One weakness of Valve's Steam Deck gaming handheld and SteamOS is that, by default, they will only run Windows games from Steam that are supported by the platform's Proton compatibility layer (plus the subset of games that run natively on Linux). It's possible to install alternative game stores, and Proton's compatibility is generally impressive, but SteamOS still isn't a true drop-in replacement for Windows.

Microsoft and Asus' co-developed ROG Xbox Ally is trying to offer PC gamers a more comprehensive compatibility solution that also preserves a SteamOS-like handheld UI by putting a new Xbox-branded user interface on top of traditional Windows. And while this interface will roll out to the ROG Xbox Ally first, Microsoft told The Verge that the interface would come to other Ally handhelds next and that something "similar" would be "rolling out to other Windows handhelds starting next year."

Bringing a Steam Deck-style handheld-optimized user interface to Windows is something Microsoft has been experimenting with internally since at least 2022, when employees at an internal hackathon identified most of Windows' handheld deficiencies in a slide deck about a proposed "Windows Handheld Mode."

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Shares of Deckers Outdoor (NYSE: DECK) continue to tumble. The parent company of footwear brands including UGG, HOKA, Teva, and Ahnu has fallen roughly 50% since peaking early this year at over $200 per share.

It never feels good to buy a stock that continues to go down. It's only human to want to buy winners. The reality is that all companies face adversity at times; the trick is knowing when the company is working through minor bumps or if there are serious problems underneath the surface.

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So, I took a peek into the business to see which side of the coin Deckers Outdoor lands on. Here is whether you should invest $1,000 into Deckers stock today.

Image source: Getty Images.

Core brands continue to lead the way despite some industry headwinds

Deckers Outdoor's two primary brands are UGG, a California lifestyle brand most known for its boots, and HOKA, a premium running shoe brand. Together, UGG and HOKA combined for $4.76 billion of the company's $4.99 billion total sales in fiscal 2025.

The good news is that both brands continue to perform well. Sales of UGG and HOKA increased 13.1% and 23.6%, respectively, in fiscal 2025. But Q4 sales growth was much lower, just 3.6% for UGG and 10% for HOKA in Q4. In other words, sales momentum has dramatically slowed.

Slowing growth isn't ideal, but there is a fair amount of evidence that Deckers is dealing with industrywide headwinds rather than internal issues. Uncertainty regarding tariffs has complicated the supply chain for footwear companies, which primarily manufacture outside of the United States. Deckers manufactures most of its products in Vietnam.

Management estimated that the company's cost of goods sold may increase by $150 million in fiscal 2026 due to tariffs, and is unsure how that may impact consumer demand. The company declined to offer financial guidance for the upcoming year.

The stock's decline may have created a buying opportunity -- though risks exist

Shoes are a discretionary spend for most consumers, so economic uncertainty can easily disrupt business. However, it could be a buying opportunity for the stock if these challenges are temporary and the brands themselves remain strong with buyers.

Deckers is holding up far better in this operating environment than Nike, which reported a 9% year-over-year sales decline in its most recent quarter. I think it's a positive sign that HOKA is Deckers Outdoor's fastest-growing brand, while Nike, the industry leader, is struggling.

If you zoom out, the HOKA brand's recent growth is no fluke. The brand's sales have skyrocketed from just $352 million in fiscal 2020.

Deckers is also well-equipped to navigate a challenging business climate, with a debt-free balance sheet and nearly $1.9 billion in cash on hand. Management re-upped the company's share repurchase program in Q4 as well, bringing its authorized buybacks to $2.5 billion, or 15% of its current market capitalization. That's going to do wonders in establishing a solid floor for earnings-per-share growth.

Whether it's sneakers or apparel, fashion brands are a popularity contest. The risk in these stocks is that the brands lose their appeal. Fortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case here.

Should you invest $1,000 in Deckers Outdoor stock today?

Things could always change in the future, but Deckers Outdoor seems poised for a bounce-back once the economic landscape improves. Consumer sentiment has taken a clear hit amid the uncertainty in recent months.

The negativity is weighing on shoppers, and the stock's steep decline could be as simple as the market lowering growth expectations. Earlier this year, analysts were anticipating approximately 15% annualized long-term earnings growth from Deckers. Those estimates have dropped to just 6.4% today.

