Charles Schwab is embodying the “How do you do, fellow kids?” meme by making its first foray into crypto trading. The 55-year-old company announced the move during its earnings call on Thursday, when it shared that its quarterly profit jumped more than 30% as trading activity surged across the industry.

Now, Schwab wants to give clients more assets to move around: digital ones. Schwab said it’ll soon add the top two tokens by market cap, bitcoin and ether, to its platform under the on-the-nose offering name, Schwab Crypto.

TradFi Blurs Digital Lines

It has been a banner earnings season for Wall Street firms. Schwab averaged a record 9.9 million trades a day in the first quarter, and CEO Rick Wurster tied the frenzied trading activity in part to geopolitical uncertainty swaying investors to hold smaller positions for shorter periods. Small-scale trading activity could surge further in the second quarter, depending on when a decision by regulators to end the $25,000 minimum equity requirement for day traders takes effect.

Adding crypto could also boost Schwab’s volume as investors, especially Gen Z ones, turn to alternative assets during uncertain times. In adding a crypto offering, Schwab joins a swath of other Wall Street institutions (a.k.a., Traditional Finance or TradFi) looking to compete with younger fintech firms like Robinhood:

• Fidelity Investments was relatively early to the crypto game. In 2022, Fidelity made crypto investing available in its 401(k) plans, and in 2024, it launched a spot bitcoin ETF. It began supporting bitcoin and ether trading in 2023 and later added litecoin and solana. This year, it even launched a stablecoin for trading on its crypto platform. Schwab plans to undercut Fidelity’s crypto trading fee, charging 0.75% per trade compared with Fidelity’s 1%. Schwab’s CEO has previously said that its clients already hold a little crypto, but they’ve had to do so through a competitor. Now, they could move their money back over.
• Morgan Stanley, meanwhile, recently started a bitcoin ETF while Goldman Sachs filed to create one of its own. Though much of TradFi has stuck to ETFs, which could help to maintain a degree of separation away from the actual assets, Bloomberg reported last year that JPMorgan was quietly considering offering crypto trading to institutional clients.

Not Your Father’s Firm: Gen Z started investing earlier than other generations and is more likely to pour money into alternative assets, particularly crypto. As boomers age and wealth moves to younger generations, Wall Street is making sure it’s offering the assets Gen Z wants. Traditional institutions could also be looking to up their cred with a generation that might be more familiar with fintech companies that have splurged on self-marketing, like Robinhood and Webull, than Wall Street’s old guard.

Now, PepsiCo knows: Charging people more money actually makes them buy less stuff.

In its first-quarter earnings call on Thursday, the soda and soft drink giant reported a revenue beat and a return to volume growth for its North American food business for the first time in two years. The company’s not-so-secret strategy? Slashing prices.

Lay It All out There

Cost-conscious consumers are long past their foodflation breaking point. If McDonald’s struggled to sell $6 cheeseburgers, it’s no wonder Pepsi’s Frito-Lay brand struggled to sell $6 bags of Doritos, which became the recent going rate for large-sized bags in many major markets. After two years of declining sales across its Frito-Lay and Quaker Oats North America division, push came to shove in February, when Pepsi announced it would slash prices on packaged food by as much as 15%. The decision came after a successful push for lower prices by activist Elliot Investment Management late last year.

As it turns out, affordability has its appeal in the new era of penny-pinching. Sales volume for the unit increased 2% for the quarter, while companywide revenue climbed 8.5% to $19.4 billion, beating Wall Street’s expectations.

Next up? Turning around its core soda business, which is losing some of its pop:

• Sales volume in Pepsi’s North American beverage business fell 2.5% from a year ago, as consumers snubbed high prices.
• Still, the dip is an improvement from the previous quarter, when beverage sales had fallen 4% year-over-year. The company has been chasing growing beverage markets amid shifting consumer tastes; last year, the company acquired healthier soda line Poppi and invested in fast-rising energy drink brand Celsius.

Health Makes Wealth: The health-consciousness extends beyond Poppi, too. The company noted in its earnings call that its Gatorade and Propel brands are strong players in the growing sports drink market, and it’s moving to replace artificial colors as it toes the MAHA culture line. In the snack space, the health-conscious push has manifested in a new marketing strategy proclaiming classic Lay’s potato chips are “Made with real potatoes.” We had always assumed they were, though the fact that Pepsi is boasting about it now gives us some doubts.

The last time there was a debut like this, Britney Spears was topping the charts and the world was stockpiling canned goods for Y2K.

Madison Air Solutions has officially claimed the title of the largest industrial IPO since UPS in 1999, pricing its $2.23 billion offering at the top of its range and surging 18.5% in its Thursday debut. While the UPS trade was about shipping and express delivery, Madison Air is about cooling the servers that power AI. The Chicago-based company makes climate-control products for both homes and businesses, including brands such as AprilAire, Big Ass Fans and Nortek Data Center Cooling.

Hot, Hot, Hot

The debut was also the largest of 2026 so far, but it’s likely to be eclipsed later this year by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, not to mention OpenAI and Anthropic, which are reportedly queuing up launches of their own.

While IPOs slowed in March, with war between the US, Israel and Iran roiling markets and chilling enthusiasm, they’ve had something of a heat wave this year. During the first quarter, 22 IPOs raised more than $9.4 billion, compared with 15 that raised about $7.9 billion the year before, according to consulting firm PwC. Among them were:

• Forgent Power, a Minnesota-based maker of electrical distribution equipment for AI data centers and electrical grids, which raised $1.51 billion.
• Generate Biomedicines, a Massachusetts-based biotech firm that uses artificial intelligence-driven tech to develop protein-based therapies, which raised $400 million.

Preferred Shares: While AI companies continue to command investor attention, the market is growing more selective, according to PwC. “Infrastructure, compute, automation and monetizable AI-enabled platforms are receiving stronger support than more speculative application-layer businesses,” the firm said. That may benefit companies like Forgent and Madison Air, which count large data centers among their customers, if the IPO market rebounds as Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon predicts. “There are some very large IPOs that are lined up, and my expectation is a number of them are going to come because it’s important for those businesses and for the capital formation around those businesses,” he said Wednesday. “They are also less sensitive to short-term geopolitical trends.”