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Supporters, like Gov. DeSantis, say property-tax revenue has far outpaced inflation in recent years. Detractors warn of trimmed services.

Florida lawmakers approved a measure for the November ballot that would dramatically overhaul the state’s property-tax system, significantly reducing the tax bill for many homeowners and creating potential funding woes for local governments.

In a special legislative session that concluded Tuesday, the Republican-led House and Senate backed a constitutional amendment proposed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, after revising it to protect funding for schools. It is now up to Florida voters to decide the fate of the measure, which requires 60% support to pass.

Property-tax revolts have erupted around the country in recent years as homeowners’ tax bills have climbed along with home values. In Florida, the issue has intensified amid an influx of wealthy people who have pushed up home prices. Escalating property-insurance premiums and other living costs are contributing to affordability problems for many state residents.

Supporters of the Florida proposal, mainly Republicans, argue that swelling property-tax collections have fueled irresponsible spending by local governments. Opponents say the sharp reduction or elimination of property taxes would decimate funding for key areas, including education, public safety and infrastructure.

The constitutional amendment would expand the so-called homestead exemption—a reduction in the taxable value of a homeowner’s primary residence that results in a lower property-tax payment. The amendment would increase the exemption from the current $50,000 to $150,000 in 2027 and $250,000 in 2028. And it would create a framework for potential future increases in exemptions that could reach the full assessed value of a home.

The measure would also reduce the cap on the annual increase in assessments of non-homestead properties—such as second homes and rental properties—to 5% from 10%.

During the special session, lawmakers passed amendments to DeSantis’s original proposal to soften some of its effects. One key change was to shield school funding from the proposal, ensuring a continued stream of property-tax revenue for education.

In promoting the overhaul, DeSantis argued that property taxes have become a big financial burden for Floridians and that they force homeowners to pay up repeatedly on the same asset. He also said property-tax revenue has soared in recent years at a rate that far outpaced inflation and population increase.

“Is there anything else that can be proposed that would actually deliver thousands of dollars of savings every single year to taxpayers?” he said at a news conference on Monday.

City and county leaders across the state sounded alarms over potential repercussions for Floridians. They warned that funding would be gutted for essential services such as fire rescue, public hospitals and road repairs. And they argued that the measure would reduce fiscal autonomy for local governments.

In an opinion column for the Miami Herald, Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said the move would be “catastrophic” and a “wholesale dismantling of the property tax system.” It would reduce revenue for Miami-Dade County by a projected $386 million in 2027, she said.

Local governments would have to find other ways to pay for essential services, such as adding fees or drawing more revenue from non-homestead properties, said Esteban Santis, director of research at the Florida Policy Institute, a research and advocacy organization that opposes the proposed amendment.

Considering that Florida already lacks a personal income tax and that the amendment creates a pathway to eliminating far more property taxes, Santis said, “This is the most radical property-tax-cut proposal in the country in modern times.”

In one weekend, Warren Buffett’s successor gives shareholders reason to believe he is a savvy dealmaker

Greg Abel spent the past year trying to reassure investors that Berkshire Hathaway BRK.A 0.29%increase; green up pointing triangle is still the willing and opportunistic dealmaker it had been under his predecessor, Warren Buffett.

He said the right things, but a prolonged slump in the company’s stock showed that shareholders wanted action. In one weekend in late May, they got it.

Abel, who succeeded Buffett as Berkshire’s chief executive officer in January, agreed over the weekend to pay $6.8 billion for the home builder Taylor Morrison Home TMHC -0.07%decrease; red down pointing triangle while also in pursuit of a second multibillion-dollar transaction. On Monday, he delivered his encore: a $10 billion purchase of shares in Alphabet GOOGL -3.86%decrease; red down pointing triangle, Google’s parent company.

“He’s unbelievably efficient, and that’s probably dramatized by the fact that I’m slow and inefficient,” Buffett said of his successor, in an interview. “Even in my prime, I did not get as much accomplished in a day as Greg does.”

The deals rank among the biggest Berkshire has pursued in recent years and reveal how Abel is willing to borrow from Buffett’s successful playbook while putting his own stamp on how to organize Berkshire.

“It signals to the market that Greg Abel is—no pun intended—ready, willing and able to allocate capital to deals and not afraid to venture into an out-of-favor industry in keeping with the Berkshire MO,” said Cathy Seifert, an analyst at CFRA Research.

