Cboe Global Markets (CBOE), a leading provider of market infrastructure and tradable products, delivers cutting-edge trading, clearing and investment solutions to market participants around the world. The company is committed to operating a trusted, inclusive global marketplace, providing leading products, technology and data solutions that enable participants to define a sustainable financial future. Cboe provides trading solutions and products in multiple asset classes, including equities, derivatives and FX, across North America, Europe and Asia Pacific.

Based in Flagler Beach, Florida, he works as a real estate agent focused on the Flagler Beach and Palm Coast markets, helping buyers, sellers and investors work through residential property decisions with a personalised approach.

Alongside his residential work, Flores is Managing Partner at Vellum Capital Partners, a commercial real estate brokerage he helps run that focuses on investment and commercial transactions across Florida. Through Vellum Capital Partners, he works with investors, business owners and partners to identify and execute commercial opportunities, bringing a level of deal structuring and market insight that sits apart from typical residential brokerage work.

What distinguishes Flores’s career is the range across both sides of the industry. Few agents operate comfortably in both residential and commercial real estate, and fewer still hold a Managing Partner role in a commercial brokerage while remaining active with homebuyers and sellers on the ground. That dual view, he says, has shaped how he thinks about property value, timing and risk in ways a single-track career would not.

Flores has spoken about the importance of transparency and education in real estate, arguing that clients make better decisions when they understand the market rather than simply following an agent’s recommendation. That philosophy carries through both halves of his work, from a first-time Palm Coast homebuyer to a commercial investor structuring a multi-party deal through Vellum Capital Partners.

Today, Flores continues to split his time between residential clients in Flagler County and commercial work through Vellum Capital Partners, a pairing that has become the throughline of his professional identity in Florida real estate.

Interview with Robert Flores

You work in both residential real estate and commercial real estate through Vellum Capital Partners. How did that combination come about?

They developed alongside each other rather than one following the other. Residential work put me in front of buyers and sellers every week, which taught me how local markets actually move, street by street. Commercial real estate, through Vellum Capital Partners, asked a different set of questions: how a property performs as an investment, how a deal gets structured, how partners align on risk. Doing both at once meant neither side of my thinking stayed static. Residential kept me close to the ground. Commercial pushed me to think in longer time horizons.

Does working in both make you better at either one?

I think so. A homeowner selling a property is, in some sense, exiting an investment, even if they never think of it that way. Having a commercial lens helps me explain that side of it clearly. On the flip side, commercial investors sometimes lose sight of the human decisions that drive residential markets, like why a family chooses one neighbourhood over another. Moving between both keeps me honest about what actually drives value.

What does a Managing Partner at a commercial brokerage spend most of their time doing?

A lot of it is analysis before a deal ever gets discussed with a client. Looking at a property, understanding what it could become, and working out whether the numbers support that vision. Then there is the partnership side: aligning investors and business owners on structure, timeline and expectations before money moves. Vellum Capital Partners was built around doing that work carefully rather than quickly.

Why the name Vellum Capital Partners?

Vellum refers to a durable writing material, historically used for documents meant to last. We chose it because we wanted the name to reflect something built to hold up over time, a foundation rather than a shortcut. Commercial real estate rewards patience and careful structuring far more than it rewards speed, and we wanted a name that pointed to that.

How has the Flagler Beach and Palm Coast market shaped your approach?

Working a specific, well-defined area for years means you stop treating the market as an abstraction. You know which blocks flood, which streets are quiet, which corridors are drawing new development interest. That local knowledge does not always show up in a listing sheet, but it shapes every conversation I have with a client, whether they are buying a first home or evaluating a commercial site.

What is different about advising a business owner or investor compared to a residential buyer?

Residential buyers are usually deciding where to live, so emotion is part of the process, and it should be. Business owners and investors coming through Vellum Capital Partners are asking a narrower question: does this deal make sense financially, and does the structure protect everyone involved. My job with them is less about guiding a life decision and more about making sure the numbers and the partnership terms hold up.

Looking at your career overall, what has stayed consistent?

Wanting clients to understand what they are actually doing before they do it. That has been true whether I am walking a first-time buyer through a purchase in Palm Coast or working through a commercial structure with partners at Vellum Capital Partners. The properties and the stakes change. The commitment to explaining things clearly has not.

What would you tell someone considering a career that spans both residential and commercial real estate?

Expect it to take longer to feel confident in either one, because you are building two skill sets instead of one. But the two inform each other in ways that make the work more interesting, and over time, that combination becomes an advantage rather than a distraction.

