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North America
Yahoo Finance

Making Six Figures but Betting Everything on U.S. Stocks? AVUV Fixes That Problem

You check your portfolio and it looks like every other portfolio in America. Apple, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Amazon, Meta, Alphabet, and a heaping side of S&P 500 index fund that is, when you look under the hood, basically more of the same seven names. You are 38, you have 25-plus years until retirement, and you have a nagging feeling that betting the house on the same handful of trillion-dollar tech giants is not actually diversification. You are right to feel that way, and the ETF that fixes it is the Avantis U.S. Small Cap Value ETF (NYSEARCA:AVUV), a fund built to own everything your index quietly underweights. Mega-cap growth has carried the market for so long that the average investor now owns almost no exposure to the two factors academic research has identified as the most reliable long-run sources of equity premium: small size and cheap valuation. The fix isn’t to sell your index fund. It’s to add a counterweight. Something that zigs when the Mag 7 zags, with a different earnings stream, a different valuation profile, and a different beta to whatever AI capex does next. That is exactly the role AVUV is built to play. AVUV is run by Avantis Investors, a unit of American Century, and it is the most popular actively managed small-cap value ETF on the market for a reason. It holds more than 500 positions drawn from the cheapest, most profitable corner of the U.S. small-cap universe. As of the latest filing, fund net assets sat at roughly $23.5 billion, which means you get institutional scale and tight spreads without giving up the active-screening edge. What does that screening look like in practice? The top holdings are a tour of unloved economic plumbing: Five Below at 0.97% of the fund, GATX at 0.92%, Avnet at 0.79%, Archrock at 0.77%, Dana at 0.73%, Alaska Air at 0.72%, California Resources at 0.71%, and Air Lease at 0.69%, with a long tail of regional banks, retailers, energy names, and industrial cyclicals. The top ten is intentionally free of household tech names, and those ten positions add up to just 7.5% of assets. That is genuinely spread-out exposure rather than a few concentrated bets. For your portfolio, the cost is minimal. AVUV charges a published expense ratio of 0.25%, meaning roughly $9,975 of every $10,000 stays invested and working for the value factor. And the value factor has been working. AVUV is up 20.38% year to date and 38.82% over the trailing year, with shares closing at $122 on June 18, 2026. Over the trailing five years it has returned 81.73%, well ahead of the 33.07% from the plain-vanilla Russell 2000 proxy IWM over the same span. That gap is the value tilt and the profitability screen earning their keep. Small-cap value is volatile and cyclical. AVUV slipped 0.97% in the past week while large-cap indices held up, and there will be 12-to-18-month stretches where it lags the S&P badly. The fund is also concentrated in regional banks, retailers, and energy, so a credit cycle or an oil collapse will hurt. This is a long-horizon allocation, not a quick trade. If your portfolio already looks like the index, the missing piece is the slice of the market that the index underweights and that history says compounds hardest over decades. For a long-horizon investor, AVUV is worth researching as a complement to a core S&P allocation, the counterweight that makes the rest of your portfolio more than just seven stocks in a trench coat.

Making Six Figures but Betting Everything on U.S. Stocks? AVUV Fixes That Problem
North America
Yahoo Finance

If You’re 38 With $500K Saved, AVUV Fixes Your Tech-Heavy Portfolio

You check your portfolio and it looks like every other portfolio in America. Apple, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Amazon, Meta, Alphabet, and a heaping side of S&P 500 index fund that is, when you look under the hood, basically more of the same seven names. You are 38, you have 25 plus years until retirement, and you have a nagging feeling that betting the house on the same handful of trillion dollar tech giants is not actually diversification. You are right to feel that way. The ETF that fixes it is the Avantis U.S. Small Cap Value ETF (NYSEARCA:AVUV). Mega-cap growth has carried the market for so long that the average investor now owns almost no exposure to the two factors that academic research has identified as the most reliable long-run sources of equity premium: small size and cheap valuation. Keep your index fund and add a counterweight. Something that zigs when the Mag 7 zags, something with a different earnings stream, a different valuation profile, and a different beta to whatever AI capex does next. AVUV is run by Avantis Investors, a unit of American Century, and it is the most popular actively managed small-cap value ETF on the market for a reason. It holds more than 500 positions drawn from the cheapest, most profitable corner of the U.S. small-cap universe. As of the latest filing, fund net assets sat at roughly $23.5 billion, which means you get institutional scale and tight spreads without giving up the active-screening edge. What does that screening look like in practice? The top holdings are a tour of unloved economic plumbing: Five Below at 0.97% of the fund, GATX at 0.92%, Avnet at 0.79%, Archrock at 0.77%, Dana at 0.73%, Alaska Air at 0.72%, California Resources at 0.71%, Air Lease at 0.69%, and a long tail of regional banks, retailers, energy names, and industrial cyclicals. The top ten is intentionally free of household tech names. With the top 10 positions adding up to roughly 7.5% of assets, you are getting genuinely spread-out exposure across the portfolio. The translation for your portfolio: AVUV charges a published expense ratio of 0.25%, meaning roughly $9,975 of every $10,000 stays invested and working for the value factor. And the value factor has been working. AVUV is up 20.38% year to date and 38.82% over the trailing year, with shares closing at $122 on June 18, 2026. Over the trailing five years it has returned 81.73%, well ahead of the 33.07% from the plain-vanilla Russell 2000 proxy IWM over the same span. That gap is the value tilt and the profitability screen earning their keep. Small-cap value is volatile and cyclical. AVUV slipped 0.97% in the past week while large-cap indices held up, and there will be 12 to 18 month stretches where it lags the S&P badly. The fund is also concentrated in regional banks, retailers, and energy, so a credit cycle or oil collapse will hurt. This is a long-horizon allocation. If your portfolio already looks like the index, the missing piece is the slice of the market that the index underweights and that history says compounds hardest over decades. For a long-horizon investor, AVUV is worth researching as a complement to a core S&P allocation.

