Short Squeez

🍋 OpenAI’s $20B Footnote

Short Squeez — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Together With

“The more complicated the system, the easier it is to fool yourself.” — Morgan Housel

Good Morning! A Miami developer made a $1B gain selling land to Ken Griffin for Carnegie Mellon's new Miami campus. Goldman's top 20 executives are set to unlock a special bonus worth $500M+ combined, with David Solomon taking home over $100M.

Starbucks is eyeing Chipotle in what could be the largest acquisition in restaurant history, and Vance says the US will suspend Microsoft from the green card program. Jeff Bezos says AI could enable three-day workweeks, and Tottenham's Xavi Simons enrolled at Harvard Business School while recovering from a torn ACL.

Plus: a Lincoln Park billionaire was accused of fueling a rat infestation in Chicago, and how to make friends in a new city.

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SQUEEZ OF THE DAY

OpenAI’s $20B Footnote

OpenAI has been planning one of the largest IPOs in history, which the company’s management recently pushed back to at least 2027 over AI safety concerns. But in addition to needing time to build some guardrails around new models, the company apparently might need time to find another $20 billion in revenue it had been mistakenly reporting.

Yesterday, new financial documents showed that OpenAI is approaching around $50 billion of annualized revenue through September, which sounds healthy but is about $20 billion below the $70 billion figure that had been widely reported just days earlier.

And, even though OpenAI isn’t public, it’s still one of the most important companies in the world, and Wall Street noticed. AI-linked stocks sold off after the report, and Nvidia closed down 3%. Oracle closed down more than 5%. Some investors were already nervous about all the debt needed to finance the AI buildout, and finding out that OpenAI’s headline revenue run rate was materially lower gave them another reason to revisit the model.

The good news is that OpenAI didn’t exactly lose $20 billion. Part of the discrepancy comes down to how investors were trying to compare OpenAI with Anthropic. Anthropic includes revenue generated through cloud partners like AWS and Google Cloud in some of the run-rate figures investors use, and OpenAI doesn’t. So investors were effectively grossing up OpenAI’s number to make the two companies more comparable. But still, markets don’t love discovering that one of the most important numbers in AI needs a reconciliation.

And OpenAI is still losing money while committing enormous sums to chips, data centers, and computing capacity, and the entire AI trade increasingly rests on the assumption that revenue will grow quickly enough to justify hundreds of billions of dollars of infrastructure spending underneath it. So whether the industry’s flagship private company is running at $50 billion or $70 billion is not exactly an accounting detail.

Takeaway: $50 billion is still an absurd number. OpenAI generated a little over $20 billion of annualized revenue at the end of 2025, and the company is still growing at an absolutely insane pace. The problem is that when investors are discussing a $1.4 trillion valuation, “the business is growing insanely fast” and “the business is growing as fast as everyone thought” become two very different questions.

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HEADLINES

Markets Rundown

Market Update

Stocks closed lower as tech underperformed after OpenAI reported annualized revenue that missed expectations.
WTI crude traded near $91 as energy companies shut infrastructure ahead of Hurricane Isaias.
The 10-year Treasury yield eased to near 5.23% on solid auction demand, and the U.S. dollar weakened.

Economic Data

Initial jobless claims fell to 197,000, below the 200,000 forecast.
Continuing claims rose modestly to 1.72 million, slightly above the 1.70 million forecast.
Limited layoffs give the Fed room to stay focused on inflation as energy prices remain elevated.

Fed Outlook

Fed minutes showed most policymakers see another hike as likely appropriate by year-end, with 16 of 18 officials projecting at least one more this year.
For 2027, eight officials project one more increase while 10 expect no change or a cut.
Two more quarter-point hikes are expected over the next year, bringing the fed funds rate to about 4.5%.

Movers & Shakers

(+) Chipotle ($CMG) +6% after reports that Starbucks has explored a takeover of the burrito chain.
(–) Oracle ($ORCL) -6% because OpenAI's annualized revenue is reportedly about $20 billion below the figure previously circulated.
(–) CoreWeave ($CRWV) -8% after the AI cloud infrastructure company was dragged lower in the same selloff in AI stocks.

Prediction Markets

The Nobel Prize for Economics will be announced on Monday.
Trade on real-world events with Kalshi. Use code OWS to get a $10 bonus when you trade $10.

