TheChek News Flow

Nicolas Puech says his wealth manager isolated him from friends and family and siphoned away a massive fortune. Then came the clue that began to reveal the deception.

When French authorities interviewed Eric Freymond earlier this year, one of their first questions for the Swiss wealth manager was a simple one: Tell us about your relationship with Nicolas Puech, the Hermès heir who had given Freymond effective control over a fortune now estimated at more than $15 billion.

Freymond replied with a bombshell: The two men were lovers.

“I think that in a certain way he loved me. We were a couple,” Freymond said, adding that they were “extremely discreet” about the relationship.

Freymond described the two men’s lives crisscrossing at houses and five-star hotels across Spain, Switzerland and London, where they lived in nearby apartments.

When asked by a magistrate what Puech had seen in him, Freymond responded that it was “probably my looks. My way of carrying myself. The fact that I had respect for him.”

But according to Puech, this was all a lie—one of many Freymond spun over the years to create an elaborate fiction around his client. Puech told French investigating magistrates that his money manager was not a lover but rather a trusted friend who became a Svengali-like figure and isolated him from friends and family so that he could siphon away a massive fortune.

By shielding Puech from anyone who might uncover his deceptions, Freymond maintained control over him, Puech said—and was able to keep up the illusion that Puech was still one of Europe’s richest people.

Puech, the 82-year-old fifth-generation heir to one of Europe’s most iconic and profitable businesses, testified that Freymond “turned out to be a con man, even a gangster.”

When the magistrates asked about his current financial situation, Puech said he has requested to liquidate his holdings in an Hermès real-estate unit, valued at roughly $1.2 million.

“Otherwise, I have nothing left,” said Puech.

Freymond, who was 67 years old and married with two daughters, was struck by a train and killed in July in his Alpine village near Gstaad, a death local police concluded was a suicide.

The testimony from Freymond and Puech was reviewed by the Journal; it has not been publicly released and much of it hasn’t been previously reported. The testimony, as well as other legal documents and the accounts of people who knew both of them, provide fresh details about the relationship at the center of what could be one of the frauds of the century—a $15 billion vanishing act involving the largest individual holding of shares of Hermès, the prestigious French luxury group considered the pinnacle of the fashion world and best known for its iconic silk scarves and Birkin handbags.

Puech sued Freymond before his death in both Switzerland and France, and what happened to Puech’s wealth is the subject of an ongoing criminal investigation by magistrates in Paris. Puech is cooperating with that investigation in an effort to claw back some of his fortune.

Freymond had faced other allegations of wrongdoing during his long career as a wealth manager. In 2010, he and his company at the time were fined four million euros for insider trading. A late French ballet dancer and actress sued him for breach of trust, an allegation he denied. Other former clients alleging wrongdoing include the original Bond girl, Swiss actress Ursula Andress. And the estate of a late businessman is seeking to claw back a loan of €20 million, or about $23 million, that Freymond arranged.

Mounting pressure

In the weeks leading up to his death in late July, legal and financial pressure on Freymond was mounting. The French investigation was gathering pace. On July 7, just two weeks before his death, Freymond was in Paris to answer questions from magistrates.

In his testimony, Freymond confirmed what many observers long believed to be true—that he sold off most of Puech’s Hermès holdings to the company’s rival, LVMH, more than a decade ago. His defense was that his client was aware of the sales, but Puech denies it, in part citing documents showing that Freymond repeatedly assured him in the following years that his fortune was intact.

That same day, a Geneva court ordered the freezing of Freymond’s bank accounts. Five days before his death, the order was extended to include the paintings, sculptures and furniture in his Geneva residence.

Puech’s lawyers say they have now traced how Freymond moved some of the proceeds from the Hermès stock sales into bad investments, often through entities linked to a small network of people around the Swiss financier. An architect close to Freymond even oversaw the renovation of a vineyard property in southwest France—a project Puech funded for family members—filling it with designer furniture which was later revealed to be fake.

Puech is now being helped financially by some members of the Hermès family and other people close to him. On a recent flight to London, the heavyset Puech squeezed into a middle seat on EasyJet, the famously low-budget European airline, according to people close to him.

The two men were products of European high society who were nonetheless very different.

Puech spent much of his time in a tiny hamlet in the Alps, or caring for his horses.

Freymond, by contrast, was consumed with fine art and luxury, and fond of complex investments and financial transactions. Said one person who visited Palazzo Al Bosco, his private estate near Florence, and saw his collection of art and designer furniture: “It was unimaginable.”

Their relationship unraveled after an innocuous inquiry three years ago.

In the summer of 2022, while sitting with Freymond at Puech’s sprawling mountain chalet in Ferret, Switzerland, and discussing routine financial matters, the heir asked about the transfer of a million Swiss francs, equivalent to $1.25 million, to his longtime handyman Jadil Butrak and his wife, Maria Paz, who he considered almost an adopted family.

Puech said he found it odd that Butrak hadn’t thanked him.

When questioned later by French magistrates, Puech recalled Freymond’s explanation: “Since he is embarrassed about money, he did not want to mention it.”

Paz, who was in the next room, overheard the exchange. After Freymond left, she approached Puech: Freymond was lying, she said. No money had ever arrived.

Not knowing where to turn, Puech confided in a friend, a former French ambassador, who advised him to conduct an audit.

Early deceptions

Freymond’s deceptions began early in his career.

In the 1980s, as he was marrying into one of Geneva’s most distinguished families, Freymond took up a position at Ferrier, Lullin & Cie, the private bank where his father-in-law, Guy van Berchem, was a partner. Van Berchem was one of the city’s most respected financiers, a patrician figure with deep roots in Geneva society.

In that rarefied setting, Freymond quickly made a name for himself. Colleagues remember him as ambitious and headed for stardom within the firm, but they also recall that troubling habits were already emerging.

According to those former colleagues, Freymond made extensive use of presigned client forms to handle withdrawals and reimbursements. The practice, permitted by the bank, was meant to spare clients the hassle of going to the teller’s desk for cash, but Freymond’s clients began to complain that the amounts they received didn’t match what had been debited.

When auditors came to search Freymond’s desk, the story took a farcical turn: Freymond had tried to dispose of the incriminating papers by stashing them outside his office window, on the cornice. But a gust of wind scattered the forms into the street, where bank security guards chased after them.

An audit put the missing sums at around 1.3 million Swiss francs, according to one of the people. The matter was never made public, and former colleagues of Freymond believe that his powerful father-in-law quietly arranged for clients to be reimbursed. The episode ended with Freymond’s abrupt departure from the bank.

Freymond’s in-laws aided his career in another way: They connected him to the Hermès dynasty.

Puech—pronounced “pwesh”—belongs to the fifth generation of the Hermès family, alongside his cousin Jean-Louis Dumas, who drove the company’s spectacular growth over three decades until his death in 2010. The company went public in 1993 but the family still holds the bulk of its shares.

Puech, among other endeavors, helped to launch a couture business that eventually declared bankruptcy and dabbled as a water-skiing instructor, but in recent decades he lived almost entirely off the dividends from his Hermès shares.

Freymond told prosecutors that he met Puech for the first time around 1989, adding that they grew “very close” beginning in 1997.

Puech said he trusted Freymond because his family was well-known and respected around Geneva. “I had a blind trust in his sense of integrity,” he testified.