Since Buffett announced plans in May 2025 to cede his CEO title at year-end, Abel has been working to persuade Berkshire’s shareholders that he would maintain what has made the company such an unusual fixture among U.S. corporations: a conglomerate of unrelated businesses from railroads to energy to children’s toys, a dominant insurance arm and a sizable portfolio managed by the CEO.

The new CEO came into the role as an operational maestro who would bring a critical eye to that vast portfolio of businesses. His skills as a dealmaker and stock picker weren’t as well-defined. Some investors weren’t quite sure whether Abel had the chops to execute big deals as Buffett had. That helps explain why Berkshire’s Class A shares have dropped by more than 6% in the past year. And so far in 2026, the stock is underperforming the S&P 500 by the widest margin since 1990, according to Dow Jones Market Data.

A sticking point for investors: Would Abel start to put some of Berkshire’s trove of cash to work? At Berkshire’s annual meeting in May, Abel told shareholders he had a shortlist of companies he was interested in buying, at the right price. He has also restarted a stock-buyback program that had been idle since 2024 and bought a stake in an insurer in Japan that deepened Berkshire’s interests there.

While neither deal will make much of a dent in Berkshire’s cash pile, which had reached more than $380 billion at the end of March, each represents a different flavor of the kinds of deals that built Berkshire in the first place.

Taylor Morrison is a stalwart in an out-of-favor industry battered by high mortgage rates and expensive housing prices—the kind of company that Buffett eagerly snapped up for decades. Indeed, Abel’s statement on the deal—“homeownership remains central to the American dream, and this investment expands our ability to serve that market”—appeared to echo his predecessor’s words in October 2008, when the financial world was reeling from the worst credit crisis in decades.

“In the near term, unemployment will rise, business activity will falter and headlines will continue to be scary,” Buffett wrote then in a New York Times opinion column. “So…I’ve been buying American stocks.”

Berkshire added Alphabet to its portfolio during the third quarter of last year. While Apple remains the single-biggest holding in Berkshire’s stock portfolio, the conglomerate had been underweight in technology.

Abel spoke with Goldman Sachs, Alphabet’s banker, on Sunday to work out the terms of Berkshire’s participation in the company’s stock offerings and later connected with Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and finalized the deal Monday, people familiar with the matter said. Berkshire is getting those shares at a steep discount to where they trade.

Henry Asher, president of the Northstar Group, which owns shares of Berkshire, said he is looking past the stock’s declines and hopes Abel will continue making deals.

“If that’s misery, we’ll take more,” said Asher. “I hope that this is accompanied by significant buybacks of their own stock at these levels.”

In a departure from some of Berkshire’s past acquisitions, Abel said in a statement that he expects to “unify our site-built home-building operations into a combined platform,” referring to Taylor Morrison and Clayton Homes, a Berkshire-owned maker of manufactured houses.

Buffett in the past gave the businesses Berkshire acquired autonomy from one another, even in cases in which one or more operated in the same industry. Abel’s plan for the housing group, said Berkshire analysts and watchers, is a signal that the new CEO is beginning to put his own stamp on the conglomerate.

Leading up to Abel’s succession, Berkshire had made moves to align related subsidiaries in its far-flung portfolio, last year bringing Helzberg Diamonds and Ben Bridge Jeweler under one chief executive. In December, Berkshire appointed a new president of consumer products, service and retailing businesses.

“In some respects, it flies in the face of the Berkshire model,” said Seifert. “It’s worth watching to see if Greg tweaks that model a little.”

Data suggests only 9 per cent of retirees will achieve the income required for this standard of living

Fewer than one in 10 Britons is on track to achieve a “comfortable” standard of living in retirement, according to new data that underscores the severity of under-saving into pensions.

For someone living on their own, a comfortable lifestyle requires an annual income of £45,400, according to the annual Retirement Living Standards report by industry body Pensions UK, a level that only 9 per cent are forecast to hit. A “minimum” standard of living in retirement would cost £13,900 a year, while a “moderate” lifestyle would cost £32,700.

The data, calculated for Pensions UK by the Centre for Research in Social Policy at Loughborough University, forecast that around four in five people (82 per cent) of the working population would reach the minimum standard of living in retirement, while only one in five (23 per cent) would retire with a moderate standard of living. 

“This is out of step with what some people expect for their retirement,” said Zoe Alexander, executive director of policy and advocacy at Pensions UK.

Alexander said the problem was particularly acute for middle and higher earners, who are at risk of a greater drop in living standards at retirement. 

