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XLB ETF: Its Relevance to Increased Construction Activity

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–News Direct–

The United States has recently seen a resurgence in the construction industry. Investors aiming to benefit from this rise in construction activity may want to explore an exchange-traded fund (ETF), the Materials Select Sector SPDR Fund (XLB), which offers a snapshot of this bustling sector.

As of the latest reports, the XLB ETF's strategic holdings reflect its commitment to offering diverse exposure within this thriving industry.

Key Holdings Within XLB*

XLB encompasses a diverse portfolio of businesses operating in different domains, including chemicals, construction materials, packaging and containers, metals and mining, along with paper and forest products. There are currently 28 companies in the portfolio.

Leading the pack we have Linde PLC, a global leader in industrial gasses and engineering, at 21.45%. It is followed by Freeport-McMoRan Incorporated, a leading mining company, holding 7.19% of XLB.

Next we have Sherwin-Williams, which is renowned for their excellence in paints, coatings, and related products, at 7.08%. Following is Ecolab, a prominent player in the industrial sector, making a significant contribution to XLB at 5.76%. Finally, there is Air Products and Chemicals, another key player in industrial gasses and related equipment, with 5.27%.

This extensive coverage offers investors the opportunity to tap into numerous facets of the materials sector, proving advantageous during phases of economic expansion or heightened infrastructure investment. As the construction industry continues forward, XLB, with its 0.09% expense ratio**, remains well-positioned.

Increasing Demand for Building Materials

The steady demand for building materials has been a key factor in the growing relevance of XLB. As we continue to navigate the post-COVID-19 era, construction activities are on a significant rise, creating a surge in the need for raw materials.

Furthermore, the increasing focus on infrastructure development is adding fuel to this rising demand. The recent passage of the infrastructure bill opens up avenues for substantial investments in diverse fields such as transportation, broadband, and clean energy, thereby making XLB a potentially attractive investment option.

The Materials Select Sector SPDR Fund (XLB) provides diversified exposure to the thriving materials sector. With its current demand driven by ongoing construction projects and potential infrastructure expenditure, XLB emerges as a compelling choice for investors seeking to tap into these trends.

DISCLAIMER: This is a work of research and should not be taken as investment or financial advice. Therefore, Select Sector SPDRs or the publisher is not liable for any decision made based on the publication.

About the Company:

Select Sector SPDR ETFs offer flexibility and customization opportunities. Many investors have similar outlooks, but no two are exactly alike. Select Sector SPDR ETFs let investors select the sectors that best meet their investment goals.

*Holdings, Weightings & Assets as of 4/30/24 subject to change

**Ordinary brokerage fees apply

DISCLOSURES

The S&P 500 Index is an unmanaged index of 500 common stocks that is generally considered representative of the U.S. stock market. The index is heavily weighted toward stocks with large market capitalizations and represents approximately two-thirds of the total market value of all domestic common stocks. The S&P 500 Index figures do not reflect any fees, expenses or taxes. An investor should consider investment objectives, risks, fees and expenses before investing.

One may not invest directly in an index.

Transparent ETFs provide daily disclosure of portfolio holdings and weightings

All ETFs are subject to risk, including loss of principal. Sector ETF products are also subject to sector risk and non-diversification risk, which generally will result in greater price fluctuations than the overall market. Diversification does not eliminate risk.

An investor should consider investment objectives, risks, charges and expenses carefully before investing. To obtain a prospectus, which contains this and other information, call 1-866-SECTOR-ETF (732-8673) or visit www.sectorspdrs.com. Read the prospectus carefully before investing.

ALPS Portfolio Solutions Distributor, Inc., a registered broker-dealer, is distributor for the Select Sector SPDR Trust.