When visiting Geneva, Puech would sometimes stay with Freymond and his family.

“They would give me a room as if I were a cousin from the provinces,” he said.

In 1999, Freymond advised Puech to transfer his Hermès holdings from France to Switzerland.

The shares were in bearer form, meaning they were paper certificates that belong to whoever physically holds them—like cash—so the owner’s name never appears in a register. The rest of the Hermès family, by contrast, held their shares in registered form, meaning ownership was recorded in their names and could be easily traced. It is not clear why Puech’s shares were bearer shares.

That same year, Puech signed a sweeping agreement authorizing Freymond not merely to manage but also to dispose of his assets, according to French investigators.

Puech testified that he gladly let Freymond handle all of his finances. “It was to simplify my life. He took care of paying everything that needed to be paid,” he said.

Around the turn of the millennium, luxury titan Bernard Arnault entered the picture. After losing out on a bid for Gucci, the LVMH boss started building a stake in Hermès—with the discreet assistance of Freymond.

As his cousin Jean-Louis Dumas neared the end of his tenure, Puech became increasingly anxious about succession. At that time, Freymond said, Puech was “very active and eager” to develop a relationship between Hermès and LVMH.

And with his 6% stake, Puech was a crucial figure in the Hermès shareholding structure. According to an audit later compiled by FTI Consulting, that holding was worth some €528 million at the end of 2006.

Still, Puech insists he never authorized Freymond to dispose of his own stake in the family business.

“I had no intention of selling my inherited shares, my family shares,” Puech said. “If, with the dividends those produced, he bought new Hermès shares, then he could resell those—but not the original inheritance.”

And yet, that’s exactly what happened—though the truth remained hidden from Puech for nearly two decades.

A 2012 report by France’s stock-market authority said that four years earlier, Freymond had transferred about 4.8 million Hermès shares from Puech’s account to a vehicle called Dilico, before channeling them to Société Générale as part of an equity swap with Arnault’s group.

Freymond long maintained he had simply routed other shares through Puech’s account before moving them on to LVMH, but regulators didn’t believe him. He finally acknowledged the sales when questioned by magistrates earlier this year.

“Absolutely,” he replied. “The acquirer was indeed LVMH, and Mr. Puech was perfectly informed.” He contended Puech is now trying to evade responsibility in order to placate his family.

Puech told the magistrates that he hadn’t been informed at all, calling it another lie. Because the shares passed through the French bank, LVMH did not know where they originated from, people close to the company said. People familiar with Arnault’s thinking said he didn’t know LVMH was buying Puech’s stake.

Freymond sold the Hermès shares at an average of €86.66 per share between April and May 2008. Today they are worth more than €2,000 apiece, which would put Puech’s stake at more than $15 billion if it had never been sold.

After Arnault’s stock acquisitions finally became public in late 2010, it set off a bitter feud with the Hermès family that would drag on for years.

Puech, relying on the assurances of Freymond, insisted throughout the litigation that followed that his own holding had never been part of Arnault’s effort—despite the suspicions of other family members.

Part of Puech’s conviction came from the paper trail Freymond assembled, including in 2012, when Freymond wrote to Hermès stating that Puech owned more than 6 million shares. A few months later, Puech voted at the annual meeting as Hermès’s largest individual shareholder and was elected to the board.

Constant companions

During this period, Freymond assumed even more control over Puech’s life, including opening his mail and fielding his phone calls. Friends and acquaintances who encountered Puech in those years say they never saw him without Freymond at his side.

Henri-Louis Bauer, who managed the Hermès family holding company, told a French magistrate in 2016 that he believed Puech was under Freymond’s sway. He recounted traveling to Spain with a lawyer and a psychologist to visit the heir. At first, Puech seemed interested in talking, even asking to review documents Bauer had brought.

“But that same evening, when we tried to call him back as he had asked, he no longer picked up the phone,” Bauer said. “By the next day, his line had been cut.”

People close to Puech say Freymond surrounded him with a small circle of associates, including a lawyer named François Besse. The effect, they say, was to create an echo chamber: When both a trusted financial adviser and a lawyer repeated the same message, it reinforced Puech’s belief in what he was being told.

Months before his 75th birthday, Puech received a memo dated September 2017 that was signed by Besse. It warned that legal proceedings “initiated by your family” were under way and laid out a strict set of instructions: He was not to travel to France; he must alert Besse ahead of every trip; and he was to avoid any contact with relatives about his whereabouts, according to the memo, which was reviewed by the Journal.

The memo urged vigilance with phones—“a single call on, or from, a mobile makes it possible to locate the person on the other end”—and advised him never to accept surprise visitors or answer questions: “Remember, the most harmless questions are the most dangerous.”

According to people close to Puech, the same warnings and instructions were also being reinforced directly by Freymond, both before and after the memo.

Freymond himself helped to organize the birthday celebration, which took place in Spain. Vanity Fair, which covered the weekend, described guests arriving by horse-drawn carriage for a dinner and flamenco party, and there were also cultural tours of castles and art galleries. Among the seventy invitees were Farah Diba Pahlavi, widow of Iran’s last shah, former French culture minister Frédéric Mitterrand, and a scattering of aristocrats and artists.

It was also conspicuous for who was missing: any other members of the Hermès family.

Puech later told investigators he went out of his way to avoid his family during this time.

“I often spent holidays in France with Jadil, his wife and their children, but we had to do so incognito in Scotland to avoid running into members of my family. Mr. Freymond was afraid I might speak to my nieces.”

Money trail

All the while, in the background, Puech’s fortune was quietly on the move.

An audit by FTI Consulting recently commissioned by Puech’s legal team found that at the end of 2013, Puech still held 535,899 Hermès shares, then worth about €134.4 million and making up the bulk of his fortune. Over the next decade, that position dwindled to nothing.

Again and again, auditors discovered transfers that pointed back to Freymond or people close to him. In one 2017 deal, according to a document reviewed by the French investigation, 200,000 Hermès shares were routed to the Dubai investment firm Noor Capital, where Olivier Couriol oversaw assets and funds administration. That transfer was made through a Panama-registered shell called Veladale Gardens, administered by Freymond.

Couriol is a Franco-Swiss financier with a background in banking in Geneva and Dubai. He has been linked to a number of high-profile fraud and money-laundering cases. In 2019, he drew the attention of U.S. authorities for allegedly helping to arrange the sale of part of Venezuela’s gold reserves to the United Arab Emirates, a transaction he said was carried out by his company, not him personally, and which he said was entirely legal. Efforts to reach him for comment were unsuccessful.

When French investigators asked Freymond about his relationship with Couriol earlier this year, he said Couriol had been someone he had worked with since 2006.

A separate report found that six funds and two special-purpose vehicles held by Puech were managed by Nemo Asset Management, an Emirati company which French investigators described as being operated by Couriol. Through Nemo, some €25.8 million of Puech’s money was invested in Hydroma, a company developing natural hydrogen projects in West Africa.

Freymond also set up joint accounts with Puech, including one at the Geneva bank Gonet into which Puech placed around €35.8 million. According to the FTI audit, the outgoing transfers mainly benefited Freymond, with the money spent on a range of purchases, from stocks to art. When that account was eventually closed, it still held nearly €15 million in cash and investments, which were transferred to Freymond.

