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Arm Holdings is the IP owner and developer of the Arm architecture, which is used in 99% of the world’s smartphone CPU cores. Arm also has a high market share in other battery-powered devices, such as wearables, tablets, and sensors. Arm licenses its architecture for a fee, offering different license types depending on the flexibility the customer needs. Customers such as Apple or Qualcomm buy architectural licenses, which allow them to modify the architecture and add or remove instructions to tailor the chips to their specific needs. Other clients directly buy off-the-shelf designs from Arm. Both off-the-shelf and architectural customers pay a royalty fee per chip shipped. In 2026, Arm announced plans to launch its own CPU products on top of its existing royalty business.

Stocks fended off fears of war, high oil prices, inflation, and tech bubbles to post a modest gain in 1H26. That said, the markets are now entering the poorest performing quarter of the year. By our calculations, 3Q performance has been underwhelming compared to 1Q, 2Q, and 4Q returns. Indeed, we analyzed data collected on S&P 500 performance from 1980-2026. The strongest quarter has been the fourth, which has generated average gains of 4.7%. First- and second-quarter returns have averaged 2.0% and 3.0%, respectively. On the other hand, 3Q is barely positive, with an average return of 0.5%. Now not every 3Q is a disaster. In fact, the "win percentage" for the quarter is 63%, which means that markets deliver positive returns in the quarter almost two-thirds of the time. But the actual quarters that are negative can really hurt: -12% in 1981, - 15% in 1990, - 15% in 2000, - 18% in 2001, -14% in 2008 and -14% in 2011. Last year, stocks popped 7.5% in 3Q. Some of the events that occurred in these quarters are random: the September 11 attacks in 2001; the Lehman bankruptcy in 2008; and the S&P U.S. Treasury downgrade in 2011. But 3Q is also when companies better know if they are going to meet their estimates for the year. As such, they may signal if they are poised to fall short. Further, this year features mid-term elections in November, which can add political intrigue and volatility into the mix. One bit of good news, though, is that about three-quarters of the times during our test period, stocks posted gains in the first half. And during those years, the market has tacked on additional gains by year-end almost 80% of the time.

The stock market ended June in recovery mode -- and while the month showed mixed returns from a plethora of indices, it was an absolute slam-dunk of a quarter. The second quarter certainly benefited from some prescient timing, as the market bottomed on the second to last day of March following a four-week slide due to the war in Iran and the spike in global energy prices. Stocks ignited on March 31 and ripped higher, with the major indices peaking on June 2.

The Vickers Top Buyers & Sellers is a daily report that identifies the five companies the largest insider purchase transactions based on the dollar value of the transactions as well as the five companies the largest insider sales transactions based on the dollar value of the transactions.