The Malcolm On Money Guide to Restricted Stock Units

For nearly four years, the biggest beneficiaries of the AI investment boom have been the companies supplying the infrastructure necessary to develop and operate those increasingly powerful AI models. Companies like Nvidia, Broadcom, and other semiconductor manufacturers have benefited from seemingly endless spending on graphics processing units (GPUs), networking equipment, gas turbines, and anything else needed to build and outfit a datacenter.

Up to this point, investors have rewarded these companies because they are selling the essential building blocks of the AI revolution. But as AI moves beyond novelty and experimentation and into widespread deployment, investors must also shift their focus to the companies that can use the technology to reduce operating expenses, increase employee productivity, expand profit margins, or generate entirely new revenue streams.

For decades, prenuptial agreements have been painted in a purely negative light. If mentioned before getting married, it can sound as if you are preparing for the marriage to fail before walking down the aisle.

As a result, prenups have almost exclusively been associated with celebrities, professional athletes, and wealthy families attempting to protect their enormous fortune from a future spouse who is on unequal financial footing. But in recent years, couples are growing more receptive to the idea of prenuptial agreements, and that raises the question of whether they should simply be seen as an extension of a well-crafted financial plan.

There’s an age-old saying on Wall Street: “no one ever went broke taking a profit.” And like most clichés, this one oversimplifies the dilemma facing investors who find themselves sitting on substantial unrealized gains during a bull market.

Many investors refuse to sell appreciated stocks because they don't want to pay capital gains taxes. The problem is that the tax bill they're trying to avoid may be far less than the losses they risk by continuing to hold a highly appreciated position. But at some point, an investment gain stops being merely a number on an account statement and becomes wealth worth protecting—even if it means paying taxes.

For most of the Internet era, giving a website access to your digital life was a relatively benign thing to do. You might allow a budgeting app to track your spending, give a travel app access to your calendar, or let an email service scan your inbox to filter out spam. The software could see things, organize important information, and make recommendations. But for the most part, a human was still required to press a button to get a result.  

But with the recent release of Muse from Meta Platforms and its astounding acceptance among consumers, artificial intelligence is beginning to change this relationship entirely. Until now, most consumer AI apps were used to answer questions and perform deep research. But Meta’s new personal agent is designed to do a lot more with minimal human intervention and oversight, which begs the question: who is going to keep the agents in check? 

For decades, bonds have played a fairly straightforward role in any investment portfolio. While stocks are expected to provide growth—in exchange for some occasional volatility—bonds are expected to provide stability and predictability, allowing a diversified investor to sleep peacefully. 

But this year, the bond market has been anything but boring. Both short- and long-term treasury yields have moved up in tandem as inflation expectations, Federal Reserve policy, and the federal government's substantial borrowing needs have all come into sharper focus simultaneously. Then, add to the mix that some of the largest technology companies in the world have begun borrowing money at a pace rarely seen outside of a major financial crisis, driven by the staggering capital requirements of the AI buildout. 

For high-earning couples who have spent decades accumulating assets, one of the most common measures of financial success is whether they will eventually leave something meaningful behind for their children. And for many, life insurance is expected to play an important role in accomplishing that goal. 

A large life insurance payout can create a multi-million dollar inheritance overnight, making it entirely possible for parents to leave their children in a much better financial position than they were in at the same age. But leaving behind a large inheritance and creating generational wealth are not necessarily the same thing. 

Artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to create one of the largest identity-management challenges enterprises have ever faced. For decades, cybersecurity programs were designed primarily around human users, with employees receiving credentials that determined what systems, applications, and data they could access.

But as companies deploy an increasingly large number of AI agents, they must manage a rapidly expanding universe of non-human identities, creating new security challenges. That shift could make identity security one of the most important areas of cybersecurity, and thus one of the most lucrative investment opportunities this decade.

From a financial planning perspective, there is nothing magical that happens once an individual or couple breaches the $1,000,000 mark with respect to their gross income. There is no special million-dollar tax bracket, nor does the IRS suddenly hand you a different rulebook once the first seven-figure W-2 arrives. 

In fact, by the time someone earns $1 million in one calendar year, they have already crossed most of the income thresholds that materially affect their taxes. However, for senior leaders who reach this level of compensation, the basic rules of personal finance start to change entirely.

Investing used to be simple. All you needed to do was buy good companies, add to them over time, ignore the noise, and allow the laws of compounding to do the rest. Now, although none of those principles has stopped working, following them has gotten a lot harder. 

Prediction markets, sports betting, and crypto have all exploded in popularity over just a few short years, and the ability to access such speculative bets has been lumped in with traditional financial instruments like stocks. When this sort of risk-taking behavior is normalized and seen as a sustainable long-term strategy, it inevitably begins to spill over into traditional financial markets.

The savviest investors know that they are not supposed to buy a stock simply because it has gone up a lot and that last year’s winner will not necessarily be this year’s. By the time a particular investment has become the subject of podcast conversations and social-media posts, all the easy money has likely already been made.

That said, every market cycle produces the same behavior. A stock begins rising enough to attract some attention. Analysts trip over themselves to be the first to increase their price targets. Media coverage of the company and its CEO expands. Finfluencers, who happened to have bought the stock early begin posting extraordinary gains online. And eventually, people who had no interest in the company just six months earlier suddenly become convinced that they are missing out on the next big thing.