Other transfers reviewed by investigators include a payment of 7 million Swiss francs in July 2015 made from one of Puech’s accounts to Freymond himself. Between 2014 and 2023, roughly €4.4 million also flowed to Triuniversal Holding—later renamed Gabriel Holding—a Czech company where Freymond sat on the board and which he said produced movies. And there were some €7 million in transfers to Besse.

“Freymond was very generous with those around him,” Puech told investigators. “Mr. Besse really lined his pockets, didn’t he?”

In an email to the Journal, Besse said he disputed the information regarding payments made to him but did not elaborate.

Mad scramble

In his last few years, Freymond appeared to scramble to keep up appearances.

In late February 2022 and again in March of that year, he dipped into the estate of his recently deceased client, Richard Desurmont, to extend two loans of €10 million apiece to Puech.

When the funds arrived, Puech’s account at Gonet had been overdrawn for months. The loan, however, never benefited the heir. Of it, €13.7 million was channeled into shares of Hydroma, while another portion went into trades in the stock of Moderna, the biotech firm. The Moderna shares fell, and the investment lost about €500,000 before it was closed out, according to documents reviewed by French investigators.

Puech told investigators he never agreed to the loans or other transactions, and says that his signature on an authorization letter must be fake, as he was in Tanzania on the date in question.

Desurmont’s family sued Puech in an effort to recover the money, and later sued Freymond for misappropriating assets.

After Paz, the wife of his longtime handyman, pointed out to Puech that Freymond had lied about the transfer of the one million francs, Puech turned to a former ambassador and a notary in a nearby town for advice. The notary wrote to Freymond several times seeking information about Puech’s financial affairs, but received no substantive response. In 2023, Puech launched lawsuits against Freymond in both Geneva and Paris, accusing his longtime adviser of stripping him of his fortune.

By the middle of the following year, Freymond was making increasingly desperate attempts to raise cash.

First, he hatched a plan to “reissue” six million Hermès shares and sell them off quietly, contending that they were a replacement for Puech’s missing shares, according to people he spoke to about the plan. He enlisted a banker to draw up papers for the deal, promised him a 6% cut, and told the banker he had connections inside a European stock exchange who could arrange the transaction.

Freymond didn’t hide his own need for money, telling the banker he needed €100 million before the end of the year—though he ultimately dropped the scheme before it went anywhere.

Next, Freymond was involved in an attempt to sell the nonexistent shares to Qatar. According to documents filed alongside a later lawsuit, he and Besse presented themselves as acting on Puech’s behalf, and agreed to sell more than 6 million Hermès shares they said Puech owned to an investment vehicle backed by the Persian Gulf nation. The two sides signed a stock-purchase agreement on Feb. 10.

Puech says he was entirely in the dark, and that he learned about the supposed deal in April from a news article. The piece reported that the Hermès heir was being sued in Washington, D.C., for allegedly reneging on the deal.

In an email, Besse said he disputed this account, but gave no details.

In the weeks that followed, Freymond’s acquaintances tried to convince Puech that the missing shares had been found. One sent a text that relayed what he called “exceptional news”: A “great royal family” had traced Puech’s long-lost Hermès stock to a company in the U.S. Another claimed that Puech was in line for a €2 billion payout—provided he agreed to the supposed sale immediately.

But Freymond’s hold over Puech was now broken. Puech brushed both of them off, telling them to speak to his lawyer.

The Hermès heir continues to discover fresh signs of his financial ruin. Puech learned earlier this year that the house in the Swiss hamlet of Ferret—his primary residence—is not his. It legally belongs to a foundation he established called Isocrates. He no longer holds the right to use it.

“I must have signed documents,” he told magistrates, though he said he had not realized it at the time.

The foundation has contemplated selling the property back to him, a prospect Puech rejected: “I cannot buy this house twice.”

One of the heir’s advisers has instead floated the idea of a symbolic repurchase for a single Swiss franc, but nothing has yet come of it.

Deloitte to pay $34mn over audit work on US nuclear fiasco

Former shareholders in utility said Big Four firm failed to spot red flags and allowed management to hide mounting issues

Deloitte has agreed to pay $34mn to investors who blamed the auditor for losses stemming from the collapse of one of US’s largest nuclear power projects, a rare legal settlement by a Big Four firm.

Former shareholders in the South Carolina utility Scana said Deloitte failed to spot red flags and allowed management to hide mounting problems with the construction of two nuclear reactors a decade ago.

Scana shares tumbled when it eventually abandoned work on the reactors in 2017, leading to its cut-price sale to a rival utility and jail time for its former chief executive, who pleaded guilty to misleading regulators. The fiasco also pushed construction company Westinghouse into bankruptcy.

Lawyers for Scana’s shareholders claimed Deloitte should pay a portion of losses estimated at $800mn, because the firm repeatedly signed off on financial statements in which the company indicated the project would be finished on time.

A judge will need to approve the settlement, which was filed in South Carolina federal court on Friday, but plaintiff lawyers called it an “excellent result” for shareholders. It comes on top of a $192.5mn settlement from Scana and its officers in 2020.

“The $34mn recovery from Deloitte is one of the largest securities class-action settlements against an auditing firm in the last decade,” the lawyers wrote.

“The settlement was also reached after extensive litigation, at a time when the parties were fully aware of the strengths and weaknesses of their respective positions, and was the culmination of extensive arm’s length negotiations overseen by a well-respected mediator.”

Deloitte on Friday said: “Deloitte stands behind the quality of its audit work and is participating in this settlement to avoid the ongoing cost and distraction of extended litigation.”

Investors face a high legal bar for implicating auditors in the securities frauds of their clients because audits are meant to provide only “reasonable assurance” that financial statements are free of error. In the largest recent settlement, PwC paid $65mn in 2015 over claims related to the collapse of the brokerage MF Global.

Years of litigation shined a harsh spotlight on Deloitte’s audit, particularly how the firm dismissed claims from a Scana whistleblower who said as early as 2015 that the reactors would not be completed in time to trigger vital government subsidies.

One of Deloitte’s own construction experts conducted an internal review of the firm’s work after the fact, and penned a six-page handwritten memo concluding it should have done more to investigate the whistleblower’s claims.

Deloitte has said it stands behind its work and argued in court that Scana’s financial statements contained plenty of warnings about the project’s risks. Its settlement does not indicate an acceptance of liability.

TPG and Blackstone near deal for medical technology company Hologic

Acquisition by private equity groups would be one of the biggest take-private deals of the year

TPG and Blackstone are nearing a deal to buy medical technology group Hologic, in one of the biggest take-private deals of the year so far.

A deal could be announced as soon as early as next week, said people familiar with the matter. The private equity groups have agreed on the terms of the deal and have lined up debt financing, they added.

Hologic’s enterprise value stood at more than $16bn, including nearly $1bn in debt, as of market close on Friday, following months of takeover speculation surrounding the company best known for manufacturing breast cancer screening technology.

The Financial Times first reported in May that the pair of buyout groups had submitted an offer to the Massachusetts-based company of between $70 and $72 a share, or between $16.3bn and $16.7bn in enterprise value. That bid was rejected. Hologic shares closed up almost 2 per cent at $69.85 on Friday.

As recently as August last year, Hologic was valued near all-time highs at well in excess of $80 a share. But a combination of a drop-off in demand from breast cancer screening after the Covid-19 pandemic, a slowdown in exports to China and US government funding cuts that supported HIV testing hurt its revenues, leading its share price to tumble.

