, the investment would be worth over $6,200.

Data by YCharts.

What could the next 10 years look like for QQQ?

The QQQ is a tech-heavy ETF (the sector makes up over 60% of the fund), so as the industry goes, so does the fund. This has worked in its favor so far, but will that be the case going forward? I believe so as the technology sector still has some of the most compelling growth opportunities across the entire economy.

The one making the most headlines right now is artificial intelligence (AI) and its potential to help companies across every industry increase their efficiency. Other opportunities that will drive tech sector growth over the next decade include cloud computing, cybersecurity, and digital advertising.

With companies like Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta Platforms leading the way, the QQQ is in good hands for the foreseeable future.

I won’t keep you in suspense. If you had invested $1,000 in the Vanguard Real Estate ETF (VNQ -0.51%) a decade ago, you would have about $1,770 today, assuming you reinvested your dividends along the way.

This isn’t a terrible outcome. After all, you wouldn’t have lost money. But when you consider that $1,000 invested in an S&P 500 index fund such as the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF (VOO -0.37%) 10 years ago would be worth $3,900, it doesn’t exactly look like stellar performance.

Image source: Getty Images.

What went wrong?

The short version is that the real estate sector underperformed the S&P 500 because, first, the S&P 500 has been on an incredible bull run. It has produced annualized total returns of about 14.6% over the past decade, making it touch to beat.

In addition, real estate is perhaps the most rate-sensitive sector of the market. Over the past 10 years, we’ve seen two prolonged periods of Federal Reserve rate increases, with a global pandemic in between. In fact, the benchmark federal funds rate is more than 400 basis points higher than it was a decade ago.

Real estate investment trusts (REITs) have a strong history of outperforming the market in falling rate or zero-rate environments but underperforming when rates are high or rising.

Without turning this into an economics lesson, there are a few reasons REITs are so sensitive to interest rates. One is borrowing costs. REITs tend to rely heavily on borrowed money to grow, similar to how you might rely on a mortgage to buy a home. Rising rates make the economics of borrowing less favorable.

In addition, rising rates put pressure on commercial real estate property values, which tend to have an inverse relationship with risk-free interest rates (those offered by Treasury securities). The properties REITs own can literally be worth less simply because rates went higher.

On the other hand, it’s worth noting that these things can also become real estate’s biggest catalysts in a falling-rate environment.

Few technologies have captured the attention of investors quite like artificial intelligence (AI) has in the past few years. It makes sense given that few technologies have had the potential to transform society as much as AI.

The company at the center of this AI boom, Nvidia (NVDA -0.25%), has seen its stock absolutely skyrocket since AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude took off.

AI demand and big tech spending are powering Nvidia’s surge

A wave of investment from big tech companies like Meta, Alphabet, and Microsoft, racing to stay ahead of the curve, has driven Nvidia’s revenue and earnings through the roof. While it’s no longer growing quite as fast as a few years ago, the company is still delivering 65%+ growth year over year.

Image source: Getty Images.

Before the AI boom, Bitcoin mining drove Nvidia’s stock higher, and before that, gaming. It’s been many years of growth. So if you’d been lucky enough to invest $10,000 in Nvidia 10 years ago, how much would that be worth today?

Your $10,000 would have turned into an incredible $3.05 million. You can see the scale of that growth below.

NVDA data by YCharts

Should you buy Nvidia stock?

It might feel like Nvidia’s rise is over. The truth is, the growth can continue. Granted, it probably will never see quite such a dramatic arc again, but it can continue to outpace the market. For the time being, the demand signals from the rest of big tech are strong, and its growth is likely to continue for the foreseeable future.

Now, the stock does carry a hefty premium with significant growth already baked in, and it will be more sensitive to slowdowns in the company’s growth, but I still think Nvidia has a long way to go and remains a buy.

Greg Saunier already had reasons to be wary of Spotify. The founder of the acclaimed Bay Area band Deerhoof was well acquainted with the service’s meager payouts to artists and songwriters, often estimated around $3 per thousand streams. He was unnerved by the service’s splashy pivots into AI and podcasting, where right-wing, conspiracy-peddling hosts like Joe Rogan got multimillion-dollar contracts while working musicians struggled.