Deckers traded at a price-to-earnings ratio of 37 in January, but that has plunged to just 17. Even modest sales growth coupled with those massive buybacks should generate the mid-single-digit earnings growth analysts now expect, and there could be significant upside potential if growth eventually reaccelerates and drives that valuation higher again.

The stock can always go lower, but the long-term risk-to-reward dynamic looks attractive here, making Deckers Outdoor a fine buy-and-hold candidate to park $1,000 in.

Should you invest $1,000 in Deckers Outdoor right now?

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• Ciroos builds AI agents that act as site reliability teammates to find and fix software errors.
• The startup just launched from stealth with $21 million in seed funding from Energy Impact Partners.
• Business Insider got an exclusive look at the pitch deck Ciroos used to raise its seed round.

A team of enterprise tech veterans just raised $21 million to introduce an AI fix to some of the most painful software engineering problems: middle-of-the-night outages and other critical system failures that require immediate attention.

Ciroos, a new startup founded by former Cisco, Amazon Web Services, and Gigamon executives, just launched from stealth with its seed funding round, led by Energy Impact Partners.

Headquartered in Pleasanton, California, Ciroos builds AI agents that act as site reliability engineering (SRE) teammates. Traditionally, it can take a long time and many people to keep software systems running — and to find a fix when something breaks. When a website breaks down overnight or during a holiday weekend, it's up to a team of unlucky, on-call engineers in triage mode to find a fix as quickly as possible.

Ciroos's agents work alongside a company's operations team to detect problems before a human is officially alerted, identify the root cause, and either fix them autonomously or help their human teammates fix them faster.

Considering that the median size of a seed funding round in the first half of 2024 was just $1.3 million, per Crunchbase data, Ciroos's $21 million round is staggering in comparison. The startup's CEO, Ronak Desai, told Business Insider that he and his co-founders connected with investors who agreed that enterprise operations needed a new approach, which AI agents could achieve.

"We saw deep curiosity from investors on the customer anecdotes we shared, and everybody noted our focus on cross-domain correlation as our point of differentiation," he said. "Investors also readily recognized our execution track record, our relentless customer focus, and the deep experience we had assembled — all necessary ingredients to build enterprise-class products."

Desai said that with its funding round completed, Ciroos will focus on hiring: the startup plans to staff up with AI engineers, full-stack engineers, and salespeople in the San Francisco Bay Area and India.

AI agents are booming in 2025, and Ciroos faces stiff competition from a multitude of enterprise tech startups that build AI teammates to help software and computer engineers. In May, no-code AI agent startup StackAI announced it raised $16 million from Lobby VC, and in April, AI debugging agent startup Spur announced it raised $4.5 million from First Round Capital and Pear.

Other startups offer general AI agents that can complete a variety of workplace tasks, including those traditionally handled by software and computer engineering teams. For example, the startup Artisan announced it raised $25 million in April, and Coworker announced a $13 million round in May.

Here's an exclusive look at the 11-slide pitch deck Ciroos used to raise $21 million in seed funding.

• Hedra, a generative AI platform, creates images, video, and audio, with a focus on characters.
• Hedra raised $32 million in Series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz's Infrastructure fund.
• Read the pitch deck the startup used to raise its latest funding.

A video of a baby interviewing a dog on a podcast went viral last month.

No, it wasn't real. It was an AI-generated video created by comedian Jon Lajoie, who used Hedra, an AI video generation platform, to make the animation.

Hedra's platform allows users to generate images, video, and audio with its web-based content creation studio.

"Our model and technology focuses on the most controllable, compelling characters, whether that's a hyperrealistic human or an animated character or even an animal," Hedra's CEO, Michael Lingelbach, told Business Insider.

On Thursday, Hedra announced that it raised a $32 million Series A fundraising round led by Andreessen Horowitz's Infrastructure fund. The round included returning investors such as A16z Speedrun, Abstract, and Index Ventures.

Since its launch in 2024, the AI video startup has rapidly raised capital. In August, it announced a $10 million seed investment round. In March, Amazon's Alexa Fund announced that it invested in the startup and several other AI companies. Hedra said it has raised a total of $44 million but has not disclosed a valuation.

Competition in the generative AI is hot, with buzzy companies like Captions, HeyGen, Synthesia, and Runway building tech around video and avatars (Hedra specified that it is not an avatar company).

"We're not trying to compete with Google Veo, we're not trying to compete with Sora," Lingelbach said. "We're focusing really firmly on building the best character models, and that's something that with this additional capital we can make another step function in doing."