News that Hologic was nearing a deal to sell to TPG and Blackstone was reported earlier on Friday by Bloomberg.

Listed companies across the life sciences sector have faced challenges in recent months because of funding cuts from US government agencies including the National Institutes of Health and USAID carried out by President Donald Trump’s administration. Investor interest has also cooled significantly since the pandemic.

TPG and Blackstone have long been on the hunt for a target in the sector. Last year, they were in months of negotiations over a take-private deal for eyecare company Bausch + Lomb. Following the collapse of that deal they agreed to look for a new target in the sector, said people familiar with the matter.

The exact terms of the deal could not immediately be established. The people warned the timeline of the buyout could shift or a deal could collapse if it hit a last-minute snag.

With large amounts of dry powder, private equity has been putting money to work in recent months with a few big bets on listed companies, despite dealmaking in the sector proving sluggish.

Last month, a consortium made up of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, Silver Lake and Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners struck a $55bn deal to take video games maker Electronic Arts private, in the biggest leveraged buyout of all time.

Earlier this year, Thoma Bravo agreed a $12.3bn deal to take Dayforce private, while Sycamore Partners recently closed its deal to take Walgreens private for $23.7bn. 

TPG declined to comment. Hologic and Blackstone did not immediately respond for a comment.

Vestas shelves Polish turbine plant amid weak European demand

Danish group’s move to suspend investment in Szczecin facility underlines challenge for continent’s offshore wind sector

Europe’s leading wind turbine manufacturer, Vestas, has shelved plans to open its biggest factory in Poland, citing sluggish demand in its core European market.

Vestas announced last year that it would build the plant outside Szczecin, close to the Baltic Sea coast, to make blades used in powerful wind turbines.

However, the Danish group has now decided to suspend its investment in a facility that was initially expected to open in 2026 and employ more than 1,000 people.

The company told the Financial Times that the plans had been “paused due to lower than projected demand for offshore wind in Europe”.

It declined to say whether any of its other operations had been affected by the difficult market conditions in Europe, its key market.

The decision underlines the challenges faced by Europe’s offshore wind sector as it navigates higher costs, supply chain bottlenecks and political opposition in the US.

It is also a setback for Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s government and its efforts to cut Poland’s dependence on polluting coal by expanding in green energy and building domestic manufacturing for renewables.

The EU, UK and Norway have a combined offshore wind target of at least 129GW either operating or under construction by the end of the decade.

However, consultancy TGS 4C has said they are on track for only about 84GW, with Denmark and Germany both failing to find bidders for projects in separate auctions over the past 12 months.

European governments are trying to offer attractive terms and support to developers to help the industry, given its strategic importance as a source of low-carbon and domestically generated power.

But, outside China, the sector has struggled to generate returns, while attracting the ire of US President Donald Trump, who has a personal animosity towards the technology.

Ørsted, the world’s largest wind developer, recently outlined plans to retreat from the US and refocus investment in Europe and parts of Asia.

Turbine makers such as Vestas are generally keen to be certain of demand before investing heavily.

Yet any retreat by European manufacturers from their core market could open the door for Chinese competitors to move in and take market share.

Vestas said it “continues to invest in a local manufacturing footprint where offshore wind market volume and certainty allow”.

Offshore wind is central to Poland’s green efforts, with several projects under way that seek to turn the waters off Poland’s north coast into one of Europe’s largest hubs for wind farms.

Warsaw also hoped these can spur the creation of a domestic manufacturing sector capable of supplying turbines to a range of European markets.

Vestas has already invested in Poland by building an assembly plant for the nacelles that hold a turbine’s critical components and by buying a facility that makes blades for onshore turbines.

The planned Szczecin factory, however, was to be its largest Polish project to date, located on land bought in 2023. It was intended to manufacture blades for Vestas’s flagship offshore turbines, each capable of generating 15MW.

Poland’s first offshore turbines are expected to begin operating next year as part of the €4.7bn Baltic Power joint venture between state-controlled Orlen and Canada’s Northland Power, using Vestas as a supplier.

Warsaw wants Baltic Power and other large-scale projects to deliver 18GW of offshore capacity by 2040, roughly half of Europe’s current total.

Trump had to choose between Israel and Qatar. He chose Qatar

Gaza’s future hangs in the balance. But while a fragile ceasefire holds, it looks like Israel has lost influence over the peace process, writes Lawrence Freedman

It is not hard to think of reasons why the “Trump Peace Agreement” will fail. The first stage requires the release of Hamas’s hostages and Israel’s prisoners, a very partial withdrawal by the Israel Defense Forces, and more aid getting into Gaza. Although the living hostages are thankfully now freed, predictably Hamas has been unable to locate the remains of all the deceased. Aid convoys must navigate their way through rubble full of unexploded ordnance. Hamas is still in charge of Gaza City and is, again predictably in the absence of any stronger force, settling scores and dealing with opposing factions. If they manage to hold on to their weapons then Israel will have an excuse to keep the IDF in place, ready to renew hostilities. 

To move the process forward, big steps will need to be taken soon. The most urgent requirement is to get the international stabilisation force in place and bring some law and order to the Strip. Without this, and without Hamas disarming, aid will remain hard to distribute and a new transitional authority will not be able to get on with recovery and reconstruction. US Central Command in Doha will have a role in the introduction of the force, although no American troops will be involved.

Egypt has a big stake in calming Gaza and has been preparing a small Palestinian police force (Israel will be nervous about a large one). Indonesia seems ready to make a significant contribution to the stabilisation force, although it may want a UN Security Council resolution. Pakistan and Azerbaijan have also been mentioned. Agreeing on the size of the contingents and sorting out command structures and logistics for such forces normally takes weeks or even months but in this case, that time is simply not available if a chaotic situation is to be avoided. The longer it takes, the more desperate and frustrated the Gazan people will become.

As always with Trump, the rhetoric is as hyperbolic as the details are sketchy. And as always with Trump, there is also a suspicion that despite the early results and the immediate boost to his prestige, if the process starts to falter he will get bored and move on to his next grand project. The record of past plans for a lasting peace in the Middle East is hardly encouraging. 

Nonetheless this is already a landmark agreement, not only for where it might potentially lead but how it came about. The process tells us a lot about how the events of the past two years have transformed the region, how Trump’s priorities may change it even more, and, most of all, how Israel has managed to combine the effective military defeat of its most dangerous enemies with a diminution of its power and influence.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could have declared victory months ago with a “day after” plan more to his liking. He chose not to do this because his government could not agree on how to bring the war to an end, and so it was easiest politically to keep it going. He could get unity behind bold military initiatives but diplomatic moves that involved concession to international opinion and Palestinian aspirations promised only division. So Trump made the decision for him, which meant that he ended up with a deal for which the president gleefully took the credit and over which, should it progress beyond the faltering first steps, Israel will have little control. 

Netanyahu’s error lay in his confidence that he could disregard the concerns of those who objected to the ferocity of Israel’s campaign because he was sure of American support. This made him highly dependent upon the notoriously volatile Trump’s goodwill. Eventually he took the president too much for granted. The critical moment came on September 9, when Netanyahu authorised what turned out to be an unsuccessful strike against the residual Hamas political leadership meeting in Doha. They were discussing an American ceasefire plan that had Israeli input. Qatar was furious at the violation of its sovereignty and threatened to walk away from its mediating role. Trump had to choose between Israel and Qatar. He chose Qatar.