Media Contact:

Company: Select Sector SPDRs

Contact: Dan Dolan*

Address: 1290 Broadway, Suite 1000, Denver, CO 80203

Country: United States

Email: dan.dolan@sectorspdrs.com

Website: https://www.sectorspdrs.com/

*Dan Dolan is a Registered Representative of ALPS Portfolio Solutions Distributor, Inc. ALPS Portfolio Solutions Distributor, Inc., a registered broker-dealer, is the distributor for the Select Sector SPDR Trust.

SEL007537 EXP 7/31/24

Contact Details

Dan Dolan

+1 203-935-8103

dan.dolan@sectorspdrs.com

Company Website

https://www.sectorspdrs.com/

View source version on newsdirect.com: https://newsdirect.com/news/xlb-etf-its-relevance-to-increased-construction-activity-772310290

Select Sector SPDR

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CapitalXtend Launches New Brand Identity and Enhanced Digital Experience

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Quatre Bornes, Mauritius, August 08, 2026, ZEX PR WIRE — CapitalXtend has announced the launch of its refreshed identity and redesigned website, marking an important milestone in the company’s continued evolution. The update reflects CapitalXtend’s commitment to creating a more modern, accessible, and client-focused trading experience while strengthening the foundation for its next phase of growth.

This represents more than a visual update. It reflects CapitalXtend’s ongoing investment in improving how traders engage with the company across every touchpoint. Alongside the new identity, the redesigned website introduces a cleaner interface, improved navigation, and a more intuitive structure, making it easier for both new and existing clients to explore the company’s products, platforms, and trading services.

The enhanced digital experience enables traders to access account information, compare trading solutions, explore platform features, and navigate market opportunities with greater ease. Every improvement has been designed to simplify the user journey while maintaining the professional standards, reliability, and performance for which CapitalXtend is known.

This milestone also reinforces CapitalXtend’s broader commitment to innovation and continuous improvement. By refining its digital experience and strengthening the way traders interact with the brand, CapitalXtend continues to invest in making its services more accessible, intuitive, and user-focused. As part of its offering, traders continue to benefit from solutions such as CFD Shares, Holders Account, Return on Equity, and Unlimited Leverage.

Existing clients will experience a seamless transition, with no changes to account credentials, funds, or account types. The updated platform allows traders to continue operating without interruption while benefiting from a more refined digital environment.

Speaking on the milestone, Dr. Farrukh Adeeb, Group CEO & Chairman of XGroup, said:

“This is an important milestone for CapitalXtend. Our refreshed identity reflects how the company has evolved and where we are heading next. Beyond a new look, this launch represents our continued investment in delivering a better experience for our clients, making it simpler to access our services, navigate our platform, and trade with confidence as we continue to grow.”

The website is now live, representing another step in the company’s journey to deliver a trusted, innovative, and client-centric trading experience for its global community.

 

About CapitalXtend

CapitalXtend is a global multi-asset broker committed to delivering a secure, transparent, and technology-driven trading experience. Offering access to a wide range of financial markets through advanced trading platforms, the company continues to focus on innovation, client-centric service, and empowering traders with reliable trading solutions.

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Press Release

Grepix Infotech Highlights White Label Apps as a Smart Business Model for On-Demand Entrepreneurs

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Grepix Infotech shares industry insights on how enterprise-grade white label technology is helping entrepreneurs launch faster, reduce technology costs, and compete in the growing on-demand economy.

Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India, 8th Aug 2026 — Grepix Infotech Pvt Ltd, a globally recognised on demand technology company powering app businesses across 30+ countries, today published its industry perspective on the question every technology entrepreneur eventually faces: do you build your own platform from scratch, or do you launch faster and smarter using a proven white label solution?

For entrepreneurs targeting the on demand economy in 2026 — one of the fastest-growing and most competitive commercial landscapes in the world — the answer has never been clearer.