If You’re 38 With $500K Saved, AVUV Fixes Your Tech-Heavy Portfolio
North America
CNBC Economy

Hormuz relief may not ease the economic toll that's already 'baked in,' analysts warn

Early signs that the Strait of Hormuz is reopening have eased the most acute threat to global energy supplies, but economic damages from the nearly four months of war will take months to unwind, analysts warned. The U.S. and Iran signed a memorandum Thursday to open the Strait of Hormuz, ending a war that has upended global energy supply chains, pushed inflation higher and dented the outlook for growth. But even if shipping through the strait normalizes, higher inflation has already been largely "baked in" across many economies, Simon MacAdam, deputy chief global economist at Capital Economics, said in a note this week. "It can take many months for higher energy and fertiliser prices to be passed along food supply chains to end-consumers," MacAdam said. Prices of natural gas piped to households typically lag the upstream market by around three months, he said. Oil prices retreated to around $80 a barrel on Friday, down from a peak of $118 in March when the war was at its height. Goldman Sachs cut its oil price forecast Tuesday, projecting Brent to average $80 in late 2026 and $75 in 2027, citing a faster-than-expected recovery in Persian Gulf crude flows. Higher energy costs and upstream supply disruptions would take longer to feed through to the downstream food and energy sectors. A backlog of vessels waiting to transit the Strait of Hormuz could further delay a full recovery in freight flows. The World Bank, which last week lowered its global economic growth forecast to 2.5%, the slowest pace since the pandemic, expects global inflation to climb to 4% this year, up from 3.3% in 2025, even if disruptions to oil flows ease in the coming weeks. Fertilizer prices could jump as much as 38% this year as supply disruptions and shortages of key inputs from the Gulf ripple through agricultural markets, it said. Europe could face particular pressure because natural gas storage levels remain historically low, MacAdam said, expecting inflation in Europe and Japan to rise by an additional 3 to 4 percentage points as U.S. liquefied natural gas export prices move higher. The European Central Bank was the first major central bank to raise interest rates last week, its first tightening move in nearly three years. Meanwhile, the Fed, under new Chairman Kevin Warsh, left short-term interest rates unchanged on Wednesday but raised its forecast for personal consumption expenditures inflation to 3.6% by December, from 2.7% projected in March. Nine of the 18 voting members expect at least one rate hike before the end of this year. The trajectory underscores how the Hormuz crisis has altered the calculus for central banks trying to balance slowing growth against rising inflation.

Hormuz relief may not ease the economic toll that's already 'baked in,' analysts warn
Asia
The Hindu BusinessLine

Andhra govt inks deal with Canva for visual communication in govt schools

The Andhra Pradesh government has inked a deal with Canva to provide free access to the visual communication and design platform for all public school students in the State. The deal was struck on June 18 between the Education Department, Samagra Siksha and Canva, which will also benefit teachers and Education Department officials. "Andhra Pradesh has become the first State in India to facilitate statewide access to Canva for Education for all government school students, teachers and education department officials," an official release said on Saturday. Through this partnership, students will gain access to world-class tools that enable them to create presentations, projects, infographics, videos, graphics and other visual learning content. It will help them to develop essential digital, communication, design-thinking and problem-solving skills required in the 21st-century economy. Based on technical feasibility, Canva will be integrated with the government's LEAP (Learning Excellence in Andhra Pradesh) App, Google workspace ecosystem and chromebooks being deployed in schools. The initiative will create a seamless digital learning environment while enhancing classroom engagement and student creativity, the release said. "Teachers will receive phased capacity-building support through a Training of Trainers (ToT) model. The programme will also promote the responsible and effective use of Artificial Intelligence tools in classrooms, enabling educators to leverage emerging technologies while ensuring safe learning environments," it said. State Council of Education Research and Training (SCERT) will develop dedicated Telugu and English template libraries aligned with the State curriculum and Foundational Literacy and Numeracy (FLN) goals, enabling digital content creation to be more accessible and relevant for students and teachers alike. Besides incorporating robust privacy safeguards, role-based permissions and teacher-controlled AI features to ensure student safety and data protection, the platform will be implemented across the state in four phases to ensure smooth adoption and capacity building. "Through this partnership, Andhra Pradesh is empowering every government school student with access to world-class digital tools that were once available only to a privileged few," said State Human Resource Minister Nara Lokesh. This initiative is another step towards building a future-ready generation and transforming Andhra Pradesh into India's knowledge and innovation capital, he said.