To understand how this came about, we need to go back to the very different circumstances of the first Trump administration. In 2017 the Palestinian issue had lost much of its salience because the Palestinian leadership remained divided between Hamas in Gaza and Fatah in the occupied West Bank. Israel had encouraged the division. For most Arab governments a more pressing strategic issue was the challenge posed by Iran and its radical proxies, especially Hizbollah in Lebanon. 

The biggest conflict, with extraordinary levels of casualty and suffering, was the Syrian civil war. Iran and Hizbollah struggled to prop up the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria until they were helped by the Russian air force that swung the war against the rebels. Assad survived.

Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, wanted to disengage from the Middle East and concentrate on the Indo-Pacific. He refused to intervene in the Syrian civil war, although he had to send troops back to Iraq when Islamic State (Isis), a legatee of al-Qaeda, surged out of Syria and towards Baghdad. To stop Iran becoming a nuclear power, he did a deal with Tehran in 2015. 

In this effort Obama was opposed not only by Israel but also the Saudis and other Arab Gulf states. They were unconvinced that the regime would honour the deal, which was of limited duration, and worried that the funds released to Tehran in return for showing restraint in uranium enrichment would bankroll Iran’s regional violence and subversion. 

Obama had viewed the authoritarian Saudi regime with evident distaste. Trump, by contrast, attracted by its wealth and power and unperturbed by its human rights record, made Riyadh his first overseas visit when he came to power in 2017. He followed this up by abandoning the nuclear deal with Iran, claiming that with waves of sanctions he could get a better one. Inevitably this led instead to Iran enriching more uranium to higher levels, while the severity of the extra economic sanctions led Iran to sponsor attacks on tankers and oil installations, including in Saudi Arabia.

In January 2020, after Iraqi militias killed a US contractor, Trump authorised the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, who orchestrated the actions of Iran’s radical proxies. At the same time, the shared threat of Iran encouraged Arab and Muslim states to establish diplomatic relations with Israel, though the deals were largely transactional. These became known as the Abraham Accords, largely negotiated by his son-in-law Jared Kushner, and provided the main foreign policy achievement of Trump’s first term. 

From 2021 President Joe Biden tried to extend the accords to Saudi Arabia while also reviving the nuclear deal with Iran but progress was limited. He was hampered by the impression of weakness created by the abrupt withdrawal from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021 and then distracted by the demands of the Russia-Ukraine war. A Saudi-Israeli deal, lubricated by promised American arms sales, was close, but this was thwarted by the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7 2023. 

Thereafter everything came to be dominated by the fighting and unfolding humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Biden expressed his exasperation with Netanyahu multiple times but never seemed able to do much about the remorselessness of the Israeli campaign. Netanyahu’s partners in his rightwing coalition prioritised defeating Hamas over getting the hostages returned. As Hamas could be damaged but not eliminated, insisting that elimination was essential became a formula for a never-ending war. Hamas only had to survive as a symbol of resistance, while hoping that international outrage over Israel’s behaviour would force it to agree to a ceasefire.

The clerical regime in Iran saw itself as the leader of anti-Zionist forces yet was unable to do much to help Hamas. It had encouraged Iranian-backed Hizbollah to join the conflict but the Lebanon-based militant group sought to avoid a full-blown war. It was caught by surprise when Israel dramatically escalated its operation in September 2024, involving a ruthless process of decapitation, starting with exploding pagers. Israel went on to assassinate Hizbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah. After being battered for a few weeks, Hizbollah had little choice but to agree a ceasefire. 

Iran watched on aghast. In April 2024, after Israel had killed two generals at the Iranian consulate in Damascus, it had launched ineffectual strikes against Israel. On October 1, with Nasrallah dead and the regime still smarting from the murder of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh while staying in Tehran the previous July, it sent missiles towards Israel, this time doing more damage. Israel retaliated with limited targeted strikes, mainly against missile production and air defences, which left Iran slightly more vulnerable for the future. 

Then to add to Iran’s growing sense of weakness, Turkish-backed rebels advanced against Assad, whose regime collapsed in a matter of days in December. Neither Iran nor for that matter Russia was able to do much about it. Suddenly the much-vaunted “Axis of Resistance” was looking lame, with only the Houthis in Yemen showing any resilience. This was a remarkable shift in the regional balance of power — and very much in Israel’s favour.

As Trump was preparing for his inauguration, a ceasefire deal, backed by his envoy Steve Witkoff, was agreed between Israel and Hamas. So the president started his second term with the situation seemingly calming down. Once again, for his first trip to the region he chose his comfort zone of the Gulf monarchies, countries in which his family regularly do business, and which always seem happy to see him. This time he visited Qatar, which he’d missed in 2017; he celebrated some big investments in the US and was even gifted a plane.

As Iran suffered a decline, the oil-rich Gulf states had been on the ascendant. Qatar had already established a niche role for itself as a mediator and demonstrated its pragmatism by hosting both Hamas and a US military base. For most of Trump’s first term, the Qataris were in dispute with the UAE and Saudi Arabia. The UAE and Bahrain joined the Abraham Accords; Qatar and the Saudis did not. The accords held during the Gaza war. No Arab state broke diplomatic relations with Israel, although over recent months they were becoming more stressed.

Last March, Netanyahu realised that if the ceasefire continued to the IDF’s withdrawal, with Hamas still present in Gaza, then his coalition was unlikely to survive. He found reason to abandon the process. Things had been awful before for the Gazans; with a full-scale siege they now became intolerable. An Israeli and US-backed aid distribution scheme intended to take the task away from the UN international organisations Israel accused of being too sympathetic to Hamas was so flawed that, when combined with the siege, it led to famine conditions inside the Strip. With Israel getting all the blame, Hamas saw no need to make major concessions to get a new ceasefire. Witkoff’s attempts to revive the process made little headway and Trump no longer seemed interested.

Nonetheless, his dealmaking instincts were unstayed. He encouraged Witkoff to see if he could instead agree one with Iran. After the events of the previous year, the regime was weakened and its economy was in a desperate condition. The Iranians signalled that they were prepared to negotiate so long as they were not required to abandon all their enrichment capabilities. Witkoff was tempted but Israeli and Congressional pressure led to a proposal that essentially required Iran to give up on enrichment. On June 17, before Tehran had a chance to reject it, Israel decided to end all possibilities of an agreement with strikes against Iran’s military leadership, air defences and nuclear facilities. 

To Netanyahu’s delight, Trump decided to join in, using America’s “bunker buster” bombs against the more protected enrichment plants. Then the president called an abrupt halt to the operation, insisting that the job was done. Netanyahu was less pleased, as he would have preferred to continue with the operation. There was a pattern. Trump would support Israel but only so far and on his own terms. He did not want forever wars of his own.

Trump went to great lengths to show that he had not been a party to the Israeli plan and promised he would not allow the attack to be repeated

Meanwhile, Israel was becoming progressively more isolated over its conduct of the war, aggravated by rightwing talk about expelling Palestinians from Gaza and annexing the occupied West Bank. Opposition to Israeli policies was becoming intense. European governments, including France and the UK, decided to recognise a Palestinian state. The move was largely symbolic. The Trump administration was actively hostile to the idea. This was a relief to Netanyahu but it underscored how friendless his country had become. Even inside the US, traditional support for Israel was wilting, especially among the young. Israel felt it could continue to act with impunity but only because Trump would always take its side.