“While many people will reach a ‘minimum’ standard of living, far fewer are on track to achieve the more moderate or comfortable retirement most say they want,” she said. “That gap is particularly pronounced for those on middle and higher incomes, who often expect to maintain something close to their working-life lifestyle but are not saving at levels that make that realistic.”

The data comes as the government’s Pensions Commission explores how saving levels and retirement “adequacy” can be improved through policy. It is due to issue its final recommendations next spring, but in an interim report last month, it outlined the challenges presented by an ageing population and the relatively weak wage growth over the past couple of years that has squeezed people’s ability to save. 

The commission will consider how the income thresholds and minimum contribution rates for auto-enrolment — a policy introduced in 2012 to nudge employees into saving via workplace pension schemes — will need to be adjusted in future. The minimum contribution level is currently set at 8 per cent of qualifying earnings, of which employers must pay at least 3 per cent — a total that pension experts have long deemed insufficient. 

The commission also said stronger guardrails were needed around how workers receive their retirement income, especially as guaranteed final salary-style pensions were increasingly being replaced by defined contribution schemes, which place all the investment risk on the individual.

Pensions UK estimated that a comfortable retirement would require a pre-tax income of £54,720. When taking the non-means-tested state pension into account, this means the saver would need a DC pot of between £560,000 and £845,000. For a two-person household, each person’s pot would need £315,000 to £470,000.

For a one-person household to reach the “minimum” retirement standard of an income of £13,900, a pension pot of £23,000-£34,000 would be required. 

The rising cost of food and other essentials has also driven up the amount that people need to save to achieve target outcomes, according to Charlene Young, senior pensions and savings expert at investment platform AJ Bell. 

“Sticky inflation baked into the record price hikes we saw in the early 2020s means the pension pot values required to generate those incomes” have soared, Young said, “and some people are likely to find themselves behind”.

Pensions UK’s projections did not account for housing costs, which can vary wildly due to regional price differences, and the number of pensioners renting privately or paying a mortgage is on the rise. The Pensions Commission’s interim report estimated that renting throughout retirement “can easily require over £200,000 of extra pension saving”.

Pensions UK’s Alexander said rising numbers of younger people in particular anticipate paying housing costs beyond retirement. “We do make clear that those who expect to still be paying rent or a mortgage in retirement need to plan for those costs on top of the headline figures,” she added.

Ahead of further changes to UK pension policy, Alexander urged employers to “go further than the minimum — for example through stronger matching contributions” to help bridge the gap until policy catches up and legislates for higher savings levels.

Increasing longevity is putting pressure on public finances and there are questions around how sustainable the state pension is over the longer term.

“Against that backdrop, policy can only go so far,” said Rebecca Williams, financial planning divisional lead at wealth manager Rathbones. “The biggest impact still comes from what individuals do themselves — starting early, saving consistently, and making the most of workplace pensions and employer contributions.”

Index investing will evolve with mega IPOs

New offerings will be a test but markets ultimately absorb new supply and determine prices over time

This year marks 50 years since index investing was first introduced to everyday investors. At the time, the concept drew scepticism. Why would anyone settle for “average” returns rather than trying to beat the market? Today, it’s facing a different kind of test, one defined by a new wave of mega initial public offerings from companies such as SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI.

Those IPOs are raising questions about whether index funds will be forced to buy them at scale, exposing them to risks.

When indexing began a half-century ago, IPOs looked very different. Offerings were smaller and a larger share of the company was listed and traded from the outset. That’s no longer the world we live in. With the upcoming IPOs, a smaller portion will probably be made available at listing, with additional shares entering the market for public consumption over time. Today’s pipeline of IPOs includes companies with trillion-dollar valuations, placing them among the largest companies in the market.

This shift has fuelled debate about how indices should incorporate these mega flotations amid claims that IPO structures, and even index inclusion rules, are being engineered to take advantage of passive flows. But that framing misunderstands how indexing works and how markets ultimately absorb supply and determine prices over time.

From the start, index investing rested on a few core principles: broad diversification, low costs, transparency and letting the markets determine outcomes. Those principles weren’t designed for any single era. They were designed to hold up as markets change. And the market always changes.

Over the years that Vanguard has been offering index-tracking funds, methods have evolved in response to those changes. One of the most important adaptations has been the shift towards float-adjusted market capitalisation, meaning a company’s weight in the index is based on the shares investors can actually buy, not including shares held by insiders and other private investors that aren’t listed on an exchange.

