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(NEW YORK) — New Mega Millions rules will come into play next month, the company has announced, under which the minimum jackpot value will more than double to $50 million.

The new rules will come into force after the final drawing of the current game on Friday, April 4, the company said in a notice posted to its website. The first drawing under the new rules will be on April 8.

From that draw, jackpots will start at $50 million, rather than the current starting point of $20 million. “Jackpots are expected to grow faster and get to higher dollar amounts more frequently in the new game,” the company said.

Minimum non-jackpot prizes will jump in value from between $2 and $1 million to between $10 and $10 million. Every winning ticket will payout at least double the price, Mega Millions said.

Mega Millions will introduce a new $5 game with a built-in multiplier, with a multiplier value of 2, 3, 4, 5 or 10 randomly assigned at the time of purchase.

Prizes for match 5 — achieved by matching five white balls — will range from $2 million to $10 million with the new multiplier.

Matching the Mega Ball on its own will now payout $10 to $50, depending on the assigned multiplier.

Mega Millions said the new rules improve the odds of players winning the jackpot — from 1 in 302,575,350 to 1 in 290,472,336 — due to the removal of one gold Mega Ball from the game. The new format will have 24 rather than 25 Mega Balls.

Overall odds of winning any prize will improve to 1 in 23 from 1 in 24, the company said.

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(NEW YORK) — President Donald Trump’s tariffs sent stocks tumbling in recent weeks, but the uncertainty helped propel a different asset viewed as a safe haven: gold.

The price of gold topped $3,000 per ounce for the first time ever last week, and the precious metal continued to hover around that mark in early trading on Monday.

Gold prices have soared 12% so far this year, while the S&P 500 has plummeted nearly 7%. Over that period, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has dropped 2% and the tech-heavy Nasdaq has tumbled 8.5%.

The rush toward gold makes financial sense, experts said. The asset offers investors a hedge against uncertain stock performance, since gold prices often display a degree of independence from movements in equities markets.

However, gold prices carry volatility of their own, some experts added, especially when buyers enter the market at a high point, risking losses instead of providing a security blanket.
“Investors need to be careful,” Campbell Harvey, a professor at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business who studies commodity prices, told ABC News.

“At a time of heightened uncertainty, people look toward a safe haven – and gold is a perceived safe haven. But most people don’t realize that gold is volatile,” Harvey added.

The run-up in gold prices comes amid a market slump set off by an escalating global trade war.

Last week, the S&P 500 closed down more than 10% since its high in February, meaning the decline officially qualified as a market correction. It marked the index’s first correction since October 2023. At the same time, the Dow suffered its worst one-week drop-off since 2023.

“Right now, it’s a very anxious marketplace,” Jim Wyckoff, senior market analyst at Kitco Metals, told ABC News. “That’s been a detriment for stock-market bulls and a boom for gold-market bulls.”

The flight to gold in moments of market crisis draws on decades of evidence, according to an analysis co-authored by Harvey in 2020. The price of gold moved higher during seven of the last nine major stock market selloffs stretching back to the late 1980s, researchers found.

“It’s a good track record, but it’s not a sure thing,” Harvey said. “Even though it went up seven out of nine of these drawdown periods, that doesn’t mean it will be seven out of nine in the next nine drawdowns.”

Last week, Paris-based financial firm BNP Paribas raised its forecast for gold prices, predicting the precious metal would exceed $3,100 an ounce. The company attributed the rosy outlook to economic uncertainty incited by Trump, but it warned such gains would likely fizzle out by the second half of this year.

“The gold market will price in or normalize Trump-driven trade risks, as it typically does with geopolitical risk,” BNP Paribas said in a report shared with ABC News. “Thus, if there is no ongoing escalation in trade tensions, gold prices will, in our view, struggle to maintain further upside momentum.”

Some experts who spoke to ABC News acknowledged the current price boom may eventually lose steam, but they still encouraged investors to add the precious metal to their portfolios as a means of offsetting the heightened risk of stocks.

“Gold offers diversification,” Trevor Yates, an analyst at investment firm Global X, told ABC News. “We see gold warranting a place in the portfolio.”

Investors who add gold for the sake of diversifying their portfolio, however, may want to add other assets alongside it, such as Treasury bonds or real estate, Harvey said.

“There are other safe assets besides gold,” Harvey said. “Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket.”

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(NEW YORK) — Stocks futures were again showing jitters early Thursday, after a reprieve for the S&P and NASDAQ on Wednesday amid President Donald Trump’s trade war.

A back-and-forth over international tariffs is hanging over the U.S. economy, along with a looming government shutdown with a deadline on Friday.

Dow futures evened out ahead of Thursday’s open, after earlier trading down about 0.3%.

Federal officials said Wednesday that consumer prices climbed 2.8% in February over the same year-earlier month, meaning inflation cooled more than economists expected.

After initially modest gains, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed on Wednesday down about 0.2%, while the S&P 500 climbed 0.5%. The tech-heavy Nasdaq ticked increased 1.2%.

Markets may look on Thursday to a smaller inflation report called the Produce Price Index, which is expected at 8:30 a.m. ET, along with weekly jobless claims, for an indication of the health of the larger economy.

Still, its news out of Washington that is likely to have the biggest impact on the direction of stocks.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

ABC News’ Max Zahn contributed to this report.

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