Good morning. Andrew here. Do you wear an Oura ring or Whoop band to track your exercise and sleep? (I do!) The battle over health trackers is heating up, with every major technology company jumping into the game: Google bought Fitbit and, of course, the Apple Watch is a behemoth in the space. Oura has filed to go public and Whoop is expected to be not far behind. DealBook contributor Brent Crane takes a look at a huge battle going on behind the scenes this morning. Also: Sarah Kessler has a Q&A with David Booth, the famed index investor. And make sure to take our quiz (hint: it helps to know about the energy ecosystem). (Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up here.)
Battle of the wearables
The year is 2035. You, like most people you know, have a small, button-sized device implanted in your forearm. For a recurring fee, it continuously monitors your blood pressure, core temperature, cardiovascular activity and all other health measures a physician would value. Anything suspicious is promptly flagged to your doctor by a personalized A.I. system. Disease and illness is caught — and treated — as early as possible. This is the healthmaxxing future that the $44 billion global wearable industry is rapidly manifesting, as a swath of smart watches, smart rings and smart bands offer new takes on tracking health and fitness data. Since the release of the pioneering Fitbit Tracker in 2009, consumer interest has powered the category. But what has caught the attention of venture capital firms and some of the biggest companies in the world — including Apple, Samsung, and Google (which paid $2.1 billion for Fitbit in 2021) — is a vision that could be even more profitable. “The end goal is to be part of the medical ecosystem,” said Jitesh Ubrani, an industry analyst with IDC, a technology research company. “It’s a very lucrative market to be in if every hospital and doctor recommends one of these devices.” That long game also partly explains why the knives are out: The smart ring maker Oura, which recently filed confidentially for an I.P.O., has sued seven competitors over patent infringement. It has won against three, with four cases pending. Apple Watch, which sells more devices in a quarter (around eight million) than Oura has ever sold, is also embroiled in at least two patent infringement lawsuits. Amid the fierce competition, companies have taken small steps toward integrating with hospitals and health care providers. Apple has partnered with health care data giant Epic Systems. Oura paired up with Dexcom, a maker of continuous glucose monitors, which invested $75 million into the Finnish-American ring maker in 2024. (Rather than “fitness wearable,” the Oura C.E.O. Tom Hale prefers to describe his product as “a health intelligence platform.”) In May, Google introduced Google Health, an app that combines Fitbit data with third-party app data and your health records, meant “to be the one platform to manage all of your health data,” said Fitbit’s head of product, Andy Abramson. And last year, Samsung, which makes a smart ring and smart watch, acquired Xealth, a platform that connects consumer health data to hospital systems. The acquisition would help transform Samsung “into a connected care platform,” the company said in a statement. The visionAs wearables become even more enmeshed in the health care system, parsing all of that data will require sophisticated A.I. assistance, experts say, and there are also weighty data privacy concerns to navigate. But the upsides are compelling. Beyond flagging illness far earlier than currently possible, a wearable-enhanced health care system could supercharge telehealth opportunities. Diagnostic tests that once would’ve required a trip to the hospital would be unnecessary — the requisite data (very, very much of it) will have already been beamed to a doctor via a wearable. “You could see any patient at any time, anywhere in the world,” said Dr. Andrew Jagim, the director of sports medicine research at Mayo Clinic Health System, who studies the accuracy of wearables. Beyond health, wearables are increasingly adding features that turn the device into a key. Apple Watch, for example, lets you unlock your Mac automatically when nearby. Future devices might use your gait, heart rate or other biometrics to log you into systems, grant building access or authorize online purchases. But health care is where the real money lies. The technology is reliable enough for use in some medical contexts already, experts say. Whatever shape they come in, wearables depend on a small array of sensors — optical detectors, accelerometers, thermistors — that track your blood flow, movement and skin temperature. Onboard algorithms then infer physiological signals like heart rate, sleep stages and blood oxygen from the noisy raw data produced. Over the years, they have steadily improved in their accuracy, said Dr. Jagim, especially in tracking sleep-time spent in deep sleep, or REM, versus light sleep. A decade ago, Dr. Jagim said, he would have “totally discarded that data.” Not anymore. Many pathsAs brands work toward integration with the health care industry, they are building their customer bases in varying ways. Whoop, a subscription wristband that costs as much as $359 per year, attracts a wealthier fitness-focused consumer (their bands are often worn alongside expensive watches or luxury handbags, notes Ubrani.) But the brand has also earned the loyalty of many athletes who value its recovery and strain scores, which translate heart rate variability and sleep data into a daily readiness number. Apple Watch and Fitbit, which provide users with less hyper-detailed health metrics, tend to appeal to a more “general wellness crowd,” said Dr. Jagim. Garmin smart watches, infused with advanced GPS capabilities and even altitude readings in some models, appeal to extreme athletes (the company recently released a screenless smart band). Oura, whose newest iteration is as thin as any normal ring, has leaned into its popularity with women by trumpeting features that predict menstrual cycles and ovulation windows. Wearables are becoming more proactive, too. Rather than just tracking health fitness data, they now offer recommendations on what to do with it: when to work out and how; when to sleep and how much to eat. This is where more established brands like Apple and Google, which can pull information from other products in their universe, may have a leg up, said Ben Arnold, an industry analyst with Circana. “Gemini, for instance, knows me in other venues, so those recommendations are even more drilled into me as a user,” Arnold said. “That’s a big differentiation factor.” Arnold adds, your A.I. “coach” could comb through your email inbox looking for things like correspondence from a gym, or DoorDash or Instacart receipts, which could then inform coaching recommendations. The long gameFull-on health care integration is still in utero. “The medical industry moves very, very slowly and is very bureaucratic,” said Ubrani. “There are real hurdles to get over.” Last year, Whoop ran into one such hurdle. After it launched a feature estimating users’ daily blood pressure, the Food and Drug Administration declared Whoop an unapproved medical device. Whoop publicly refused to pull the contentious feature, arguing that the smart band did not constitute a medical device. “It’s designed to help you understand how your body responds to daily life, not to diagnose or treat any condition,” the company said in a statement. In June, the F.D.A. officially backed down after issuing new guidance exempting wellness blood pressure measurements from medical device regulation — a win not just for Whoop but for the wearable industry writ large. In a LinkedIn post, Whoop’s C.E.O., Will Ahmed, celebrated with a nod toward the future. “We have tremendous respect for the agency’s role in ensuring that medical devices are safe and effective,” he wrote. “We look forward to continuing to work with the F.D.A. as Whoop brings more regulated medical technologies to market.”
