By Amy Miller ( September 15, 2025, 23:52 GMT | Insight) — The deep-pocketed tech industry has proven once again that it can block efforts to regulate artificial intelligence, even in California. Even though California legislators approved more than a dozen bills aimed at regulating AI, from chatbot safety, to transparency, to data centers, several proposals attempting to put guardrails around AI died after facing concerted opposition, including the closely watched Automated Decisions Safety Act, which would have set new rules for AI systems that make consequential decisions about individuals.The deep-pocketed tech industry has proven once again that it can block efforts to regulate artificial intelligence, even in California….
AI Insights
Prediction: This Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stock Will Beat Opendoor Technologies over the Next 3 Years
Opendoor has been on a tear, but this fintech stock looks like a better long-term winner.
Opendoor Technologies (OPEN -13.59%) dazzled investors over the last three months like few other stocks. The online home-flipper jumped an incredible 1,400% over the last three months, going from a little over $0.50 a share to more than $10 at one point.
The rally began with hedge-fund manager Eric Jackson making the case that the stock could be the next Carvana, which jumped to almost 100 times its original price after nearly going bankrupt in 2022. That argument gained steam online and helped turn Opendoor into a meme stock, as it initially surged on high volume and no news.
Since then, the stock gained on real news. That includes the prospect of the Federal Reserve lowering interest rates next week and later in the year, and the company’s board overhauling its management team. In August, embattled CEO Carrie Wheeler stepped down; after hours on Wednesday, Opendoor named Shopify chief operating officer Kaz Nejatian as its new CEO, which sent the stock up 80% on Thursday.
Additionally, the company said that co-founders Keith Rabois and Eric Wu were rejoining the board of directors, and ventures associated with them were investing $40 million into Opendoor. It’s easy to see how that news would inject enthusiasm into the stock, especially after it was on the verge of being delisted by the Nasdaq stock exchange earlier.
However, nothing’s really changed for Opendoor as a business in the last three months. The company never reported a full-year profit, and the business is expected to shrink this quarter due to the weak housing market.
It’s still a high risk with a questionable business model. If you’re looking for a similar stock that can capitalize on falling interest rates, I think that Upstart Holdings (UPST 1.54%) is a better bet, and that it can outperform Opendoor over the next three years.
Image source: Getty Images.
Upstart’s opportunity
Upstart has a number of things in common with Opendoor. Both went public around the same time in 2020, and initially surged out of the gate before plunging in 2022 as interest rates rose and tech stocks crashed.
Upstart is a loan originator. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) technology to screen applicants, producing results it claims are significantly better than traditional FICO scores. Once it creates a loan, it typically sells it to one of its funding partners, so it doesn’t keep the debt on its books.
Like Opendoor’s, Upstart’s business was struggling back in 2022, but the company revamped its business with the help of an improved AI model that increased conversion rates for its loans. Even in a high-interest-rate environment, it’s delivering strong revenue growth. And it’s now profitable based on generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP).
Revenue in the second quarter jumped 102% to $257 million, on a 159% increase in transaction volume. The company reported GAAP net income of $5.6 million, and for the full year, it expects that to be $35 million.
Upstart built its business around consumer loans, but it’s been expanding rapidly into auto and home loans. The home loan market, where it could potentially compete with Opendoor, is massive. In the second quarter, Upstart’s home originations grew nearly 800% from the year-ago quarter to $68 million. That’s still a small fraction of its business, but there’s clearly more growth ahead in the home loan market for Upstart.
Upstart vs. Opendoor
Upstart and Opendoor have similar market caps following Opendoor’s surge. Upstart is valued at $6.1 billion as of Friday, while Opendoor’s market cap is $6.7 billion.
Both companies are also chasing massive addressable markets, and are likely to benefit from lower interest rates.
However, Upstart is the only one of the two that has proven it can grow in a challenging macro environment, and its business now looks set for consistent profitability. At Opendoor, meanwhile, there are real questions about whether home-flipping can scale up as a business model and deliver a consistent profit. Notably, both Zillow Group and Redfin (a subsidiary of Rocket Companies) bowed out of the iBuying competition, finding it too difficult and prone to large losses.