Private Dealmaking

Manus, a Chinese AI agent startup, raised over $500 million
Oratomic, a quantum computing startup, raised $475 million
Type One Energy, a fusion startup, raised $200 million
Matchpoint Therapeutics, a precision medicine biotech, raised $150 million
Veir, a developer of superconducting power delivery systems, raised $110 million
Parallel, an autonomous electric freight rail startup, raised $100 million

For more PE, VC & M&A deals, subscribe to our Buysiders newsletter.

BOOK OF THE DAY

When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows

Description:
Steven Pinker explores one of the most fascinating and underappreciated forces shaping human behavior: common knowledge, or the things we know that other people know, and that we know they know, and so on. Pinker shows how this seemingly abstract idea helps explain financial bubbles and crashes, political movements, social conventions, diplomacy, relationships, and even awkward everyday interactions. He combines psychology, economics, game theory, linguistics, and evolutionary science to explain why people sometimes openly acknowledge what everyone already knows, while at other times they go to extraordinary lengths to pretend that nobody knows. The result is a fascinating framework for understanding how shared awareness coordinates societies, creates collective action, and can suddenly cause entire groups of people to change their behavior.

Book Length: 364 pages
Release Date: September 23, 2025

Ideal For:
Investors, economists, entrepreneurs, psychologists, political thinkers, and anyone interested in behavioral finance, game theory, social dynamics, human psychology, and understanding why markets and societies sometimes move collectively.

“Knowing something is powerful. Knowing that everyone else knows it can change everything.”

DAILY VISUAL

AI This, AI That

Source: Apollo

PRESENTED BY MOSAIC

Reverse LBOs are Here

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For bankers, that means a faster way to frame sponsor bid capacity, pressure-test valuation, and run scenarios during a process. For PE teams, it means quickly understanding how much they can pay while still preserving target returns.

See a Reverse LBO in action.

DAILY ACUMEN

Simpson’s Paradox

In 1973, UC Berkeley’s graduate programs admitted about 44 percent of male applicants and about 35 percent of female applicants. It looked like clear bias against women.

Then researchers split the data by department. In most departments, women were admitted at rates equal to or higher than men. Women had applied more often to the most competitive departments, where almost everyone gets rejected, and that dragged down their overall rate.

A trend can reverse once you split the data by a hidden variable. It happens in business constantly. A company’s blended margin can rise while every product’s margin falls, simply because the mix shifted toward the higher-margin product.

Before trusting any headline average, ask what is hiding inside it, and split the data by segment, cohort, or channel.

ENLIGHTENMENT

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Stop developing your leadership
Kind Snacks founder on the advice on failure he gives kids
Successful people share 1 habit to ask for help
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MEME-A-PALOOZA

Memes of the Day

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🍋GPU-Backed Securities

Short Squeez — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Together With

“Your job, throughout your entire life, is to disappoint as many people as it takes to avoid disappointing yourself.” — Glennon Doyle

Good Morning! SpaceX is looking to borrow $40 billion to buy chips from Nvidia. A third of some PE firms are demanding "super carry" in new funds. And First Brands' brothers say they'll blame each other at trial.

A former White House AI advisor is raising a $500 million VC fund. Partners Group is getting creative to fix funds hit by redemptions. Citi's co-head of IB also says PE firms are still aggressively poaching junior bankers, despite last year's promises from firms like Apollo to slow down.

Plus: Ray Dalio warns the AI bubble could soon burst, the wine industry is dealing with an oversupply problem, and how to spot toxic productivity.

There is now a card that allows you to borrow and spend as the wealthy do. Learn more about Stelrix here.

SQUEEZ OF THE DAY

GPU-Backed Securities

AI companies are increasingly turning to Wall Street to finance chip purchases, as the cost of building out data centers outgrows what balance sheets and public bond markets can absorb.

Broadcom is working to arrange more than $50 billion in financing for OpenAI's custom AI chips, which the two companies are developing together, and has held talks with Apollo and Blackstone about participating.

Oracle is separately in talks with Apollo and Goldman Sachs to finance a large chip purchase, and SpaceX has approached lenders about a $40 billion financing for Nvidia chips. Talks are early and deal sizes could change, but Broadcom and Oracle are both aiming to close before year-end.

Cloud providers like AWS and Oracle have historically funded hardware from operating cash flow, then turned to the bond market, issuing hundreds of billions of dollars of debt for their AI build-outs.

Now a new group of buyers has emerged. AI labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic, which used to rent most of their compute from cloud providers, want to own more of their infrastructure to lower costs, but they lack the balance sheets to buy it outright.