This is why the Israeli strike on Doha turned out to be such a mistake. The hope was that what was left of Hamas’s political leadership could be taken out in one blow — which also meant aborting the ceasefire deal that Witkoff and Kushner had been working on. Its failure meant that the leaders survived and the peace process got a boost. 

Qatar was furious and, because of this, so was Trump. The suffering of the Palestinian people was one thing; embarrassing his friends was another. Trump went to great lengths to show that he had not been a party to the Israeli plan and promised he would not allow the attack to be repeated.

Trump now wanted not only a ceasefire but also a more ambitious “day after” plan to deal with this issue once and for all. He appreciated the need to get Arab countries on board, which unavoidably meant paying more attention to the Palestinian issue. There had to be promises that there would be no forced displacement of Palestinians, no occupation of Gaza, no annexation of the West Bank and at least the possibility of a Palestinian state. 

Before the plan was published, Netanyahu was able to alter some of the language on Hamas decommissioning and the Israeli withdrawal (which may provide him with reasons to keep the IDF in position) but not its broad thrust. All he could get on a Palestinian state was for Trump to acknowledge his disagreement. Trump not only made him sign up to the plan but also call the Qatari prime minister to make an awkward apology. As he had so obviously been pressured into the deal, Netanyahu could not present the release of hostages as his triumph. It was Trump who got the cheers while he got the boos. 

We know how everything could unravel, but we might allow ourselves a moment to look ahead to a more benign process. The first steps are the hardest. Arab governments and Turkey promise to ensure Hamas’s compliance so long as Trump keeps Israel under control. He may find the biggest issue here is not what Israel wants to do with Gaza but the continued pressure on the West Bank. 

If the stabilisation force is introduced successfully; if Hamas’s more prominent military capabilities are decommissioned; if the transitional authority can make life in Gaza less miserable; if resources can be spent on their wellbeing rather than on tunnels and rockets; and if the Palestinian Authority can implement the promised reforms — some big “ifs” there — then over time an embryonic Palestinian state will start to emerge. There will be little Israel can do about this. With a less rightwing coalition in power, it might even accept the logic of respecting Palestinian aspirations in the West Bank (more big ifs) with the promise of extending the Abraham Accords, including to the Saudis. 

Iran will also be watching from the sidelines, preoccupied more with its own internal problems than its diminished regional influence. There are many pitfalls ahead, but these are matters for the new regional power brokers — the Gulf states working with the US. We shall soon see whether they are up to the task.

High prices that are hard to justify and a Chinese preference for cheaper runarounds account for the sluggish demand

People who buy expensive cars do so because they are keen on roaring engines, buttery-soft interiors and iconic logos. What doesn’t play into their purchasing decisions, apparently, is how environmentally friendly the vehicles are. 

Responding to customer preferences, Ferrari said last week that it only expects 20 per cent of its models to be fully electric by 2030, down from 40 per cent previously. Porsche last month delayed a new range of high-end EVs, with chief executive Oliver Blume — who may be on the off ramp at the sports-car maker — citing a drop in demand for exclusive battery-electric cars. Mercedes has also seen weak EV sales, although third-quarter numbers improved.

That’s somewhat of a contrast to the mood in the broader EV market, which — amid ups and downs — sold a record 2.1mn vehicles in September. There are lots of reasons why luxury EVs are failing to get traction. One is that China is the biggest market in the world, accounting for 65 per cent of overall EVs sold last year. And in China, the cars that do a roaring trade tend to be cheap little runarounds. On top of that, consumers who do want the convenience of the high-end electric car have homegrown models to choose from: buffs reckon the Xiaomi SU7 is not entirely dissimilar to the Porsche Taycan, at a fraction of the price.

Price is also a factor in Europe, where luxury and premium EVs carry a relatively high premium compared to the equivalent internal combustion engine (ICE) model. Plus, the rapid pace at which EV technology is developing means that resale values are relatively low.

In the near term, sluggish demand for luxury EVs is only really a problem for western manufacturers who raced down that road. Porsche, for instance, has had to write down some of its investment. For those who have been keeping their options open, the slower than expected decline of the old technology means they can carry on selling the more profitable ICE cars for longer.

Still, it potentially stores up problems later on. For one thing, electrification may shrink the pool of customers that are willing to pay top dollar for a car: electric engines are less differentiated than the traditional kind, so manufacturers will have to figure out how to justify the extra expense via design and gizmos. And, for another, Chinese manufacturers are rapidly moving up the value chain. When the market for luxury EVs does ignite, western carmakers may find that rivals have raced ahead.

They’re launching more-powerful trading tools and surprising new features in hopes of attracting more of these highly profitable

Key Points

• Fidelity launched its new trading platform, Fidelity Trader+, offering integrated desktop, mobile, and web experiences for active individual investors.
• The percentage of investors with self-directed accounts rose to 33% in 2025 from 24% in 2020, with assets increasing to 24% from 17% over the same period.
• Brokerage firms like Schwab and Interactive Brokers reported significant second-quarter daily average trading volume increases of 38% and 49% year over year, respectively.

On a late-September evening, with summer’s warmth still lingering in the New England air, about 200 of Fidelity’s most prized brokerage customers sipped cocktails, nibbled hors d’oeuvres, and chatted about investing at the waterfront Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. More than one attendee came bearing a well-worn copy of legendary Fidelity fund manager Peter Lynch’s 1989 classic, One Up on Wall Street. The crowd came to hear Lynch speak, and to try out Fidelity’s new trading platform on stations staffed by experts.

For Boston-based Fidelity, the event served multiple purposes: to exhibit client appreciation, demonstrate the firm’s rich history, and show off its new trading platform, Fidelity Trader+, which launched just days before the event. The platform offers more-robust tools and—this is key—an integrated experience across desktop, mobile, and web, so customers can now begin a trade on desktop and execute it later on mobile.

Competition to win over the growing ranks of active individual investors is heating up. “We think if we can deliver a broader, better offering, it can provide the impetus for them to switch to us,” says Josh Krugman, Fidelity’s head of brokerage product strategy.

Robinhood Markets is also rolling out the red carpet for active traders, or “complex investors,” as some industry executives prefer to call them—although each firm defines the group differently. In September, Robinhood hosted more than 1,000 individual investors in Las Vegas, where it treated them to go-kart racing and unveiled new capabilities for its active trader platform, Robinhood Legend.

The battle for individual investors pits legacy brands such as Charles Schwab, Interactive Brokers Group, and Fidelity against younger upstarts such as Robinhood and eToro Group, which went public earlier this year. Financial-services companies large and small are launching advanced trading platforms, extending trading hours, adding charting capabilities, and expanding the number of investment products available. They are also creating artificial-intelligence assistants to help retail investors identify trading opportunities and, in the case of Robinhood, unveiling plans for its own investing-focused social-media network.

“It’s an arms race,” says Steve Quirk, chief brokerage officer at Robinhood. “You have to keep delivering for people, or they will leave.”

The result is a constant drumbeat of product announcements. In July, Interactive Brokers launched a new trading platform, IBKR Desktop. Less than three months later, the company introduced version 1.2 of the platform, which it says boasts more features, including an AI tool that provides portfolio insights and one-click, instant order transmission.