Given those differences, despite the fanfare over Opendoor, Upstart looks like the better bet today. Over the next three years, Upstart looks set to be the winner of the two.
Jeremy Bowman has positions in Carvana, Rocket Companies, Shopify, and Upstart. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Shopify, Upstart, and Zillow Group. The Motley Fool recommends Nasdaq and Rocket Companies. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
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AI Insights
This Artificial Intelligence (AI) ETF Has Outperformed the Market By 2.4X Since Inception and Only Holds Profitable Companies
For well under $100, you can buy one share of this under-the-radar AI exchange-traded fund (ETF) that looks poised to continue to outperform the market.
For this article, I asked myself: Where would I start investing if I had less than $100 to invest?
Image source: Getty Images.
An AI ETF that’s concentrated and full of leading and profitable companies
This answer to my question popped into my head: I’d want a concentrated exchange-traded fund (ETF) focused on leading and profitable companies heavily involved in artificial intelligence (AI), but with enough differences among themselves.
Why an ETF? Because I’d not want to put all my (investing) eggs in one basket.
Why AI? Because it’s poised to be the biggest secular trend in many decades or even generations.
Why concentrated? Because I believe if investors are going to buy a very diversified ETF, they might as well buy the entire market, so to speak, and buy an S&P 500 index ETF. Indeed, buying an S&P 500 index fund is a good idea for many investors, and recommended by investing legend Warren Buffett. That said, over the long run, I think an AI ETF full of only leading and profitable companies will beat the S&P 500 index.
Roundhill Magnificent Seven ETF (MAGS): Overview
And bingo! There is such an ETF — the Roundhill Magnificent Seven ETF (MAGS 1.92%). It has seven holdings — the so-called “Magnificent Seven” stocks: Alphabet (GOOG 4.38%) (GOOGL 4.53%), Amazon (AMZN 1.42%), Apple (AAPL 1.06%), Meta Platforms (META 1.18%), Microsoft (MSFT 1.01%), Nvidia (NVDA -0.10%), and Tesla (TSLA 3.54%). This ETF closed at $62.93 per share on Friday, Sept. 12.
These megacap stocks (stocks with market caps over $200 billion) were given the Magnificent Seven name a couple of years ago by a Wall Street analyst due to their strong growth and large influence on the overall market. The name comes from the title of a 1960 Western film.
Two other main traits I like about this ETF:
- Its expense ratio is reasonable at 0.29%.
- It provides equal-weight exposure to the seven stocks. At each quarterly rebalancing, the stocks will be reset to an equal weighting of about 14.28% (100% divided by 7).
Since its inception in April 2023 (almost 2.5 years), the Roundhill Magnificent Seven ETF has returned 160% — 2.4 times the S&P 500’s 65.9% return.
Roundhill Magnificent Seven ETF (MAGS): All stock holdings
Stocks are listed in order of current weight in portfolio. Keep in mind the ETF is rebalanced quarterly to make stocks equally weighted.
|
Holding No. |
Company |
Market Cap |
Wall Street’s Projected Annualized EPS Growth Over Next 5 Years |
Weight (% of Portfolio) |
1 Year/ 10-Year Returns |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
1 |
Alphabet | $2.9 trillion | 14.7% | 17.72% | 55.9% / 677% |
|
2 |
Nvidia | $4.3 trillion | 34.9% | 15.00% | 49.3% / 32,210% |
|
3 |
Apple | $3.5 trillion | 8.8% | 14.13% | 5.6% / 812% |
|
4 |
Tesla | $1.3 trillion | 13.4% | 13.81% | 72.3% / 2,270% |
|
5 |
Amazon | $2.4 trillion | 18.6% | 13.30% | 22% / 762% |
| 6 | Meta Platforms | $1.9 trillion | 12.9% | 13.16% | 44.3% / 725% |
| 7 | Microsoft | $3.8 trillion | 16.6% | 12.76% | 20.3% / 1,250% |
|
Overall ETF |
N/A |
Total net assets of $2.86 billion |
N/A |
100% |
40.5% / N/A |
|
N/A |
S&P 500 |
N/A |
N/A |
N/A |
19.2% / 300% |
Data sources: Roundhill Magnificent Seven ETF, finviz.com, and YCharts. EPS = earnings per share. Data as of Sept. 12, 2025.