The structures look more like asset finance than corporate borrowing. Oracle's deal would likely have investors fund a separate entity that buys the chips and leases them to Oracle over time. That bridges the gap between paying for hardware and earning cloud revenue from it, without adding debt to Oracle's balance sheet. For context, Nvidia chips for a single 1-gigawatt data center can cost tens of billions of dollars.

Takeaway: GPU purchases have become capital markets transactions. For Apollo, Blackstone and Goldman, these deals offer a way to put large amounts of private credit to work in a single transaction. Lenders still have to judge how fast chip values depreciate as new generations arrive and how creditworthy the lessees are, and that will determine how this financing gets priced.

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Family Offices Grew 31% in Five Years

There are now over 8,000 single family offices worldwide, up 31% in five years, and Deloitte projects 10,720 by 2030. “Single Family Offices” are private firms that exist to serve exactly one family.

Beyond picking investments, a family office’s real job is running the family balance sheet like a corporate treasury. Liquidity comes from credit, not sales. Real estate, tax bills, and new deals get funded by borrowing against the portfolio which allows it to continue compounding untouched. It’s why the ultra-wealthy rarely show up as sellers.

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HEADLINES

Markets Rundown

Market Update

Stocks closed modestly lower after record highs Tuesday; the 10-year Treasury yield finished little changed near 5.29% following a well-received auction.
The DXY U.S. Dollar Index hit its highest level since spring 2025 on elevated U.S. yields and European political uncertainty.
Asian and European markets closed lower as the 10-year French yield rose 0.11 percentage points.

Economic Data

Fed minutes showed broad support for the September hike, but futures now price roughly an 80% probability of a hold this month.
U.S. investment-grade bonds are down nearly 3% year to date.
NIPA corporate profits rose 26.6% year over year in Q2, the strongest non-recovery gain since 2012.

Earnings Season Preview

Major U.S. financial firms kick off third-quarter earnings next week.
S&P 500 earnings per share rose 27.2% in Q1 and 49.6% in Q2, with Q3 growth expected above 27%.
Growth has been led by technology, communication services, consumer discretionary, and energy.

Movers & Shakers

(+) Spotify ($SPOT) +5% after Bank of America analyst reaffirmed a Buy rating on the music streaming giant, calling it "Muse-proof".
(+) Micron ($MU) +4% because D.A. Davidson raised its price target on the memory chipmaker to a Street-high $3,000 from $2,100.
(–) Webull ($BULL) -19% after a bipartisan report said the online brokerage is tied "in structural ways" to China and poses a national security risk.

Prediction Markets

The Nobel Peace Prize award winner will be announced tomorrow at 5am EDT. The Nobel for economics will be announced on Monday.
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Private Dealmaking

Ledgebrook, a specialty insurance startup, raised $200 million
General Medicine, a telehealth provider and medical marketplace, raised $120 million
Nous Research, a developer of AI assistants for business users, raised $90 million
KymaThera, a precision medicine biotech focused on cancers and vascular malformations, raised $80 million
Constellation Brands acquired SpikedAde, a ready-to-drink vodka beverage brand, for $75 million
Stuut, an AI coworker that runs order-to-cash for enterprises, raised $52.2 million

For more PE, VC & M&A deals, subscribe to our Buysiders newsletter.

BOOK OF THE DAY

101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think

Description:
Brianna Wiest brings together 101 essays exploring self-awareness, emotional intelligence, personal growth, relationships, and the mental patterns that shape how we experience our lives. Rather than offering conventional self-help formulas, Wiest challenges readers to reconsider deeply held assumptions about success, happiness, purpose, failure, and identity. She explores ideas such as choosing purpose over passion, embracing negative experiences, recognizing cognitive biases, changing destructive patterns, and becoming more intentional about how we spend our time and attention. The essays are short, accessible, and highly reflective, making the book particularly easy to return to at different stages of life. Its enduring appeal comes from a simple premise: changing the way you interpret your circumstances can fundamentally change the way you experience them.

Book Length: 448 pages
Release Date: November 14, 2016

Ideal For:
Anyone interested in personal growth, psychology, self-awareness, emotional intelligence, relationships, productivity, and developing a more intentional approach to life.

“Changing your life often begins with changing the assumptions you use to understand it.”

DAILY VISUAL

Wall Street on Track for Record Profits

Source: Axios

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DAILY ACUMEN

Crowd Wisdom

In 1906, at a livestock fair in Plymouth, England, 787 people guessed the weight of an ox. The statistician Francis Galton collected the entries expecting to prove the crowd was foolish. The average guess landed within a pound of the true weight of 1,198.