This matters enormously for today’s mega IPOs. A company like SpaceX may carry a trillion-dollar valuation, but only a fraction of its shares is likely to be available for trading, the so-called free float. Float-adjusted indexing ensures that portfolios reflect what investors can actually buy, not the full headline valuation.

Float-adjusted indices are not allocating capital based on hype, they are allocating based on investable reality. Even with a relatively small float, SpaceX will probably be the largest IPO to date, so the dollar value available to trade will still be substantial, supporting deep liquidity and efficient price discovery. For most portfolios, the impact may be modest, but in the market, these mega IPOs will probably trade easily from day one.

This high liquidity explains why large IPOs are sometimes included in indices sooner than smaller ones. This is often described as a rush, but in practice, it’s the opposite. Large companies that meet size and liquidity thresholds simply satisfy inclusion rules faster than others.

What indexing resists, by design, is the temptation to embed narratives into long-term portfolios. Indices don’t predict which IPOs will succeed or stumble. They don’t pass judgment on business models. They take the market as it is. They promise exposure to the investable market over time with clear rules. Sometimes, that means adding companies that later disappoint but it also means owning companies early that go on to reshape industries.

Facebook’s 2012 IPO offers a useful illustration. After its debut, the stock fell nearly 50 per cent in the first few months. Now called Meta, the firm has a market capitalisation of more than $1.5tn. This underscores the difference between short-term volatility and long-term investing. As the late Vanguard founder John Bogle was fond of saying, don’t look for the needle, just buy the haystack.

Indexing has endured because it continues to adapt. With several mega IPOs expected in the near term, many index providers are continuing to refine criteria for index inclusion. By tying inclusion to what investors can actually buy, indices stay grounded in economic reality rather than reacting to the excitement surrounding the deal.

Fifty years ago, indexing offered investors a simple proposition: participate in the growth of markets without needing to outguess them. That proposition still holds. As IPOs grow larger and structures more complex, the value of disciplined representation only matters more.

Can’t afford a Klimt? Now you can bet on it

Predictions platform Kalshi has entered the art auctions arena — though not everyone is convinced it’s a winner

As the art world flirts with financialisation and prediction markets soar in popularity, it was perhaps inevitable that the two areas would find common ground. So it was last week that Kalshi, a predictions platform that was valued at $22bn earlier this year, revealed its official entry into the auctions arena — though not everyone is convinced it’s a winner.

People can now put their money on whether Vincent van Gogh, Andy Warhol or Jean-Michel Basquiat will break their auction record prices this season or if Gustav Klimt’s elegant and elongated “Portrait of Gertrud Loew” (1902) will sell for more than $40mn, one of a few works on Kalshi’s art offering from the prized Lewis Collection auction at Sotheby’s later this month.

The point, Kalshi says in a statement, is that “the majority of the population is priced out from speculating on [art]. With derivatives on Kalshi, investors of all financial backgrounds can now access the asset class.”

Prediction markets have the look and feel of traditional gambling but they are not the same. Wagers are not made against a “house” setting the odds but are instead matched by them. So each financial contract is between two players — one saying that, for example, Warhol will break his record and the other saying otherwise. The prediction firms take a small cut of each paired trade (Kalshi’s standard fee ranges from $0.07 and $1.75 for 100 contracts).

This determines the type of question, always a binary, either-or outcome. The winning settlement for any contract on Kalshi, priced between $0.01 and $0.99, is $1, making the odds of success clear. At time of writing, for 47 cents you could take a punt on the Klimt selling for more than $40mn, but there is a 53 per cent chance that you are wrong. Contracts on this painting are available from the $20mn level.

Sport and, increasingly, politics have been the main drivers of volume in prediction markets. Current questions on Kalshi include whether New York or San Antonio will win the 2026 Pro Basketball Finals or who will be the 2028 Republican presidential nominee. Kalshi is a US firm that operates worldwide, though individual national regulation means it can’t be accessed by all (including in the UK).

Many in the art market, a notoriously opaque industry, have pointed to the potential for insider trading. An auction house employee could know now that a major Warhol is coming to market ahead of Kalshi’s January 1, 2027 cut-off date. It could also be known that this work had, in effect, sold before its live auction via a pre-arranged guarantee that is higher than Warhol’s current $195mn record.

Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips have all extended their policies regarding employee activities in their auctions. These stipulate restrictions on bidding and the use of confidential information, which, as Sotheby’s puts it, applies to “all forms of investment and speculative trading or wagering, including event-based trading and betting products offered through prediction markets and similar platforms”.

