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Spotify Technology (SPOT) on Friday announced a new lower-priced subscription plan in the U.S.

The streaming audio service said its Basic plan would cost $10.99 per month, and subscribers would get the same ad-free music available with its Premium Individual plan, but not access to audiobooks.

The Premium Individual option provides 15 hours per month of audiobook listening time. Spotify just raised its price from $10.99 to $11.99 earlier this month. The company also upped the cost of its Premium Duo plan by $2.00 to $16.99, and its Premium Family plan by $3.00 to $19.99.

Last week, reported that Spotify would launch a new “Supremium” plan later this year that would offer better audio and new ways for users to create playlists and manage their song libraries. The upgrade would be at least $5 a month more, with the rate depending on the subscriber’s base plan.

Spotify shares gained 1.2% to close Friday at $317.77. The stock has gained nearly 70% since the start of the year.

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A popular personality on Facebook has revealed that she wouldn’t accept Davido as husband if he was offered to her for free.

She made her statement as she took a swipe at his bride-to-be Chioma over the singer’s many controversies with women.

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Sales of previously owned homes fell in May for the third straight month as prices climbed to a record high, according to the National Association of Realtors (NAR).

The NAR reported existing home sales dropped 0.7% in May from April to an annualized rate of 4.11 million, the lowest level since January. They were down 2.8% from a year ago.

The group said that the median price jumped 5.8% from 2023 to $419,300, an all-time high. The rise marked the 11th consecutive month of year-over-year price hikes. 

NAR Chief Economist Lawrence Yun said soaring prices are “creating a wider divide between those owning properties and those who wish to be first-time buyers."

The Federal Reserve's interest rate hikes to tame inflation have also kept mortgage rates high, discouraging many potential buyers, with Yun adding that "The mortgage payment for a typical home today is more than double that of homes purchased before 2020."

The average rate for a 30-year mortgage this week was 6.87%, according to Freddie Mac, well above a record low of 2.65% in 2021.

The NAR noted inventories of unsold homes jumped 6.7% from the month before, and "eventually, more inventory will help boost home sales and tame home price gains in the upcoming months."

Yun said that higher supply also "spells good news for consumers who want to see more properties before making purchasing decisions."

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When cancer patients are treated with radiation, it's possible that the therapy itself may cause new tumors to form in the body later. Radiation kills cancer cells by damaging their DNA, but if the treatments cause genetic damage to normal cells near the radiation target, there's a small risk that these secondary malignancies may arise over time.

Just over 10 years ago, Canadian researchers set out to assess the risk of secondary malignancy among men with prostate cancer who were treated with a type of radiation called brachytherapy. Unlike radiation delivered from sources outside the body, brachytherapy is accomplished by implanting dozens of radioactive pellets, or "seeds," directly into the tumor site. Those seeds, which are never removed, emit radiation at a dose that declines toward zero over the course of a year.

Brachytherapy has the advantage of convenience. Instead of traveling for repeat sessions of radiation, men need only one treatment, usually given in an outpatient setting. But brachytherapy is also falling out of favor, in part because newer types of external beam radiation deliver high-precision doses with fewer side effects.

Study methodology and results

The Canadian study compared rates of secondary malignancies in the pelvis among men treated either with brachytherapy or with surgery to remove the prostate. All the treatments took place in British Columbia between 1998 and 2000. The brachytherapy group included 2,418 men with an average age of 66, while the surgically-treated group contained 4,015 men whose average age was 62. Within that group, 2,643 men had been treated with surgery alone, and 1,372 men with surgery plus external beam radiation given later.

After median follow-ups of between 5.8 years (brachytherapy) and 6.4 years (surgery), the study team reported in 2014 that there was no difference in rates of secondary malignancies between the groups, or with cancer incidence in the general population.

But that's no longer the case: In April 2024, the researchers published updated findings. This time, rates of new cancers in the pelvis — including the bladder and rectum — were higher in the brachytherapy group. Specifically, 6.4% of brachytherapy-treated men had secondary malignancies at 15 years of follow-up, increasing to 9.8% after 20 years. By contrast, 3.2% and 4.2% of surgically-treated men developed secondary pelvic malignancies over the same durations. There was no difference in deaths from secondary malignancies between the groups.