The crowd worked because the guesses were made independently. Each person's errors were different, so they canceled out.

Put people in a room, let the loudest voice go first, and the errors line up instead. You get one confident guess repeated, not hundreds of independent ones.

Before your next forecasting meeting, have everyone write their number privately, then average them. The average will often beat most of the individuals who contributed to it.

ENLIGHTENMENT

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Why your greatest strength is your biggest problem
6 ways to make adversity useful
How to spot toxic productivity
The new ways to thrive at work now
Why your behavior counts more than performance at work

MEME-A-PALOOZA

Memes of the Day

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📬 Deals Newsletter – Buysiders: A curated roundup of major M&A, private equity, and VC activity. Plus access to private deal flow. Subscribe here.

🍋 Barbarians at the Bunk Bed

Short Squeez — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Together With

“Someone who only works when they're getting paid will always lose to someone who keeps working when they're not.” — Shane Parrish

Good Morning! Wall Street is on pace for its best year ever. First-half profits hit a record $45.9B (+51%), and New York's comptroller says the full year could top $90B, nearly 1.4x last year's record. That sets up another record bonus season, with IB bonuses tracking up 20%+. LIV Golf, the bankrupt Saudi-backed tour, is getting up to $300M from BC Partners to save its 2027 season, and Dimon says Anthropic's Mythos pushed cyber risk up 10x.

Some high earners are ditching the 401(k) max, betting they can invest better on their own, distressed US loans hit their highest level since the pandemic, and PE and VC money is leaning Republican ahead of the midterms.

Plus: The Supreme Court sounds skeptical of a challenge to PE in 401(k)s, Anthropic is giving startups a free year of Claude Team plus $1,000 in credits, and how successful people say no to their bosses.

Unique AI has built an AI teammate for financial advisors and wealth managers. Learn more about how it can help you increase your AUM.

SQUEEZ OF THE DAY

Barbarians at the Bunk Bed

If you've ever been a broke 20-something backpacking through Europe, you've probably stayed in a hostel. And when you’re young and adventurous, sometimes sleeping six feet from an Australian named Lachlan is worth it if the bed costs just $30 a night.

Turns out that in addition to helping create memories to last a lifetime, hostels also have a pretty solid business model. Hostels need fewer services and less staff than real hotels, and their customers are the kind of travelers who trade down when money gets tight. So naturally, private capital noticed, and now Apollo and Brookfield are figuring out how to optimize EBITDA per bunk bed.

Brookfield paid roughly $880 million for Generator Hostels’ European business last year, and Apollo provided A&O Hostels with nearly $1 billion of financing earlier this year. Both hostel groups want to use the capital to double in size. A&O is even turning an empty Berlin office into a 2,500-bed hostel that it will be the largest in Europe.

The traditional European hostel model is also almost tailor-made for private capital. Operators take cheap, slightly sketchy hostels and pour capital into fixing it up and adding amenities. And ultimately, these companies do a pretty solid job at squeezing out as much value as they can per square inch.

Generator has leaned into “poshtels,” which keep the shared rooms but add amenities like bars and rooftop terraces. So while Generator can squeeze a dozen guests into a room that a luxury hotel might sell to one traveler or couple, they also are rolling out the high-margin hotel amenities like bars and restaurants.

Gen Z is the perfect customer base for a business offering one of the cheapest ways to spend a night in Europe. Gen Z wants to travel, but they’re still price-conscious. The number of large hostels in Europe rose 13% in the year through August, which outpaced hotels and every other type of accommodation.

Takeaway: Hostels might be the last untapped frontier for private capital, people like hostels precisely because they don't feel designed by private equity. Critics worry that as big chains move in, they could strip away the cheap, quirky, and local character that made hostels popular in the first place. And if your favorite $30 hostel suddenly gets a rooftop cocktail bar, dynamic pricing, and a slide in the investor deck about premiumization, you'll probably know what happened.

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Account Review: It reviews client allocations on an ongoing basis and surfaces relevant investment ideas based on the client’s objectives, constraints, and your firm’s approved research universe.

See how Remy helps financial advisors and wealth managers use AI to bolster their workflows, grow relationships, and win deals.

HEADLINES

Markets Rundown

Market Update

The S&P 500 hit a fresh record high, led by utilities and consumer discretionary, as bond yields stabilized.
The 10-year Treasury yield eased to around 5.28% and the 2-year declined to around 4.8%.
WTI crude closed just below $90; Asian and European markets traded higher.