 

A $600 Billion Market With No Room for Slow Movers

A $600 Billion Market With No Room for Slow Movers

The global on-demand economy is now valued at over USD 600 billion and growing at a compound annual growth rate of over 18 percent. From ride-hailing giants like Uber, Bolt, and Didi to food delivery leaders like DoorDash, Glovo, and Jumia Food, the playbook has been written. Consumers in every market — from São Paulo to Kuala Lumpur, Karachi to Cairo, and Manila to Mexico City — have already formed on-demand habits. They expect instant service, real-time tracking, and seamless digital payments as a baseline — not a luxury.

The opportunity for regional entrepreneurs is enormous. The platforms dominating global headlines are not winning in every city, every town, or every emerging market corridor. There are thousands of underserved markets across Asia, Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East where a fast-moving, locally operated on-demand business can capture significant market share — if it gets there fast enough.

That is exactly where white label technology changes the game entirely.

 

Why Most On-Demand Startups Never Make It to Launch

Why Most On Demand Startups Never Make It to Launch

Across hundreds of client engagements spanning markets from Dhaka to Dubai, Bogotá to Bangkok, and Accra to Auckland, Grepix has observed a consistent and sobering pattern: the most common reason on-demand startups fail is not a flawed business model or insufficient funding. It is the time, cost, and complexity of building the technology itself.

Building a competitive ride-hailing platform — with a passenger app, driver app, admin panel, real-time GPS dispatch, dynamic surge pricing, and multi-gateway payment integration — requires a minimum development timeline of 10 to 14 months and a budget typically ranging between USD 40,000 and USD 100,000, depending on team quality and feature scope. That figure excludes ongoing maintenance, server infrastructure, security updates, and the continuous feature development required to stay competitive in a rapidly evolving market.

By the time a custom-built app launches, a competitor running on a proven white label platform has already acquired drivers, signed up restaurants, onboarded service providers, and locked in early customer loyalty.

“We have seen brilliant entrepreneurs with the right market insight, the right capital, and the right team — completely derailed by a development cycle that consumed 18 months and twice their planned budget. By launch day, someone else already owned the market,” said a spokesperson for Grepix Infotech. “The technology timeline does not just slow a business down. It can kill it entirely.”

 

What Modern White Label Actually Delivers

The white label model of 2026 bears no resemblance to the generic, off-the-shelf software of a decade ago. Today’s enterprise-grade white label platforms like those built by Grepix offer full source code ownership, complete brand identity customisation, region-specific feature configuration, dedicated technical onboarding, and continuous product updates informed by real-world deployments across diverse global markets.

Entrepreneurs who choose white label do not receive a template. They receive a battle-tested, commercially proven technology foundation that has already processed millions of transactions, resolved thousands of edge cases, and been refined across deployments in markets as diverse as Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Vietnam, Ghana, Turkey, and Colombia.

A white label deployment through Grepix can be live in under two weeks at a fraction of the cost of custom development with zero compromise on quality, scalability, or brand identity.

 

Speed to Market is the Real Competitive Moat

Speed to Market is the Real Competitive Moat

In the on-demand economy, first-mover advantage is not a cliché. It is a commercial reality.

The platform that signs up drivers first, the aggregator that onboards restaurants before anyone else, and the logistics operator that locks in enterprise clients early — these businesses build supply and demand flywheels that are expensive and time-consuming for any competitor to replicate. Just as Bolt disrupted Uber across multiple markets by moving fast and operating with local agility, and just as Grab built a dominant super app position across Southeast Asia by prioritising speed of market penetration over perfection of technology, regional entrepreneurs can carve out dominant positions in their own cities and countries — if they launch before the window closes.

White label eliminates the development delay entirely. Rather than spending a year building, entrepreneurs can redirect every dollar and every hour into driver acquisition, restaurant partnerships, hyperlocal marketing, and customer experience — the activities that actually determine whether an on-demand business survives and scales.

