Even with worries about expensive oil and high inflation, the U.S. stock market has run to records largely because U.S. companies keep making more money. Stock prices tend to follow the path of corporate profits over the long term, and companies have been routinely topping analysts’ expectations for the first three months of 2026.

Dollar Tree’s stock soared 18.1% after it became the latest to report fatter profit than analysts expected. CEO Mike Creedon said improved store conditions helped the retailer make more profit off each $1 in sales during the latest quarter despite tariffs adding to its costs. The company also gave a forecast for profit over the full year that topped analysts’ expectations.

Kohl’s rallied 16.3% after the retailer reported better results for the latest quarter than analysts had feared, while Best Buy climbed 15.9% following its own better-than-expected profit report. Hormel Foods climbed 9.8% after a strong performance for its Jennie-O ground turkey and exports of its Spam luncheon meat helped it report a better profit than analysts expected.

Snowflake rose 34.1% after saying artificial intelligence continues to be a strong driver of its business, and profit and revenue for the latest quarter exceeded expectations.

They helped offset a dip for Marvell Technology, which fell 1.3% after its profit for the latest quarter only matched analysts’ expectations. It also said AI is driving big revenue growth for it, particularly its data center business.

In the oil market, prices ticked higher following their latest U-turns. The price for a barrel of benchmark U.S. crude oil rose 1.2% to $89.76, but only after bouncing between $87 and $92. It’s been swinging as hopes rise and fall that the United States and Iran may reach a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and get oil flowing again from the Persian Gulf to customers worldwide.

The yield on the 10-year Treasury fell to 4.46% from 4.48% late Wednesday after giving up an earlier gain.

Data also showed how U.S. households are less able to save money, with the personal savings rate down to a four-year low of 2.6%, “pointing up the financial pressure on lower- and middle-income families,” according to Gary Schlossberg, global strategist at Wells Fargo Investment Institute.

A report on Thursday said the pace of sales of new U.S. homes unexpectedly slowed last month, as the weight of higher mortgage rates hurts the market.

In stock markets abroad, indexes dipped across much of Europe and Asia. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng fell 1.3% for one of the world’s larger losses.

___

Business Writer Elaine Kurtenbach contributed to this report.

“You were privy to his struggle with addiction,” said Judge Sherilyn Peace Garnett, who handed down the sentence to the 60-year-old Kenneth Iwamasa in federal court in Los Angeles. “Your conduct was reckless, not just on the day of his death but in the days leading up to his death.”

Iwamasa was the last person sentenced of the five who pleaded guilty in the investigation and prosecution that followed Perry’s death at age 54 on Oct. 28, 2023. The group included corrupt doctors and a major street dealer, “Ketamine Queen” Jasveen Sangha, whose 15-year sentence was the only one longer than Iwamasa’s.

The assistant was constantly at Perry’s side in his final days, acting as the actor’s enabler, drug messenger and de facto doctor. He was the last person to see Perry alive, and he was the one who found him dead in his Jacuzzi. He would eventually become prosecutors’ most important informant.

How much blame for an assistant to an addict?

Wednesday’s nearly three-hour hearing was largely a debate between lawyers for both sides, the judge and Perry’s loved ones over the level of responsibility that can be put on the employee of a powerful person when addiction is in the mix.

“His loyalty to Mr. Perry was paramount,” Iwamasa’s lawyer, Alan Eisner, told the judge. “He worshipped Mr. Perry, he looked up to Mr. Perry. All he did was please and accommodate Mr. Perry.”

Eisner argued for a six-month prison term with six months of home confinement.

“Mr. Perry was not blameless,” the lawyer said. “Nobody likes to hear that.”

When Eisner said Iwamasa was unable to act differently than he did, the judge cut him off and said: “Unwilling. Not unable. He could have said no.”

Perry’s mother and sisters made it clear in letters to the judge that there is no one, not even Perry himself, who they blame for his death more than Iwamasa — a longtime friend they thought would help the actor maintain sobriety.

Perry’s stepfather, longtime “Dateline” journalist Keith Morrison, spoke for the family at the sentencing.

“We really felt that he was part of the family,” Morrison said. “We trusted him implicitly.”

Morrison acknowledged the power imbalance, but said Iwamasa still had a choice.

“You did the injections. You could have made the phone call,” he said. “But you didn’t. Because you were living a dandy life.” He added, “You were in control of one of the most famous people in the world.”

‘The monster that killed him’

Lisa Ferguson, Perry’s business manager for most of his career and now his estate executor, painted a darker picture, saying Iwamasa deliberately drove out everyone else surrounding Perry, including sober-living companions and medical workers, to shore up his own power and influence. She angrily said he used Perry’s addiction to his own advantage.

“What you are is the monster that killed him,” Ferguson said. She said he had shown “not a shred of guilt or remorse” since Perry’s death, and that he ought to “rot in prison.”

“Matthew deserved to live,” she said. “You don’t.”

Iwamasa looked right at Morrison and Ferguson throughout their remarks, and made the unusual move of facing Perry’s family and friends in the audience when he spoke.

“I’m horribly, horribly sorry, and I offer my condolences to you,” he said. “I’m just so sorry to have done these illegal acts that I will forever regret.”