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Shares of SanDisk Corp. fell 5.18% to $1,544.98 in Monday trading, down $84.59, as a fresh wave of concern over the pace of artificial intelligence development combined with lingering questions about a Chinese AI model’s dramatically reduced memory requirements to pressure NAND flash and memory chip stocks across the board.

The decline, which briefly pushed shares down as much as 6% in premarket trading before paring slightly at the open, extended a broader pullback for storage and memory names Monday. Micron Technology fell roughly 5%, while Western Digital and Seagate Technology each dropped more than 4%. South Korea’s SK Hynix fell more than 7% in its own session. The sector-wide weakness came as investors weighed calls from prominent AI executives to slow the pace of frontier model development against a separate, more technical concern specific to memory chipmakers: whether the assumptions underpinning the sector’s explosive rally may be overstated.

That second concern traces back to DeepSeek, the Chinese AI developer, which released an updated version of its cost-optimized Flash model on September 10. The new model, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, introduced architectural changes that dramatically reduce the amount of memory needed to run AI inference workloads, cutting the model’s key-value cache consumption, a core driver of memory demand during AI processing, to between roughly 13% and 25% of its predecessor’s requirements. In practical terms, the redesign allows the model to support four to eight times as many simultaneous users within the same memory footprint, according to DeepSeek’s own technical documentation.

The release rattled memory chip investors because so much of the sector’s recent rally has been built on the assumption that AI inference workloads would require ever-increasing amounts of high-bandwidth memory and NAND flash storage as AI adoption scales. If leading AI model developers adopt similar memory-efficient architectural techniques broadly, some analysts have warned, the baseline demand growth for high-capacity enterprise storage and memory chips, the very products that helped drive SanDisk’s revenue to $20.25 billion in its most recent fiscal year, could plateau earlier than current Wall Street forecasts anticipate. The concern first hit Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix directly in Seoul trading on September 11, when the DeepSeek release sent both stocks lower, before spreading more broadly across the global memory sector as U.S. markets absorbed the news alongside the weekend’s separate AI safety debate.

That AI safety debate, triggered by a weekend essay from Anthropic Chief Executive Officer Dario Amodei calling for a coordinated industry-wide slowdown in AI capability development, added a second, distinct source of pressure on memory stocks Monday, compounding the DeepSeek-related unease. Not every investor has accepted the safety framing at face value, however. Prominent short-seller Michael Burry, known for his early bet against the U.S. housing market, publicly dismissed the slowdown calls as self-interested positioning. “Let’s all take a moment to understand how self-serving it is for OpenAI, Anthropic and other execs of big hyperscalers to talk of slowing things down,” Burry wrote on social platform X, adding that large language models are not, in his view, genuine artificial intelligence and therefore have “nothing AI to slow down.” He also suggested the safety rhetoric could serve as convenient cover for both companies as they prepare for stock market listings, writing separately, “IPOs need hype & puffery.”

Despite Monday’s sharp decline, SanDisk’s rally over the past year has been extraordinary by almost any measure. The stock’s 52-week range spans from a low of roughly $82 to a high of $2,354.39, reflecting a period of intense investor enthusiasm for memory chip stocks tied to the broader AI infrastructure buildout. Even after Monday’s drop and a broader pullback that has already seen shares fall roughly 31% from their year-to-date high, SanDisk remains up dramatically from where it traded a year ago.

Wall Street’s outlook on the stock has remained largely positive even amid the recent volatility. Among 24 analysts covering the stock, the average rating remains a Buy, with a 12-month consensus price target of $2,125.09, implying substantial potential upside from current levels. Individual analyst targets have varied in recent weeks: Mizuho maintained an Outperform rating while trimming its price target to $1,875 in late August, RBC Capital raised its target to $1,600 while maintaining a more neutral Sector Perform rating, and Wells Fargo lifted its own target to $1,550 while keeping an Equal-Weight stance, reflecting a range of views on how much further the stock can climb even as most analysts remain constructive on the underlying business.

The bull case for SanDisk and its memory sector peers has rested heavily on severe supply constraints in the broader chip market. Industry researcher TrendForce has projected conventional DRAM contract prices to rise sharply quarter over quarter through the first half of 2026, with NAND flash contract prices also climbing substantially over the same period, reflecting a market where supply has struggled to keep pace with demand. Samsung’s chief financial officer has said the company’s 2026 production of next-generation HBM4 memory chips is already fully sold out, underscoring how tight the supply picture has been even before DeepSeek’s efficiency breakthrough raised questions about the durability of that demand.

