TheChek News Flow

Wealthy individual investors are willing to pay nearly double the $30.5 billion valuation institutions got in Anduril’s last fundraising.

Defense tech company Anduril expects to burn through $800 million to $900 million in cash this year in an aggressive bid to win giant Pentagon contracts. Investors big and small are unperturbed, lining up to back the fast-growing seller of drones, missiles and border surveillance towers.

The company appears to be the most coveted stock in the private markets, with small investors on the secondary market willing to pay nearly double what institutions most recently paid. That’s a far higher premium than small investors are paying for shares of other popular private companies such as SpaceX or OpenAI. Demand for Anduril shares has soared in recent weeks as executives did the rounds of popular podcasts and discussed the company’s fast revenue growth.

New, big investors have also bought in recently. GV, the independent venture capital arm of Alphabet, took a more than $30 million indirect stake in Anduril earlier this year on the secondary market, a person familiar with the matter said. Alphabet, GV’s sole limited partner, earlier this year scrapped a pledge to not “pursue” AI technologies that cause harm, like weapons. A GV spokesperson declined to comment.

Early investor Founders Fund told its limited partners earlier this year it had invested a total of nearly $2 billion in the company over the years, a stake now worth about $6 billion. The firm led a funding round in June that valued Anduril at $30.5 billion.

David You, a small investor who invests his family’s wealth, put more than $1 million into an indirect stake in Anduril via the secondary market earlier this year at a price that was roughly 60% above what institutional investors had paid just months earlier. He’s paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees to get in the door. Secondary market deals typically let small investors buy into private companies through special purpose vehicles, rather than buying shares directly from the company.

“Someone told me Anduril is Tesla plus Palantir,” he said. “I fully agree.” He added that he also thought Anduril “has more potential than SpaceX.”

The company appears to be made for the current moment. Anduril has connections with President Donald Trump’s administration, an America-first marketing message and a meme-lord billionaire co-founder, Palmer Luckey. Revenue is expected to double this year, company executives have said.

The company’s cash burn this year will help fund its first major weapons manufacturing facility and the development of an autonomous fighter jet, among other projects.

Anduril’s backers have encouraged the heavy investments because they increase the likelihood that the company will win larger long-term contracts from the Pentagon over bigger, more entrenched defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, leading to profits over time. Anduril often shuns government subsidies to help develop new products, using its balance sheet instead. That’s an expensive approach.

Chip Walter, a former Northrop Grumman executive who is now a managing partner at Anduril investor Marlinspike Partners, said the goal is to win big government contracts, known as programs of record, which are formal initiatives that last several years. “Getting on a program of record is not easy, but if you do, the revenue tends to be very sticky,” he said.

A lingering question is when regular investors will be able to buy the stock on the public markets instead of through secondaries. Josh Wolfe, co-founder of Lux Capital, an early Anduril investor, said on an investment panel last week he thought Anduril would go public “within the next year.”

“I think it’ll be a $50 billion–plus [initial public offering] on $3 billion of top-line revenue with high growth,” Wolfe said. That market cap would make Anduril about two-thirds as valuable as Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics, even though Anduril would have less than 10% of their respective annual revenues.

“We’re not in a rush and don’t need the distraction,” Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf told The Information earlier this month. A Lux spokesperson said Wolfe has no specific knowledge of the company’s IPO plans or revenue targets.

Wealthy individuals and funds have been willing to pay nearly double Anduril’s most recent $30.5 billion valuation in the secondary market for shares, said Javier Avalos, CEO of Caplight, which tracks the secondary market. That compares to a premium of 14% for OpenAI, while small investors can get shares of SpaceX at roughly the same price the big guys got in the last funding round, according to Caplight.

Demand for Anduril’s shares has jumped recently. “Over the past two weeks, buyer willingness to pay has increased,” Avalos said. He added that investors are clamoring for stakes because “there is currently no supply in the market.”

Anduril, for its part, said it doesn’t allow such secondary sales outside formal tender offers it runs. “Anyone claiming they can offer Anduril secondary shares is probably misrepresenting the facts and may be defrauding buyers, to say nothing of charging layers of egregious fees,” Anduril’s chief operating officer, Matt Grimm, said in a statement to The Information.

The demand also seems impervious to potential negative impacts of the prolonged government shutdown, which Schimpf said earlier this month would also stall its progress. (The first test flight for its Air Force fighter jet, Fury, was delayed from a mid-October plan.)

Some of the recent enthusiasm for Anduril may be traced to its efforts to raise its profile. In August, it became the lead sponsor of a San Diego NASCAR race, as well as of Ohio State athletics. Co-founder Trae Stephens appeared on the popular Shawn Ryan podcast, while Luckey sat with Joe Rogan.

You, the Anduril retail investor, said he decided on his investment in Anduril after doing heavy research. He didn’t know about the company’s cash burn, but he thought it was more important to focus on its revenue growth.

“I’m really confident,” he said. He was working on a deal to buy another $600,000 worth of SPV stakes at more than $100 a share, a price that implies an Anduril valuation of more than $70 billion.

