Hi! iOSasquatch? The latest Apple update just landed — and while iOS 26.4 Beta 4 is designed to fix bugs and improve stability, what people really care about is 8 new emojis, including a trombone, ballet dancers, and Bigfoot. Today we're exploring: |
- Dry slopes: Ski resorts in the West have had a rocky season so far.
- Big red: Is YouTube the world's largest media company?
- Perp walk: Perplexity is lagging behind its peers in the AI wars.
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Western US ski resorts are weathering a record snow drought |
Last month, amid one of the most topsy-turvy cold seasons that America has ever seen — the West had its warmest winter on record, while extreme cold in the East saw snow cover rise well above the 20-year average — skiing hotspots Colorado and Utah both reported their lowest snowpacks since the early 1980s, when records began. In bad news for American ski resort operators, this year's snow drought already appears to be trickling down to the bottom line. Vail Resorts announced Monday that it cut its full-year guidance, with the company now expecting net income of $144 million to $190 million for FY2026, far below analyst estimates of $237 million, per Bloomberg. |
America's largest ski resort owner and operator also outlined in its Q2 results that total skier visits had shrunk 12.5% year over year to just 6.8 million, with the past 12 months seeing 16.9 million visits in all — off some 6% from the same point last year and 11% lower than the ~19 million visits that Vail clocked in Q2 2023. |
That's snow business, baby |
With Vail's Western US resorts seeing historically low snowfall, the lack of powder has meant that many of the region's usual skiers have headed off to sample fresher slopes, weighing on the company's primary mountainside moneymaker: lift passes. In the second quarter, large dents appeared in Vail's mountain segment, including revenue from lift passes, which slipped 2.9%, yet comprised more than half of the segment's revenue. Retail/rental and ski school sales also fell 6.8% and 9.3%, respectively — though both still brought in roughly 1.7x more revenue than Vail's entire lodging segment. But with sales from its 'Epic Pass' subscription service stalling, even if Vail manages to artificially conjure a mountain's worth of snow by next season, will enough people still be there to ski it? |
Just how huge is YouTube, anyway? |
YouTube is an entertainment behemoth. This much we've known for a while… even before it started cropping up as the biggest thing on TVs, emerged as the leading platform in the expanding podosphere, and steadily built an ad business that has (by itself) become almost Netflix-sized. Now, according to research from industry analysts at MoffettNathanson, the Alphabet-owned property has grown to become the biggest media company in the world, per fresh revenue estimates for the latest fiscal year. |
MoffettNathanson estimates that YouTube brought in some $62.3 billion in revenue across 2025 — a sensible estimate, given that Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai confirmed that YouTube FY2025 sales "surpassed $60 billion across ads and subscriptions" just last month. What it would mean, however, is that YouTube notched higher revenues last year than Disney did across its media properties (what's left of the business after its gargantuan Experiences segment is stripped out), perhaps making it "the world's largest media company." |
For its last fiscal year, Disney's Entertainment and Sports categories — which cover everything from the ~$6.6 billion its movies took at the global box office in 2025, to the monthly Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN subscription fees that users pay — brought in $60.2 billion combined. While that puts Disney ahead of the money that Netflix and other competitors brought in, it also places the company about $2 billion short of YouTube. Of course, a lot of that YouTube money doesn't necessarily end up in GOOG's pocket, as the company splits as much as 55% of its advertising revenue with creators. Indeed, Alphabet said it paid YouTubers a staggering $100 billion in just four years through September 2025, owing to its various revenue splits with the users that fill the site with content. No wonder MrBeast always smiles like that in thumbnails. |
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Go beneath the surface of gold's price rise |
VanEck believes the drivers of gold's 2025 breakout aren't just last year's news. Gold's strength, in their view, is underpinned by forces that look structural rather than cyclical, reinforcing confidence that the current environment is not a short-lived spike. From the makers of the first U.S. gold equity fund, VanEck offers the Gold Miners ETF (GDX). But why gold miners? |
- As gold prices increase, miners' revenues can grow faster than operating costs, creating operating leverage and potential for expanding margins.
- Higher costs don't negate the opportunity when prices are materially higher. The magnitude of gold price moves can more than offset cost increases, preserving miners' earnings leverage.
- Despite gold's strength and improved capital discipline, VanEck still views miners as undervalued relative to the metal, a disconnect that creates the potential for a re-rating.
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1 The VanEck® Gold Miners ETF (GDX), launched in 2006, is the first gold miners ETF in the U.S. It seeks to replicate as closely as possible, before fees and expenses, the price and yield performance of the MarketVector Global Gold Miners Index (MVGDXTR), a pure-play, global index, tracking the performance of the largest publicly-traded companies in the gold mining industry. |
Perplexity has been left behind in the AI wars |
Last summer, Perplexity was hot stuff. The CEO of the AI-powered research tool was on the front cover of Fortune magazine, the company itself was about to make a long-shot $34.5 billion offer to buy Google Chrome from Alphabet, and executives at Apple were warning that traditional internet search was starting to feel the pain as users switched to services like ChatGPT and Perplexity. But just a year later, Perplexity's progress has already stalled. Per data from Similarweb, US website traffic to perplexity.ai has been broadly flat, adding fewer than 4 million visitors from February 2025 to February 2026, while rival Anthropic's AI model Claude saw users more than quadruple. |
Confused, baffled, bewildered |
From the start, Perplexity was structured somewhat differently to ChatGPT and others: its primary function was to answer questions as precisely as possible, and its powerful citation framework saw it become a research tool for many. However, as other models have progressed, what initially made Perplexity special has now become table stakes, with Google incorporating Gemini's real-time AI overviews and ChatGPT adding answers with citations. It's almost hard not to feel sorry for Perplexity, considering the company's three biggest competitors are: the most well-funded startup in history, Google, and the second-most well-funded startup in history. Throw in a number of bitter lawsuits and legal tensions, and Perplexity's offering has become increasingly difficult to execute on and increasingly available elsewhere. |
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- With global oil prices soaring, the 32 IEA member countries have agreed to release a record 400 million barrels — more than double the agency's largest release of reserves to date.
- Shares of Oracle surged in early trading this morning after exceeding sales expectations in Q3, with cloud revenue growing a massive 44% year over year to $8.9 billion.
- Brick by brick: After reporting record sales and profits for 2025, with revenue rising 12% to 83.5 billion kroner (~$12.9 billion), Danish toymaker Lego is growing its US footprint with a new factory.
- Lindt, a 180-year-old Swiss chocolatier, says that premium chocolate sales rose nearly 17% among American GLP-1 users in 2025, almost triple the 6.5% growth among other consumers.
- iNdia: Apple now reportedly makes some 25% of its iPhones — about 55 million devices last year — in India, as the company looks to curb its China dependence.
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| The drivers behind gold's 2025 breakout appear durable into 2026. As the flagship gold miners ETF, the VanEck Gold Miners ETF (GDX) offers diversified exposure to the world's leading gold miners, providing an institutional-quality gold equities investment. |
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- Never did run smooth… Exploring the paths that 10 seasons' worth of US "Love Is Blind" couples have taken.
- A collection of great charts from Reuters on how the Strait of Hormuz closure has impacted the world's oil supply so far.
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Off the charts: Alphabet just completed its biggest acquisition in history — but which three-letter biz did it buy? [Answer below]. | Not a subscriber? Sign up for free below. |
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