Economic Data

ADP weekly data showed private employers added an average of 23,750 jobs over the past four weeks, the highest since June.
The S&P 500 is up roughly 14% year to date including dividends.
Midterm years have averaged a 3.6% return since 1970, versus 12.5% across all years.

Global Bond Volatility

French 10-year yields rose above 5% late last week, their highest since 2002, up from about 3.51% in late June.
The French-German 10-year spread widened above 150 basis points, its widest since 2011.
International developed large-cap stocks and international bonds are both underweighted, with France about 9% of each benchmark.

Movers & Shakers

(+) Option Care Health ($OPCH) +33% after the home infusion provider agreed to be taken private by Clayton, Dubilier & Rice and McKesson in a $5.8 billion deal.
(+) Vistra ($VST) +11% because the independent power producer received a conditional $4.2 billion Department of Energy loan.
(–) Seagate Technology ($STX) -9% after the hard drive maker is bidding against Toshiba for TDK's magnetic-head business.

Prediction Markets

After Oura’s delay announcement chances of an IPO this year plummeted from 97.9% to 14%.
Trade on real-world events with Kalshi. Use code OWS to get a $10 bonus when you trade $10.

Private Dealmaking

CD&R and McKesson agreed to buy Option Care, a medical infusion company, for $5.8 billion
Uber agreed to acquire ezCater, a platform for catering and workplace meals, for $2.3 billion
Informa agreed to buy Clarion Events, a B2B live events business, for around $2.9 billion
Vinci, a chip simulation startup, raised $250 million
Capitolis, a fintech for banks, raised $120 million
Spiko, a provider of tokenized cash funds, raised $90 million

For more PE, VC & M&A deals, subscribe to our Buysiders newsletter.

BOOK OF THE DAY

Private Equity’s Best Kept Secret

Description:
Randy Holligan argues that Central and Eastern Europe represents one of the most overlooked opportunities in global private equity. The book examines the region's fragmented founder-owned businesses, relatively low private equity penetration, strong technical talent, nearshoring trends, and growing entrepreneurial ecosystem. Holligan's thesis is that CEE offers investors an unusual combination of developed-market infrastructure and faster growth, creating opportunities for buy-and-build strategies, operational improvements, cross-border consolidation, and eventual sales to international strategics. Rather than treating the region simply as an emerging-market bet, he presents it as an increasingly integrated European economic bloc whose capital markets have not yet caught up with its underlying potential. The book is ultimately a case for looking beyond crowded U.S. and Western European markets to find attractive acquisition opportunities where operational expertise can create significant value.

Book Length: 240 pages
Release Date: September 2026

Ideal For:
Private equity professionals, investors, entrepreneurs, M&A executives, and anyone interested in Central and Eastern Europe, buy-and-build strategies, emerging-market investing, near-shoring, and overlooked opportunities in global private markets.

“The best opportunities are often found where capital is scarce, competition is limited, and the market has yet to recognize what the business can become.”

DAILY VISUAL

Since the Fed Started Hiking, Multiple Expansion Has Nearly Vanished as a Source of PE Value

Source: Apollo

PRESENTED BY PETRARCH

Finding the “Diamond” in Distressed Assets

A company in trouble sells what it can: inventory, real estate, equipment, and intellectual property all have buyers lined up. The thing nobody lines up for is the data the business generated every day it operated. This includes the emails, project files, payment records, and site documentation that pile up over years. That material has real value, but nobody can touch it in raw form, because it is full of names, addresses, faces, and logos that expose both the people in it and the company that produced it.

But now, credit and bankruptcy firms are trusting Petrarch with this task. The firm buys the material and strips out everything traceable, leaving the operational knowledge without the risk attached to it. They’ve built an asset class out of operational data, and buyers will line up for that.

Book a demo to see how they do it.

DAILY ACUMEN

Real Options

A pilot project. A minority investment. A phased rollout. A lease with a renewal clause.

They all have something in common: you are buying an option.

You spend a little today to preserve the right, but not the obligation, to spend a lot more tomorrow.

That sounds cautious. In reality, it can be incredibly aggressive.

When uncertainty is high, most people freeze. But uncertainty is precisely when flexibility becomes most valuable. You can learn before you commit, double down when the evidence is good, and walk away when it is not.

Think about it like investing: you don't need to know the future if you can buy the right to participate in it.

The catch? Options have a clock.

While you wait, competitors can move, opportunities can disappear, prices can rise, and the window can close.

