I don't get excited about most new investment trends, and I've been investing and advising people since the 1980s, so I've watched the "next big thing" come and go more times than I can count.

Which is exactly why this new source of retirement income stopped me cold.

Forbes recently described a new category of income investment as entering a "golden era."

And Bloomberg reported that the eye-popping yields on these investments are fueling a boom among everyday investors.

So naturally, I started digging — and what I found wasn't another speculative fad…

These new funds trade right on the NYSE and NASDAQ…

And three years ago, barely a dozen of these funds existed.

But today there are more than 100… holding over $140 billion.

That's serious money, moving fast.

Why the smart money is moving here before the crowd →

But what interests me most isn't the headlines.

It's what this could mean for your retirement.

Because these investments are built to do one thing:

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Some folks are targeting $5,000 a month with around 10X less instead.

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Tim Plaehn

Is Duolingo the Next Netflix-Style Comeback Story?

Written by Sam Quirke. Published: 9/5/2026.

When the AI boom took hold, few companies looked more vulnerable than Duolingo Inc. (NASDAQ: DUOL). If a chatbot could teach you a language for free, the thinking went, why bother with a dedicated app?

That fear sent the stock down more than 80% in less than a year. But since bottoming out last April, shares of the language-learning app have rallied sharply. After gaining about 70% through the end of last week, the stock jumped again this week following a fresh analyst upgrade.

Evercore’s Mark Mahaney has turned bullish, saying the threat from ChatGPT and its peers has been significantly overstated. Alongside a fresh Outperform rating, he raised his price target to $210, indicating more than 30% upside from current levels.

Mahaney also offered an interesting comparison. He likened Duolingo's setup to that of Netflix Inc. (NASDAQ: NFLX) in 2022, when the streaming giant's shares fell more than 75% before a wave of product improvements powered a spectacular recovery. As we head into the final few months of 2026, could Duolingo be setting up for a Netflix-style comeback of its own?

Why the AI Fear Was Overdone

The heart of the bullish case is that the market has fundamentally misjudged the AI threat. Rather than stealing Duolingo's users, tools like ChatGPT appear to coexist with the app, and many people use both. The evidence is telling. Evercore's research found that most language learners who use ChatGPT also use Duolingo, and, crucially, they use the app just as intensively as Duolingo's most dedicated fans.

Far from cannibalizing the business, the AI-chatbot crowd treats ChatGPT as a casual supplement, reaching for it mostly for light, travel-related practice rather than serious study.

Given that Duolingo’s stock lost more than 80% of its value on the assumption that this wouldn’t be the case, that distinction matters enormously. It suggests the company’s committed, habit-forming core—the users who log in day after day to keep their streaks alive—remains firmly intact. But with shares still down 70% from last year’s all-time high, it feels as though the market still hasn’t fully priced this in.

A Business in Good Health

Beyond the AI question, the underlying numbers paint a picture of a company in good health. User growth, for example, has been accelerating rather than fading, with daily active users recently hitting an all-time high. Just as important, those users are sticking around, with retention rates well above 80%. They’re also coming back, with a clever one-off campaign to win back lapsed learners bringing millions of users back to the app.

That’s not exactly the kind of engagement momentum you’d expect from a product being disrupted by AI. Duolingo is also widening its appeal well beyond languages, expanding into subjects such as math, music and even chess, while using AI to reduce the cost of premium features. One of the app's tools saw its cost per use collapse from around 30 cents to less than 1 cent—a neat illustration that, far from being replaced by AI, Duolingo is making the technology work in its favor.

Where the Bears Still See Risk

For all the renewed enthusiasm, the skeptics have not been entirely silenced, and their concerns deserve a fair hearing. The most pressing is the gap between Duolingo's booming user numbers and the slower pace at which it converts those users into paying subscribers. Strong engagement is one thing; turning it into hard revenue is quite another.

Then there are external risks, from the ever-present threat of new and more capable AI rivals to the regulatory complications of operating in China. This market holds the key to much of Duolingo’s planned growth. In addition, given the sharp rebound in shares, investors are right to question whether most of the easy gains have already been made.

Could History Repeat?

So, could Duolingo really deliver the next Netflix-style comeback? The parallel is appealing: a beaten-down favorite, written off too soon, staging a comeback on the back of relentless product innovation. If the comparison holds, today's price could look cheap in hindsight, just as Netflix's did after its own 700% recovery.

Yet caution is warranted. Netflix operated at a vastly greater scale, and the monetization questions hanging over Duolingo are real and unresolved. History, as ever, rarely repeats itself so cleanly, and a single upbeat analyst call doesn’t guarantee a repeat performance.

Still, the direction of travel is hard to ignore. Duolingo seems to have answered its biggest existential question, with strong evidence that AI is proving more friend than foe, while its engagement numbers continue to climb. For investors willing to look past the near-term doubts, this recovering favorite may be at the start of a triple-digit rally of its own.

Jon Najarian's #1 Energy Trade for 2026

Elon Musk just built the largest private power network in American history. Hall of Fame Trader Jon Najarian says one tiny $6 billion company is critical to every piece of it — and it's his #1 Energy Trade for 2026 as Elon's new "Infinite Power Grid" expands across America.

Watch Jon's breakdown here.

SLB’s Kelvion Deal Could Change How Investors Value the Oilfield Giant

Reported by Chris Markoch. Originally Published: 9/3/2026.