Kalshi too is on the case. “We go beyond the legal definition of insider trading, which can be a bit of a grey area when it comes to prediction markets,” a spokesman says. He explains that their prohibitions govern people with advanced information, including auction house employees and journalists (noted). Kalshi “has surveillance systems that flag if someone places a suspiciously large or specifically timed trade” and that, given the identification processes needed to sign up, “we know who you are,” he says.

Even if illegal activity can be prevented, art market experts don’t think it is a level playing field. “For sport, you can make an educated guess, based on available tables and statistics,” says Anders Petterson, founder of analysis firm ArtTactic. “The art market doesn’t have those tools, there is a built-in asymmetry of information, a knowledge gap, of the things that we understand but that people who play might not.”

A venture capital investor who has been looking into the auctions predictions area, and asked to remain anonymous, notes that such a situation played out last year through Kalshi competitor Polymarket. This platform ran trades on works in the Leonard A Lauder auction at Sotheby’s in November, two of which caused confusion because of the difference between a hammer price — the price called during an auction when the gavel comes down — and the higher price that includes an auction house’s fees and is the number that gets reported publicly afterwards. These two prices distinguish between what the seller gets and what the buyer pays and are a familiar differential to those in the art market.

Less so for those playing the game. Two of the Lauder works — Henri Matisse’s “Figure decorative” (a sculpture of a woman leaning on a plinth, conceived in 1908) and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s vibrant painting “Fränzi with Bow and Arrow” (1910) — had a strike level of $15mn and $3mn respectively on Polymarket. Both hammered at prices that made one side of the wager win —$14mn and $2.6mn respectively — but, once premiums were added in, their $16.7mn and $3.2mn prices swayed the results to the others side. Polymarket had specified “hammer price” but the outcomes on both contracts were disputed twice, while trading apparently continued for “several hours” after the auction closed, “giving those with knowledge of the market an edge,” the investor says. Polymarket did not comment on the situation.

As if this wasn’t off-putting enough, Petterson notes too that there isn’t enough activity in the lumpy art market to keep people engaged. “Sports, politics and macroeconomic events are 24/7. The art market is highly seasonal, with maybe two or three major seasons a year that get reported on,” he says.

Volumes on Kalshi would suggest it is slow going. As of June 1, wagers on the Klimt trade had reached a value of $29,790. For the Pro Basketball final and Republican nominee these were $243mn and $45mn respectively.

Meanwhile, attempts to harness crazes in the financial markets to the art world — whether non-fungible tokens, fractionalisation or mutual funds — have proved limited, at best. Art’s questionable status as the “asset” Kalshi wants it to be does not help such projects get off the ground.

“It isn’t so much an issue of speculation,” Petterson says. “The problem is how to get the masses into an area that struggles with liquidity and visibility. You might get people curious at first, but they need guardrails and education, which means in the long run they could get bored and just move on.”

Can the rush for vaccines slow the latest Ebola outbreak?

The Bundibugyo strain is a reminder that serious health threats can escalate from under-the-radar pathogens

The happiest ending, if that is the right phrase, for any disease outbreak is that it naturally burns itself out or is snuffed out by countermeasures, such as vaccines and drugs. For a new Ebola outbreak currently spreading inside and beyond the Democratic Republic of Congo, neither finale looks imminent.

Last week, the World Health Organization said there were more than 1,000 suspected cases of Bundibugyo virus disease, caused by a rare virus for which there is no vaccine or targeted treatment. Most of the 1,000-plus suspected cases are in DR Congo, with some in neighbouring Uganda, including the capital Kampala. The true toll, though, is thought to be higher. The virus is circulating in a border area characterised by conflict, poverty and displacement, making testing and contact tracing difficult. The WHO declared it a public health emergency of international concern on May 17, though not a pandemic, with it posing the highest risk to those in the region.

Now scientists are marshalling knowledge culled from previous epidemics, including Covid, to tackle this unfamiliar foe. The non-profit Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (Cepi) announced on Monday that it would fast-track three experimental Bundibugyo vaccines into clinical testing and called for more vaccine candidates. The WHO will test potential treatments using the same no-frills protocol that showed remdesivir, an antiviral medication, could speed up recovery from Covid.

The outbreak also offers frustratingly familiar lessons in our poly-plague world: that serious health threats can escalate from under-the-radar pathogens, and preparedness matters; that aid cuts weaken the local networks that can spot outbreaks early; and that, with the US embroiled in a dispute over plans to quarantine its own returning citizens in Kenya, dropping the ball on infectious diseases is a losing strategy for global security and international relations.

