For decades, UnitedHealth Group (UNH -0.40%) could do no wrong. The company raised its dividend by an exceptional 7,266% from 2010 to 2025, while shares rose as much as 1,700% during this run.

But shares have fallen roughly 40% year to date as the company faces a host of problems, from the murder of Brian Thompson, CEO of major business segment UnitedHealthcare, to federal investigations into allegedly fraudulent Medicare billing practices.

Nonetheless, shares surged 12% on Aug. 14 after filings revealed Berkshire Hathaway had bought over 5 million shares.

Berkshire’s move was seen as a major vote of confidence in the stock — and investors joined a stampede to follow Warren Buffett into the trade. Should you?

Big growth potential for all segments

UnitedHealth operates through four segments. Its UnitedHealthcare segment provides consumer-oriented health benefit plans and services for employers. Optum Health provides healthcare management and financial services, while Optum Insight offers data analysis tools, consulting, and tech solutions to healthcare providers. Optum Rx is a direct-to-consumer platform offering pharmacy services and 190 million prescriptions per year to U.S. homes.

In its second-quarter report on July 29, the company reported quarterly revenue of $111.6 billion, up roughly 13% from the year-ago period. The trouble is with margins. For UnitedHealthcare, the biggest segment, operating margin fell from 6.2% in Q1 2025 to 2.4% last quarter. Combined, margin for the three Optum segments fell from 6.1% in Q1 2025 to 4.6% in Q2.

These declines are steep enough that, even with revenue on the upswing, earnings fell from $9.1 billion in Q1 2025 to $5.2 billion last quarter.

Rising medical costs are the chief headwind. In the July earnings report, new CEO Stephen Hensley acknowledged that UNH “significantly underestimated the accelerating medical trend,” and medical costs totaled $6.5 billion more than anticipated.

But management is under no such illusions now. They’re taking actions to boost efficiency and cut waste, from stepping up audits of clinical policy and payment integrity tools, to scaling artificial intelligence (AI) efforts to improve provider and patient experiences while driving down costs. Implementation of AI technologies is part of initiatives the company hopes can deliver almost $1 billion in cost reductions. Perhaps most significantly, the company is raising premiums after saying it underpriced Medicare Advantage plans in 2025.

In the meantime, each of these segments could grow significantly in the years ahead. UnitedHealthcare Employer & Individual just rolled out services in its 30th state, while Optum Rx’s growth outlook is 5%-8% annually. Optum Insight is targeting operating margin of 18%-22%, while the 4.7 million patients receiving value-based care from OptumHealth represent only a fraction of the nearly 340 million Americans who could fall under its 100-plus health plans.

It’s not just Berkshire buying

Berkshire Hathaway’s move in UnitedHealth is getting headlines. But billionaire David Tepper also scooped up 2.3 million shares, while Michael Burry of The Big Short fame bought 350,000 call options on the stock in a bet that shares would rise.

In addition, BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset manager, bought over 1 million shares last quarter. Goldman Sachs bought over 1.1 million shares, while Renaissance Technologies (the fabled fund that achieved an average annual return of 66% for decades) bought over 1.35 million.

As for management, Stephen Hensley invested $25 million just days after becoming CEO, while the company’s CFO bought another $5 million worth in shares. All told, the insider buying of UNH stock outweighed insider selling by a nearly 4:1 margin last quarter.

As the investing legend Peter Lynch observed, insiders can sell for many reasons unrelated to a stock. But they buy for only one: They think shares will go up.

Why UnitedHealth is a buy for retail investors, too

Berkshire officials haven’t commented publicly on their rationale for buying UnitedHealthcare, but it’s possible to speculate on their reasons.

Warren Buffett has called cash flow the most important metric in assessing a business’s potential. In a 2000 letter to shareholders, he wrote that dividend yield, the price-to-earnings ratio, book value, and even growth rates “have nothing to do with valuation except to the extent they provide clues to the amount and timing of cash flows into and from the business.”

Positive cash flow shows the company can cover its obligations, return money to shareholders, and potentially pursue growth and expansion. After floundering in 2024, UnitedHealth’s trailing-12-month operating cash flow has rebounded to $29 billion compared to $24.2 billion at the end of last year.

And if price-to-earnings, dividend yield, and growth rates are only background clues to cash flow, these metrics seem to bode well for UnitedHealth, too.

The company’s price-to-earnings ratio of 13.7 is cheap compared to the S&P 500,
with its average P/E ratio of around 26, while revenue growth of 13% year over year further fuels the bull case. Meanwhile, the company’s recent 5.2% dividend increase — its 15th consecutive annual payout hike — brings its yield to 2.8% as I write this, nearly triple the S&P 500 average.