How Tim Cook Evaded Disaster at Apple This Year

The CEO was facing risks from Trump’s tariffs, Google litigation and the AI craze. He turned to his playbook and now the iPhone maker is worth $4 trillion.

It took two quarters for Tim Cook to save Apple AAPL -0.38%decrease; red down pointing triangle from what was almost a disastrous year.

President Trump’s on-again, off-again tariffs risked massively increasing the company’s costs. A pending court ruling imperiled Apple’s lucrative Google contract. Plus, the company was seen as lagging on artificial intelligence.

Facing so much uncertainty, Apple tumbled to a market capitalization of $2.6 trillion in April and lost its title as the world’s most valuable company.

Six months later, Cook pushed Apple’s market value above $4 trillion for the first time. That’s more than 10 times what the company was worth when Cook took over as chief executive from Steve Jobs 14 years ago.

During Cook’s years at the helm, Apple hasn’t unveiled a revolutionary technology or introduced a new product that will reshape people’s lives the way the iPhone did. Instead, Cook, who turns 65 on Saturday, has won over shareholders by doing just enough to protect and grow the business, a conservative strategy that has been on display this year with clever political and legal maneuvering and enticing new iPhones.

Scariest to Apple investors had been the threat of tariffs and Trump’s direct criticism of Apple’s supply chain. Apple remains largely reliant on huge manufacturing operations built up in China over more than 20 years, a supply chain Cook himself built when he was head of Apple’s operations.

With most iPhones still made there, investors panicked on “Liberation Day” in April when Trump announced massive import tariffs. Apple’s stock cratered more than 20% in the days that followed.

Cook was already in position to avoid the worst from a U.S. trade war with China. He had been shifting the final assembly of more iPhones to India for several years, so he was able to reroute more India-assembled phones to the U.S. to dodge the tariffs on China.

That didn’t please Trump. “We’re not interested in you building in India. India can take care of themselves,” Trump said in May, referring to Apple.

But Apple’s supply chain is never coming back to the U.S., not in any substantial way, current and former employees say. Among other advantages, Asia has pools of both skilled and cheap labor that aren’t available domestically.

During Trump’s first term, Cook learned he can win over the president by giving him a good headline. In 2018, Apple promised to invest $350 billion in the U.S. over five years—primarily spending the company was already planning to make, say people familiar with the calculations.

In 2019, facing potential tariffs on China, Cook personally lobbied Trump, explaining how such levies would increase iPhone prices and help foreign rivals. Then Apple reversed its decision to move production of its Mac Pro computer to China from Texas, and Cook led Trump on a tour of the Austin factory. “Today I opened a major Apple manufacturing plant in Texas,” Trump boasted. Actually, the factory had been open since 2013, and it made a niche product. Cook didn’t correct Trump.

The strategy worked. Trump scaled back tariff threats during his first term, giving exceptions to electronics like the iPhone.

So Cook deployed the strategy again. In August, Cook said he was increasing Apple’s promised U.S. investments to $600 billion over four years. He made the announcement next to Trump in the Oval Office, as he gave him a plaque with a base of gold.

Again, Cook gave up little, making promises primarily on already planned investment, said the people familiar with the figures. Investments include making AI servers in Texas and offering manufacturing training for U.S. businesses in Detroit. Specific figures Apple announced were a $2.5 billion commitment to make iPhone cover glass in Kentucky with longtime supplier Corning, and a $500 million partnership to produce rare-earth magnets in the U.S.

What Cook isn’t doing is committing to make Apple’s popular products in the U.S.

After the U.S. investment pledge, Trump announced Apple would be exempt from a tariff on imported electronics, leaving the company subject to only a smaller China tariff, which Trump agreed to cut in half on Thursday.

That’s not the only blow Cook avoided this summer. During the penalty phase of an antitrust trial against Google, a judge held in his hands the ability to cancel payments Google makes to Apple for placement as the default search engine in Apple’s Safari web browser.

Such a move would have cost Apple dearly. The contract generates more than $20 billion of revenue a year for Apple, nearly all of which falls to the bottom line, accounting for roughly a fifth of the company’s operating profit, analysts estimate.

Cook sent lieutenant Eddy Cue to testify. Apple’s senior vice president in charge of services told the judge he “lost a lot of sleep thinking about” the possible disappearance of the Google contract and testified that technology shifts are so powerful they can take down even the most massive companies. The subtext: The judge didn’t need to impose harsh penalties; the market would take care of itself.

The judge gave Google a slap on the wrist and said the competitive dynamics of the marketplace were changing already, largely because of AI. Notably he said prohibiting search-distribution payments would harm companies such as Apple. As one analyst said at the time: “Apple didn’t just dodge a bullet; they dodged a missile.”

Just after Labor Day, Cook welcomed hundreds to Apple’s spaceship campus to unveil his newest generation of iPhones. A new, thinner smartphone dubbed the iPhone Air was the star of the show. But its weaker camera, single speaker, smaller battery and high price tag have combined to make the device less popular with customers.

Nothing stood out as a game changer; perhaps the biggest cheer among those in attendance was for a camera sensor that enables landscape photos without turning a phone to the side.

