DOVER, Del. — A confirmed tornado tore through Dover, Delaware, on Thursday evening, ripping roofs from two motels along North DuPont Highway and downing trees and power lines across the city, prompting Dover’s mayor to declare a local state of emergency as officials worked to assess the damage.

The tornado struck around 6:18 p.m., according to a report from a trained storm spotter cited by the National Weather Service, who observed a rain-wrapped tornado on the ground with flying debris near East Division Street close to William Henry Middle School. The state of emergency took effect at 6:20 p.m. and remained active while authorities worked to secure damaged buildings and clear affected roads.

The worst damage occurred along North DuPont Highway near Route 13, where the storm tore into the Days Inn and Super Lodge motels, ripping off sections of their roofs. Both properties were evacuated safely, and no serious injuries were reported anywhere in Dover, according to local authorities.

Guests staying at the two motels described terrifying moments as the storm intensified. Kuimonie Goins, of Greensboro, North Carolina, said she was staying at the Days Inn with her family when conditions rapidly deteriorated. “When it started raining, we started seeing like pieces of buildings flying, and then we started to see the tornado form, and then we ran in the bathroom because we were scared,” Goins said. Jiana Hall, of Dover, who was also staying at the hotel, said she immediately moved her children to safety once the danger became apparent. “We immediately grabbed the kids and ran in the bathroom,” Hall said, recalling how she tried to reassure the children while the family waited out the storm. “Everything gonna be OK. Praying,” she recalled telling them.

Randall Butler, a longtime resident of the Superlodge, said he had no warning the storm would strike his home directly. “I didn’t think it was going to hit here. I thought I was going to come home and get some sleep,” Butler said. He was forced to find alternative housing following the damage to the property. “It’s unbelievable. Thank God I wasn’t there,” Butler said.

Dover Police Department spokesperson Lt. Mark Hoffman described the scale of the destruction and the fact that no one was seriously hurt as remarkable given the severity of the damage. “Honestly, it’s a miracle. I don’t know how we made it out of this without anybody being injured,” Hoffman said. He also detailed the dangerous conditions facing utility crews working to restore power in the aftermath of the storm. “As you can see there’s power lines down, significant damage to poles. We have a roof structure hanging over power lines, so it’s creating a dangerous situation for our power crews,” Hoffman said.

Dover Police identified the Division Street and Lockerman Street corridor, along with portions of North DuPont Highway, as the hardest-hit areas of the city. In a social media post, the department urged residents to stay off the roads given the scale of the disruption. “We are also dealing with significant power outages and numerous intersections where traffic signals are not functioning, creating extremely dangerous travel conditions. WE NEED EVERYONE TO STAY HOME AND GET OFF THE ROADS,” police said.

Resident Julian O’Neill described the unsettling experience of the storm passing through, particularly the sound it produced as it moved through the area. “I never experienced anything like it,” O’Neill said. “The craziest part was the sound of it. It was like a whistling sound, almost like a train sound. The rain was so bad and the wind was so bad, you couldn’t really see it. All you could see was the trees bending down like crazy.”

Beyond the two motels, the tornado caused structural damage at a Kraft Foods facility in the area, according to a second trained storm spotter cited by the National Weather Service. Damage was also reported at the Dover Little League complex on Electric Avenue, where fencing and poles were knocked down and a fallen tree struck the facility’s scoreboard. Numerous additional trees and large branches blocked roadways throughout other parts of the city, compounding the disruption to local travel.

DART, Delaware’s public transit authority, dispatched vehicles to help relocate residents displaced from the Superlodge, according to Delaware Public Media. The National Weather Service’s Mount Holly, New Jersey, office, which covers the Dover area, indicated it would send officials to conduct a formal survey of the damage in the coming days to determine the tornado’s strength and confirm the exact path it took through the city. As of this report, no official Enhanced Fujita Scale rating had been assigned to the Dover tornado, and the damage path had not yet been formally surveyed.

Thursday’s severe weather extended beyond Dover itself, part of a broader storm system that swept across the mid-Atlantic region. The same system tore the roof off a school building in central Pennsylvania and brought torrential downpours to the Philadelphia suburbs and the Jersey Shore, according to regional coverage of the storm. A separate funnel cloud was also spotted in Egg Harbor Township in South Jersey during the same system. In Pennsylvania, preliminary storm reports documented severe structural damage in the Columbia area, including collapsed walls, a collapsed shed, and shingles torn from multiple roofs, with the National Weather Service’s State College office scheduling its own damage survey for Eastern York County and Columbia beginning at 8 a.m. Friday.