Hedra's Character-3 "omnimodal" model combines images, text, and audio to generate video. Creating a character with Hedra begins by uploading an image and then uploading audio that they've either already recorded (like a podcast) or generated using text-to-speech models like ElevenLabs.

"Both voice and video are seeing rapid evolution right now," Lingelbach said. "We took a big leap forward on naturalness of expression with our current model."

Hedra's platform is also users to integrate outside models like ElevenLabs, Google Veo, and Flux "all in one workflow," Lingelbach said.

Expanding beyond the creator economy

Hedra's core user base has been professional creators and marketers, Lingelbach said.

"We're already seeing a massive influx of AI-generated content," Lingelbach said. "My Instagram and TikTok feed are filled with various memes and also more serious content now that's AI-generated."

From comedy skits to faceless creator content to … talking babies, Hedra's already seen a wide range of use cases. Podcast content, particularly, has been a popular application of Hedra's tech.

"It's not really something that we anticipated initially, but it definitely has been driving a lot of our usage," he said.

In addition to the viral trend of AI baby-hosted podcasts that people have been creating using Hedra, others have used Hedra to create Studio Ghibli-style videos of the classic podcast interview clip.

With its recent raise, Hedra plans to expand into more enterprise marketing applications, expand its team, and open an office in New York City.

Read the pitch deck Hedra used to raise its Series A:

Note: Some slides have been redacted in order to share the deck publicly.

Hedra is focused on storytelling and characters.

Here's what the slide says:

Every good story is crafted around characters.
But until now, creating compelling characters has been the most challenging part of content creation.

The deck explains Hedra's 'omnimodal foundation model' that lets people quickly generate digital characters.

Here's what the slide says:

At Hedra, we've built the world's best character performance model that uniquely combines video, voice, motion, and emotion in a way never before possible.

• Hedra's Character-3 model is the world's first omnimodal foundation model in production.
• The only model that supports human, animated, and animal characters. And it works with any angle or framing.
• Built to prioritize efficiently scaling unified models
• The entire model was developed with a budget of under $2 million

Hedra's customers range from everyday consumers to creators and marketers.

Here's what the slide says:

We've seen three key customer segments rely on Hedra for their various character performance needs.

Consumers

Consumers love the fun content they can create on Hedra — ranging from memes to music videos to short films.

Prosumers

Prosumers are using Hedra for use cases such as video podcasts, social media, and developing IP.

Marketing Teams

Marketing teams are using Hedra to create UGC, product tutorials, and other content to drive sales conversions.

Hedra has plans to expand into more enterprise offerings.

Here's what the slide says:

And we've already gotten heavy inbound interest from businesses for professional use and have signed notable early enterprise customers.

Upcoming Enterprise Features:

• Teams management
• IP Guards
• Enterprise-level security

The deck highlights Hedra's research team and its proprietary tech.

Here's what the slide says:

Hedra is poised to be the first company to shatter the "uncanny valley."

• We have a best-in-class research team that enables us to train proprietary omnimodal models that no competitor can develop
• We're a product focused company that builds foundation models for real world applications, listens to our users, and ships frequently.
• We're a capital efficient team that built Character-3 on under $2M in capital and a small research team.

Then the deck introduces the team.

Here's what the slide says:

We've assembled the best team to own this category — marrying deep research with AI-Native product design.

Key Leadership Team:

Michael Lingelbach: Founder / CEO

• Stanford PhD student of Fei-Fei Li and Jiajun Wu. Senior author of 3 real-time diffusion papers. Recipient of prestigious Stanford Graduate Fellowship.

Hongwei Yi: Head of Research

• Former PhD Student of Michael Black, principal researcher behind first audio to video diffusion model to hit the market in the US.

Wei Li: Research Lead

• Core contributor to Google Bard/Gemini, PaLM-2 and T5, with 8+ years experience at Google Brain/Deepmind.

Jason Wilson: Head of Engineering

• Previously led engineering at Nava Benefits (Thrive-backed Series B startup) and engineering manager at Descartes Labs.

Alan Guo: Chief of Staff

• MBA from Harvard Business School. Previously worked in growth & strategy at Disney, Jubilee Media, and Firework.

Ramin Keene: Principal Engineer

• Former CTO at StockX and two-time founder.

Hedra concludes its deck by saying 'we're just getting started.'