Even so, Apple delivered just enough new features across the rest of its iPhone 17 lineup that many customers are upgrading. On Thursday, Apple projected up to 12% revenue growth in the holiday quarter, double Wall Street’s estimate, thanks to strong iPhone sales.

The company has faced criticism for being slower to deliver flashy AI advancements while rivals make huge investments.

But the stock has been supported, in part, by $100 billion in annual share buybacks, and revenue continues to grow because of Cook’s focus on delivering products that have become ubiquitous in people’s lives. His motto has been be best, not first.

Many forget that the first-generation AirPods almost nine years ago were widely mocked as expensive Q-tips that were easily lost. They had been a challenging product to develop, and Cook stuck with them. Now they are a must-have iPhone accessory that generate billions of dollars in annual sales. So is the Apple Watch, which evolved from a somewhat marginal digital fashion statement into a widely used health and fitness device.

All the while, Cook has milked the iPhone ecosystem for more revenue each year, selling apps, subscriptions and App Store ads, and squeezing bigger payments from Google. All those services surpassed $100 billion in revenue this past fiscal year for the first time, at a higher profit margin than device sales. News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal, has a commercial agreement to supply news through Apple services.

The knock on Cook since the day he took over is that he isn’t a “product guy” like his predecessor. Jobs paid frequent visits to Apple’s design studio where future products were in development. Cook doesn’t stop by as much, preferring to focus on operations. Yet on his watch, Apple built its own semiconductor operation that designs some of the best chips in the world.

When Cook eventually steps down, some analysts want the company to appoint a more visionary, product-minded CEO who can better innovate in the age of AI. Neither he nor the company has suggested that is imminent, and he is widely expected to continue as executive chairman once he leaves the CEO post.

Egyptian president Sisi to inaugurate new mega-museum

Authorities to open much-anticipated Tutankhamun galleries in centrepiece of $1.2bn Grand Egyptian Museum

Egypt will inaugurate its Grand Egyptian Museum at a lavish ceremony hosted by President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, officially opening the $1.2bn project it hopes will help attract millions of tourists to the country.

The vast GEM, which sits on the Pyramids plateau in Giza, is touted as the largest museum in the world dedicated to one civilisation.

Though much of it has already been opened, authorities will unveil on Saturday the centrepiece: the much-anticipated Tutankhamun galleries, displaying for the first time the entire collection of artefacts found in the tomb of the ancient Egyptian king who lived more than 3,000 years ago.

The formal inauguration, postponed from July because of wars in the region, will be attended by what officials say will be some 40 heads of state, and will include an ancient Egyptian-themed spectacle.

Similar celebrations of Egypt’s pharaonic heritage have been held under Sisi with the aim of shoring up tourism and burnishing the image of the country and its leader.

Sherif Fathi, Egypt’s tourism minister, has said he expects 5mn people to visit the GEM annually after its full opening.

Tourism is a main foreign currency earner and crucial for the economy of heavily indebted Egypt. Some 15.7mn tourists visited the country in 2024 and officials have said arrivals were on track to approach 18mn this year.

The Tutankhamun treasures are expected to be the biggest draw at the GEM, which houses tens of thousands of ancient Egyptian artefacts covering periods from prehistoric times until the end of the Roman era.

Since the discovery of his intact tomb in Luxor by Howard Carter in 1922, “the boy king” Tutankhamun has captured imaginations around the world, though little is known about his short reign of nine years and his mysterious death at 18.

Tutankhamun is believed to be a son of Akhenaten, the ancient Egyptian king who led a religious revolution introducing the worship of a single god, the sun disc Aten — an unpopular change that was reversed after his death.

The collection of 5,600 objects showcased at the GEM include pieces such as the king’s gold death mask, his gilded chariot, an intricately decorated throne and his jewellery.

“In the past, we just exhibited the most attractive pieces,” said Tarek Tawfik, a professor of Egyptology who was a former director-general at the GEM while it was still under construction. “What’s new here is that it will be a full experience allowing the visitor to understand the context which gave rise to the objects.”

The artefacts on display will cover themes such as the daily life of the king and his court, his royal descent and the concepts of rebirth and the afterlife, which were key to the belief system of the ancient Egyptians. There is also a section highlighting the story of the discovery of the tomb.

“The visitor will feel he is getting close to the king,” said Tawfik, who added that he developed the concept for the galleries.

Restorers had worked for years in the museum’s laboratory to clean and conserve the king’s relics in preparation for display, said Tawfik. They have restrung colourful beaded collars, restored gilded furniture and salvaged textiles and leather sandals worn by the king that had been left in store rooms for decades.

“The funerary items in the Tutankhamun halls are arranged in a way that they replicate the actual funeral procession of the king as if you are really attending it,” Tawfik said.

Some travellers prefer to borrow engines to use with their own customised jets

Private jet owners are cashing in on a supply chain crunch by leasing their engines to people facing long waits for their own aircraft to be repaired.

The aerospace industry has been plagued by labour and parts shortages since the Covid-19 pandemic, leading to protracted delays in deliveries of engines and aircraft for both private and commercial jets.