Dover’s storm system triggered two separate tornado warnings for Kent County on Thursday night, reflecting the sustained and evolving nature of the severe weather threat as it moved through the region. As cleanup efforts continued into Friday, city officials, utility crews and displaced residents faced the task of assessing both the structural damage to the two motels and the broader disruption to power and roadways across Dover, even as police continued urging onlookers to stay away from the affected areas to allow emergency crews room to work safely.

Strategy Inc., the company formerly known as MicroStrategy, has swung back into a substantial unrealized profit on its massive Bitcoin holdings, as a sharp multi-day rally in the cryptocurrency pushed the company’s common stock up 10% in Friday pre-market trading to $120, its highest level in two months.

According to CoinDesk, Strategy owns 840,447 bitcoins, acquired at an average purchase price of $75,385 per coin. With bitcoin trading near $77,000 Friday, the company now holds an unrealized gain of roughly $1.4 billion, or 2.4%, marking its first return to profitability on its bitcoin treasury in months. Bitcoin has surged nearly 22% over five consecutive days of gains, a rally that Benzinga described as a 20% jump specifically over the trailing 72 hours, pushing the cryptocurrency’s price up from a low of $58,000 in July, when Strategy’s unrealized loss had reached approximately $13 billion, equivalent to 20.4% of the company’s total bitcoin cost basis at the time.

Strategy had spent much of 2026 underwater on its bitcoin holdings as the cryptocurrency fell roughly 54% from its October all-time high of $126,000, according to CoinDesk. That extended stretch of paper losses had weighed heavily on the company’s stock and financial reporting, given that Strategy’s business model has increasingly transformed the company into what one analyst characterized as less a traditional software business and more a leveraged bitcoin holding vehicle wrapped in a public company structure.

During the period when bitcoin traded in the low to mid-$60,000s, Strategy sold approximately 6,916 bitcoins, according to CoinDesk, while simultaneously building up its U.S. dollar cash reserve to $4.8 billion. According to CryptoTimes, that dollar reserve is intended to provide roughly 2.8 years of coverage for the company’s dividend payments and other financial obligations, reflecting a more measured, risk-managed posture compared with Strategy’s earlier years of continuous, aggressive bitcoin accumulation under Executive Chairman Michael Saylor.

In the week ending Aug. 16, Strategy reported no new bitcoin purchases or sales, according to CryptoTimes, keeping its holdings steady at 840,447 BTC. Instead, the company raised approximately $333.7 million through sales of common stock during that period, directing the proceeds toward preferred stock dividends, preferred share buybacks and further contributions to its cash reserve.

Strategy’s underlying financial results have continued to reflect the volatility inherent in its bitcoin-heavy balance sheet. According to Timothy Sykes’ market coverage, the company reported a massive GAAP net loss driven by roughly $8.3 billion in unrealized bitcoin losses recorded earlier in the reporting period, even as its core enterprise analytics software business remained essentially flat, with second-quarter revenue of $122.4 million landing just under the $122.9 million analysts had expected. That divergence between GAAP accounting losses tied to bitcoin’s price swings and the company’s comparatively stable software revenue has become a defining characteristic of how analysts now evaluate the stock.

Management has continued actively reshaping the company’s balance sheet alongside the bitcoin rally. According to Timothy Sykes, Strategy has cut its convertible debt by 18%, lifted its U.S. dollar reserves to $3.75 billion in one recent snapshot, and has been repurchasing shares of its STRC Series A preferred stock below par value, while signaling support for the preferred shares within a targeted $99 to $100 trading range. The company has also repurchased approximately 288,930 common shares for roughly $25 million, according to a separate Timothy Sykes report, part of broader efforts to reinforce investor confidence in the stock alongside its ongoing 12% dividend commitment.

Despite the recent volatility and multiple price-target reductions from analysts, Wall Street sentiment toward Strategy has remained largely positive. According to Timothy Sykes, firms including Clear Street, Benchmark and B. Riley have all cut their price targets on the stock in recent weeks but maintained buy ratings, with a consensus price target sitting near $258.50, well above the stock’s current trading levels.

Strategy’s stock has shown a consistent pattern of tracking bitcoin’s price movements closely, a dynamic that has led some analysts to describe the company’s shares as carrying an unusually high sensitivity, or “beta,” to bitcoin’s underlying price. According to TS2.Tech, Strategy’s stock recently demonstrated a bitcoin beta exceeding 2.6 times, meaning the shares have moved more than 2.6 times as much, in percentage terms, as bitcoin itself during certain trading sessions, reflecting the leveraged nature of the company’s business model built around its massive cryptocurrency holdings.