Whether DeepSeek’s memory-efficient architecture proves to be an isolated technical achievement or the start of a broader industry shift toward less memory-intensive AI model design remains an open question for investors. Some engineers who have examined the model’s architecture note that while its reduced live memory footprint is significant for serving AI inference at scale, it does not directly reduce the massive amount of memory still required to train large AI models in the first place, suggesting the long-term implications for chip demand may be more nuanced than Monday’s sharp selloff implies.

With SanDisk’s stock remaining highly sensitive to shifting sentiment around AI infrastructure demand, and with the broader debate over the pace of AI development still unfolding following Amodei’s essay, investors are likely to remain focused in the coming days on further signals from both the AI industry’s largest developers and its chip suppliers about how durable current memory demand assumptions actually are.

SEOUL — SK hynix American depositary receipts fell 6.33% to $178.04 on Monday, down $12.03, as memory stocks sold off on concern that calls to slow frontier artificial-intelligence development could crimp demand for high-bandwidth chips.

The Nasdaq-listed ADRs had closed Friday at $190.07. Premarket prints ran as low as about $175. In Seoul, the ordinary shares dropped 6.35% and the KOSPI index lost 3.26%. Micron, Sandisk and Western Digital also slid more than 4% in U.S. dealing. There was no SK hynix earnings warning. The tape was a sector move.

Investors marked down suppliers after Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei urged the industry to manage the pace of frontier models, saying building AI “too fast is reckless” and calling China the “toughest dilemma” in any global speed limit. Reports said OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Elon Musk had echoed a slower-build argument. High-bandwidth memory is the bottleneck inside AI accelerators. A pause in server orders would hit SK hynix first among Korean names because HBM is the core of its premium mix.

That mix just printed a record quarter. On July 29 the company reported second-quarter revenue of 79.32 trillion won, up 51% from the prior quarter and 257% from a year earlier. Operating profit was 60.54 trillion won, a 76% margin. Net profit was 93.92 trillion won. HBM4 mass shipments started in the quarter. “HBM4 has demonstrated its differentiated technological edge by achieving customer-required operating speeds while delivering industry-leading power efficiency and cost competitiveness,” the company said. Production is set to ramp in the second half. HBM4E samples went to a major customer in the first half.

For the third quarter, management guided DRAM bit shipments up about 10% and NAND up a low-single-digit percentage. It said it has long-term agreements with about 10 key customers, cash of 88 trillion won and a debt-to-equity ratio of 7%. On the AI-capex-slowdown narrative, executives framed data-center leasing and more efficient models as monetizing kits already built, not cutting investment. Major customers, they said, are still asking for more memory.

Counterpoint Research put SK hynix at 50% of HBM revenue in the second quarter, down from 58% in the first as Samsung rose to 33%. The gap is narrower than a year ago, when SK hynix held 64%. The company remains the volume leader into Nvidia-class stacks. JPMorgan initiated coverage of the ADR on Sept. 10 at Overweight with a $245 target. Needham’s target is $220. A compiled average near $248 implied more than 30% upside from Friday’s close — before Monday’s gap.

The ADR listed in July at $149 and printed a 52-week high of $199.87 on Sept. 9. Monday’s $178 handle is a giveback of that spike, not a collapse of the earnings run-rate. Ipek Ozkardeskaya, senior analyst at Swissquote, called the session a “sour mood” morning after hotter U.S. core inflation revived talk of a firm Federal Reserve this week.

The risk Monday priced is duration. If hyperscalers stretch server cycles, HBM4 ramps into a softer book. If they do not, SK hynix is still the firm that started HBM4 shipments, guided 10% more DRAM bits this quarter and told the market customers want more silicon, not less. The next official numbers will come with the third-quarter report. Until then the ADR is a high-beta claim on a debate in San Francisco, not a change in Icheon’s shipment plan.

EL SEGUNDO, CALIF. —Beyond Meat, Inc. is launching its Phytosphere portfolio. The nutrient-focused portfolio includes powders, bars, beverages and center-of-plate offerings, according to the company.

Beyond Starmatter protein powders are formulated with plant protein, fiber, probiotics, polyphenols, plant sterols, biotin, adaptogens, vitamins and minerals. The powder is available in five flavors: plain, vanilla, salted caramel, strawberry banana and golden latte.

Beyond Starcut is a plant-based jerky bar containing 17 grams of protein and 3 grams of fiber. The bar is free from added sugar, cholesterol, added antibiotics, added hormones, added nitrates and added nitrites. The jerky is offered in Asada style, spicy Southwest barbecue style and classic dill.

Beyond Veggie is a plant-based burger formulated with fruits, vegetables, legumes, seeds, plant-protein, polyphenols and plant sterols. Each burger patty contains 12 grams of protein and 6 grams of fiber. The patties are offered in chipotle black bean and spiced chickpea varieties.