 

Five Verticals Where White Label Delivers the Strongest ROI

Five Verticals Where White Label Delivers the Strongest ROI

Ride Hailing and Taxi — Where Uber, Bolt, and Careem dominate at a global scale, hundreds of city-level and country-level markets across Indonesia, Morocco, Kazakhstan, Peru, and Senegal remain open to locally operated alternatives. Grepix’s HireMe taxi app platform gives entrepreneurs a fully branded, Uber-class ride-hailing business with intelligent dispatch, surge pricing, and real-time GPS tracking — deployable in days, not months.

Food Delivery — As Glovo, Jumia Food, Talabat, and DoorDash expand across markets from Istanbul to Lagos and from Riyadh to Ho Chi Minh City, the demand for locally owned and zero commission alternatives is accelerating rapidly. Grepix’s MasalaDish food delivery platform lets entrepreneurs launch a fully independent food delivery business — retaining complete control of margins, customer data, and vendor relationships in a way the large aggregators will never offer.

Roadside Assistance — A high renewal, high retention vertical with strong demand from insurance companies, automobile manufacturers, and fleet operators across markets including the UAE, South Africa, Malaysia, Argentina, and Egypt. Grepix’s InstaResQ Roadside Assistance platform connects stranded drivers to the nearest verified service provider in minutes — white labeled and fully brandable for any insurer, OEM, or fleet operator entering this space.

Logistics and Freight — As platforms like Porter, Kobo360, Lalamove, and Trukker have demonstrated across India, Nigeria, Hong Kong, and the UAE, digitising freight logistics is a multi-billion-dollar opportunity in every emerging and developing market on the planet. Grepix’s GTA Logistics platform gives logistics entrepreneurs a complete digital freight operation — booking, real-time fleet tracking, route optimisation, proof of delivery, and automated billing — without a single line of custom code, ready to compete from day one.

Home and Hyperlocal Services — In markets where Urban Company, TaskRabbit, Helpling, and Handyman have proven the hyperlocal services model across India, the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom, the opportunity for locally operated equivalents across Thailand, Nigeria, Chile, Jordan, and the Philippines remains wide open and largely uncontested. Grepix’s On Demand Services platform enables entrepreneurs to launch a fully configured hyperlocal marketplace across any home service category — cleaning, beauty, appliance repair, healthcare — in virtually any city, in virtually any market, within days.

 

White Label Is Not a Shortcut — It Is a Growth Strategy

The most successful franchise and platform businesses in the world — from global fast food networks to logistics giants — do not build proprietary technology stacks from the ground up. They adopt proven operational systems, focus investment on local execution, and compete on customer relationships and market knowledge.

White label on-demand technology follows exactly the same principle. The entrepreneurs winning in the on-demand space in 2026 are not the best developers. They are the best operators — and white label gives them the technology infrastructure to operate at full commercial scale from week one, in any city, in any country, with any brand name they choose.

For any entrepreneur evaluating entry into the on-demand economy, the question is no longer whether white label is credible or capable enough. The question is whether they can afford the capital burn, the time delay, and the competitive risk of not using it.

white label advantage

 

About Grepix Infotech Pvt Ltd

Grepix Infotech Pvt Ltd is a New Delhi-based technology company and the developer behind HireMe, MasalaDish, InstaResQ, GTA Logistics, and the Grepix On Demand Services Platform. With 500+ clients across 30+ countries and over a decade of product development experience, Grepix is the white label technology partner of choice for entrepreneurs and enterprises building on-demand businesses across Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Latin America.

Media Contact

Organization: Grepix Infotech Pvt. Ltd.

Contact Person: Vinay Jain

Website: https://www.grepixit.com

Email: Send Email

Contact Number: +918860213347

Address:Logix Technova A 328, Noida-Greater Noida Expy, Block B, Sector 132, Noida, India – 201304

City: Noida

State: Uttar Pradesh

Country:India

Release id:47948

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AI Expert Amol Walvekar Builds First-Ever RAG-Powered, Custom AI for Finance Processes

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Anchor, from Adra Technologies, builds the first retrieval-augmented generation to the finance back office built by a product leader who shipped enterprise-grade AI at JP Morgan, WePay, Lead, Bolt, and Insight Data Science.