Wealth advisers and industry experts said some owners wanted to rent just the engine because they were attached to their customised jet interiors, which can include gold and marble bathroom fixtures and large cinema spaces.

Laura Uberoi, head of private wealth finance at law firm Addleshaw Goddard, said: “It’s the first time in my career I have seen families turning a profit on their private jets, which are usually a depreciating liability.”

To hire a mid-size jet engine for a couple of days would cost about $50,000, and the engine could be removed fairly quickly, even overnight.

“Typically people didn’t do that in private jets, the jets are in busy use,” but the practice has been increasing for the past five to eight years as the commercial incentive has made it worthwhile, Uberoi added.

Kevin Michaels, managing director of AeroDynamic Advisory, said there was “a well-known issue with small propulsion engine supply chain” which was delaying maintenance and repairs. Business aviation operators typically had small fleets and few stocked spare engines, he added.

“Turnaround times are averaging four to six months and sometimes eight to 10 months versus two to three months typical,” he said. “This adds to the demand for exchange engines.”

Pratt & Whitney, Rolls-Royce and Honeywell are the biggest makers of business jet engines.

Increased demand is worsening the situation. “The number of flights in business aviation is up more than 30 per cent compared to pre-Covid levels,” Michaels said. This had taken some aircraft manufacturers “by surprise” and “their supply chains are trying to catch up”.

Daniel Hall, senior valuation consultant at Cirium Ascend Consultancy, said business aviation was suffering from the same problem as commercial jets — supply chains, parts, facility capacity — but also “a dwindling supply of aviation maintenance professionals . . . a sector which young people are no longer entering”.

Strict transfer spending rules linked to income are forcing clubs to chase growth off the pitch

A global audience of hundreds of millions watched Real Madrid forward Kylian Mbappé spring past FC Barcelona’s defence and sweep the ball into the corner to open the scoring in last month’s El Clásico.

But any Madridistas inspired to mark Mbappé’s blistering start to the season by purchasing a replica shirt could be in for a bout of sticker shock.

A replica of the French forward’s Adidas-branded shirt, with his name on the back, retails for as much as £185 — or £200 for one with long sleeves and Champions League badges. 

The advent of the £200 shirt is seen by some industry executives as a byproduct of prevailing trends reshaping football finance.

Merchandise is an increasingly important growth driver for clubs, as the media rights market slows significantly — and with onerous new regulations linking transfer spending limits with revenues, generating growth off the pitch is crucial to stay competitive on it.

Revenues at the retail and licensing division of FC Barcelona — which charges fans £320 for a shirt with teenage star Lamine Yamal’s name in a limited edition font on the back — rose 55 per cent to €170mn last year.

Manchester United’s retail sales grew 16 per cent to £145mn last year, despite flat revenue overall. Meanwhile, Liverpool FC has built a retail network across Asia and the Middle East, opening its 22nd store last week in China’s Shenzhen.

Alongside the income from selling replica jerseys and other apparel and merchandise, top clubs can also earn tens of millions of pounds a year in sponsorship fees from the sportswear brands that produce their teams’ kits.

Those fees mean brands such as Nike and Adidas often lose money supplying the shirts, they reap the benefits of exposure gained by having their logo on a club’s kit.

“The reason you sponsor a club is to make money selling something else,” explains Gianluca Pavanello, chief executive of Italian sportswear brand Macron, which produces kits for teams including Premier League side Crystal Palace.

Pavanello said the cost of kit deals had soared over the past decade. Earlier this year Puma agreed a new 10-year deal to supply Manchester City kits worth about £100mn annually, up from £65mn previously.

When a new season rolls around most fans do not splurge on high-end replicas, choosing instead to buy so-called stadium edition replica shirts, which are made with more basic materials.

The average price of these shirts for Premier League clubs is £75, with children’s shirts ranging from £45 to £65.

Tom Beahon, co-founder of sportswear brand Castore, said a recent influx of investment into football clubs — including from institutional investors — had focused executives on “monetisation”.

“Kit deals are a part of this wider trend,” he said.

Sportswear executives say that fierce competition between kit makers is enabling top teams to drive up the value of their shirt deals, which results in brands raising prices for fans.

A shirt that retails for £70 will typically cost about £15-20 to manufacture, and be supplied to retailers at a wholesale price of £35, according to industry executives.

While clubs rake in royalties on shirts sold by third-party retailers, the margins for the sportswear brands are thin — typically between zero and 10 per cent, the executives added. Club executives stress their own retail businesses operate on tight margins too.

Adolfo Bara, head of football at sports marketing agency IMG, said only a small group of clubs had the global appeal to command high fees from brands. “The top clubs get a lot of money. The mid-tier get a little, and the lower tier get nothing,” he said.

Premium replica shirts cost more to produce but come with higher margins. The average price of a premium Premier League club shirt, with a player’s name printed on the back, is £132, according to data collected by the Financial Times. Bayern Munich, Paris Saint-Germain, Inter Milan and Manchester United all sell replica shirts priced at or more than £150.