Iwamasa wore a charcoal-gray suit, with his long white hair combed back. He had no visible reaction to the sentence. His father and brother sat in the audience with other supporters.

Iwamasa comes clean to police, faces the spotlight

At first, Iwamasa lied to police and got rid of evidence of ketamine use. But after investigators served a search warrant on the house in January of 2024, he began coming clean. By that August he had pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to distribute ketamine resulting in death.

That came quietly before any Perry-related indictments were announced, and Wednesday was Iwamasa’s first time under the intense public spotlight surrounding the case. He stood in front of dozens of cameras outside the courthouse as Eisner spoke for him, saying that the sentence was excessive and didn’t reflect the dynamic between the two men.

“One person had the power. One person had no power,” the lawyer said.

Morrison said outside court he was satisfied that the family could get the sentencing behind them.

But, he added, “It doesn’t change the fact that we’ve lost him, that he’s dead, and that my wife is broken.”

The sentence was exactly what prosecutors sought, though Garnett disagreed with them on the details. She found Iwamasa did not abuse a position of trust, which could’ve brought more prison time, saying that category was generally reserved for professionals and experts. She found that he had not benefited financially from the crime, though acknowledged he did from the relationship with Perry.

She also told Iwamasa, “there is no hard evidence that you acted with malicious intent, though some would disagree.”

His sentence also included a $10,000 fine and two years of probation. He was ordered to return to go to prison on July 17.

The 14-year-old from Rancho Cucamonga, California, works with three coaches. He pays for word lists and study guides. He tries to learn every Greek and Latin root, every language pattern, every spelling bee-worthy word he can find. And he competes throughout the year in online bees that pit him against the country’s other top spellers.

Shrey’s proach has proven effective for spellers seeking to hold the trophy, and on Wednesday he became one of nine spellers who got through the semifinals and will compete in the finals Thursday night.

But at least one other finalist has gone old-school, shunning outside help and using the dictionary as his guide.

“At the end of finals, most of the words aren’t going to have a really clean-cut language pattern or rule that you can pull from. So I think memorization is really important,” said Sam Evans, who coached each of the past two champions. “Sometimes it gets a bad reputation, but you have to do it.”

Every word is in the dictionary, if you can find it

Sarv Dharavane might be the next of that group.

Sarv finished third in 2025 as a relative unknown in the spelling community. There’s a reason for that. The 12-year-old sixth-grader from Dunwoody, Georgia, has no coach. He doesn’t participate in online bees. And his only study guide is the source for every word in the competition: Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged dictionary.

“The book is my coach,” Sarv said.

Given his past success, he saw no reason to change it up. And he’s back in the finals.

“I didn’t really change anything because my strategy got me far last year, but I did more of what I did before,” Sarv said.

“I used to read the dictionary and set aside difficult words to study later,” he explained. “I did it a lot, so I got a lot of words and it was really easy just to go through them. I’ve always been able to remember pretty well, and I can read through long lists without getting tired, so this strategy works pretty well for me.”

Simple, right?

Many spellers think there’s a better way.

Master the roots, and you don’t need to memorize as much

Shah accepted that he could never memorize the dictionary — “No one can,” he said — and he believed if he got a word he didn’t know, he could figure it out.

“The skill of guessing is everything,” he wrote in a Washington Post op-ed after his victory.

In an interview Wednesday, Shah said memorization was important, especially for quirky words with obscure origins. He said the best spellers, including Avant-garde, found a balance between memorization and mastery.

Having a conceptual understanding of how words are spelled can also help spellers perform under pressure when their memory fails them, said Shah, who admitted he finds it daunting to memorize a huge volume of words.

Former champion Sohum Sukhatankar, who coaches Shrey, said spellers need to fill their brains with the most useful information.

“When you’re at the highest level, you have to be prepared for hundreds of thousands of words,” he said. “You want to do as little memorization as possible to avoid the chance that you just forget it, so it’s all about efficiency.”

After a catastrophic school bee, one speller seeks every edge

Shrey knows he might have to guess when he’s at the microphone, but he wants to eliminate variables. That makes sense, given that a year ago, he wasn’t even the top speller at his school.

“I had a fever at my school bee last year, and I just blanked on the word ‘calipers’ … and I missed it,” he said. “I was really devastated.”

It took a few months before Shrey was motivated to start studying again. Once he did, he added Sukhatankar to his coaching team. He’s learned how to slow down when he’s at the microphone because of a bad experience in 2023, when he rushed through a word, didn’t enunciate it clearly and judges determined he got it wrong.

He’s also a believer in study guides. Shrey said an interactive, AI-assisted platform called Onyma that offers personalized learning and competition with other spellers — launched this month by Sukhatankar and Evans — has helped with his preparation.

Shrey won the annual SpellPundit bee, the South Asian Spelling Bee and several other online bees, which he doesn’t necessarily see as an advantage.

“I feel like it (creates) more pressure to perform,” he said.

Evans believes spellers who want to win should use their study time efficiently, but there’s no barrier to learning every possible word.

“There’s a common joke among spellers that says everything’s in the dictionary, so it’s all ‘on-list,’” he said. “The dictionary is the most basic thing that spellers need to know.”

___