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Shares in Walgreens Boots Alliance (Nasdaq: WBA) are trading slightly higher this morning after the company reported its Q2 2025 earnings. The results, which beat on earnings and revenue, are notable as they will be one of the last earnings reports the company posts as a publicly traded company. Heres what you need to know about Walgreens’s results. Walgreens shares trading higher after Q2 2025 results As of the time of this writing, WBA shares are up about 1.72% in early-morning trading. The price rise likely reflects the fact that much of the markets are up todaya first in the past three trading days since April 2 when President Trump announced his chaotic tariffs on countries around the world. However, WBA stock is also likely rising slightly today due to the fact that the company posted beats on revenue and earnings for its second quarter of fiscal 2025. For the second quarter, Walgreens Boots Alliance announced revenues of $38.6 billiona 4.1% increase from the same quarter a year ago. The company also announced an adjusted earnings per share (EPS) of 63 centsdown from an adjusted EPS of $1.20 in the quarter a year earlier. Walgreens said that the EPS decline was due to several factors, including prior year adjusted effective tax benefit, lower U.S. retail sales and prior year sale-leaseback gains, partly offset by cost savings within U.S. Retail Pharmacy and growth in U.S. Healthcare. As noted by CNBC, despite the disappointing EPS, Walgreens still managed to beat analyst expectations. Analysts had expected an EPS of just 53 cents and revenue of $38 billion. No fiscal 2025 guidance One notable absence from Walgreens’ Q2 2025 numbers was its fiscal guidance for the rest of the financial year. The company removed its previous FY25 guidance because it is being taken private. Last month, private equity firm Sycamore Partners agreed to buy the struggling pharmacy chain for $11.45 per share. That transaction is scheduled to conclude in the final quarter of the 2025 calendar year, pending regulatory and other approvals. Walgreens had previously said in January that it had expected a full-year 2025 EPS of between $1.40 and $1.80 per share. However, in its press release for its Q2, Walgreens stated that WBAs previously issued guidance for full year fiscal 2025 should no longer be relied upon. Walgreens stock price down from 12-month highs Given that Sycamore Partners has already agreed to buy Walgreens Boots Alliance for $11.45 per share, its no wonder that the companys stock price has fluctuated little since the deal was announced last month. As a matter of fact, until Trumps tariff announcements last week, WBA stock had been relatively steady since the deal was announced. However, primarily due to global stock markets crashing in the past several days, WBA stock is currently still down about 4.7% in the past month. WBA stock is also down significantly from where it was a year ago, when it traded at over $19 per share. Since its January 2024 highs, WBA shares have fallen over 43%.
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Olja Ivanic looked forward to welcoming some cousins from Sweden to her Denver home in June. Ivanic and the four travelers were planning to go hiking in Colorado and then visit Los Angeles and San Francisco. But then President Donald Trump berated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a February meeting at the White House. Ivanics four relatives immediately canceled their scheduled trip and decided to vacation in Europe instead. The way (Trump) treated a democratic president thats in a war was beyond comprehensible to them, said Ivanic, who is the U.S. CEO of Austria-based health startup Longevity Labs. The U.S. tourism industry expected 2025 to be another good year in terms of foreign travelers. The number of international visitors to the United States jumped in 2024, and some forecasts predicted arrivals from abroad this year would reach pre-COVID levels. But three months into the year, international arrivals are plummeting. Angered by Trumps tariffs and rhetoric, and alarmed by reports of tourists being arrested at the border, some citizens of other countries are staying away from the U.S. and choosing to travel elsewhere. The federal government’s National Travel and Tourism Office released preliminary figures Tuesday showing visits to the U.S. from overseas fell 11.6% in March compared to the same month last year. The figures did not include arrivals from Canada, which is scheduled to report tourism data later this week, or land crossings from Mexico. But air travel from Mexico dropped 23%. For the January-March period, 7.1 million visitors entered the U.S. from overseas, 3.3% fewer than during the first three months of 2024. The travel forecasting company Tourism Economics, which as recently as December anticipated the U.S. would have nearly 9% more international arrivals this year, revised its annual outlook last week to predict a 9.4% decline. Tourism Economics expects some of the steepest declines will be from Canada, where Trumps repeated suggestion that the country should become the 51st state and tariffs on close trading partners have angered residents. Canada was the largest source of visitors to the U.S. in 2024, with more than 20.2 