For investors willing to take a long-term approach and be rewarded with rising income in the meantime, UnitedHealth is a buy.

The U.S. Department of Justice is cracking down on yet another cryptocurrency fraud ploy.

The losses amount to tens of millions, and it’s expected that more will be identified.

An Elaborate Scheme

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Western District of Washington filed a civil action on Tuesday, demanding the forfeiture of cryptocurrency assets valued at roughly $7.1 million. The funds were seized during an investigation into a scheme involving fraudulent investment in oil and gas, which Acting U.S. Attorney Teal Luthy Miller announced.

The assets are only a fraction of the $97 million obtained by coconspirators between June 2022 and July 2024, which Homeland Security Investigations seized in December last year.

“The co-schemers in this fraud moved their ill-gotten gain through various cryptocurrency accounts to try to launder the money stolen from victims,” said Attorney Miller.

“Federal investigators and prosecutors in our office moved as quickly as possible to trace and seize the cryptocurrency so that some of the losses can be returned to victims.”

According to the filing and other case records, the plot was presented as escrow accounts for purchasing oil tank storage in either Rotterdam, the Netherlands, or Houston, which spanned from at least August 2022 through August 2024.

The victims were convinced to send money to these accounts, where the conspirators indicated that investors could make significant profits by renting out the oil tank storage to others. At least seven separate entities have been marked where funds were sent.

However, the good news ended there, as once the funds were sent, no further information on the investment was provided, and the co-schemers just stopped replying.

How The Funds Were Moved

A resident from Newcastle, Washington, Geoffrey K. Auyeung, 47, was indicted as a coconspirator in the U.S in August 2024, being charged with receiving the majority of the funds generated by the deceptive plan.

The money was quickly shuffled to one or more of at least 81 accounts at various institutions, either offshore or not, or to one of the at least 19 different crypto accounts.

The assets were then funneled into various cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, USDT, USDC, and Ethereum, the majority of which was further transferred to accounts at the Binance exchange.

The forfeiture filing further states that the crypto accounts, which were seized, were linked to individuals in Russia and Nigeria, where some of the victims’ funds, used to purchase digital assets, were also sent to exchanges in those countries.

At least one of the money markets in Russia or Nigeria is alleged to have facilitated money laundering for transnational criminal organizations, including terrorist organizations and other parties that have been known to violate international trade sanctions.

At the time of Auyeung’s arrest, $2.3 million was seized from his bank accounts, which is in addition to the $7.1 million in crypto the government is seeking to forfeit.

If the court approves the forfeiture, the funds will be distributed accordingly to the victims. Investigators, so far, have identified dozens of such cases, with the total amount of exploits reaching approximately $17.9 million, which is expected to grow as more casualties are identified.

A New York judge ruled Friday that the majority of New York Attorney General Letitia James’ civil securities fraud suit against crypto venture firm Digital Currency Group (DCG) and two of its executives can proceed to trial.

In 2023, James sued James sued DCG and its CEO Barry Silbert, DCG’s now-bankrupt lending arm Genesis Global Capital and its former CEO Michael Moro and crypto exchange Gemini, alleging that they worked together to cover up a gaping $1 billion hole in Genesis’ balance sheet caused by the wipe-out of Singapore-based crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital (3AC) in 2022.

James said DCG and Genesis made “false assurances” on social media that DCG had absorbed Genesis’ losses from 3AC’s implosion when, in fact, they had just papered over the hole with a promissory note, pleading to pay Genesis $1.1 billion over 10 years at a 1% interest rate. While DCG has adamantly maintained that the promissory note was legitimate, James’ suit claimed that DCG has “never made a single payment under the Note.”

While Gemini and Genesis both settled with the OAG, DCG, Silbert and Moro have fought them tooth and nail. Last spring, DCG and both executives filed motions to dismiss the suit, alleging that the Office of the Attorney General (OAG) had failed to state a claim — essentially arguing that they were not selling securities and thus should not be sued under New York State securities laws.

But the judge presiding over the case disagreed in her Friday ruling, writing that the OAG had, at least at the current stage of the case, adequately alleged that the Gemini Earn program — the now-defunct Gemini lending product that went belly-up in November 2022 and which sits at the center of James’ case — was a security.

Crane did, however, agree to toss out two of James’ claims against DCG, Moro and Silbert — one claim under New York’s Executive Law that they engaged in a scheme to defraud in the first degree, and another that they engaged in a conspiracy in the fifth degree — ruling that those claims were duplicative.

