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Cash App wants you to take a dip into its newest feature: Pools. The company announced the launch of a new pools feature Tuesday, which allows users toyou guessed itpool their money and make group payments. For instance, it can be used to pay for a dinner with friends, a vacation, or even to collect money for a birthday or wedding gift. Owen Jennings, Business Lead at Block, Cash Apps parent company, says that implementing pools was something of a no-brainer, since they were able to simply look at how their users were utilizing the app, and create a new feature to facilitate the behavior the Cash App team was seeing. Its really, really common behavior, we see more than half of our customers engaging in pooling behavior, he says of Cash App users sending money to each other to pay for a single, larger expense. To some extent, weve just built something thats custom for this specific use-case. Jennings adds that what hes particularly excited about, in terms of pools, is that for the first time, were allowing out-of-network contributions, which means some users dont even need to have Cash App in order to participate. In those cases, their friends can send them a link to a Cash App pool, and the out-of-network participants can use Apple Pay or Google Pay to contribute. While pools is an active feature for a subset of Cash App users currently, there is a wider rollout planned for the coming months. Jennings also mentions that launching new features and products, such as pools, is the primary way that Cash App, and Block at large, have grown its customer base and deepened engagement with current customers. Folks typically come in because of our peer-to-peer features, he says, and increasingly attach to additional features. In that sense, the company is seeing a payoff. Blockwhich was founded by CEO Jack Dorsey (perhaps most well-known for founding Twitter) in 2009 and is also the parent company of Square, Afterpay, TIDAL, Proto, and Bitkeyhas grown enough to become the latest entrant into the S&P 500. Investors evidently liked that news, too, because the companys stock has popped recentlyshares are up nearly 24% over the past month, as of writing.
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German semiconductor materials supplier Siltronic on Tuesday lowered its full-year sales guidance and warned on sales in the next quarter, amidst continued weakness in its semiconductor business and high customer inventories. The group now expects sales to be in the mid-single-digit percentage range below the previous year, having previously guided towards sales being in the same region as the previous year. Shares in Siltronic, which have fallen 11.3% since the start of the year including today’s session, were down 7% as at 1014 GMT. In 2024, the company, which makes silicon wafers used in semiconductor chips, achieved revenue of 1.41 billion euros ($1.63 billion), which was 7% below the previous year. Siltronic, whose customers include Infineon, Intel, Samsung, and TSMC, also said it expects third-quarter sales to be below the previous quarter’s level, due to shifts in delivery volumes in 2025, most of which have been postponed to the fourth-quarter. Its second-quarter revenue amounted to 329.1 million euros, down from 351.3 million euros a year earlier. That was ahead of analysts’ average forecast of 322 million euros, according to a poll by LSEG. On a conference call with analysts, CEO Michael Heckmeier said that high customer inventories were an issue across the entire industry. Semiconductor materials suppliers have suffered from slower than expected customer inventories reductions. “We are stable, there’s no indication that we are doing significantly better or worse than our peers,” he said. U.S. President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs and uncertainty over his trade policies have sent global markets into a tailspin and significantly dampened investors’ economic optimism. Analysts at Jefferies said in a note that the U.S. and European Union agreement still poses some questions on the potential impact on wafers. Last week, ASML, the world’s biggest supplier of computer chip-making equipment, also warned that it may not achieve revenue growth in 2026 as chipmakers building factories in the U.S. await clarity on the potential impact of tariffs. ($1 = 0.8631 euros) Ozan Ergenay, Reuters
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Want more housing market stories from Lance Lamberts ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. In a normal housing market environment, giant homebuilder PulteGroupwhich is worth $23 billionspends $18,000 to $21,000 on incentives on a $600,000 home sale. But with affordability strained and housing market softness spreading, the homebuilding giant is now shelling out closer to $52,200 per sale of a home of that value. Incentives for the second quarter were 8.7% of gross sales price, which is up from 6.3% last year, and on a sequential basis [quarter-over-quarter] up from 8.0%, Jim Ossowski, CFO of PulteGroup, said during the builders July 22 earnings call. Ever since mortgage rates spiked in mid-2022, which followed a historic run-up in U.S. home prices during the Pandemic Housing Boom, U.S. housing affordability has been strained. In housing markets where that affordability strain has manifested into spiked active inventory/months of supply and soft/falling home prices, giant homebuilders have leaned into doing bigger incentives, in particular, mortgage rate buydowns to pull in priced-out homebuyers and keep sales going. Of course, given the widespread housing market softeningmost acute over the past year in parts of the West, Southwest, and Southeastmany homebuilders, including PulteGroup, have further increased their incentive spending to prevent a deeper pullback in home sales. We have responded to these conditions by adjusting [net] sales prices where necessary and focusing sales incentives on closing cost incentives, especially mortgage interest rate buydowns, wrote PulteGroup in its earnings report published on July 22. That strategy has led to some additional builder gross-profit compression. PulteGroups gross margin in Q2 2025 still came in at 27.0%. While