million, according to U.S. government data. Flight Centre Travel Group Canada, a travel booking site, said leisure bookings to U.S. destinations were down 40% in March compared to the same month a year ago. Air Canada has reduced its schedule of spring flights to Florida, Las Vegas, and Arizona due to lack of demand. The National Travel and Tourism Office gave a rosier forecast last month for international travel to the U.S. Based on 2024 travel patterns, the office said it expected arrivals to increase 6.5% to 77.1 million this year and surpass 2019 levels in 2026. But Tourism Economics said the impact of the less favorable view of the U.S. from abroad could be severe enough that international visits won’t surpass pre-pandemic levels until 2029. The survey data is all indicating a significant mix of cancellations and a massive drop in intent to travel, Tourism Economics President Adam Sacks said. Ian Urquhart, a professor emeritus at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, was supposed to go to Las Vegas for five days in June and see Coldplay in concert. He canceled the trip to protest Trump’s incredibly disparaging tone toward Canada even though it meant losing a $500 deposit on the vacation package. His oldest daughter similarly nixed a planned May trip to Sedona, Arizona, while his brother-in-law decided not to go on his usual weeklong golf trip to Scottsdale, Arizona, according to Urquhart. None of us jumped for joy when we made those decisions, but it seemed to be one of the few ways we could signal how we felt about the bullying that has been directed towards Canada by your president, Urquhart said. For Pepa Cuevas and her husband, who live in Madrid, Trumps election in November was a turning point. The couple had planned to spend a month skiing in Colorado over the winter holidays. They went to Japan instead. Trumps victory left us, especially me, very shocked, Cuevas said. For the moment, we have lost the desire to return. I dont know what will happen in the future, but for the moment we are still shocked, and it doesnt look like this is going to be resolved. According to the government data released Tuesday, international arrivals from China were down nearly 1%. Leisure trips by Chinese citizens to places like Disneyland, Hawaii and New York are decreasing dramatically and likely wont pick up again until Trump has left office, said Wolfgang Georg Arlt, the CEO of the China Outbound Tourism Research Institute. He dubs it the Trump Slump. That slump has financial consequences. Tourism Economics expects U.S. spending by international visitors to drop by $9 billion this year. Marco Jahn is the president and CEO of New World Travel, a California company that works with overseas tour operators on vacation packages and activity planning. It arranges the hotels and rental cars for a family that wants to take a driving tour of U.S. national parks, for example. Jahn said bookings have dropped between 20% and 50%, depending on the source market, over the last eight to 10 weeks. He notes particular declines from Scandinavia, where Trumps repeated threat to take control of Greenland, a self-governing territory of NATO ally Denmark, has antagonized citizens. The U.S. is not perceived as a welcoming destination, Jahn said. Beyond, a revenue management platform for vacation rental owners, said Canadian searches for short-term rentals in the U.S. plunged 44% after Feb. 1, when Trump first announced a since-paused 25% tariff on goods from Canada and Mexico. Florida, Texas, and New York were among the hardest-hit markets, Beyond said. American Ring Travel, a tour operator based in California, offers carbon-neutral bus tours of the U.S. that often attract eco-conscious travelers from Europe, said Richard Groesz, the companys director of contracting. But bookings from Germany flattened starting in January after Elon Musk threw his support behind a far-right political party in that countrys federal election, Groesz said. There are other issues impacting foreign visits. The U.S. has been the top destination by country for Japanese tourists for years, but data ompiled by JTB Tourism Research & Consulting showed South Korea topped the U.S. in January. The weak yen not Trump is likely the biggest factor dampening the attraction of the U.S., said Takaaki Mitamura, a spokesperson for Tokyo-based travel agent Veltra Corp. Travelers are picking destinations where the currency effect isnt as big, like South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and Australia, he said. Haruka Atomiya, a Tokyo resident, visits Los Angeles at least once a year. Last year, she brought her young children for the first time and did a lot of research to find affordable places to stay. The exchange rate made some hotels double or triple the price she paid in the past. Atomiya, who went to college in Vermont, has always loved the diversity and the freedom in the U.S. She said she doesnt understand why Americans elected Trump, but doesnt plan to stop visiting unless she senses any physical danger. If America changes in a way thats clearly visible, thats a reality, too, and I will likely keep visiting, she said. What will happen to America after Trump intrigues me. Dee-Ann Durbin, AP business writer AP Writers Yuri Kageyama and Teresa Medrano contributed to this report.
