Good evening and welcome to Markets Desk, your closing look at the stories moving money and markets today.
For Social Security recipients, there may be more value hiding inside a year-end tax-loss harvest than most retirees realize. Selling a losing position in a taxable brokerage account before December thirty-first, two thousand twenty six, can do double duty — offsetting capital gains while simultaneously reducing the share of Social Security benefits subject to federal income tax. That is a meaningful two-for-one in retirement planning.
Shifting to prediction markets, Kalshi is now investigating three wagers totaling roughly one hundred seventy three dollars placed on Trump's press secretary pick before the selection was publicly announced. Those bets are expected to pay out around nine thousand six hundred dollars combined, raising fresh questions about information integrity on political prediction platforms.
And in the streaming wars, a new analysis shows HBO Max and Paramount Plus share just six titles in common — virtually no content overlap between the two services. That distinction matters because it makes any future consolidation or cost-cutting significantly more complicated. Distinct libraries protect subscriber bases but leave little room for the kind of redundancy cuts that Wall Street typically rewards in a merger scenario.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