The strength of the association with bladder cancer in particular is "similar to that seen with smoking," wrote the author of an accompanying editorial. Results from the study "should be considered when treating men with localized prostate cancer who have a long life expectancy," the authors concluded.

Commentary from experts

"I do believe that this study reveals a dark truth about radiation for prostate cancer that has been long suspected," says Dr. Anthony Zietman, a professor of radiation oncology at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, and a member of the advisory and editorial board for the Harvard Medical School Guide to Prostate Diseases. "As the decades pass after radiation therapy of any kind — brachytherapy or external beam — the risk for radiation-induced malignancies rises.

"These malignancies are usually in adjacent organs like the bladder and rectum, or within the prostate itself. They may be very curable, and thus the survival rates are the same for radiation or surgically treated patients, but there is little doubt that, for these patients, they represent a 'sting in the tail' long after the radiation has been given and forgotten. This data certainly gives us pause when offering radiation to very young men with several decades of life expectancy ahead of them, and it also reminds us of the value of follow-up visits."

"The fact that second cancers arise in the area where radiation was given is not surprising, but the magnitude of the long-term increases is concerning," added Dr. Marc Garnick, the Gorman Brothers Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and editor in chief of the Harvard Medical School Guide to Prostate Diseases. "There are other common and troublesome urinary side effects of brachytherapy — independent of second cancers — that patients should fully consider before selecting it as a treatment option. This is especially true given the availability of other convenient and similarly effective prostate cancer therapies."

Source: Harvard Health Publishing

Nigerian International artiste Ayodeji Balogun, popularly known as Wizkid, has addressed his hate for Davido. He is hot on those misreading his tweets.

Wizkid took to the microblogging X platform to express his displeasure with those who misinterpreted his tweets. He called them foolish for mixing up his tweets.

The singer explained that he is in a phase where he loves God more, his family more, and himself more and harbours no hatred for anyone.

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The S&P 500 has set record after record in the past month, but pop the hood and things aren’t looking quite so good. 

The advance-decline (A/D) line, a measure of market breadth, has been on its way down since the end of May, even as the S&P 500 has soared to new heights, according to a note from LPL Financial Friday.

The A/D line is calculated by subtracting the number of declining stocks in the S&P 500 from the number of advancing stocks and adding the difference to the prior day’s value. An increasing A/D line indicates strong breadth, while a declining A/D line represents narrowing breadth.

Together, a soaring S&P 500 and declining A/D line, as shown in the chart from LPL Financial below, can be cause for concern on Wall Street. It indicates gains by a handful of large stocks are masking softness among smaller stocks, potentially signaling weakening investor sentiment. 

The divergence also increases the market’s concentration risk because the biggest stocks are increasing their weight in the S&P 500 while laggards are losing weight. A sharp decline in the shares of the index’s largest companies will have an outsized impact on the index as a whole when breadth is minimal. 

That dynamic was on full display on Thursday when the S&P 500 fell from a record intraday high as Nvidia (NVDA) slumped 3.5%—its largest one-day decline since late May. That's not a particularly long time, but in that period Nvidia shares rose 22%, boosting its market capitalization from $2.7 trillion to more than $3.3 trillion and increasing its influence over the S&P 500.

To be sure, Nvidia isn't the only stock that's contributed to the divergence. The other members of the $3 trillion club, Microsoft (MSFT) and Apple (AAPL), also have surged to all-time highs in recent weeks. They have been joined by a cadre of smaller mega caps, including Broadcom (AVGO), Oracle (ORCL), and Adobe (ADBE), which have been buoyed by earnings reports that demonstrated strong demand for their artificial intelligence (AI) offerings.

Meanwhile, the rest of the market has languished. As of Thursday’s close, Information Technology (+10.7%) was the only sector to have outperformed the S&P 500 (+3.7%) so far this month. The only sectors within 1 percentage point of the broader index were Consumer Discretionary (+3.3%) and Communication Services (+2.7%), sectors dominated by AI giants Amazon (AMZN), Alphabet (GOOGL), and Meta Platforms (META).

The A/D line divergence noted earlier does not, LPL Financial’s Chief Technical Strategist Adam Turnquist points out, mean the bull market is over, “but it does point to elevated risk the broader market could be due for a potential pause or pullback.”

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