So when facing a big decision, ask two questions:

What can I learn cheaply before making the big bet?

And:

What am I giving up by waiting?

The smartest decision is not always yes or no.

Sometimes, it is "not yet, but keep the door open."

ENLIGHTENMENT

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MEME-A-PALOOZA

Memes of the Day

📣 Partner With Us: Get in front of an audience of over 1 million finance professionals, business leaders, and policy influencers. Submit a partnership inquiry.

📊 Wall Street Comp & Culture Data: Get the most detailed comp, carry, and culture insights across 1000+ Wall Street firms. Explore the data.

📈 Grow With Us: Work directly with the Overheard on Wall Street team to scale your finance brand. Schedule your free consult.

🧢 Wall Street Shop: Explore our collection of finance-themed apparel and merchandise. Visit the shop.

📬 Deals Newsletter – Buysiders: A curated roundup of major M&A, private equity, and VC activity. Plus access to private deal flow. Subscribe here.

🍋 Citi Tries to Kill Two-And-Out

Short Squeez — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Together With

“I believe that fortunes are built by focus and preserved through diversification.” — Strauss Zelnick

Good Morning! Musk became a trillionaire again after SpaceX climbed to its highest level since June after a Morgan Stanley upgrade. KKR agreed to buy Gen II Fund Services from Hg and General Atlantic for more than $5 billion.

Meta and Microsoft are reportedly cutting employees' Claude usage to reduce costs and push their own AI tools. Bondholders of Electronic Arts, which went private in the largest LBO of all time, are alleging a $1.4 billion debt default. And Wall Street's alpha-chasing biohackers are trading wine for wearables, with many execs wearing Whoops and Oura rings.

Plus: Private equity firms are doubling down on fossil fuels, and the 8 habits of great conversationalists.

Stuut is the AI coworker for order-to-cash, helping finance teams increase cash flow by an average of 40%, reduce DSO by 47%, and cut manual tasks by 70%. Learn more here.

SQUEEZ OF THE DAY

Citi Tries to Kill Two-And-Out

Citi is officially trying to kill the traditional “two-and-out” structure that has been a staple of investment banking programs across Wall Street for years. And instead of continuing to watch its best juniors leave for private equity after two years, Citi is giving them the chance to move up internally.

The bank is cutting its analyst program from three years to two, which will let juniors make associate a year earlier. Citi is trying to catch up with competitors and offer young bankers a faster path to more responsibility and higher pay. The expected path from analyst to VP will also shrink from six and a half years to five and a half.

And it all comes at a point where the war for junior talent is getting ridiculous. After PE recruiting kept getting earlier and earlier, investment banks started to fight back. Last year, JPMorgan told incoming analysts they could be fired for accepting another job before or during their first 18 months. Goldman started requiring new analysts to regularly attest that they hadn’t lined up another job, and Citi introduced disclosure requirements of its own.

But now Citi is trying to play the good cop and, rather than threatening its best analysts with the door, Citi is dangling an earlier promotion, more responsibility and a bigger paycheck.

Of course, analysts aren’t leaving investment banking because they’re impatient for a title. The career path for Wall Street’s rising stars has traditionally looked more like learning the deal-making ropes at a bank like Citi or Goldman before leaving for the investing side.

But private equity isn’t the slam-dunk exit it was a few years ago, and getting rich on carry looks a little less certain when funds are struggling to sell portfolio companies. Wall Street 360 analysis shows bankers now earn ~10% to 30% more in cash comp than PE professionals at every level below MD/Partner.

And Citi might be realizing that AI makes retaining early-level bankers even more important. As AI takes over more of the grunt work traditionally handed to analysts, AI-proficient associates and VPs could become dramatically more productive, especially if they know the bank’s systems, clients, and internal tools. Banks may ultimately need fewer analysts doing manual work and more experienced bankers who can use AI effectively and have the judgment to check its work.

Takeaway: Citi will never be able to out-carry the megafunds like KKR, and making associate a year early won’t stop the analysts who have been dreaming of the buy side since high school. But Wall Street’s response to PE poaching is getting more sophisticated. The banks started with the stick, but now Citi is adding the carrot: stay here and we’ll move you up faster. And between a weaker PE market and AI changing what banks need from their junior ranks, the traditional two-and-out model might finally have some real competition.

PRESENTED BY STUUT

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HEADLINES

Markets Rundown

Market Update

The S&P 500 gained 0.7% and the Nasdaq rose over 1%, with every sector higher except real estate.
The 10-year Treasury yield finished around 5.31% and the 2-year slipped to 4.82%.
WTI crude declined modestly to around $89.