But Saunier hit his breaking point in June, when Spotify’s Chief Executive Daniel Ek announced that he’d led a funding round of nearly $700 million (through his personal investment firm, Prima Materia) into the European defense firm Helsing. That company, which Ek now chairs, specializes in AI software integrated into fighter aircraft like its HX-2 AI Strike Drone. “Helsing is uniquely positioned with its AI leadership to deliver these critical capabilities in all-domain defence innovation,” Ek said in a statement about the funding round.

In response, Deerhoof pulled its catalog from Spotify. “Every time someone listens to our music on Spotify, does that mean another dollar siphoned off to make all that we’ve seen in Gaza more frequent and profitable?” Saunier said, in an interview with The Times. “It didn’t take us long to decide as a band that if Daniel Ek is going harder on AI warfare, we should get off Spotify. It’s not even that big of a sacrifice in our case.”

A small band yanking its catalog won’t make much impact on Spotify’s estimated quarterly revenues of $4.8 billion. But it seemed to inspire others: several influential acts subsequently left the service, lambasting Ek for investing his personal fortune into an AI weapons firm.

Spotify did not return request for comment about Ek’s Helsing investments.

This small exodus is unlikely to sway Ek, or dislodge Spotify from dominating the record economy. But it may further sour young music fans on Spotify, as many are outraged about wars in Gaza and elsewhere.

“There must be hundreds of bands right now at least as big as ours who are thinking of leaving,” Saunier said. “I thought we’d be fools not to leave, the risk would be in staying. How can you generate good feelings between fans when musical success is intimately associated with AI drones going around the globe murdering people?”

Swedish mogul Ek, with an estimated wealth around $9 billion, may seem an unlikely new player in the global defense industry. But his interest in Helsing goes back to 2021, when Ek invested nearly $115 million from Prima Materia and joined the company’s board. [Helsing, based in Germany, says it was founded to “help protect our democratic values and open societies” and puts “ethics at the core of defense technology development.”]

With his investment, Ek joined tech moguls Jeff Bezos and Palmer Luckey in pivoting from nerdier cultural pursuits (like online bookselling and virtual reality) into defense. The Union of Musicians and Allied Workers said then that Ek’s actions “prove once again that Ek views Spotify and the wealth he has pillaged from artists merely as a means to further his own wealth.”

A range of anti-Spotify protests followed later, like a songwriters’ rally in West Hollywood in 2022 and a boycott of Spotify’s 2025 Grammy party, after Spotify cut $150 million from songwriter royalties. Neil Young and Joni Mitchell pulled their catalogs in response to Rogan spreading misinformation about COVID-19.

Yet eventually, both relented. “Apple and Amazon have started serving the same disinformation podcast features I had opposed at Spotify,” Young said in a pithy note in 2022. “I hope all you millions of Spotify users enjoy my songs! They will now all be there for you except for the full sound we created.”

Daniel Ek, founder and CEO of Spotify, in 2023.

(Noam Galai / Getty Images for Spotify)

Ek’s latest investment seems to have struck a nerve though, especially in the corners of music where Spotify slashed income to the point where artists have little to lose by leaving.

After Deerhoof’s announcement, the influential avant-garde band Xiu Xiu announced a similar move. “We are currently working to take all of our music off of garbage hole violent armageddon portal Spotify,” they wrote. “Please cancel your subscription.”

The Amsterdam electronic label Kalahari Oyster Cult had similar reasoning: “We don’t want our music contributing to or benefiting a platform led by someone backing tools of war, surveillance and violence,” they posted.

Most significantly, the Australian rock band King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard — an enormously popular group that will headline the Hollywood Bowl Aug. 10. — said last week that it would pull its dozens of albums from Spotify as well. “A PSA to those unaware: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek invests millions in AI military drone technology,” the band wrote, announcing its departure. “We just removed our music from the platform. Can we put pressure on these Dr. Evil tech bros to do better?”

“We’ve been saying ‘f— Spotify’ for years. In our circle of musicians, that’s what people say all the time for well-documented reasons,” the band’s singer Stu Mackenzie said in an interview. “I don’t consider myself an activist, but this feels like a decision staying true to ourselves. We saw other bands we admire leaving, and we realized we don’t want our music to be there right now.”

Ek’s moves with Prima Materia come as no surprise to Glenn McDonald, a former data analyst at Spotify who became well known for identifying trends in listener habits. McDonald was laid off in 2023, and has mixed feelings about the company’s priorities today. It’s both the arbiter of the record industry and a mercurial tech giant that only became profitable last year while spinning off enormous wealth for Ek.

