In anticipation of the start of the conclave today, prediction markets have seen $19 million wagered on who will be the next pope. We’ve charted the current favorites. (Sadly, the odds of a Pope Pizzaballa are still somewhat slim.) 

US stocks slumped for a second straight day as the momentum trade that’s powered the market’s comeback sprung a leak. The S&P 500 fell 0.8%, the Nasdaq 100 gave back 0.9%, and the Russell 2000 declined 1.1%.

It’s some consolidation for the stock market after a nine-day streak of gains that erased all the losses since the Rose Garden tariff announcements. While the outlook for cross-border commerce is shaping up to be much worse than feared, there’s still significant uncertainty and volatility surrounding levies on US imports going forward.

The most expensive and hotly awaited pop culture product in development is not a splashy prestige television show, not a massive comic book movie that brings together scores of movie stars in a single flick, and certainly not a musical collaboration or tour. 

No, it’s the game “Grand Theft Auto VI,” and last week Take-Two broke the news that the long-awaited game — a product that is singlehandedly expected to boost console sales and book something like $1 billion worth of preorders — would be punted from fall 2025 to May 26, 2026. That ticked off fans something fierce, but it also angered another crucial constituency: traders.

If anything, this just underscores what a massive part of the media ecosystem games have become, where one good-looking trailer can be enough to reverse the ailing fortunes of a $41 billion company.

It’s not often that a YouTube video less than three minutes long can add $1.1 billion to shareholder value over the course of about six hours. Crime doesn’t pay, but crime simulators sure seem to. 

Anyway, the second trailer for the game looks great. Watch it here.

Homebuilding’s easy when you’re playing with blocks. Just snap pieces together and you’re done. Unfortunately, real construction hasn’t worked the same way.

BOXABL plans to fix that. Founded by an award-winning designer and his tech-entrepreneur son, they turn home construction from complicated to automated. 

New homes roll off their assembly lines in hours, equipped with HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and all. Buyers want them, too — with 600+ built and delivered already.

Now, BOXABL is preparing for Phase 2, where modules connect to create larger homes and apartments. In other words, meeting demand in the ~$5T global home construction industry could get a lot easier.

You can share in BOXABL’s growth as an investor for just $0.80/share.¹

To get ahead of price increases caused by tariffs, we’ve seen a hustle to buy cars, iPhones airlifted from India, and gaming consoles rushed from Vietnam. Pharmaceuticals, which have almost always been excluded from tariffs, are preparing for their ticket to be punched: the US imported $20 billion more pharmaceutical products in the first three months of 2025 than it did during the same period last year as drugmakers grapple with the unprecedented threat of import taxes on medicines made abroad.

President Trump says he’ll unveil in the next two weeks what tariffs drugmakers will face. It’s not that the companies don’t want to increase domestic output, but the C-suite of Big Pharma is unusually united in the message that, as Johnson & Johnson’s CEO put it, “If what you want is to build manufacturing capacity in the US, both in med tech and in pharmaceuticals, the most effective answer is not tariffs but tax policy.” 

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla seems to think the firms may still be able to negotiate a way out, but meanwhile, drugmakers are piling the pills into the US while they can.

There’s a reason pharmaceuticals are generally excluded from tariffs: people rely on them every day for their health and literal survival. That’s why the US signed a World Trade Organization agreement in 1994 agreeing to the carve-out. Tariffs obviously don’t mean that drugs just disappear from the world, but keeping life-saving meds like insulin affordable is hard to argue against. 

Go Deeper: Where America imports its drugs from.

Sherwood News spoke with billionaire and former Trump administration member Wilbur Ross about his worries on the current tariff strategy, the key thing he thinks Trump should have prioritized, what’s changed since Trump’s first turn at the helm…

And what’s still “vintage Trump.”

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