Bundibugyo, named after a town in Uganda, is one of six species of Orthoebolavirus, four of which cause illness in humans. Outbreaks, which start with zoonotic spillovers, are most often linked to its sibling, Zaire, which drove the record 2014-16 epidemic in west Africa that killed more than 11,000, and the 2018 outbreak in DR Congo that killed nearly 2,300. There is an Ebola vaccine, Ervebo, that targets Zaire but, the WHO cautions, there is “limited and inconclusive” evidence that it can cross-protect against other Orthoebolaviruses.

Meanwhile, scientists are sceptical that the Bundibugyo outbreak will fizzle out on its own. At a briefing last week, Christophe Fraser, from the Pandemic Sciences Institute at Oxford university, said epidemiological analysis suggested it had been spreading for about three months and was already outpacing the 2018 DR Congo outbreak. One bright spot: data from Uganda suggests a case fatality rate of 14 per cent, lower than for Zaire, which without medical care typically kills half or more of those infected; one nurse sickened by Bundibugyo is reported to have fully recovered.

Cepi head Richard Hatchett told the briefing it was “hard to fathom” how this outbreak would end without vaccines and treatments, given the affected area contains 15mn people and armed groups suspicious of outsiders. Clinics have been targeted by arsonists and burials disrupted by grieving relatives trying to reclaim the bodies of loved ones. Local customs, such as washing bodies before burial, are known to spread the disease.

One of the fast-tracked experimental vaccines, developed by the International Aids Vaccine Initiative, uses the same technology as Ervebo; Cepi is giving IAVI around $3mn to produce a “master virus seed” stock, the starting material for a vaccine. About $50mn is earmarked for early testing of Moderna’s mRNA Bundibugyo vaccine candidate. Nearly $9mn will go to the team behind the Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid jab, with the Serum Institute of India again partnering to make doses of ChAdOx1 Bundibugyo — designed to boost antibodies and T-cells — hopefully ready for human testing in two to three months.

Oxford university scientists will also play a leading role in the therapeutics trial, testing remdesivir and a monoclonal antibody known as MBP134. Close contacts of confirmed cases may be given the antiviral medication obeldesivir, experimentally, to test whether post-exposure prophylaxis can prevent disease developing.

Bundibugyo might be a viral stranger but the sense of foreboding it has stirred, and the desperate race for effective vaccines and treatments, looks grimly familiar.

Guilty verdict for famed short seller raises questions on line between public commentary and illegal trading

For years Andrew Left had celebrity status as an activist short seller, appearing on the biggest business news networks and attracting hundreds of thousands of followers with his pugnacious social media posts.

But his legacy will be shaped by a landmark fraud conviction that has reverberated through hedge funds and Wall Street at large.

The founder of Citron Research may spend years in prison after his conviction this week in a 15-day Los Angeles trial, though his sentence is not due to be decided until August. Prosecutors said his public profile was key to his crimes: he used his commentary to manipulate share prices and made quick profits when it did.

The case has put a spotlight on a grey area of financial markets, raising questions about what an investor is obliged to disclose about their trading and how long they must hold a position after publicly stating their opinion about a stock — whether they are long or short.

“He’s always been known as the most aggressive,” said one hedge fund manager, who asked not to be named. But he said “murky” regulation often made it hard to discern what is required when it comes to publicly touting positions. “What are the . . . rules?”

Left built credibility over a decade ago when he published a scathing report on the drug company Valeant Pharmaceuticals, with allegations of accounting irregularities that were proven correct. His argument is that short selling protects investors by digging out problems that might otherwise remain hidden.

Since then, his stardom in finance-focused corners of the internet meant his commentary could move stock prices — even though he ran a firm that had no outside investors.

Prosecutors outlined a pattern in which Left would take a position in a stock, post about it on Twitter — now called X — then quickly exit at a profit when the price moved in his favour. In some cases he posted a “target price”, but cut his exposure far from that number. 

“What the SEC and the justice department have a really big problem with is implying you’re doing one thing while you’re doing another,” Jim Chanos, the legendary short seller who famously predicted the downfall of Enron, told the FT. “That’s where you begin to cross lines that get you into legal trouble.”

He said short sellers tended to come under closer scrutiny than other investors. “You’re profiting from other people losing money, so you’re held to a higher standard. But the legal concept should exist for both sides.”

The verdict has sent a shiver through the industry at an already difficult time. Many funds have closed because of the stock market’s relentless rise, and they have faced an onslaught of regulatory scrutiny since late 2021.

