John Detrixhe

Skyrocketing home rental prices are making America’s largest single-family landlord a top performing stock.

The US housing market is red hot, as home prices grow by record amounts. While there are reasons for concern, so far this boom is much different than the one that shook apart the financial system in 2008.

The debut of Robinhood—the controversial brokerage that ignited an explosion in retail trading—on the public stock market was expected to be a wild ride. Instead it fizzled.

Is Robinhood’s IPO a bargain? It depends on whether Gen Z sticks with the company in the coming years.

Digital money is nothing new—debit and credit cards have been with us for years. What’s changed is its pervasiveness. With fewer people carrying paper money, and with some places no longer accepting it, we’ve become ever more reliant on electronic cash provided by commercial institutions, from PayPal to Visa.

Coinbase founder Brian Armstrong got two big things right: He understood early on that bitcoin was a trillion-dollar opportunity, and that regular people would need a simple, regulator-friendly way to access it. That vision became Coinbase, and when the biggest US crypto exchange went public in April, it made 38-year-old Amstrong one of the richest people on the planet.

Hi Quartz member,

Wouldn’t it be great if you could say no to sky-high executive pay?

Klarna was already big in Europe, and now the Swedish buy-now-pay-later company is becoming big in America.

Sometimes it seems like bitcoin is worth whatever Tesla founder Elon Musk and star stock picker Cathie Wood say it is. But what happens if they disagree?

Consumer prices, from used cars to airline tickets, shot up in the US last month. But some economists think policy makers in Washington can and should ignore seemingly eye-popping inflation data, and worry instead about the recovery in the labor market.

The US stock market’s top watchdog has questions about the underpinnings of the retail trading boom. One of those concerns is whether a small number of trading firms and brokerages have too much market power.

Expectations for a US employment boom missed the mark last month, as hirings came in well short of what economists had forecast. Hopes for a jobs rebound for Black Americans, who were hit hardest by the pandemic, are also yet to materialize.

It’s all but impossible to imagine Berkshire Hathaway without Warren Buffett as its chief. But stock investors appear sanguine about the decision to make Greg Abel the 90-year-old’s eventual successor.

Breaking open the IPO

Stock investors don’t like tax increases, but they tend to get over it.

Bitcoin arrived on one of the world’s most important exchanges, a watershed moment that could bring crypto from the fringes to the mainstream. The original virtual asset soared on optimism that it was an important step toward bitcoin becoming a fixture among institutional investors.

Small businesses are a big business for technology companies.

Affirm is one of the companies at the forefront of “buy now pay later”—the slick digital lending that’s growing in popularity with Gen Z and millennial shoppers. Nearly a decade since Affirm was started, the BNPL business model is dogged by questions about whether its claims about being interest-free and not charging late fees are too good to be true.

For crypto fans, Coinbase’s $86 billion IPO is a stamp of validation for bitcoin and the nascent world of digital assets. Coinbase’s bottom line is poised to be a major beneficiary of that optimism.

Grab’s record-breaking deal to merge with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) will raise an eye-popping $4.5 billion in cash. Based on where shares are trading, the ride-hailing, food-delivering super app might have been able to raise a few billion dollars more.

It’s good to the be the top dog at Coinbase—better than it is to be the chief of JPMorgan or Goldman Sachs, if CEO Brian Armstrong’s total pay is anything to go by.

JPMorgan chief Jamie Dimon had a lot to get off his chest: The head of America’s biggest bank wrote his longest shareholder letter since becoming CEO 16 years ago, clocking in at 66 pages. Some new words also made their debut in his popular annual missive, like Latinx, carbon, and booming.

It’s another sunny, pandemic-stricken day at home, which means another day of online shopping from the sofa until a vaccine is coursing through our veins. But those Dr. Martens Chelsea boots cost £150 ($206) and you’ve only got 50 quid. What to do?