Beyond Immerse is a protein beverage containing 20 grams of plant protein, 5 grams of fiber, electrolytes and antioxidants. The 110-calorie canned beverage is made with organic agave and includes peach mango, strawberry lemonade and cherry berry varieties.

“The nutritive benefits of plants are extraordinary, yet we often fail to get meaningful amounts of these superpowers in our modern diet,” said Ethan Brown, founder and chief executive officer of Beyond Meat. “The Phytosphere portfolio invites the consumer into a world where access to powerful phytonutrition is cutting edge, delicious and convenient. As with our innovation more generally, we are building out the Phytosphere portfolio with our consumers, and for our consumers, and have been looking forward to this launch.”

Products in the Phytosphere portfolio are available for purchase online through the company’s website.

Asian equities opened lower on Monday as a renewed oil-price surge intensified inflation concerns and investors prepared for potentially tighter monetary policy in both the United States and Japan. Brent crude rose around 3% to US$107.18 a barrel, after gaining almost 9% last week, while US crude reached US$102.62 as attacks and shipping disruptions threatened energy supplies.

On September 14, 2026, technology and artificial intelligence-linked shares plummeted across major Asian markets. The broad regional sell-off was triggered by unexpected weekend statements from the leaders of prominent AI development labs calling for a coordinated industry slowdown to manage existential risks and safety concerns.

Key Drivers of the Retreat

• The Amodei Essay: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a detailed essay calling for frontier AI labs to intentionally slow down model capability advancements to ensure adequate safety, alignment, and protection against misuse.
• C-Suite Consensus: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and xAI chief Elon Musk publicly backed Amodei’s call for restraint.
• IPO Cancellation: Further souring investor sentiment, Sam Altman confirmed that OpenAI would not pursue an initial public offering (IPO) this year, citing safety and regulatory frict

The market reaction was broad. Japan’s Nikkei fell 1%, South Korea’s KOSPI dropped 3.2%, and MSCI’s broad Asia-Pacific index excluding Japan declined 1.1%; Chinese blue chips slipped 0.5%. Technology stocks were particularly weak after OpenAI and Anthropic executives called for slower AI development, adding another source of pressure to high-valued Asian technology shares.

The bigger macro issue is the combination of higher oil prices and accelerating inflation. Markets now price an 86% probability of a 25-basis-point Federal Reserve rate hike on Wednesday, following stronger-than-expected US consumer-price data, while the Bank of Japan is also expected to raise its policy rate by 25 basis points to 1.25% on Friday.

Bond yields are reinforcing the pressure on equities. The US 10-year Treasury yield was around 4.97%, while the two-year yield stood near 4.61% after rising 26 basis points last week, reflecting expectations that central banks may need to keep tightening even as economic growth faces the effects of higher energy costs.

The currency market is also adjusting. The yen was around 154.03 per dollar, close to a seven-month high, and has gained about 4% this month as investors increasingly expect the BOJ to accelerate its tightening cycle. The combination of a stronger yen, higher US yields and expensive oil could produce significant shifts in Asian capital flows during the week.

Key points

• Brent crude rose about 3% to US$107.18/barrel, after gaining almost 9% last week.
• Asian equities fell: Nikkei −1%, KOSPI −3.2%, MSCI Asia-Pacific ex-Japan −1.1%.
• Markets price an 86% probability of a Fed hike this week, while the BOJ is widely expected to raise rates to 1.25%.

Why it matters: Thailand faces the same combination of risks: higher imported energy costs, tighter global financial conditions and potentially more volatile regional currencies. A sustained oil price above US$100 could complicate the Bank of Thailand’s policy choices, while higher US and Japanese rates could encourage capital to move away from emerging Asian markets.

ARLINGTON, VA. — Nestle is expanding its Gerber brand with Gerberlyte, an oral rehydration solution (ORS) intended for children.

Gerberlyte is formulated with coconut water, electrolytes and 25% of the daily recommended intake of zinc per 12-oz serving. The beverage is the first USDA-Certified pediatric ORS, according to the company.

The beverage is available in kiwi, berry blend and tropical punch flavors.

“We heard from parents that they need simple, trusted solutions they can feel confident giving their children, whether they’re managing a stomach bug or replacing fluids after a long day of outdoor play,” said Oscar Benítez, president of Gerber. “For nearly 100 years, we’ve helped parents nourish their little ones, and with Gerberlyte, we’re extending the trusted quality and expertise families know from Gerber to new moments when hydration support matters most.”

The rehydration beverage is available in a 32-oz multi-serve bottles and a 4-count pack of 4-oz bottles. The beverages are available at retailers nationwide.