“It’s well documented that Spotify was only a music business because that was an open niche,” McDonald said. “I’m never surprised by billionaires doing billionaire things. Google or Apple or Amazon investing in a company that did military technology wouldn’t surprise me. Spotify subscribers should feel dismayed that this is happening, but not responsibility, because all the major streamers are about the same in moral corporate terms.”

McDonald said the company’s push toward Discovery Mode — where artists accept a lower royalty rate in exchange for better placement in its algorithm — added to the sense that Spotify is antagonistic to working artists’ values. More recently, Spotify rankled progressives when it sponsored a Washington, D.C., brunch with Rogan and Ben Shapiro celebrating President Trump’s return to the White House, and raised $150,000 for Trump’s inauguration (Apple and Amazon also donated to the inauguration).

While Ek’s investments in Helsing are not directly tied to Spotify, the money does come from personal wealth built through his ownership of Spotify’s stock. Fans are right to make a moral connection between them, McDonald said.

“Ek represents Spotify publicly, and thus its commitment to music. Him putting money into an AI drone company isn’t representing that,” McDonald said. “He can do whatever he wants with his money, but he is the face of a company as controversial and culturally important as Spotify. So yeah, people want to hold him to a less neutral standard.”

For artists looking to leave the service, the actual process of getting off Spotify varies. For King Gizzard, which releases its catalog on its own record labels, it was easy to remove everything quickly. Deerhoof and Xiu Xiu needed time to clear the move with several labels and former band members who receive royalties.

Being a smaller, autonomous band enabled Saunier to act according to his values, even at the cost of some meaningful slice of income. He has considered that, by torching his band’s relationship with Spotify, Deerhoof’s music could slip from away from some fans.

“Everyone I know hates Spotify, but we’ve been conditioned to believe that there is no other option,” he said. “But underground music is filled with so many beautiful examples of a mom-and-pop business mentality. I don’t need to dominate the world, I don’t need to be Taylor Swift to be counted as a success. I don’t need a global reach, I just need to provide myself a good life.”

Yet the only artists that might genuinely sway Ek’s investments would be ones with a global reach on the caliber of Swift. She has pulled her catalog from Spotify before, in 2014 just after releasing her smash album “1989.”

“Music is art, and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for,” she said, before eventually returning to Spotify in 2017.

It’s hard to imagine her, or other comparable pop acts, taking a similar stand today, especially as the major labels’ fortunes are so bound up in Spotify revenues. Spotify reported a $10 billion payout to rights holders in 2024, roughly a quarter of the entire global recorded music business. Its stock has surged 120% over the last year, but in the second quarter of 2025, the firm missed earnings targets and dropped 11% this week, for the stock’s worst day in two years. “While I’m unhappy with where we are today, I remain confident in the ambitions we laid out for this business,” Ek said in an earnings call.

This recent, small exodus most likely didn’t contribute to that. But it might add to a creeping sense among young listeners that Spotify is not a morally-aligned place for fans to enjoy beloved songs.

“I actually think Spotify will eventually go the way of MySpace. It’s just a get-rich-quick scheme that will pass, become uncool, one that had its day and is probably in decline,” Saunier said. “They wrote an email to me seemingly to do face saving, which makes me think they’re more desperate than we think.”

Acts like Kneecap, Bob Vylan and others have been outspoken around the war on Gaza, at real risk to their careers — proof that young fans care deeply about these issues. While Ek would argue that Helsing helps Ukraine and Europe defend itself, others may not trust his judgment.

“Maybe it’s silly to expect cultural or moral leadership from Daniel Ek, but I don’t want it to be silly,” McDonald said. He thinks fans and artists can morally stay on Spotify, but hopes they build toward a more ethical record industry.

“It’s hard to see what ‘stay and fight’ consists of, but if everyone leaves, nothing gets better,” he said. “If we’re going to get a better music business, it’s going to come from somebody starting over from scratch without major labels, and somehow building to a point where we have enough leverage to change the power dynamic.”

King Gizzard’s Mackenzie looks forward to finding out how that might work. “I don’t expect Daniel Ek to pay attention to us, though it would be cool if he did,” Mackenzie said. “We’ve made a lot of experimental moves in music and releasing records. People who listen to our music have been conditioned to have trust and faith to go on the ride together. I feel grateful to have that trust, and this feels like an experiment to me. Let’s just go away from Spotify and see what happens.”