“When the [Left] indictment came out it put a huge chill on the industry,” said Anne Stevenson-Yang, research director at activist investment group J Capital Research. “You can like or dislike Andrew, but it’s ridiculous to ask that people disclose their positions after they’ve decided to cover [their short] or buy some more stock.”

Prosecutors said that to maintain credibility, Left concealed Citron’s financial relationships with hedge funds, including lying to law enforcement “that Citron ‘never’ exchanged compensation with a hedge fund or co-ordinated trading with a hedge fund”.

Left told the FT shortly after the verdict that it was a “sad day for free speech”.

A statement from his legal team said: “The jury got it wrong, and Andrew Left is an innocent man. Nobody lost a dollar because of his commentary. And the prosecution’s lead case agent admitted she could not point to one false statement in anything Andrew said about these stocks. We look forward to the appeal, and expect to prevail.”

John Coffee, a professor at Columbia University who has written about the industry and corporate governance, said the biggest impact from the verdict was that short sellers would probably avoid striking clandestine deals to share their research with other hedge funds.

“[Left’s] relationships with hedge funds made him look like he was an undisclosed agent of them,” said Coffee.

While Left is known as an activist short seller, several of the 13 counts on which he was found guilty relate to long positions he had taken, including in Tesla, Facebook, Nvidia and less well-known stocks including biotech company Invitae. 

In the Invitae case, authorities said Left sent an “investor letter” to journalists, saying the stock was the long position that “we’re most excited about” even though Left was managing his own money.

Prosecutors said that in a private message to an unnamed person, Left said: “I can get stock to 30” and asked, “what can I put in a tweet to juice it[?]” In the days after the investor letter, he reduced his exposure.

The trades also included some of Left’s short positions, including one in cannabis company Cronos Group. Left said that trading around his commentary on the stock, which retail investors had backed, was like taking “candy from a baby”, according to evidence.

In his defence, Left said his posts reflected his genuine opinions and he did not believe he was required to hold his positions for a fixed period after discussing them in public. Having to disclose his positions would have a chilling effect on market commentary, he has argued.

“So now a truthful opinion that ends up making money is illegal. Is this America?” the Citron account posted on X after his conviction. “This is not over.”

In response Bill Essayli, a senior prosecutor in the office that took on Left said: “You made more than $20mn by cheating investors. You’re not a victim.”

Left’s trial has struck fear into the dwindling number of short activists still in the market, said the chief investment officer at a small hedge fund, who asked to remain anonymous.

“So many short reports are anonymous these days, no one wants to put their name on anything,” they said. “There’s zero accountability.”

Some bond investors believe the group’s debt is unsustainable, but others think its scale and edge will see it through

Sir Jim Ratcliffe has spent decades turning unloved industrial assets into a sprawling chemicals empire that is one of Europe’s biggest issuers of junk-rated debt.

Now bond investors are weighing whether the outspoken billionaire has finally met a problem he cannot refinance — or if he will be saved by geopolitical events.

For much of the past year hedge funds piled up bets against Ratcliffe’s Ineos, as a downturn in the chemicals sector raised doubts over the sustainability of its $19bn debt pile.

But in recent months they have been forced to unwind those positions, people familiar with the matter say, as the Middle East crisis disrupted chemicals supply chains and pushed prices sharply higher, prompting a sudden improvement in the group’s prospects.

“At the end of last year just about every restructuring adviser in Europe would have been sharpening their pencils,” said Simon Matthews, senior portfolio manager at Neuberger Berman, adding that while “disruption in the Middle East has been a very robust shot in the arm, the question is how long the benefit will last”.

Investors remain sharply divided. Some are convinced the company cannot last. Others are confident its scale and competitive advantages will keep it afloat.

Ratcliffe has built Ineos into a business spanning 27 countries, becoming one of Britain’s richest people in the process while also making billionaires of his longstanding lieutenants Andy Currie and John Reece, who each hold a 20 per cent stake in the group.

That wealth has allowed Ratcliffe to pursue side projects that have raised his public profile, from his part-ownership of Manchester United football club and sports sponsorship deals to building a spiritual successor to the classic Land Rover Defender.

But in recent years his empire has come under strain as higher interest rates put pressure on a debt pile built up during a period of historic lows, and as Europe’s chemicals sector has been buffeted by weak demand, overcapacity, high energy costs and cheap Chinese imports.