thats down from the cycle high of 31.3% at the end of the Pandemic Housing Boom in Q2 2022, it remains above pre-pandemic levels seen in Q2 2018 (24.0%) and Q2 2019 (23.1%). (Some builders, like Lennar, have seen greater margin compression.) Are bigger incentives essentially falling home prices? Sometimes, yes. Sometimes, no. In some cases, increased incentive spending is effectively a price cutjust delivered in a less visible way. But not always. Since 2022, part of the rise in incentive spending in some markets has come from homebuilders increasing base home prices and then using some of that additional revenue to fund incentives. That said, based on PulteGroups own commentary and the visible margin compression, its clear that in at least some markets, its increased incentive spending is functioning as a net effective price cut. Instead of bigger incentives, why dont homebuilders like PulteGroup just do bigger outright home price cuts? Some homebuilders prefer offering larger incentives rather than outright price cuts to protect community comps. Outright price cuts can sometimes complicate future sales and upset homebuyers currently in the backlog. Another reason more homebuilders are leaning into bigger incentives is because large builders claim theres currently arbitrage in financial markets, where every $1 spent on a mortgage rate buydown delivers a greater monthly payment reduction for the buyer than a $1 home price cut. “The focus still has been on rates and rate buydowns [rather than outright price cuts] and keeping consistency of that. And if we see a little weakness in a market or buy community, we may adjust further down, but [its] still more advantageous to the buyer and the cost is less to increase the rate buy down than to cut the price, D.R. Horton CEO Paul Romanowski told investors in April. Why does $1 spent on mortgage rate buydowns by builders create more payment savings right now than a $1 price cut? The answer is a little wonky. Heres the in-depth breakdown by housing analyst Kevin Erdmannwho is the author of the Erdmann Housing Tracker. As Erdmann explains to ResiClub: One reason that mortgage rates are higher than treasuries is that they have prepayment risk. If interest rates go up, the investors are stuck with fixed income that is lower than the new market rate. If interest rates go down, the borrowers refinance and the investors dont get the extra income from the higher fixed rates. So they charge an extra spread for prepayment risk. When short term rates are higher than [long-term rates], like they are now, the prepayment spread is higher because they expect mortgage rates to drop at some point in the future and the borrowers to refinance. If the builders arrange the terms so that the buyers are paying [a] 4% or 5% [mortgag rate] out of the gate, they [the borrower] arent going to prepay [because theyre less likely to refi] and so the prepayment spread is very low. From the borrowers perspective, the rate buydown only pays off slowly over time as you make the payments based on the low rate. They are incentivized not to refinance, sell the home, or pay the loan off early, so the expected duration of the mortgages is much longer. The builder and borrower can pocket the gains from the lower prepayment spread.” What risks do builder buydowns pose to homebuyers? While mortgage rate buydowns can offer meaningful monthly payment relief, they could also come with trade-offs. If a buyer accepts a builder buydown instead of negotiating a lower sale price, they may be locking in a deal (depending on the terms) that only pays off if mortgage rates stay elevated. Should rates fall soon after closing, that buyer may find themselves unable to benefit fully from refinancing. In that scenario, a lower sale price or another form of incentive might have offered more long-term value. Another risk is overpaying for the buydown. If a buyer stretches their budget or accepts a higher purchase price to secure the incentive, they could be more vulnerable to ending up underwaterowing more than the home is worthif local home prices decline and they need to sell within a few years. Speaking to analysts last month, KB Homewhich tends to favor direct price reductions over incentives when affordability adjustments are neededindeed warned that some buyers opting for competitors rate buydown deals may be overpaying for new homes. If those buyers need to sell soon, they could struggle to recoup the inflated base price tied to the incentive-heavy purchase. “I believe that there are customers [of other homebuilders] that are overpaying for the home to effectively get an incentive. So they’re tied into this higher price that they’re gonna be stuck with forever until they sell that home. They may potentially be upside down when they try to sell that home versus a clean, simple, transparent way of sellingthe value of what we offer, KB Home COO Rob McGibney said on the company’s June earnings call. Builder buydowns have lost a little of their magic lately Over the past year, many public homebuilders have seen mortgage rate buydowns lose some of their magicat least compared to early 2023, when buydowns played a key role in firming up new construction sales. I think the commentary that youve heard from us is that theres actually inelasticity in, you know, pricing. And that more incentives dont necessarily translate into incremental volume. So were trying to get incentives, you know, to the level where we get the appropriate level of volume. But pouring more incentives on top of that doesnt necessarily translate into the incremental volume that would justify those incentives. So, you know, thats why weve tried to continue to maintain some discipline around what were doing on the incentive load, Ryan Marshall, CEO of PulteGroup, said during the builders July 22 earnings call. Marshall added: We think the opportunity is to bring incentives lower over time. Were clearly not there right now, but, you know, I would long for the days of, you know, more normal incentive loads of 3.0% to 3.5%. Note: Net of incentives, PulteGroups average sale price was $559,000 in Q2 2025which is why we used $600,000 in the hypothetical example in the articles intro.
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