Regulatory developments have also factored into recent trading in Strategy shares. According to Yahoo Finance, a proposed rule change affecting non-operating companies with large treasury asset holdings, a category that includes Strategy given its substantial bitcoin reserves, could potentially force investment funds tracking certain MSCI benchmarks to sell their MSTR shares if the change is finalized. A final decision on that proposed rule change is expected by October, with any resulting changes planned to take effect in November 2026, according to the same report, representing an ongoing source of uncertainty for the stock independent of bitcoin’s own price movements.

Michael Saylor, Strategy’s executive chairman, has continued to publicly reaffirm the company’s long-term commitment to its bitcoin-centered strategy. According to TS2.Tech, Saylor stated the firm “remains committed to Bitcoin as its primary treasury reserve asset,” even as the company has more recently balanced that stance with a more measured approach to active bitcoin trading, including periodic sales aimed at funding dividends, debt reduction and share repurchases rather than pursuing continuous, uninterrupted accumulation.

Technical indicators have also pointed toward continued near-term strength in the stock following Friday’s rally. According to Benzinga, Strategy shares extended a three-day breakout that finally cleared resistance near $105 after four separate failed attempts to break through that level since July, with the stock’s relative strength index climbing sharply to 61.84 and a bullish divergence flagged earlier in July now playing out in the stock’s price action. The 100-day exponential moving average, sitting at $122.16, was identified as an immediate technical test for the stock at Friday’s premarket trading levels.

With bitcoin’s five-day rally having erased months of accumulated paper losses on Strategy’s balance sheet, investors are likely to continue closely monitoring both the cryptocurrency’s ability to sustain its recent gains and Strategy’s upcoming weekly disclosure filings, which have become a closely watched indicator of the company’s ongoing bitcoin trading activity and broader capital allocation strategy heading into the remainder of 2026.

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CleanMax is gearing up for its next phase of growth, with the renewable energy player targeting 1.5 GW of capacity additions in FY27 and EBITDA of over ₹3,000 crore by FY28, nearly 2.5 times the ₹1,280 crore reported in FY26.

In an interaction with Kshitij Anand of ETMarkets, CleanMax Founder and Managing Director Kuldeep Jain said the company remains confident of meeting its capacity addition target, backed by a sharp improvement in execution capabilities.

Jain also highlighted data centres, AI infrastructure, and the broader Make in India push as key demand drivers. A recent upgrade to an AA credit rating and a planned Rs 2,500 crore bond issue could provide greater access to capital as the company scales its contracted portfolio. The following are edited excerpts from the chat:

Kshitij Anand: I wanted to get your view on the recent results that have come out. In fact, CleanMax delivered more than 100% year-on-year revenue growth and 70% growth in adjusted EBITDA in Q1. How much of this growth is sustainable, and what should investors expect from the business over the next few years?

Kuldeep Jain: We are delighted with our growth numbers, and we have given guidance that EBITDA in FY27-28, which is next year, will be above Rs 3,000 crore. This compares with FY25-26, which was last year. So, in two years, we will go from Rs 1,280 crore to above Rs 3,000 crore. That is obviously very, very high growth of about 60% year-on-year.

Kshitij Anand: The reason I ask is that growth appears to be quite strong quarter-on-quarter. Given the long-term nature of your contracts, is the over 100% growth sustainable, or should we expect some normalisation in the coming quarters?

Kuldeep Jain: We do not give a quarter-on-quarter view on growth. Sometimes it is very tough to…

Kshitij Anand: No, no, of course, it is year-on-year…

Kuldeep Jain: …that, but I think over two years, we have given guidance to go from Rs 1,280 crore to about Rs 3,000 crore, which is actually very, very high, nearly two-and-a-half times EBITDA growth in just two years.
So, we see that high growth continuing, but of course, some variability on a quarterly basis can be there. Therefore, we do not actually provide any guidance on a quarter-on-quarter basis.

Kshitij Anand: Let me also get your perspective on the recent projects. So, you commissioned a record 0.5 gigawatt of capacity in Q1, and you are guiding for at least 1.5 gigawatts of additions in FY27. How confident are you about meeting or exceeding this target?

Kuldeep Jain: So, our principle on guidance is that we must be very sure of meeting or beating it. That is the principle we adopt. So, yes, the answer would be that we think we will hit that, and it is good that we have done 500 out of 1,500 megawatts in one quarter. The thing, though, is that our track record gives me comfort in this. So, if you look at last year also, we did about 1,400 megawatts.