SLB (NYSE: SLB) just made a clear bet that data centers, not oil wells, will define its next decade. On Aug. 31, the company announced it had signed an agreement to acquire Kelvion, a century-old thermal-management specialist, for approximately $3.4 billion in cash and the assumption of approximately $0.7 billion in debt, bringing the total transaction value to approximately $4.1 billion.

Most coverage framed the deal as another modular infrastructure tuck-in to the company's existing oil services business. That undersells it.

Paired with SLB's expanding NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) partnership and its rapidly scaling Data Center Solutions unit, the Kelvion deal signals that SLB is building a genuine second growth engine. Management is targeting $4.5 billion to $5 billion in 2028 revenue for the combined Data Center Solutions business. The real question for investors is whether that engine will be large enough to change how the market values the company's stock.

SLB’s $4.1 Billion Kelvion Acquisition Adds Data Center Growth

Kelvion isn't a startup chasing the AI boom. Founded more than 100 years ago, the company is expected to generate $2.3 billion to $2.4 billion in revenue in 2026 and $350 million to $400 million in adjusted EBITDA. Data centers are already its largest and fastest-growing segment, projected to contribute $1.2 billion to $1.3 billion of that revenue this year.

Kelvion booked $1.5 billion in orders in the first half of 2026 alone, up 43% year over year. This is a scaled, profitable business that SLB is buying at a reasonable multiple.

SLB’s NVIDIA Partnership Strengthens Its Data Center Strategy

The strategic logic builds directly on work SLB was already doing. In March, SLB expanded its partnership with NVIDIA to become the modular design partner for NVIDIA's DSX AI factories, alongside a joint "AI Factory for Energy" initiative.

SLB's Data Center Solutions revenue has grown at a compound annual rate exceeding 90% since 2024, with more than 2 gigawatts of delivered capacity. Cooling was the missing piece. CEO Olivier Le Peuch said the deal "more than doubles" SLB's revenue opportunity per gigawatt delivered, turning modular construction into a fuller-service data center platform rather than a single-discipline contractor.

Why SLB’s Kelvion Deal Can Be Accretive Despite Higher Debt

SLB is financing the deal with existing cash and debt, not new shares, which matters for the accretion language in the press release. Because the share count won't change, earnings per share (EPS) accretion depends only on whether Kelvion's earnings outpace the after-tax cost of the new debt.

At roughly 11 times 2026 EBITDA before synergies—an implied yield near 9%—Kelvion clears that bar comfortably against SLB's investment-grade borrowing costs, even before the $120 million in annual synergies management expects within three years. SLB says leverage will remain within its 1.5x net debt-to-EBITDA target, preserving the balance sheet discipline it has emphasized to shareholders.

SLB Stock Faces a Perception Gap as Oilfield Earnings Decline

This company's last four earnings reports reveal an earnings-per-share (EPS) story that provides important context for the Kelvion deal. SLB has beaten consensus EPS estimates in recent quarters, but adjusted EPS continues to decline year over year (YOY). It was down 26% in the second quarter of 2026 and 28% in the first quarter, as oilfield pricing softened and Middle East disruptions weighed on the Production Systems segment.

Full-year 2025 adjusted EPS fell approximately 24%. Headlines will continue to focus on the beats. The more relevant fact is that the company's legacy business is under real, sustained pressure. This raises the stakes on Kelvion rather than lowering them. A credible, scaling second growth engine matters more, not less, when the core business is shrinking.

Can SLB’s Data Center Business Become a Meaningful Growth Engine?

Even at the high end of the $4.5 billion to $5 billion 2028 target, data centers would represent roughly 12% to 14% of SLB's current revenue base of approximately $36 billion. That's meaningful, but not yet transformative.

Kelvion alone won't re-rate SLB into a technology multiple. But layered onto sustained 90%-plus growth in Data Center Solutions, an active NVIDIA partnership and now a profitable thermal-management platform, the strategy offers a credible enough trajectory that investors should start viewing SLB as two businesses rather than one—even if the second remains the smaller of the pair.

SLB Stock Technical Analysis: Can $55 Hold as Support?

The chart adds a technical layer to that argument. SLB shares spiked from the mid-$50s to a 52-week high above $60 immediately after the Kelvion announcement, then pulled back to close near $57.16. That's a classic sell-the-news retracement following an initial pop.

Even after that pullback, SLB trades comfortably above both its 50-day ($50.35) and 200-day ($48.84) simple moving averages. Both are trending higher, creating a constructive technical setup.

The prior range top near $55, tested repeatedly from March through June before a summer sell-off dragged shares to the mid-$40s, is now acting as support rather than resistance. As long as SLB holds that zone, the technical trend still favors buyers digesting the news rather than a market losing conviction in the deal.

SLB Stock Outlook: Kelvion Deal Could Reshape the Growth Story

Kelvion won't turn SLB into a data center pure play overnight.

Investors also must consider that a closing timeline stretching into the first half of 2027 leaves plenty of room for integration risk and regulatory review to intrude.

But the deal sharpens a thesis that's been building since the NVIDIA expansion. SLB is diversifying away from a legacy business that's still losing ground YOY and financing the move without diluting shareholders.

Since the announcement, the SLB analyst forecasts on MarketBeat show that three analysts have reiterated a Buy or equivalent rating on SLB. The chart suggests the market is only just now starting to notice.