Economic Data

The ISM Services PMI held at 54.9 in September, comfortably above the 50 expansion threshold.
Real household spending rose 0.6% in August and 2.6% from a year earlier.
Nonfarm payrolls have averaged roughly 68,000 per month this year despite September's slowdown.

Fourth Quarter Seasonality

Since 1990, the S&P 500 has averaged a 5% gain in the fourth quarter, with positive returns 83% of the time.
In years with a 10%+ gain through September, Q4 averaged 6.4%, with gains in 13 of 14 years.
The index is up more than 12% year to date through last Friday's close.

Movers & Shakers

(+) Cerebras Systems ($CBRS) +9% after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called the AI chipmaker a "close partner".
(+) SpaceX ($SPCX) +7% because Morgan Stanley reiterated its Overweight rating and $300 price target.
(–) Sphere Entertainment ($SPHR) -14% after Craig-Hallum downgraded the stock to Hold.

Prediction Markets

After a busy summer of launches (13 was the lowest month), September saw a noticeable decrease of only 8 launches.
Trade on real-world events with Kalshi. Use code OWS to get a $10 bonus when you trade $10.

Private Dealmaking

Schneider Electric agreed to buy PTC, an industrial software maker, for $22.6 billion
Shionogi agreed to buy IntraBio, a rare disease biotech, for $2 billion
GE HealthCare agreed to buy Sofie Biosciences, a maker of cancer scan chemicals, for $945 million
Valon Technologies, an OS for regulated finance, raised $150 million
Quartermaster, a maritime intelligence startup, raised $100 million
Blacksmith, an AI code-testing platform, raised $45 million

For more PE, VC & M&A deals, subscribe to our Buysiders newsletter.

BOOK OF THE DAY

Humble Power

Description:
Ethan Willis makes the case that humility is not the opposite of ambition or leadership, but one of the most powerful ways to increase both. Drawing on research, real-world examples, and decades of coaching entrepreneurs and leaders, Willis argues that people who can set aside ego, acknowledge mistakes, seek honest feedback, and prioritize something larger than themselves ultimately become more effective and influential. He organizes the book around three dimensions: Humble Self, developing an accurate view of yourself and your purpose; Humble Relationships, building trust and psychological safety; and Humble Leadership, giving others the space and authority to perform at their best. The result is a practical framework for becoming a stronger leader without relying on status, control, or ego.

Book Length: 272 pages
Release Date: September 1, 2026

Ideal For:
Executives, entrepreneurs, managers, coaches, and anyone looking to become a more effective leader, build stronger relationships, develop high-performing teams, and increase their influence without becoming consumed by ego.

“Real power isn't about having the most control. It's about creating the conditions where everyone around you can become more powerful.”

DAILY VISUAL

Euro Falls to a 17-month Low

Source: Axios

PRESENTED BY BUYSIDERS CLUB

The Most Interesting Room in Finance

Buysiders Club is a curated, highly vetted community of Wall Street's top minds, bringing together professionals across private equity, hedge funds, venture capital, investment banking, institutional investors, and operating executives.

What members get:

Exclusive private dinners at places like John Lennon’s townhome, a SoHo art gallery, private clubs, etc.
Access to private placement deals like xAI
Partner events with brands like La Pauleé and the Enhanced Games
Introductions to the global finance community and leaders from other industries, including arts, tech, culture, and fitness

If you want to level up your social circle and access the best people in finance and beyond, apply for membership below.

Apply for membership. (VP and above only)

DAILY ACUMEN

Which Price

Every return you quote has a hidden second half: the thing you measured it against. Bitcoin is about 83,500 dollars today, up 30 percent in six weeks. Measured in gold, it is about 20 ounces a coin, up from 14.5 in June.

The yardstick matters most when the two disagree. Last winter bitcoin fell from 126,000 to 60,000 dollars, roughly a 52 percent loss, while gold rose from 4,000 to 5,600. In ounces, a coin went from about 31 to about 11, a loss of about two thirds. The dollar chart showed a halving, and the gold chart showed something worse.

Before judging any position, name the denominator. Dollars tell you what you can spend today. Gold, a broad index, or the cash you would have held tells you what you gave up to own it. An asset that only wins when the currency is weakening is partly a bet on the yardstick, not on the asset.