Andhra govt inks deal with Canva for visual communication in govt schools
Asia
The Hindu BusinessLine

Mutual Funds returns

The funds with highest scores are assigned five star rating while the funds with lowest scores are assigned one star rating. Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments. We have migrated to a new commenting platform. If you are already a registered user of TheHindu Businessline and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle.

Mutual Funds returns
Asia
The Hindu BusinessLine

Unified authority to monitor Periyar river cleanliness important; lives at stake: Keralam HC

The Keralam High Court has stressed the need for a unified authority to monitor the cleanliness of the Periyar river, saying that lives of millions are at stake and all stakeholders, including the State government, need to behave responsibly and discharge their obligations. A bench of Chief Justice Soumen Sen and Justice Syam Kumar V M noted that in view of the importance of the Periyar river in the State, the need for a unified authority to monitor it "does not require any further emphasis." The court said that the government had earlier suggested the creation of an Integrated River Basin Conservation and Management Plan back in September, 2025. "The lives of millions are at stake and we should not wait for doomsday to arrive. We expect all the stakeholders to behave responsibly and discharge their obligations in order to ensure that all preventive and remedial measures are taken to save the Periyar river," the bench said. The observation came while hearing a plea to curb the pollution of Periyar river by preventing dumping of effluents into it from industries and the Aluva Market. The petitioner, K S R Menon, told the court that there was an urgent need to have a unified authority to monitor the purity of the river as no such body was in existence currently. The bench also directed the Kerala State Pollution Control Board to give a revised time schedule for setting up a Sewage Treatment Plant (STP), to curb pollution of the river, and to strictly follow the same as such a system was "essential for protection of bio-diversity and the flora and fauna" connected with the waterbody. It issued the direction after the Board told the court that the earlier timeline given by it could not be followed due to the state assembly polls. Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments. We have migrated to a new commenting platform. If you are already a registered user of TheHindu Businessline and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle.

Unified authority to monitor Periyar river cleanliness important; lives at stake: Keralam HC
Asia
The Hindu BusinessLine

India, South Korea discuss deeper cooperation in digital governance and public services

The talks between Minister of State for Personnel Jitendra Singh and Korean Interior and Safety Minister Yun Hojung focused on a proposed MoU covering e-governance, AI applications in public services, capacity building and grievance redress systems. | Photo Credit: iStockphoto India and South Korea on Saturday discussed possible cooperation between the two countries in digital governance, e-government, public administration, capacity building and citizen-centric service delivery. The discussion came up during a meeting between Republic of Korea Minister of Interior and Safety Yun Hojung and Union Minister of State for Personnel Jitendra Singh. The two leaders, accompanied by respective delegations, held bilateral talks lasting over an hour, a statement issued by the Personnel Ministry said. Singh said that the ministries concerned of both the countries are in active discussion for finalisation of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to promote cooperation in the field of public administration and government innovation. Discussions between the two sides focused on strengthening collaboration in areas such as digital transformation of government services, application of emerging technologies, including Artificial Intelligence, in public administration, capacity building of civil servants, citizen participation in governance, and best practices in public grievance redressal systems, it said. Welcoming the Korean delegation, Singh highlighted India’s significant strides in digital governance, public service delivery, and grievance redressal mechanisms under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The Union minister said India and Korea are both vibrant democracies with shared values, heritage and commitment to rule of law. He said that both the countries are bound together by the historical ties of the marital connection between Princess Suriratna of Ayodhya and King Suro of then Gaya’s confederacy and stressed that the strong bonds still have great resonance. Singh also talked about the recent visit of President Lee Jae Myung that has led to forward-looking outcomes across key sectors including trade and investment, ports and maritime affairs, digital and fintech, science and technology, culture, sports, etc. He highlighted Indiaâs initiatives such as CPGRAMS (Centralised Public Grievance Redress and Monitoring System) portal, Digital Life Certificate for pensioners and the use of technology-enabled governance platforms to improve service delivery and transparency. The Korean side shared experiences in smart governance, digital public services, and disaster and safety management, the statement said.