San Francisco, CA, August 7th, 2026— Amol Walvekar, an AI expert who has spent his career building enterprise-grade machine learning systems, today announced the launch of Anchor’s industry first RAG for finance teams, and custom agents built specifically for finance processes. Anchor by Adra Technologies Inc. enables finance teams to build, operate, and scale AI agents for complex back-office work directly within their ERP, CRM, and data warehouse.

Understanding RAG, Its Enterprise Value, and Proven ROI

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is an architectural framework that enhances the functionality of Large Language Models (LLMs) by integrating external data retrieval mechanisms. Rather than relying solely on static training data or forcing models to guess. The core business value of RAG lies in its ability to deliver secure, highly accurate, and audit-ready outputs across complex structured and unstructured corporate data.

By grounding LLM responses in an organization’s internal datasets—such as contracts, policies, and systems records—RAG dramatically reduces hallucinations, eliminates the risks of stale static knowledge, and maintains strict enterprise-grade compliance without the high expenses of continuous model retraining.

Leading industry implementations and technical benchmarks highlight the significant operational ROI of optimized RAG systems:

  • Error Reduction: Advanced semantic filtering has demonstrated the ability to reduce incorrect or partially correct RAG outputs by up to 80% while boosting baseline retrieval accuracy by over 20 percentage points.
  • Frontier Accuracy: In standardized end-to-end evaluations like the RAG-QA Arena, optimized systems utilizing fully integrated architectures consistently outperform general frontier models.
  • Efficiency Gains: Deep-dive development platforms focused on enterprise AI evaluation loops have successfully accelerated engineering cycles, delivering up to a 10x improvement in model prototyping, validation, and production deployment speeds.

Walvekar’s expertise was forged inside some of the most demanding enterprise AI environments in financial services. At WePay, through its acquisition by JP Morgan, he built enterprise-grade ML for risk and payments systems where a model’s decisions carry real financial consequences and must hold up at bank-level standards of accuracy, auditability, and scale. He continued that work across Lead and Bolt, applying machine learning to payments infrastructure where reliability is non-negotiable. As an AI Fellow at Insight, he built and shipped an abstractive text summarization platform for knowledge workers — early, hands-on work in the language-model techniques that now power Anchor.

“Finance processes have resisted automation because generic AI doesn’t know your chart of accounts, your contracts, your ERP, or your policies,” said Walvekar. “Anchor is different by design: it’s retrieval-augmented and custom to each finance team, grounded in their own systems and documents. That’s how you get the accuracy and reliability of a trained analyst. The model isn’t guessing, it’s retrieving and reasoning over the customer’s actual financial data.”

RAG, purpose-built for the finance back office

Anchor’s retrieval-augmented architecture connects directly to the systems where finance work lives including NetSuite, Salesforce, Workday, Microsoft Dynamics, Sage, Snowflake, and more than a dozen other platforms and grounds every agent in the customer’s own data, documents, and processes. Finance teams create custom agents in natural language, with no developer effort, to automate work arising from reconciliations, budget management, sales and marketing spend, commissions, and revenue compliance. The platform is SOC 2 Type II compliant, meeting the highest requirements for data protection and privacy.

The result is AI that behaves the way enterprise AI has to behave: precise, explainable, and dependable at production scale now applied to the finance back office.

Beyond building Adra, Walvekar is an active angel investor and writes on enterprise AI adoption, agentic architectures, and market structure. He holds a graduate degree from Boston University.

About Amol 

Amol is the Cofounder of Adra Technologies Inc. is the company behind Anchor, the first RAG-powered, custom AI platform for finance processes. The company is headquartered in San Francisco. Learn more at www.getadra.com.

Media Contact: founders@getadra.com

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