The ability to sell deluxe shirts at higher prices is in part a reflection of an increasingly global fan base, especially for the English Premier League, which earns more from international broadcast rights than it does domestically.

Demand for shirts has also been boosted by football’s growing appeal in the world of fashion.

“We have something in this football business which we have never seen before — that football articles have become fashion,” said Adidas chief executive Bjørn Gulden at a recent industry conference. “People are starting to wear soccer shoes on the street — even with studs — which is kind of crazy.”

Clubs are trying to ride that wave. AC Milan released limited edition kits this year designed by Off-White, the fashion brand founded by the late Virgil Abloh, while Arsenal has previously produced collaborations with designer Stella McCartney.

Gulden said “the forecast for the next 12 months for soccer-inspired products is almost twice what it’s been”, adding that a lot of investment was being directed towards “selling football as a much bigger thing than only for the fan”.

The Week’s 10 Biggest Funding Rounds: AI, Fintech And E-Commerce In The Lead

1. Mercor, $350M, AI hiring: San Francisco-based Mercor, a provider of AI-enabled tools for hiring, secured $350 million in Series C funding at a $10 billion valuation. Felicis led the financing, which included participation by Robinhood Ventures, General Catalyst and Benchmark.

2. (tied) SavvyMoney, $225M, fintech: SavvyMoney, which offers tools for financial services providers to embed features like credit scores and personalized offers into their consumer offerings, announced a $225 million investment co-led by PSG Equity and Canapi Ventures. Founded in 2009, the Dublin, California, company currently works with more than 1,500 financial institution customers.

2. (tied) Whatnot, $225M, e-commerce: Whatnot, a live shopping platform and marketplace, has closed a $225 million Series F round, more than doubling its valuation to $11.5 billion in less than 10 months. DST Global and CapitalG co-led the financing, which brings the Los Angeles-based company’s total raised to about $968 million since its 2019 inception.

4. (tied) Sublime Security, $150M, cybersecurity: Sublime Security, a developer of agentic AI tools for email security, raised $150 million in a Series C round led by Georgian. The financing brings total funding to date for the 6-year-old Washington, D.C.-based company to around $240 million, per Crunchbase data.

4. (tied) Harvey, $150M, legal tech: Harvey, developer of an AI-enabled platform for legal professionals, closed on a fresh $150 million, bringing total reported funding to date to $1 billion. Andreessen Horowitz led the latest round, which reportedly set an $8 billion valuation for the 3-year-old, San Francisco-based company.

6. (tied) Human Interest, $100M, finance: Human Interest, a San Francisco-based startup that helps small businesses offer 401(k) plans to their employees, raised more than $100 million at a $3 billion valuation, Axios reports. That valuation is up from the $1.3 billion the company was last valued at in 2024. Previous investors Baillie Gifford, BlackRock, Marshall Wace, Morgan Stanley and TPG again backed the company.

6. (tied) Substrate, $100M, semiconductors: Substrate, a San Francisco-based startup seeking to build semiconductor factories with new laser-based technology, raised $100 million from Founders Fund, General Catalyst, IQT and others.

8. Zag Bio, $80M, biotech: Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Zag Bio, a developer of thymus-targeted medicines, announced its public launch with $80 million in financing, including a recently closed Series A round. Polaris Partners founded and incubated the startup and co-led the Series A financing with the JDRF T1D Fund.

9. ConductorOne, $79M, identity security: ConductorOne, an identity security startup building an AI platform geared for human, non-human and AI identities, landed $79 million in a Series B financing led by Greycroft. The 4-year-old Portland, Oregon-based company says it saw 400% revenue growth last year.

10. Blueprint, $60M, personal care: Blueprint, a Los Angeles-based brand that markets supplements, skin and hair care products, and foods geared to promote well-being and longevity, raised $60 million from a long list of venture and celebrity investors including Paris Hilton, Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss and Logan Paul.

The AI rally has many investors wondering where to turn in anticipation of its end. The medical-device maker is one solid option.

Key Points

• Boston Scientific’s cardiovascular segment is forecast to grow more than 22% year over year.
• The Watchman product for AF patients saw sales grow 35% in the third quarter, reaching 12% of the estimated five-million-patient market.
• Analysts expect Boston Scientific’s total sales to grow 11% to $23.4 billion in 2026, potentially leading to midteens earnings per share growth.

Investors seeking a stock unrelated to artificial intelligence should take a look at Boston Scientific.

The historic rally in everything AI has inevitably led to thoughts about how the whole thing will end. Maybe some companies’ earnings will disappoint the market? Or maybe something more widespread will occur, like Big Tech significantly reducing its spending expectations? The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite has seen several days when it was deeply in the red recently, which could foreshadow a true drawdown if any of these—or other—risks emerge.

With all this in mind, we look to medical-device makers. These companies are constantly enhancing their products to help improve patients’ health. For example, Intuitive Surgical’s new versions of its robotic surgery machines have helped the stock rise 23% in the past month, and Abbott Laboratories’ newest glucose-monitoring device has brought its stock close to new highs.