Super Users

Active traders are a highly sought after customer demographic because they tend to use more of a brokerage firm’s services than less active traders. For example, they may trade cryptocurrencies, deploy options trading strategies, and use margin—borrowing from their brokerage firm to buy stocks—a profitable business for these companies.

Investors have been using a lot more margin this year. Margin debt hit a record $1.13 trillion through September, according to data from the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. These activities boost brokerage firms’ trading-based revenue and net interest income, which is the difference between what companies earn on interest-bearing assets and what they pay in interest on deposits.

Robust trading activity has boosted profits at brokerage firms. Robinhood’s second-quarter equity trading volume and options contracts reached record levels. Schwab and Interactive Brokers reported surging second-quarter daily average trading volume of 38% and 49% year over year, respectively. Schwab’s trading volumes have remained above seven million daily average revenue trades for the first eight months of this year, and Morgan Stanley’s E*Trade notched just over one million such trades for the third quarter, a 24% increase.

Devin Ryan, head of financial technology research at Citizens, says the brokerage industry is an example of the so-called 80/20 rule in action: 20% of customers generate 80% of revenue, but the share of active traders may in fact be less than 20%. “There is a lot of competition for what is a relatively smaller number of investors,” he says. In fact, many companies don’t release figures or even say how they define the group. Interactive Brokers, which has 4.1 million customers, says about 250,000 of its accounts trade more than a thousand times a year.

Not Just for Day Traders

A few decades ago, investors could be more neatly broken into categories like “day traders” or “buy-and-hold investors.” But now, brokerage executives say there is a blending of investor types, mainly thanks to technology. More retail investors are showing an interest in the tools and strategies deployed by active traders. Even clients with a financial advisor are increasingly opening self-directed brokerage accounts. “This [retail investor] population is growing,” says Interactive Brokers founder Thomas Peterffy. “It’s always growing during an extended bull market.”

The percentage of investors who have self-directed accounts rose to 33% in 2025 from 24% in 2020, according to data from Broadridge Financial Solutions. Their assets are rising, too. Assets in self-directed accounts rose to 24% of assets from 17% over the same period, according to Broadridge.

Brokerage firms have been reporting steady growth in new accounts and more trading, especially this year, which has been marked by AI and tariffs. Schwab added 300,000 to 400,00 accounts every month for the past 12 months. Fidelity said second-quarter retail accounts and total daily average trades were up 13% and 34% year over year, respectively.

“We’ve seen growth in the total number of individuals and the total number of accounts, and the average age has decreased,” says Fidelity’s Krugman. “We are seeing younger customers come onto our platform. That’s because the barriers to opening a new account are basically zero.”

Live Events

Retail investors’ interest in sophisticated trading strategies is showing up in other tangible ways. Charles Schwab plans to host two dozen in-person educational investing seminars this year, and the events are attracting thousands of both sophisticated and novice investors, according to the company.

Nearly 1,000 investors turned out for a recent Schwab event in Dallas, the largest one yet. Half of the attendees were what Schwab considers nontraders. “We can walk them through a variety of different topics,” says James Kostulias, head of trading services at Schwab. “How to set up your workstation, how to analyze trades, how to think about options relative to your broader portfolio.”

Kostulias adds that approximately half of the clients that log in to Schwab’s thinkorswim trading platform wouldn’t be classified as active traders. “These are investors who are very interested in the research tools, the education, and charting tools,” he says.

John Bergdoll, 70, took a more hands-on approach to his portfolio in his 60s after he took a class on investing. A Boston-based self-described long-term investor and active researcher, he spends hours doing deep dives on individual companies. “First thing I do [in the morning] when my head is still on the pillow is I check CNBC and see how the markets are doing,” he says. “I probably spend a couple hours right off the bat just reading and researching. It’s my passion, my pursuit.”

As Bergdoll attests, it’s just so much easier and cheaper to trade today. The ranks of individual investors have been expanding ever since the Securities and Exchange Commission eliminated fixed brokerage commissions on May 1, 1975, known as May Day in the industry.

That paved the way for the growth of discount brokerage firms such as Charles Schwab—and for commissions to progressively fall to zero. “When I opened my first brokerage account in 1996, I think it was $29.95 to make a trade,” says John Bell, who was an executive at TD Ameritrade’s investment management unit before starting his own financial planning practice.

Plus, it’s far easier to get information about stocks and funds today than it was years ago. “There are so many online resources that provide free information, at least up to a certain point,” says Peter Yaffe, 79, a self-directed investor and longtime Fidelity customer.

The pandemic accelerated trends, acting as a catalyst to propel millions of Americans to become first-time investors through free-trading apps offered by Robinhood, Webull, and other companies. Self-directed investors are now one of the fastest-growing parts of the brokerage industry.

While trading is easy, convincing customers they need to try out a new platform isn’t easy. Ivan Jackson, who describes himself as a long-term investor, says he has been a Robinhood customer for years because of the firm’s technology and innovations. And he figures if he’s having a good experience, why make a change? “It would take something negative to move off a platform like Robinhood,” he says.

Bergdoll says he tried Robinhood, but prefers Fidelity in part because of its customer service. “We’re in a moment when tools like AI and analytics are changing how people trade, but the fundamental things like service and trust still matter to me,” he says.

Side Benefits

Serving this group yields other benefits for brokerage firms. The active trader market can act as a laboratory for tools and services. “A lot of the things we have done for that population have rolled over to the broader population, the website, and the mobile app,” says Adam Ely, head of digital products at Fidelity.

The customers also tend to branch out over time. Companies see an opportunity to provide active traders with retirement accounts and wealth management services—and to provide brokerage services to clients who have a financial advisor.

Betterment CEO Sarah Levy says her company—a pioneer among robo-advisors, which offer low-cost, professionally managed portfolios—has experienced this firsthand. About 75% of Betterment customers have a self-directed account elsewhere. Betterment now plans to launch a self-directed offering. “We’re not doing it because we want to encourage active trading, but because investors want to do both, and that is a reasonable thing,” she says.

Levy says Betterment’s self-directed platform will stand out in a crowded marketplace by offering features such as a tool that would enable investors to see the potential tax consequences of a trade.

Other financial-services companies are also making a go for customers’ investing dollars. For example, JPMorgan Chase has been expanding its self-directed offering. SoFi Technologies, which got its start in student loans, has been expanding SoFi Invest, the company’s self-directed investing platform.

And eToro, based in Israel, is trying to make inroads in the U.S., where the brokerage firm hopes to gain market share in part by offering an expanding suite of cryptocurrencies and an investing-focused social-media-type network. “We have millions of people commenting within our app about stocks—the good, the bad, and the ugly—from 75-plus countries,” says Andrew McCormick, head of eToro US. “So, you get a great global viewpoint.”

It’s safe to say that no one is resting on their laurels. Fidelity’s Krugman says the firm is already planning to add more features for Trader+ as well as its overall brokerage offering. As he says, investors expect nothing less.

French politics are a hot mess. Emmanuel Macron’s fourth prime minister in two years finally stabilized the government this week, at the cost of “suspending” Macron’s landmark achievement, raising France’s budget-busting pension age.