So, it is not like we have not done it. If you look at the trailing 12 months as of June 30, we have done about 1,700 megawatts-plus. So, we, as an organisation, are now able to execute at that pace, which is, by the way, a marked step-up from doing 400 to 500 megawatts a year until about two years ago.

So, we have stepped up. In the last 12 months, we have added 1,700 megawatts. Therefore, I do think we should be able to meet or beat our guidance of 1,500 megawatts of capacity for this year.

Kshitij Anand: The reason I emphasise this is that every year brings new challenges. With some political volatility in 2026, do you foresee any bottlenecks or resistance that could impact growth?

Kuldeep Jain: The inherent nature of projects is that there is no easy project, and the challenges could be around land and permitting. It could be around supply chain.

It could be around execution, final connectivity and operations. So, there is never an easy project, and every project will have some challenge.

And therefore, at my level, I do not think so much about what the challenges are, but whether we, as an organisation, have the ability to deliver 12 to 15 large projects across 10 different states every year.

And then, every project will be… some may be trending a little ahead of time, some after time. These minor variabilities will happen. They are the nature of project-led growth.

Kshitij Anand: Let us also talk about the new opportunities. Data centres and AI infrastructure now account for 42% of your contracted renewable energy power sales capacity. With this portfolio growing nearly 10 times in just over two years, could this become the single biggest growth engine for CleanMax?

Kuldeep Jain: Data centres are humongous power guzzlers. Every one-gigawatt data centre needs about six gigawatts of renewable capacity to meet 75% to 80% of its requirement, so that is the equation.

And even today, data centres and hyperscalers are already 42% of our contracted business. So, about 2,500 megawatts we have already contracted.

But yes, we do see that as the data centres ramp up and AI data centres start consuming power, they might shift from 42% to a majority of our contracted volumes in the near future.

Kshitij Anand: Let me also focus on the segment, the C&I customer across technology, digital infrastructure, manufacturing and industrial sectors. Which segments are currently showing the strongest incremental demand for renewable power?

Kuldeep Jain: So, firstly, the demand is ubiquitous and not segment-oriented because all Make in India needs power and benefits from the use of cheaper, greener power.

Cheaper benefits because your cost of production comes down, and greener benefits because if you are part of a global value chain, that helps you on the sales side of your business because you have a more cost-effective and greener product.

And therefore, where we have seen a lot of demand start coming through is in some of the high-end manufacturing, like electronics, semiconductors, auto and auto components being exported, where the manufacturer is tied to a global value chain.

That mix is very potent for us. That said, only about 7.5% of corporate power demand in India is met through these bilateral green sources. So, the penetration of that 7.5% is going to 20%, as forecasted, between 2023 and 2030, driven by the fact that it is cheaper and greener, and everyone is therefore adopting.

Kshitij Anand: In fact, let me also get your perspective on the debt, which has actually come down to 8.4% from 9.2% in April 2025. How much of this benefit can be passed through to project returns as you scale the portfolio?

Kuldeep Jain: The brilliant thing about renewables is that it is the only business which has a 92% to 94% gross margin. The cost of production is nearly negligible because, incidentally, I mean, I explained it in Hindi, Surya Deva and Vayu Deva are free.

Like the sun, you are not paying for sunshine or for the wind blowing. But the cost is of interest because it is capital-intensive. You borrowed to put up your project, and therefore, the cost is of interest.

Therefore, the achievement, yes, is that our cost of debt has come down. But what is a further positive early indicator is that our credit rating has increased now to the AA bracket, starting June this year, and that gives us a better, improved credit rating and better negotiating power with lenders like banks because now we are an AA-rated borrower. So, that is a positive.

Kshitij Anand: In fact, my next question is also around that. The board has approved a domestic bond issuance to diversify funding and secure long-term fixed-rate financing. How large could this financing be, and what kind of impact could it have on your overall cost of capital, as you rightly put it, given that the rating has also…?

Kuldeep Jain: The board has approved a bond issuance of up to Rs 2,500 crore, and we are targeting to get it done by the end of September, so pretty much soon.

At an AA credit rating, the real benefit is not just the cost of funds, but tapping into a new source of capital, which is the domestic credit markets, DCM, rather than traditional bank loans.

Because as you grow, tapping into different pools of capital becomes very beneficial and positive, and that is why the first-ever bond issuance has been approved by the board.

But yes, the recent credit upgrade to the AA family was a key ingredient in doing it. Like, domestic bonds cannot really happen if you are at an A rating, but if you are AA, that is where you can start doing it.