Though Crane ruled the case can proceed, DCG said it isn’t done fighting.

“As we have stated from the beginning, the allegations against DCG are a thin web of innuendo, mischaracterizations, and unsupported conclusions,” a spokesperson for DCG told CoinDesk. “We’re encouraged by the judge’s dismissal of the New York Attorney General’s most outrageous claims based on alleged violations of criminal fraud and conspiracy statutes. We will continue to fight this baseless lawsuit as we remain focused on our mission in support of the digital assets industry.”

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has agreed to drop its enforcement case against Cumberland DRW, the crypto trading arm of Chicago-based trading firm DRW, according to a Tuesday announcement from the company.

The SEC sued Cumberland DRW last October, accusing the firm of acting as an unregistered securities dealer and alleging it sold more than $2 billion in unregistered securities, naming tokens like Polygon (POL), Solana (SOL), Cosmos (ATOM), Algorand (ALGO) and Filecoin (FIL) as a “non-exhaustive” list of tokens the agency considered to be securities.

At the time the suit was filed, Cumberland DRW and its CEO Don Wilson pledged to fight the charges. In an interview with CoinDesk last October, Wilson said that his firm had tried and failed to register as a securities dealer with the SEC, and suggested that the lack of clarity for crypto companies under then-Chair Gary Gensler was a feature, not a bug of the agency’s regulatory approach.

Read more: Who’s Afraid of Gary Gensler? Not Don Wilson, the Trader Who Beat the Regulator Once Before

“This dynamic put the SEC in a position where they could say everyone is breaking the rule, and we’re just going to go after whoever we want to,” Wilson told CoinDesk. “[It] reminds me of ‘Atlas Shrugged.’ If everybody is breaking the law, they get to selectively harass whoever they want to.”

Just five months later, under the new leadership of Acting Chair Mark Uyeda, the SEC has completely reversed course. The agency’s decision to drop its suit against Cumberland DRW is the latest in a series of abandoned lawsuits: the SEC has also dropped its case against Coinbase, and agreed to drop its cases against ConsenSys and Kraken. It has also closed a multitude of probes into crypto companies, including Gemini, OpenSea, Robinhood Crypto and Yuga Labs. As with its ConsenSys and Kraken agreements, the SEC’s agreement with Cumberland is pending approval from a majority of the three commissioners currently on the panel. The Commission voted to drop its Coinbase case last week.

“As a firm deeply committed to the principles of integrity and transparency, we look forward to continuing our dialogue with the SEC to help shape a future where technological advancements and regulatory clarity go hand in hand, ensuring tha the U.S. remains at the forefront of global financial innovation,” Cumberland said in its announcement.

A representative for Cumberland DRW declined to comment beyond the firm’s X post.

The SEC did not respond to CoinDesk’s request for comment.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued a ruling on Wednesday largely agreeing with a lower court’s 2023 decision to toss out a class action suit against decentralized exchange Uniswap.

A group of investors originally sued Uniswap Labs, the company behind the decentralized protocol of the same name, and some of its venture capital investors in 2022, alleging that the company was responsible for harming investors by allowing scam tokens to be issued on its protocol.

District Court Judge Katherine Polk Failla of the Southern District of New York (SDNY) sided with Uniswap in 2023 and scrapped the suit before it went to trial, likening the plaintiffs’ arguments to “a suit attempting to hold an application like Venmo or Zelle liable for a drug deal that used the platform to facilitate a fund transfer.”

Plaintiffs appealed Failla’s ruling in September 2023, but were largely shut down by the fresh decision from the Second Circuit on Wednesday. The Second Circuit judges affirmed Failla’s decision to throw out the plaintiffs’ claims under both the Securities Act and the Exchange Act, writing:

“In sum, we agree with the district court that it ‘defies logic’ that a drafter of a smart contract, a computer code, could be held liable under the Exchange Act for a third party user’s misuse of the platform,” the filing read.

The only part of Failla’s ruling that was vacated and remanded back to a district court – meaning the lower court will hear this sliver of the the plaintiffs’ case again – were the state law claims, which essentially seek to try similar allegations under state, rather than federal law, in New York, North Carolina and Idaho.

The ruling is a win for Uniswap, fresh off the heels of Tuesday’s announcement that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) would drop its investigation into the decentralized exchange which, under former SEC Chairman Gary Gensler, was being probed for allegedly operating as an unregistered securities broker and unregistered securities exchange, as well as issuing an unregistered security.

Read more: SEC Drops Investigation Into Uniswap, Will Not File Enforcement Action