Those pressures have come alongside heightened scrutiny of Ratcliffe himself over his role in Manchester United’s bumpy ride and controversial comments in which he said Britain had been “colonised” by immigrants.

For credit investors, Ineos is in effect two main companies, whose billions in publicly traded bonds make up the vast majority of its debt pile.

Ineos Group Holdings focuses mostly on commodity chemicals such as ethylene, polypropylene and acetone, and is regarded by credit investors as the conglomerate’s “crown jewel”. The riskier Ineos Quattro focuses on more specialised products ranging from nitriles used for carbon fibre to vinyls that go into high-performance coatings.

Both divisions are lossmaking, while leverage has grown rapidly in recent years as borrowing rose to fund Group Holdings’ new flagship facility and earnings fell to record lows.

Group Holdings carries more than $12bn of debt and Quattro roughly $5bn, and investors have increasingly questioned whether either business would be able to refinance looming maturities.

Group Holdings, whose interest payments amounted to €780mn last year, had €1bn of debt coming due for repayment in 2027. Quattro paid €550mn in interest last year and has about €350mn of debt due to be repaid in 2027.

However, taking advantage of the reprieve provided by the war on Iran, Group Holdings last month borrowed another €700mn in an oversubscribed refinancing to pay down some of its debt.

The larger of the two divisions, Group Holdings’ main business is converting cheap ethane from US shale gas into commodity chemicals that it sells to other groups or uses in its own manufacturing. It also produces speciality substances used in consumer and industrial manufacturing.

Prices for many Ineos products fell during the downturn amid an uptick in supply from the Middle East and Asia. Ratcliffe has filed more than 30 anti-dumping cases against imports of cheap chemicals. However, the price of feedstock has also remained low.

Weaker margins and spending on the new “Project One” facility in Antwerp helped push Group Holdings to a €650mn loss in 2025, down from a profit of more than €2bn in 2022.

The €4.8bn plant is due to be completed by the end of the year and will be Europe’s first new facility of its kind in more than two decades.

Project One is designed to exploit the price gulf between cheap US gas and high European chemicals prices — a spread further widened by disruption in the Middle East. Industry insiders say its efficiency could render older European cracker facilities uneconomic.

The project has helped drive an almost doubling of Group Holdings’ debt since 2021, but investors are betting it will eventually repair the balance sheet.

The company expects it to contribute an extra €700mn in annual earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation from 2027, and to improve margins for the group as a whole.

Like Group Holdings, Quattro is free cash flow negative — but in its case this is not down to a project that has required huge initial outlays but will eventually pay for itself.

Formed from assets bought from BP in 2020, the division has a much larger exposure to lower-margin Asian markets and reported a loss of more than €800mn in 2025, compared with a profit of more than €2bn in 2022.

Its debt pile has stayed relatively steady since 2020 but a sharp drop in earnings has increased leverage. With upcoming maturities, several credit investors told the FT that Quattro was unlikely to be able to access the primary bond market to raise new debt.

The division has sold assets and closed plants in Italy and Germany as pressure on the business has intensified.

However, it does have about €2bn of available cash, helped by €200mn of new equity injected by shareholders as well as another €300mn of financing linked to its inventory at the end of last year.

Debt prices across both divisions have risen sharply as the Middle East crisis tightened global chemicals markets and improved sentiment towards the sector.

Group Holdings’ Olefins & Polymers business is likely to benefit most from the conflict because the disruption to global olefins supply is “effectively reversing the capacity overhang that has pressured profitability in recent years”, said CreditSights head of European chemicals, Tom Weaver.

“Low-cost production from the Middle East and Asia has been removed from the market by a combination of feedstock and energy shortages, and damage from military strikes,” he added.

Prices of olefins and polymers in North America, where Ineos Group generated most of its ebitda in 2025, have shot up while the price of feedstock inputs has remained low.

For the first quarter of 2026, Group Holdings reported €421mn in ebitda — it expected another €400mn of ebitda in April, after the conflict had started.

Executives say the longer-term impact of the conflict remains uncertain.

Ineos also has its own issues related to the crisis, including a potential delay to Project One because two components are stranded in the Gulf.

Other lossmaking Ineos businesses including its oil and gas assets, sports and automotive divisions and the UK’s last ethylene plant at Grangemouth have also stretched the group’s finances, with cash funnelled from other parts of the empire to fund their operations.

However, many investors are still keeping the faith.

“I don’t own Ineos’s bonds,” said the chief investment officer of one distressed credit hedge fund. “But I’d never bet against Jim Ratcliffe.”