In cardiac health, innovative products are giving surgeons more confidence in their decisions to operate. Spending on cardiac procedures in the U.S. is expected to grow at just over 7% annually through 2030, to about $92 billion, driven mostly by an aging population, according to Grand View Research.

Boston Scientific is at the heart of it. Of its $20 billion in 2025 sales forecast by analysts, $13 billion is expected to come from its cardiovascular segment, up 23% year over year, according to FactSet. Some of that is because of small acquisitions and currency fluctuations.

Still, not all the growth is priced into the stock, which is trading at $100, even after its recent rally. Analysts are forecasting a 13% increase in sales of cardiovascular products next year, to $14.9 billion. The company said at its September investor day that it expects low-double digit growth over the long term as it takes market share. Analysts aren’t doubting that right now, especially after the company continued its record of beating quarterly earnings estimates on Oct. 22, with greater-than-expected cardio revenue in the third quarter amid larger-than-anticipated sales across every segment.

Part of the cardio growth story is the Watchman product, a small implant that closes the left atrial appendage of patients with atrial fibrillation, or AF. This product is intended for patients who can’t take blood thinners to stop blood clots. Watchman lowers the likelihood of blood clots, in turn reducing the risk of stroke.

Watchman sales grew 35% in the third quarter, reaching over 600,000 patients, or 12% of the five million total addressable market estimated by the company. The implant is preferred right now versus Abbott Laboratories’ competing product, Amplatzer, judging by hospital purchases. Roughly 90% of their purchases of AF products are for Watchman implants, according to a physician survey from BTIG analyst Marie Thibault.

That isn’t a surprise. The American College of Cardiology, a group of professionals that publishes medical journals, concluded Watchman has caused fewer postprocedural medical complications and is currently the safer product.

That story could continue in the first half of 2026, when Boston Scientific releases results of its Champion-AF trial. This clinical trial, reviewed by the Food and Drug Administration, will publish results for Watchman FLX, the latest version of its heart implant. FLX aims to improve the healing process and close larger appendages. Positive results on its effectiveness and safety would underscore Boston Scientific’s ability to continue to grow its presence with heart surgeons—and potentially spark stock gains.

Watchman isn’t the only avenue through which Boston Scientific can protect its competitiveness. With large profit margins and hefty free cash flow—an expected $3.4 billion this year, and growing—the company has acquired dozens of small companies over the years. An example: It bought Elutia’s BioEnvelope business for $88 million in September. Elutia sells small materials that protect cardiac patients from postoperative complications, such as infection. It’s the type of deal that allows Boston Scientific to package multiple products in its offerings to surgeons, providing a competitive advantage.

Acquisitions are also instrumental in the other areas of Boston Scientific’s business, including medical surgical, or MedSurg, which analysts expect to grow close to 10% annually over the long term. A subsegment of that business is urology, for which the company bought Axonics for $3.7 billion in 2024. Axonics makes an implantable device that treats bowel and bladder conditions, such as overactive bladder.

Urology sales could reaccelerate next year, CEO Mike Mahoney said on the third-quarter earnings call. Sales were interrupted after Medtronic asked the International Trade Commission to block the sale of the products over alleged patent infringements. Late last year, a jury found that Axonics didn’t infringe on Medtronic’s patents for competitive products. The companies reached a settlement, and Axonics products are selling without restrictions again. Management expects improving growth over the course of 2026, another potential catalyst that could unlock more confidence from the market—and stock gains.

Overall, Boston Scientific could grow total sales by 11% in 2026 to $23.4 billion, according to FactSet. Sustaining such growth can bring profit margins a touch higher over time, as it can outpace the increase in operating expenses such as employee compensation and depreciation.

This would spur midteen earnings per share growth annually over the long term, especially as Boston Scientific continues to repurchase shares and onboard acquisitions. The company says it will prioritize deals over buybacks, but the deals will increase EPS if they are accretive.

Given management’s tendency to do deals and deliver higher-than-expected growth, EPS growth could approach 20% annually, says Andrew Choi, a portfolio manager at Parnassus Investments.

That would pump the stock higher, partly because it isn’t as expensive as it could be. Shares trade at 30 times expected EPS for the coming 12 months, below its peak of 36 times this year and just a 20% premium versus the iShares U.S. Medical Devices exchange-traded fund’s 24.9 times. When Boston Scientific shares hit peaks this year, the premium was 28%.

So, the stock could trade at a larger earnings multiple—and benefit from higher earnings, particularly as the market sees continued evidence that Boston Scientific can continue to take market share. “If they do 11% [sales growth], there’s a path toward value creation” for shareholders, says Choi.

This doesn’t mean there aren’t risks: The Champion-AF trial results for Watchman could disappoint, pressuring expectations for Watchman demand, or Abbott could significantly improve Amplatzer’s safety.

We doubt those risks will materialize, a key reason being that Boston Scientific can spend a lot of money on research and development to keep its offerings competitive. Analysts expect almost $2 billion of such spend this year, close to Abbott’s $2.8 billion. But Abbott has to spread that spending across far more businesses, including diabetes care, while Boston can use most of that money to focus on heart-related care.