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Understanding intelligence and creating intelligent machines are grand scientific challenges of our times. The ability to learn from experience is a cornerstone of intelligence for machines and living beings alike. In a remarkably prescient 1948 report, Alan Turingthe father of modern computer scienceproposed the construction of machines that display intelligent behavior. He also discussed the education of such machines by means of rewards and punishments. Turings ideas ultimately led to the development of reinforcement learning, a branch of artificial intelligence. Reinforcement learning designs intelligent agents by training them to maximize rewards as they interact with their environment. As a machine learning researcher, I find it fitting that reinforcement learning pioneers Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton were awarded the 2024 ACM Turing Award. What is reinforcement learning? Animal trainers know that animal behavior can be influenced by rewarding desirable behaviors. A dog trainer gives the dog a treat when it does a trick correctly. This reinforces the behavior, and the dog is more likely to do the trick correctly the next time. Reinforcement learning borrowed this insight from animal psychology. But reinforcement learning is about training computational agents, not animals. The agent can be a software agent like a chess-playing program. But the agent can also be an embodied entity like a robot learning to do household chores. Similarly, the environment of an agent can be virtual, like the chessboard or the designed world in a video game. But it can also be a house where a robot is working. Just like animals, an agent can perceive aspects of its environment and take actions. A chess-playing agent can access the chessboard configuration and make moves. A robot can sense its surroundings with cameras and microphones. It can use its motors to move about in the physical world. Agents also have goals that their human designers program into them. A chess-playing agents goal is to win the game. A robots goal might be to assist its human owner with household chores. The reinforcement learning problem in AI is how to design agents that achieve their goals by perceiving and acting in their environments. Reinforcement learning makes a bold claim: All goals can be achieved by designing a numerical signal, called the reward, and having the agent maximize the total sum of rewards it receives. Researchers do not know if this claim is actually true, because of the wide variety of possible goals. Therefore, it is often referred to as the reward hypothesis. Sometimes it is easy to pick a reward signal corresponding to a goal. For a chess-playing agent, the reward can be +1 for a win, 0 for a draw, and -1 for a loss. It is less clear how to design a reward signal for a helpful household robotic assistant. Nevertheless, the list of applications where reinforcement learning researchers have been able to design good reward signals is growing. A big success of reinforcement learning was in the board game Go. Researchers thought that Go was much harder than chess for machines to master. The company DeepMind, now Google DeepMind, used reinforcement learning to create AlphaGo. AlphaGo defeated top Go player Lee Sedol in a five-match game in 2016. A more recent example is the use of reinforcement learning to make chatbots such as ChatGPT more helpful. Reinforcement learning is also being used to improve the reasoning capabilities of chatbots. Reinforcement learnings origins However, none of these successes could have been foreseen in the 1980s. That is when Barto and his then-PhD student Sutton proposed reinforcement learning as a general problem-solving framework. They drew inspiration not only from animal psychology but also from the field of control theory, the use of feedback to influence a systems behavior, and optimization, a branch of mathematics that studies how to select the best choice among a range of available options. They provided the research community with mathematical foundations that have stood the test of time. They also created algorithms that have now become standard tools in the field. It is a rare advantage for a field when pioneers take the time to write a textbook. Shining examples like The Nature of the Chemical Bond by Linus Pauling and The Art of Computer Programming by Donald E. Knuth are memorable because they are few and far between. Sutton and Bartos Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction was first published in 1998. A second edition came out in 2018. Their book has influenced a generation of researchers and has been cited more than 75,000 times. Reinforcement learning has also had an unexpected impact on neuroscience. The neurotransmitter dopamine plays a key role in reward-driven behaviors in humans and animals. Researchers have used specific algorithms developed in reinforcement learning to explain experimental findings in people and animals dopamine system. Barto and Suttons foundational work, vision and advocacy have helped reinforcement learning grow. Their work has inspired a large body of research, made an impact on real-world applications, and attracted huge investments by tech companies. Reinforcement learning researchers, Im sure, will continue to see further ahead by standing on their shoulders. Ambuj Tewari is a professor of statistics at the University of Michigan. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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