India, South Korea discuss deeper cooperation in digital governance and public services
North America
CNBC Finance

Bob Iger reflects on 10 years of Shanghai Disneyland as it defies the Chinese pullback

Spend a day at Shanghai Disneyland and you wouldn't know Chinese consumers are struggling. Wang Jiandong and his girlfriend Yan Xu said they have been skipping meals out and scrimping on day-to-day necessities so they could afford to enjoy the park. "We save in our daily lives so we can spend more on trips," Wang explained while taking photos with Yan in front of Disney's iconic castle. "This is a romantic place." Shanghai Disneyland celebrated its 10th anniversary this week, with former Disney CEO Bob Iger flying in for the festivities. "I'm feeling filled with pride really," Iger told CNBC during an interview at the park. "I've been involved in this project from the very beginning in the late '90s." Iger said the occasion carried extra significance "knowing not only how successful it's been, but really how important it is in many respects, not just to the Walt Disney Co. but to the people of China." Shanghai Disneyland hit 100 million cumulative visitors in 2025, according to the company. It's a relatively new but important foothold in Disney's more than 100-year history. Disney's experiences division, which includes its theme parks, resorts, cruises and merchandise, reported nearly $9.5 billion in revenue during the company's most recent quarter, ended in March, a 7% increase year over year. The division is the second largest at Disney's, accounting for almost 40% of the company's overall revenue and nearly 60% of its operating income. While Disney executives have noted recent softness in international visitors to the company's U.S. parks, its outposts in other countries are faring better. According to the Themed Entertainment Association, which tracks global theme park data, the Shanghai park attracted 14.7 million visitors in 2024 — a 5% year-on-year increase — making it the fifth most-visited theme park in the world behind Disney parks in Orlando, Florida; Anaheim, California; and Tokyo as well as Universal Studios Japan. Under newly appointed CEO Josh D'Amaro, Disney is eyeing further global expansion, with a new cruise ship berthed in Singapore and a forthcoming park and resort in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. The company announced a 10-year, $60 billion investment into its parks in 2023. "Because of the available property and because of the properties, the intellectual property that Disney has, the opportunities to expand are limitless," Iger told CNBC this week. "As long as the business is successful, which it has been, there is no reason why it won't continue to expand over time."

Bob Iger reflects on 10 years of Shanghai Disneyland as it defies the Chinese pullback
Asia
The Hindu BusinessLine

Converting crisis into opportunity: Why paddy straw-based CBG deserves special funding

Every winter, Delhi-NCR faces a severe air quality crisis from vehicular emissions, industrial activity, dust, and biomass burning. Seasonal paddy stubble burning in northern India remains a major contributor, especially during October–November when weather conditions trap pollutants near the ground. Policy measures like the Crop Residue Management (CRM) scheme have reduced burning incidents, but the problem’s scale demands a structural, economically viable solution. Compressed Biogas (CBG) production from paddy straw addresses both environmental and agricultural challenges effectively. These emissions worsen air quality, triggering respiratory illnesses, eye and skin problems, and aggravating heart and lung diseases. Much of this is lost in flames, harming soil temperature, pH balance, moisture, phosphorus availability, and organic matter. The result is long-term decline in agricultural productivity. India produces an estimated 228–230 million tonnes of surplus agricultural biomass annually (after traditional uses like fodder), with heavy concentrations in Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Rajasthan—the States worst affected by stubble burning. This biomass represents a strategic opportunity: converting paddy straw from an environmental liability into a valuable energy resource via CBG production, complemented by biomass co-firing in thermal power plants. CBG plants offer a direct alternative to open-field burning, cutting pollutant emissions at the source. Climate and sustainability benefits: As a clean, renewable fuel, CBG reduces greenhouse gas emissions and generates nutrient-rich organic manure (FOM/LFOM), aiding soil restoration and sustainable farming. Energy security: Domestically produced CBG decreases reliance on imported natural gas. The government’s CBG Blending Obligation (CBO)—starting at 1 per cent in FY 2025–26 and rising to 5 per cent by FY 2028–29—supports national targets while providing reliable, dispatchable energy. Rural economic growth: CBG projects create farmer income streams, generate rural jobs, and build organized biomass supply chains. These issues necessitate targeted policy and financial support, building on frameworks like the Revised Operational Guidelines 2024 of the CRM scheme. Enhanced capital subsidies and Viability Gap Funding (VGF): Higher subsidies can offset elevated upfront costs, especially for pre-treatment systems. VGF bridges the gap between project costs and returns, boosting investor confidence.

Converting crisis into opportunity: Why paddy straw-based CBG deserves special funding