On the whole, Boston Scientific demonstrates an excellent risk/reward scenario for patients—and for those who want to buy the stock.

CEO Kelly Ortberg has made the company investible again. Why shares could climb more than 25%.

Boeing went from a fairy tale to a tragedy in the blink of an eye. Now the story shifts to redemption—and it could pay off for the stock.

Once viewed as the perfect cash-flow machine, Boeing has been through seven years of misery, largely of its own doing. Starting with the crash of two 737 MAX jets in 2018 and 2019, the company struggled to make headway with a corporate culture that had put engineering so far down its list of priorities that even the simple task of making sure the door on a plane was installed correctly seemed out of its reach after a blowout in January 2024. Just making planes had become a slog: At the end of last year, Boeing had delivered 265 737-model jets, less than half its annual target and down from 396 delivered in 2023. At Thursday’s close, Boeing stock sat 55% below its March 2019 all-time high of $446.01.

Sometimes, though, a leader emerges just when all hope seems to be lost. Kelly Ortberg has been that leader. Since being hired in July 2024 to replace Dave Calhoun, Ortberg, an engineer with decades of experience in the aerospace industry, has done the seemingly impossible: made Boeing stock investible again. He has improved supplier relations, shaken up management ranks, reallocated resources to new program development, and, perhaps most important, is spending more time in Seattle, near where the 737 MAX is produced.

Boeing stock has gained 7% since he was named CEO. Though shares declined after Boeing’s third-quarter earnings release on Wednesday, they look set to rise even further as Ortberg demonstrates that the company’s resurgence is real.

“I love these stories,” says Hightower Advisors Chief Investment Strategist Stephanie Link. “Companies with good bones that have been so poorly run then get a good CEO.”

Boeing declined to make Ortberg available for this article.

As much as Boeing’s decline seems to start with the first MAX crash, the problems actually started nearly 30 years ago. In 1997, Boeing CEO Philip Condit and McDonnell Douglas head Harry Stonecipher orchestrated the merger of the two companies. While the deal was celebrated on Wall Street, it marked the start of Boeing’s shift away from a focus on engineering planes toward financial engineering.

Condit moved the company’s headquarters from Seattle to Chicago in 2001, a move designed to de-emphasize the core commercial aerospace business by separating management from production. It was a questionable decision and a culture killer. Things took another hit under Jim McNerney, who took over in 2005 and admitted out loud that “cowering” employees motivated him. After a painful nine-week strike in 2008, Boeing broke ground on its nonunion plant in South Carolina, where it makes the 787 Dreamliner today.

Under McNerney, Boeing’s financial path was set. From 2011 to 2019, a period that covered the development of the MAX through its grounding, Boeing spent about $49 billion on research and development and new plants and equipment, amounting to about 6.2% of sales. Airbus spent about $52 billion, or 9.4% of sales, over the same span. Boeing returned some $59 billion to shareholders over that period, including about $40 billion on share repurchases, which decreased shares outstanding from roughly 751 million at the start of 2014 to 568 million at the end of 2018.

It wasn’t money well spent: Boeing was forced to sell some $16 billion in common shares at a paltry $143 apiece in October 2024 to help repair its ailing balance sheet. Boeing now has about 760 million shares outstanding, as well as convertible debt sold in October 2024.

Nothing, however, was as damaging as the development of the 737 MAX, which was brought to market by CEO Dennis Muilenburg in 2017. Boeing decided to modify the existing 737 platform to respond quickly to Airbus’ A320neo family of jets. It turned out disastrously, with two deadly crashes due to malfunctioning sensors and new flight-control software. The crashes grounded the MAX worldwide for almost two years, tanking Boeing’s earnings and cash flow. Dave Calhoun took over for Muilenburg and managed to get the MAX recertified for commercial flight. He announced his departure shortly after an emergency-door plug blew out of a 737 MAX 9 jet while in flight on Jan. 5, 2024.

“At this point, everyone knows the story, right?” says Yale School of Management lecturer Gautam Mukunda. “[Boeing] has been brutally mismanaged for basically my entire adult life.”

Enter Ortberg. The first thing investors need to know about him is that he is an engineer. He joined Rockwell Collins in 1987, and became president and CEO in 2013. Collins was eventually acquired by United Technologies —now RTX —in 2018. Ortberg left the company in 2021, serving on corporate boards until Boeing came calling.

Ortberg hasn’t been afraid to reverse prior management’s decisions. He has moved management back to Seattle so it could be near Boeing’s workers. He raised cash by issuing stock and convertibles and selling portions of Digital Aviation Solutions to Thoma Bravo for more than $10 billion. He also stopped the development of the X-66 truss-braced-wing demonstrator plane—a futuristic concept designed to improve efficiency with long, thin wings—which might one day have produced technologies usable on a commercial jet, but was too far off to help in the next few years.

Gone, too, is the imperial management style that projected confidence when everything seemed to be working, but came across as hubris when the company ran into trouble. “We have seen a far less arrogant tone,” says Vertical Research Partners analyst Rob Stallard, who is also a fan of new Chief Financial Officer Jay Malave, who came over from Lockheed Martin. “This improvement has also been noted by customers and suppliers, with a number now commenting that they have much more faith in Boeing actually delivering on its projections.”

