The following are some of the news items mentioned in the last few days:

  • Gold is up 18 percent this year. It is currently trading at 3120 USD per troy ounce
    • Investors have poured more thatn 19.2B in to gold-backed ETF funds in this quarter
  • OpenAI has raised 40b USD from SoftBank and has become the best-funded private start-up ever. It has reached a valuation of 300B USD
  • Trump administrator is suspending federal grants to many universities such as Princeton, Columbia and Harvard
    • Dozens of federal grants to the Princeton has been frozen
    • Columbia univ last month lost 400m USD
  • BYD reported that it delivered about 1m passenger vehicles in 2025 first quarter, of which about 400k were pure EVs
    • Annual sales recently broke 100b USD figure
  • Trump tariffs could cause a 1.4T USD hit to the world economy
  • France right wing’s politician and leader Marine Le Pen banned from contesting in 2027 elections
  • European and Canadian tourists are being shackled and jailed for weeks at US borders
  • Open AI has recently announced that it will release open-weights model yielding to the market place demands created by companies like DeepSeek and Llama
  • First Catastrophe bond ETF lists on NYSE