Stocks remain near record highs after a tame inflation report. Prices rose 0.1 percent in July from a month earlier, and 3.4 percent from the previous year on a seasonally adjusted basis. The modest easing of price pressures gives the Federal Reserve some breathing room as it considers raising interest rates at its policy meeting next month. Prediction markets come under more pressure. New York City opened investigations into the marketing practices of Kalshi and Polymarket and two other operators. Prediction markets are also in legal battles with several states, including New York. On Wednesday, a judge in Seattle barred Kalshi from most operations in Washington State after the state’s attorney general argued the platform was illegally operating a sports betting business. Meta released an open version of its most powerful A.I. model. The model, Muse Glimmer, can run locally on a laptop, and Meta has positioned it as a cheaper alternative to rival A.I. models from Anthropic and OpenAI. Meta is also creating a $1 billion fund to support police and firefighters in towns where it has data centers, an effort to counter local pushback. More big deals: Josh Kushner, the venture capitalist, and Bob Iger, the former C.E.O. of Disney, said that they planned to buy the Los Angeles Lakers for $12.5 billion. OpenAI replaced its chief revenue officer after just eight months. Its annualized revenue is on track for $40 billion. And The New York Times reported that a top Forbes editor resigned after the company learned he’d accepted a $6 million gift.
How to ‘stay calm’David Booth founded Dimensional Fund Advisors, an investment firm that now has more than $1 trillion under management, in 1981. But he says he’s never bought an individual stock. A pioneer of evidence-based and index investing, Booth, 79, rejects stock-picking, market timing and most predictions. “Individual stocks, they go to zero; the stock market’s not going to zero — that’s a forecast I’ll make,” he told DealBook. Booth talked with Sarah Kessler ahead of the publication of his book, “Stay Calm,” about long-term, systematic investing in a world that increasingly looks like a casino. You wrote that it’s never been easier for people to gamble under the pretense of investing. Tell me more about that. You look at all the prediction markets and so forth, it’s pretty easy to call that investing. But it really couldn’t be more like gambling. And you have all these derivative contracts, futures contracts, so forth. It’s easy to get all kinds of leverage very easily now. You have any number of ways of taking sometimes extraordinary risks, without even thinking about it. How has that affected markets or companies? I don’t know if long-term it has much impact other than having a lot of younger people lose all their money over time. Do you think passive investing has contributed to a concentration in indexes? I think the concentration comes from people analyzing companies and saying that these companies are worth a ton of money. There’s an argument that the more successful the companies are, the more they’re automatically bought through passive investing strategies — and overvalued because of that. Those are interesting arguments, but the index funds don’t really trade much. I think it’s probably the investment community really driving up prices. One of the remarkable things, over the last 30, 40, 50 years, is the movement toward index funds. Let’s say it’s half of the total stock market. All things being equal, wouldn’t you expect trading volume in the stock market to be about half of what it was before? Because half of it’s in these index funds that don’t really trade much. And in fact, we’ve seen a rapid increase in trading volume. I think one of the contributing factors is people may have moved away from picking stocks to timing markets and sectors. An index fund is the ideal timing vehicle. You can get in and out of the market with just one ticker symbol. Like all technologies, indexing can be used for good or bad. I wouldn’t say trying to time the markets is evil, but based on all the evidence, it looks like it’s more like gambling than it is a productive way to invest. In your book, you make many comparisons between investing and life. Have you always seen things that way? I had a breakthrough about 10 years ago. Really, the economy is incredibly complex and you can’t model it exactly. But so is life. The stuff you can’t control is important and you want to manage that. But you primarily are going to make decisions about controlling what you can control, like how much risk you take. Don’t try to predict the unpredictable. Plan for it. Adapt and be flexible. And when you get off track, figure out what it takes to get back on track. That’s the way you go through life.
DEALBOOK QUIZ Crude workaroundsThis question comes from a recent Times article. Click an answer to see if you’re right. (The link will be free.) Oil giants in the Gulf are spending billions in a frenzy of activity to find lasting workarounds to the Strait of Hormuz, as shipping through the channel remains perilous because of the war in Iran. Before the war, about 20 million barrels of crude a day sailed through the Strait of Hormuz. As of last week, about how many barrels of crude exports were sailing through the strait? We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times. Thanks for reading! We’ll see you Monday. We’d like your feedback. Please email thoughts and suggestions to dealbook@nytimes.com. Follow DealBook on Instagram: @nytdealbook
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