Hi! Bieber fever pitch: After a much-watched set on Coachella’s first weekend, Justin Bieber’s music catalog reportedly racked up 160.2 million streams in the US between April 10 and 16, up 172% from the week before. Today we’re exploring:

TOGETHER WITH

Executive security budgets are reaching new highs at health giants and other large companies

Healthcare companies continued to spend large sums on body guards and home security systems to protect their executives in 2025 — a trend that ramped up at the end of 2024 after Brian Thompson, the former CEO of UnitedHealth Group’s insurance arm, was shot dead in Manhattan in December that year.

Per their recent proxy filings, often citing a “heightened risk environment,” major health insurers spent at least $3.1 million on executive security in 2025, only slightly less than the $3.3 million spent for 2024, when industry titans rushed to bolster chief security in the wake of Thompson’s death.

My boss’s boss’s keeper

Fears that were stirred in boardrooms nationwide following Thompson’s death are also driving security spending at some of America’s most valuable companies across all sectors.

A new study from data firm Equilar, featured in The New York Times this month, examined S&P 500 proxy filings through April 7, 2026, and found that over a third of companies in the index provided security services to at least some of their executives in 2025, up from 24% only four years before. 

Not only is the share of companies that spend on exec security going up, but the amount those businesses are shelling out is, too. Among the S&P 500 companies that provided executive security services, the median value of spending increased ~136% from 2021 to $130,468 last year.

But this figure is nowhere near to what Meta disclosed spending on security for Mark Zuckerberg in its 2025 proxy, released last Thursday. While slightly less than the $27.2 million it had spent in 2024, the tech giant still forked out $25.1 million on Zuck protection last year. 

With an attack on OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s home taking placeless than two weeks ago, it’s unlikely that executives’ anxieties will cool down anytime soon.

Read the full story on the web

Jersey Mike’s has filed for an IPO just over a year after Blackstone acquired it for ~$8 billion

And where are Eli Manning and Danny DeVito in all of this?

On Monday, Jersey Mike’s Subs, the self-proclaimed home of “the most authentic tasting submarine sandwich,” announced that it has confidentially filed to IPO, in what could become one of the biggest listings that the US restaurant industry has seen in years.

Let’s get this bread

According to a January Bloomberg report citing people familiar with the matter, Jersey Mike’s has been working with Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, and Jefferies Financial Group on the offering, and will seek a valuation of “at least $12 billion” on a $1 billion+ raise. For context, the company was snapped up by Blackstone for ~$8 billion including debt in a deal that only closed in January 2025.

The chain has come a long way since it was founded as Mike’s Giant Submarine Shop in New Jersey 70 years ago, thanks mostly to the efforts of Peter Cancro, who bought the branch that he worked at in 1975 as a 17-year-old high schooler, started franchising Jersey Mike’s nine years later, and helmed the business as CEO until last April.

Under Cancro’s leadership, the sub shop, which claims its bread is still freshly baked on-premises each day, has been rising for years.

Per annual data from QSR Magazine, Jersey Mike’s has become America’s third largest sandwich chain on store count, only behind Subway and Arby’s — the latter of which Mike’s could overtake in the coming years if it continues its impressive store count growth streak. 

Over the last three years, the company has added more than 275 stores annually on average across the US, and recently announced plans to franchise a whopping 400 outlets across the UK & Ireland in a clear sign of its sub-shaped ambitions around its IPO.

But how do Jersey Mike’s sales and store growth stack up against other key sandwich rivals?

Read the full story with another chart on the web

Real Assets Are Rallying. Is Your Portfolio Ready?

If you’re asking about gold hitting new highs, the real question isn’t about how to own gold. It’s about how to position for a broader real assets cycle. 

Gold’s record-breaking run is a signal that the investment regime is shifting. The AI buildout, reshoring, and massive infrastructure spending are fueling a decade-long capex cycle. Data centers need energy; AI needs copper; reshoring needs steel; and the future needs real assets.

RAAX, the VanEck Real Assets ETF, is a one-stop shop that actively rotates across gold, commodities, energy, infrastructure, and natural resources, adapting as the macro environment shifts. 

With 70 years of expertise in real assets, VanEck built RAAX to help investors move beyond the traditional 60/40 portfolio and gain active, diversified exposure in a single allocation. Check out RAAX.

America’s largest home TV shopping group, QVC, has filed for bankruptcy

After decades of broadcasting directly into people’s homes, the OG TV shopping group QVC filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last Thursday, following years of declining viewership and stiff competition pressuring its e-commerce business.

Per the company’s statement, the filing is part of a prearranged plan that will reduce more than $5 billion of its debt load and allow it to keep operating with “a more appropriate capital structure.” It’s also another step on the company’s transitional path from TV to live social media retailing, as it looks to keep up with competitors in the short form video space.

End of an era?

Although the rise of the internet had long been threatening to eat away at the group through the years, QVC sales were holding up surprisingly well on the face of things, with 2020 marking its best sales year ever. Sales have since climbed down from that $14 billion peak, however, as e-commerce alternatives and cord-cutting took their toll on the business.

Clearly, as the company has now realized, there are limits to how far you can lure younger customers through a dying media structure, especially as newer competitors catch the eyes of bored home-dwellers looking for a fix of retail therapy and light entertainment. 

TikTok Shop, for instance, with its similarly informal sales pitches from personable presenters, brought in an estimated revenue of more than $15 billion in the US alone last year, capturing some 400 million active consumers around the world, per reports.

It’s little wonder, then, that the QVC Group is now attempting to catch up with these trendier upstarts on their own turf: the company has launched channels on Amazon’s streaming app and started a 24/7 feed on TikTok. 

Read this on the web instead

VanEck has been in real assets for 70 years. If you’re aiming to add inflation protection and real-world diversification to your portfolio, RAAX VanEck Real Assets ETF could be what you’re looking for.

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Off the charts: Biotech companies working on which substances were given a boost after President Trump signed an executive order to approve them for treatment use over the weekend? [Answer below].

Answer here.

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