Here's what the slide says:

We're on a mission to build the world's best end-to-end storytelling platform. And we're just getting started.

• We've already built the world's leading character performance model on just a $2M budget.
• Prosumers, consumers, and enterprise marketers love and depend on us for their content.
• We're now working on even larger feature releases that will reinvent creation workflows.

It ends with a thank you slide.

This includes contact information for its CEO.

After a record-breaking rally in 2024 when shares of Deckers Outdoor (NYSE: DECK) soared by 82%, the stock slammed into a brick wall in early 2025 and is now down 53% from its 52-week high as of this writing.

Even as the footwear company posts strong financials, it hasn't escaped the broader stock market turbulence, with concerns about the impact of looming trade tariffs emerging as the latest headwind. Still, investors considering abandoning this footrace might be stepping away too soon.

Where to invest $1,000 right now? Our analyst team just revealed what they believe are the 10 best stocks to buy right now. Learn More »

Here are three reasons Deckers Outdoor could be a great portfolio buy now.

1. A phenomenal growth story

Deckers Outdoor is best known for its footwear brands, including the iconic Ugg sheepskin boots and high-performance Hoka running and athletic shoes. The latter has been a game changer for the company. It is projected to generate over $2 billion in sales this year, more than doubling its size in just three years. Its unique style has driven the success, managing to cross over into the lifestyle category as a fashion phenomenon.

In its fiscal 2025 third quarter (ended Dec. 31), total net sales rose 17.1% year over year, accompanied by a 19% increase in earnings per share (EPS) to a quarterly record of $3. Hoka brand sales were even stronger, surging 24% compared to the prior-year quarter, covering the holiday shopping season. Deckers expects the momentum to continue with an ongoing expansion internationally as a key growth driver.

The results stand in stark contrast with broader industry trends, as competitors like Nike are facing declining sales while blaming weak consumer spending. By this measure, Deckers is gaining market share at rivals' expense.

Beyond the ups and downs of the stock market, Deckers' fundamentals are solid, with $2.2 billion in cash on its balance sheet cash and zero debt. Investors confident in the company's long-term potential have ample reasons to stick with this industry leader for the long haul.

Image source: Getty Images.

2. Hope for tariff relief from Vietnam

Like most footwear and apparel companies, Deckers depends on overseas manufacturers in China and Vietnam, a setup now strained by the Trump administration's sweeping tariffs: a 10% baseline tax on all U.S. imports, plus higher rates like 46% on Vietnam and 34% on China. Experts predict short-term disruptions from the tariffs -- which the administration has framed as addressing trade imbalances and economic fairness -- as companies such as Deckers are forced to pass their higher costs on to consumers.

Yet, there could be a way for Deckers to escape most of these consequences. In a message posted to social media, President Donald Trump described a "very productive call" with Vietnam's leaders, suggesting open dialogue toward a potential trade deal could be reached, with the possibility of tariffs being reduced to zero. This is key since Deckers, per its 2024 annual report, sources most of its footwear from Vietnam.

While nothing has been confirmed, if tariffs are rolled back sooner rather than later for this crucial Southeast Asian manufacturing hub, it could restore the market's confidence in Deckers' growth, a catalyst for the stock to rebound.

3. A bargain valuation

The sharp decline in the company's stock price since Deckers' last earnings report may be attributed to market concerns that profit margins have peaked, sparking skepticism about the company's ability to sustain its exceptional growth. If macroeconomic conditions worsen, investors face the risk of a sales slowdown that could force a reset of earnings expectations.

Nevertheless, the silver lining of the recent sell-off is that the stock's valuation has fallen to a seeming bargain, trading at just 16 times its estimated full-year EPS as a forward price-to-earnings ratio (P/E). Though uncertainty clouds how earnings will evolve into fiscal 2026, that alone doesn't justify the steep discount to peers like Nike and On Holding, which trade at a forward P/E of 27 and 33, respectively, despite facing similar challenges. Deckers stands out as the value pick in the group.

DECK PE Ratio (Forward) data by YCharts.

Final thoughts

What I like about Deckers Outdoor as an investment is its compelling mix of brand momentum, strong growth, and value that position it to reward shareholders over the long run. I'm bullish and believe the stock represents an excellent buy-the-dip opportunity and could be a great option for diversified portfolios.

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Dan Victor has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Deckers Outdoor and Nike. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.