All these companies are profitable leaders in their core markets, and heavily involved in AI. Nvidia produces AI tech that enables others to use AI, while the other companies mainly use AI to improve their existing products and develop new ones.
Alphabet’s Google is the world leader in internet search. Its cloud computing business is No. 3 in the world, behind Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. The company also has other businesses, notably its driverless vehicle subsidiary, Waymo. (You can read here why I believe Nvidia is the best driverless vehicle stock.)
Nvidia is often described as the world’s leading maker of AI chips — and that it is. But it’s much more. It’s the world leader in supplying technology infrastructure for enabling AI. It’s also the global leader in graphics processing units (GPUs) for computer gaming.
Apple’s iPhone holds the No. 2 spot in the global smartphone market, behind Samsung. However, it dominates the U.S. market. The company’s services business is attractive, as it consists of recurring revenue and has been steadily growing.
Amazon operates the world’s No. 1 e-commerce business and the world’s No. 1 cloud computing business. It also has many other businesses, notably its Fresh and Amazon Prime Now (Whole Foods) grocery delivery operations.
Meta Platforms operates the world’s leading social media site, Facebook, as well as Instagram, Threads, and messaging app WhatsApp.
Microsoft’s Word has long been the world’s leading word processing software. Word is part of Microsoft Office, a suite of popular software for personal computers (PCs). Its Azure is the world’s second-largest cloud computing business.
Tesla remains the No. 1 electric vehicle (EV) maker, by far, in the U.S. despite struggling recently. In the first half of 2025, China’s BYD surpassed Tesla as the world’s leader in all-electric vehicles by number of units sold. CEO Elon Musk touts that the company’s robotaxi and Optimus humanoid robot businesses will eventually be larger than its EV sales business.
In short, the Roundhill Magnificent Seven ETF is poised to continue to benefit from the growth of artificial intelligence. Technically, it doesn’t have a long-term history. But if it had existed many years ago, it’s easy to tell that its long-term performance would be very strong because the long-term performances of all its holdings have been anywhere from great to spectacular.
Beth McKenna has positions in Nvidia. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla. The Motley Fool recommends BYD Company and recommends the following options: long January 2026 $395 calls on Microsoft and short January 2026 $405 calls on Microsoft. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
OpenAI is rolling out the GPT-5 Codex model to all Codex instances, including Terminal, IDE extension, and Codex Web (chatgpt.com/codex).
Codex is an AI agent that allows you to automate coding-related tasks. You can delegate your complex tasks to Codex and watch it execute code for you.
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Source: BleepingComputer.com
Even if you don’t know programming languages, you can use Codex to “vibe code” your apps and web apps.
But so far, it has fallen a bit short of Claude Code, which is the market leader in the AI coding space.
Today, OpenAI confirmed it’s rolling out the Codex-special GPT-5 model.
In a blog post, OpenAI stated the GPT-5 Codex model excels in real-world coding tasks, achieving a 74.5% success rate on the SWE-bench Verified benchmark.
In code refactoring evaluations, it improved from 33.9% with GPT-5 to 51.3% with GPT-5-Codex.
GPT-5-Codex is still rolling out. I don’t see it on my Terminal yet, even though I pay for ChatGPT Plus ($20).
OpenAI says it will be fully rolled out to everyone in the coming days.
46% of environments had passwords cracked, nearly doubling from 25% last year.
Get the Picus Blue Report 2025 now for a comprehensive look at more findings on prevention, detection, and data exfiltration trends.
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