Since the dawn of Furby nearly three decades ago, one rule in toy making has proved itself true time and time again: there’s always money in weird little guys. The latest case in point: Labubu, the wildly hyped little monster toys by Chinese toy maker Pop Mart. Sales of the Monsters franchise, fueled by the zoomorphic creatures, grew to $670 million in the first half of the year. To put that in perspective, that’s nearly twice the sales of Barbies in the same period.

The nascent pullback across high-flying, AI-linked names picked up steam on Tuesday, sending major indexes down even as most stocks went up. The S&P 500 fell 0.6% despite having far more gainers than losers, the Nasdaq 100 tumbled 1.4%, and the Russell 2000 gave back 0.8%.

Google, Amazon, and Apple have all touted improvements to their digital assistants — Assistant, Alexa, and Siri, respectively — to use more advanced generative-AI technology. The problem has been that even as they promise new and better capabilities, these tools have lost some of their initial functionality, and companies are struggling to make everything work as advertised.

A new survey from YouGov shed a little light on what exactly people want out of their digital assistants. The surprising thing? It’s all boring stuff that you can do with normal computers and don’t really need AI for. 

Where can AI help? Some 27% of smart assistant users said their main problem with the technology is that it doesn’t understand their requests, while another 12% cited a lack of accuracy and the final complaint was that digital assistants aren’t as smart as expected. Maybe generative AI and LLMs can sand those edges a bit. 

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Demand for blockbuster GLP-1 drugs has never been higher, creating opportunity for both the drugmakers that developed them and telehealth companies that sell compounded versions. But for investors in those companies — Novo Nordisk, Eli Lilly, and Hims & Hers being the ones that stand to benefit the most — the plate is half empty.

In fact, shares of each dropped the day they last reported earnings because Wall Street was unimpressed with their sales or, in Lilly’s case, progress on its next weight-loss product. What gives?

So, what’s holding them back? Uncertainty of the future, mainly. 

“The blowout in revenue and earnings per share, that’s great, but that’s all stuff that happened in the last quarter,” Brian Mulberry, an analyst at Zacks Investment Management, said of Lilly’s results. “We want to know where growth is headed.”

Lilly, which has the newer and more effective drugs on the market, has gained ground on Novo, leading Novo to shuffle executives and take a massive hit to its market cap. Both are working on pill versions of their drugs — but Lilly’s late-stage trial results have shown that patients on its pill shed fewer pounds than investors had hoped, which cast a cloud over its otherwise massive earnings and sales beat last quarter.

With SPACs back on the menu, Chamath Palihapitiya, the former Facebook exec, SoFi founder, and “All-In” podcaster, is raising at least $250 million for a new special purpose acquisition vehicle called the American Exceptionalism Acquisition Corp. But his previous merger projects haven’t all led to great stock performance, as this chart shows.

One winner out of six

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