AeroDynamic Advisory aerospace consultant and managing director Richard Aboulafia called out two additional management changes as evidence of positive momentum: naming Stephen Parker to run Boeing’s ailing defense business, and putting former Wisk CEO Brian Yutko, an MIT Ph.D. in aerospace, aeronautical, and astronautical engineering, in charge of commercial aircraft development. Ortberg “isn’t afraid of anyone with talent,” Aboulafia says.

He also isn’t afraid to make nice when he has to. While 3,200 Boeing defense workers are currently striking in St. Louis, where the company makes the F-15 and F-18 fighter jets, its labor strife likely peaked with the seven-week strike that ended in November 2024. Current Boeing management could have offered more up front, says Yale’s Mukunda, but a work stoppage might have been unavoidable, given the built-up animosity. Boeing workers won significant pay increases in their new four-year contract and a guarantee that the next narrow-body jet Boeing designs would be built in Washington state.

Boeing still has many problems to solve. The company isn’t expected to make a profit in 2025, marking seven consecutive years of losses. It’s the worst current streak for a company in the S&P 500

and one of the worst streaks ever, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence, which looked at the current components of the S&P 500. No company in the index has lost more money since 2019 than Boeing.

But there are signs of improvement. Demand, for one, hasn’t been a problem for Boeing or Airbus for a while. People like to fly, and the industry has survived shocks including 9/11, SARS, and Covid-19. Today, Boeing has more than 6,600 unfilled orders on the books. The issue has been meeting customers’ needs for more planes.

In the six years since the second tragic MAX crash in March 2019, Boeing has delivered about 2,200 jets. In the six years before the tragedy, Boeing delivered twice that many. Deliveries in 2025 should be about 600 jets, according to FactSet, up from fewer than 350 in 2024 but still nowhere near the 806 Boeing delivered in 2018.

The Federal Aviation Administration capped 737 MAX production at 38 a month in the aftermath of the 737 MAX door-plug blowout. It recently raised the cap to 42 a month. Boeing will work toward 46 or 47 a month and, eventually, 50 MAX jets a month. Higher production could help it generate over $11 billion in free cash flow in 2028, Wall Street’s current call.

“It’s actually a pretty simple story at this point,” says BofA Securities analyst Ron Epstein, who has a Buy rating on the stock. “Can it deliver more airplanes? And if they can deliver more airplanes, they generate more cash.”

Projecting Boeing’s financial performance still isn’t easy. Since the second MAX crash, Boeing has missed Wall Street estimates about 70% of the time—often by a wide margin. That is unheard of. Apple, by comparison, has missed earnings about 10% of the time over that span, while GE Aerospace—a Boeing peer that has evolved from its own turnaround story into a must-own, industry-leading stock—missed earnings about 25% of the time.

And Boeing just missed estimates once again. The company lost $7.14 a share during the third quarter, hit by a $4.9 billion charge related to the long-delayed 777x program, much worse than Wall Street’s expectation of a $5 per share loss. Third-quarter sales, however, rose to $23.3 billion, up from $17.8 billion in the third quarter of 2024 and the third consecutive quarter of revenue beats. Boeing also delivered 160 commercial jets, up from 116 a year ago, and reported its first quarter of positive free cash flow since 2023.

Valuing a mature company that hasn’t made money in roughly seven years is complicated. BofA’s Epstein uses “normalized” free cash flow of $11 a share to reach his $270 target—up 35% from a recent $200—while Vertical’s Stallard uses a combination of 2027 earnings and cash-flow multiples to reach the same valuation. Another way is to look at where Airbus trades on 2028 free cash flow. It earns a multiple of 22, and a comparative valuation implies a price of up to $300 for Boeing stock—up 50%—with the difference between that and today’s value reflecting the need for investors to buy into the turnaround story.

Other catalysts can build confidence, too. Boeing is working on certifying the 777X and the 737 MAX 7 and 10—the 10 is a longer version of the 7—for commercial service. Timing is uncertain and dependent on regulators, but all three planes should be ready for delivery to customers in 2026 or 2027.

What is clear is that the Boeing story is at the “end of the beginning,” to use Stallard’s words from when he upgraded the stock to Buy from Hold in September. He had downgraded shares in 2020, but cited supply-chain improvements, stability in the defense business, and Ortberg for his sunnier view of the stock.

And as the old problems recede, Boeing will be able to turn to the future. That will mean designing a new plane—a risk but an opportunity, too. A new plane will necessitate using tens of billions of dollars in cash flow spread out over a few years, but it can also help restore the market share it lost to the Airbus A320neo family, which has 70% market share of deliveries since the A320neo and MAX jets entered service. Beyond market share, a new jet would be another step in putting engineering back at the center of the company, something that is long overdue.

“Boeing is no longer denying the need for its creation, and they are no longer denying that they are looking at options,” AeroDynamic Advisory’s Aboulafia says.

This way redemption lies.