Kshitij Anand: And CleanMax, as a company, has grown its contracted portfolio threefold in two years, and the renewable energy market is becoming increasingly competitive. What is the biggest challenge you see in scaling from the current 6-gigawatt portfolio to, let us say, the next 10-gigawatt portfolio?

Kuldeep Jain: So, we see massive growth in both our key customer segments. So, the first segment is Make in India, where only 7.5% of the demand is being met through bilateral renewable contracts like ours.

That is going to grow a fair bit because it is cheaper and greener, and that has also doubled in the last two years. We see that kind of penetration increase continuing. The second massive booster ingredient to this is the data and AI boom.

We have grown from 250 megawatts to 2,500 megawatts in two years in terms of contracts with data centres and AI. And that industry feels like it is just getting started. The actual operating data centre capacity in India is only 1.5 gigawatts.

The next 10 gigawatts is to come up. If 10 gigawatts of data centres come up, they need 60,000 megawatts of renewables to power them, or to power them up to 75% to 80% of their requirements. And today, we are serving all of them.

So, we will get our fair share of that kind of growth uplift. So, we are very excited about continued fast growth in both of our key customer segments, and therefore, we do not see growth as being a challenge. We are gearing ourselves more to execute on that massive growth.

(Disclaimer: Recommendations, suggestions, views, and opinions given by experts are their own. These do not represent the views of the Economic Times)

Market regulator Sebi has again sounded an alarm over heavy retail losses in the futures and options segment, spooking investors about what legendary market veteran Warren Buffett once called lethal “time bombs”.

A recent study by Sebi found 88% or 9 out of 10 individual F&O traders still incurred losses in FY26. Options remained the main source of losses. The market regulator said around 92% of aggregate losses incurred by individual traders came from options trading.

The market regulator, as well as the government, has been advising investors to tread with caution in the derivatives market, which wiped off massive sums of retail investors’ wealth. This may remind investors of what Warren Buffett once said.

Warren Buffett’s warning against F&O

In his 2002 letter, Buffett called derivatives “time bombs, both for the parties that deal in them and the economic system.”
“In our view, however, derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction, carrying dangers that, while now latent, are potentially lethal,” he wrote.

Being ahead of time, as always, the Berkshire Hathaway Chairman wrote in the 2002 letter, “The derivatives genie is now well out of the bottle, and these instruments will almost certainly multiply in variety and number until some event makes their toxicity clear.”
His warnings came true during the 2008 financial crisis, when complex derivatives originally designed to protect banks from deadbeat borrowers added to their turmoil. Buffett has reiterated his warnings against F&O several times.He recently criticized the current stock market environment, highlighting that value investing is fizzling out as people prefer gambling instead. “It is tough to find values when everybody is preferring gambling,” the 95-year-old legendary investor said in an interview to CNBC.

“But since humans love to gamble so much, there is more money in actually cultivating gamblers than there are cultivating investors,” the Berkshire Hathaway Chairman said.

Also read | Rs 91,685 crore gone! 88% retail investors lost money in F&O trading in FY26 even after strict Sebi rules

Why are Indian regulators sounding the alarm?

After presenting the Union Budget in February this year, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said that the government could not remain silent as speculative ‘satta’ in derivatives inflicts heavy losses on small retail investors.

“We are touching only the futures and options segment. No one has increased transaction costs elsewhere. Speculation, what we call ‘satta’ in Hindi, is highly risky, and many people with limited funds face heavy losses. The nominal increase in STT is aimed purely at deterring excessive speculation. We respect market activity, but the government cannot ignore the losses faced by small investors. This tax is only one element to support that policy. How the rest of the market is regulated is up to the market regulator,” Sitharaman said in a statement to the press after her Budget speech.

To curb the derivatives frenzy, the government increased STT on F&O trading. As a result, some reduction in F&O volumes were noticed. As per Sebi’s latest study, individual traders posted aggregate net losses of about Rs 91,685 crore in FY26, compared with about Rs 1.12 lakh crore in FY25. The fall in total losses came mainly because the number of active individual traders declined, not because outcomes improved meaningfully for those who continued trading.

Meanwhile, active individual traders declined about 20% to 78.6 lakh in FY26 from 98.1 lakh in FY25, while new entrants dropped about 40%. Average loss per trader rose marginally to about Rs 1.17 lakh during the year.

Also read | Losing game! How India’s small F&O traders carried 70% losses while prop desks made Rs 44,000 crore

(Disclaimer: Recommendations, suggestions, views and opinions given by the experts are their own. These do not represent the views of The Economic Times)