French stocks are doing much better. The iShares MSCI France exchange-traded fund has jumped by a quarter this year, slightly lagging behind broader European equities. Stripping out gains from the euro, the CAC 40 index is up 9%.

France’s economy keeps plodding along despite a meltdown at the top. Growth estimates for 2025 are shifting upward toward 1%. Unemployment is holding near record lows at 7.5%, thanks substantially to Macron’s labor market reforms.

More to the point, France is an underappreciated export powerhouse whose listed companies reap three-quarters of their sales beyond its borders, says Irene Lauro, European economist at Schroders. Of the top 10 names in the index, only No. 10, leading bank BNP Paribas, could be considered domestic-facing.

French industry has been catching up to Germany’s since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, says Michael Field, European equity strategist at Morningstar. Or rather, Germany suffered more from the cutoff of Russian gas and a resulting jump in power prices. France draws 70% of its electricity from nuclear power. The German economy is now the most exposed in Europe to President Donald Trump’s U.S. tariffs, Lauro says—along with Ireland, whose burgeoning pharmaceutical sector looks vulnerable.

France is surprisingly strong in military technology, which is on a roll as European defense budgets expand. Airbus and lesser-known aviation contractor Safran are its third- and fourth-biggest companies by market cap. “France is deeply integrated into the European defense sector,” notes Mathieu Savary, chief strategist for Europe at BCA Research.

France Inc. isn’t totally immune to chaos in the National Assembly. Bond vigilantes, spooked by the government’s 5.5%-of-gross-domestic-product deficit, could raise corporate borrowing costs. A revenue-strapped finance ministry slapped a 41% surcharge onto large corporations’ tax bill this year. “Investors do think about zip code,” says Sebastian Schrott, portfolio manager for European equities at T. Rowe Price. “We are slightly underweight France.”

On the other hand, zip code discrimination can leave good French companies undervalued. BNP Paribas is one example, Morningstar’s Field thinks. The stock is lagging behind European peers—gaining 31% this year against an industry average of 44%—despite a broad footprint across the continent and lucrative investment banking franchise.

Schrott sees value in oil supermajor TotalEnergies, which trades at a forward price/earnings ratio around 10, compared with 15 for U.S.-domiciled rivals Exxon Mobil and Chevron. “This is a very cheap stock because it’s listed in France,” he says.

The biggest question mark, equities-wise, hangs over France’s fabled luxury goods and cosmetics makers, which have suffered while heavier industry and finance surged. Luxury supermajor LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton is still the country’s top stock. But it has lost 30% from a peak 18 months ago, enduring a one-two punch of shrinking Chinese demand and escalating U.S. tariffs.

LVMH should bounce back, eventually, Field says. “We see the downturn in luxury as cyclical, not structural,” he says.

BCA’s Savary gives similarly qualified support. “A lot depends on China, where we are anticipating more moves to help the consumer,” he explains. “Any weakness in the luxury names looks like a buying opportunity.”

The same might be said for French stocks in general. Dysfunction is in the government, not the companies.

Quanta Services is poised to benefit from increased electricity demand.

Key Points

Quanta Services has a $36 billion backlog, indicating strong long-term growth visibility.

The company’s earnings per share are projected to increase by 17% this year and next.

Despite a high valuation, Quanta’s unique capabilities and essential role in infrastructure modernization justify its premium.

There’s nothing more essential than keeping the lights on. One way to profit from that is through Quanta Services stock.

Quanta isn’t a household name, but it keeps many Americans’ homes running. It’s an industrial services provider whose clients include utilities, oil-and-gas companies, and communications providers. With electricity demand increasing by leaps and bounds thanks to artificial intelligence, the company is busier than ever, maintaining aging power plants and modernizing their transmission lines.

“Quanta builds everything that the nation needs, and they do it well,” says T. Rowe Price’s Dante Pearson, associate portfolio manager for the firm’s U.S. Structured Active Mid-Cap Growth Strategy in the U.S. Equity Division. The urgent push to modernize infrastructure hardware across the country means there’s no shortage of projects for the company. “What is limited, and what makes Quanta unique, is the craft labor—the folks who can do these things,” Pearson says. “Quanta has these people, and that makes it an irreplaceable company in terms of scale and quality of labor.”

Keeping and retaining top workers is a key consideration for a company linked to the AI boom with plenty of work. Power plants that had been slated for closure have been pressed into longer service while new ones come online as tech giants gobble up gigawatts of capacity.

The upshot is a backlog of $36 billion and counting that “gives strong visibility into long-term growth,” says Mike Smith, head of the Allspring Global Investments Growth Equity team.

“There’s a real bottleneck in AI infrastructure—data centers are power-hungry, and the grid isn’t built for that kind of load,” he says. “They’ve earned pricing power, and the flywheel is spinning—predictable growth, expanding margins, and rising free cash flow.”

That has led to strong bottom-line performance as well. The consensus calls for earnings per share to climb more than 17% this year and next, reaching a record $12.39 in 2026, on double-digit increases in revenue.

Of course, none of this has been lost on Wall Street, with the shares rising by a more than a third just this year. Quanta now changes hands for more than 35 times 2026 earnings, and, at a recent $437 has already topped the average analyst price target of $435.

“It screens expensive, but that’s what happens when you have scarcity value,” says Smith. “There aren’t many firms with Quanta’s capabilities, scale, and execution. In a world where infrastructure is the chokepoint to innovation, they’re not just a contractor—they’re an enabler. The premium seems earned.”

Quanta’s valuation is hardly a new development, either. The stock’s average price/earnings ratio has been just under 40 times over the past five years.

Part of that is certainly because of the AI effect, which could leave investors concerned about any pullback if it were to unwind.

However, Quanta has turned into a stronger, more disciplined company in recent years and is no longer plagued by project risk and cost overruns that may have kept investors up at night in the past, says Pearson.

“Even before AI, there was a reason to own Quanta,” he says. “For example, there are massive projects in California to bury power lines because we’ve all seen the risk and disruption related to wildfires. That has nothing to do with AI.”

The company’s balance sheet is strong, with plenty of cash on hand to attract and retain top talent and buy equipment. While the stock’s dividend yield of 0.1% is barely worth mentioning, Quanta has been busily buying back stock to the tune of nearly $135 million this year through the second quarter, with some $365 million remaining on its repurchase authorization through 2026.

One concern about the stock is its renewables business, which accounted for about a third of sales in 2024. With roughly 90% of its business in the U.S., where the Trump administration is hostile to green energy, some investors may worry that the revenue stream is in jeopardy.

Nonetheless, J.P. Morgan analyst Mark Strouse met with Chief Financial Officer Jayshree Desai last month and notes that she was “quite positive on the multiyear outlook for renewable energy development—particularly in Quanta’s core utility-scale solar and storage markets.”

Even before the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill, the company had strong visibility on projects through 2027. In August, the Treasury issued safe-harbor guidance that provides clarity on eligibility for clean energy tax credits. As a result, Desai expects “customers to safe harbor projects over the next nine months to lock in credits through 2030,” Strouse writes. “Quanta is not seeing a ‘pull-forward’ of projects and expects developers to continue using traditional safe-harbor methods.”

Putting it all together, Quanta is a company with stable growing earnings that is worth paying for.

“I see AI and data-center growth as another leg of the stool, on top of what’s already a very strong foundation,” says Pearson.

That means investors should be sitting pretty, too.