ENLIGHTENMENT

Short Squeez Picks

The 8 habits of great conversationalists
Why skipping the Pumpkin spice latte won’t help you save for retirement
When there's more work than your team can handle
7 books to help you cope with failure and move forward
How to turn failure into progress

MEME-A-PALOOZA

Memes of the Day

📣 Partner With Us: Get in front of an audience of over 1 million finance professionals, business leaders, and policy influencers. Submit a partnership inquiry.

📊 Wall Street Comp & Culture Data: Get the most detailed comp, carry, and culture insights across 1000+ Wall Street firms. Explore the data.

📈 Grow With Us: Work directly with the Overheard on Wall Street team to scale your finance brand. Schedule your free consult.

🧢 Wall Street Shop: Explore our collection of finance-themed apparel and merchandise. Visit the shop.

📬 Deals Newsletter – Buysiders: A curated roundup of major M&A, private equity, and VC activity. Plus access to private deal flow. Subscribe here.

🍋 $21M/Year For an Office

Short Squeez — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Together With

“Go do something great and your network will instantly emerge.” — Naval Ravikant

Good Morning! Citadel is taking a minority stake in Wolfe Research to win more institutional trading flow. A Miami condo project sold $1.7 billion of units before breaking ground, including two ~$50 million penthouses. And Blue Owl capped redemptions at 5% after investors asked to pull 39% of its Technology Income Corp. over AI fears.

Anthropic has been lobbying the Vatican to consider AI consciousness. Millennium was flat in September but is still up 8.1% this year. And NYC's Chip City is abruptly closing all its locations after years of rapid growth.

Plus: Sweden's young men have found their Wolf of Wall Street, private equity's buyout firms are facing a tough new reality, and how to spot someone who's truly secure.

Reverse engineer your buyouts with Mosaic’s Reverse LBO. See it in action.

SQUEEZ OF THE DAY

$21M/Year For an Office

A rendering of the penthouse at Related’s new skyscraper at 625 Madison Avenue in midtown New York © Related Companies

The company that just agreed to the highest office rent in New York City history is a small hedge fund with 35 employees that you’ve probably never heard of.

Castle Hook Partners reportedly agreed to pay as much as $21.2 million a year for the top two floors of the new 625 Madison Avenue tower, which is scheduled to open in 2029. For between $350 and $400 per square foot, the fund will get 53,000 square feet of penthouse space with wraparound terraces, private dining and panoramic views of Central Park. The deal smashes the previously reported NYC office-rent record of $327.50 per square foot set earlier this year.

The firm might fly under-the-radar, but was founded in 2016 by former Soros Fund Management investor David Rogers, and Stanley Druckenmiller was one of its earliest backers. A decade later, Castle Hook manages roughly $11 billion and is coming off an absurd two-year run, reportedly returning around 50% last year after gaining more than 60% in 2024.

For a firm with just 35 employees, 53,000 square feet is an absurd amount of office space. At its current headcount, Castle Hook would have roughly 1,500 square feet per employee and spend more than $600,000 a year in rent for each of them. But that extravagance makes a little more sense when you consider the arms race for the best investing talent.

Citadel, Millennium and Point72 already compete for top portfolio managers with state-of-the-art offices and increasingly ridiculous perks. So if Castle Hook wants to lure someone away from one of the industry giants, a brand-new Madison Avenue penthouse with private dining, wraparound terraces and Central Park views probably doesn’t hurt. When a great portfolio manager can oversee billions of dollars and generate tens or hundreds of millions in profits, suddenly spending $21 million a year on the office starts to look a little less insane.

New York’s office market might still have plenty of problems, but 625 Madison is a sign that Wall Street firms will still pay top dollar to be there. General Atlantic will anchor 625 Madison with five floors of its own, and the building’s developer, Related, expects it to be 67% leased by year-end. Related actually bought the site to build luxury condos before deciding there was an even better opportunity in ultra-high-end offices.

Takeaway: New York’s office market is looking pretty K-shaped in 2026. For all the struggling, aging office towers struggling to fill space, the brand-new trophy buildings in the best locations are commanding record rents. And as absurd as spending $21 million a year on an office sounds, it’s just a drop in the bucket if Castle Hook can recruit and retain a top portfolio manager. So in 2026, the top hedge funds aren't just competing on comp anymore: the office, the amenities, and even the Central Park view are now part of the recruiting package.

PRESENTED BY MOSAIC

Reverse LBOs are Here

HEADLINES

Markets Rundown

Market Update

Stocks rose on the September jobs report, with all S&P 500 sectors except healthcare higher; the Nasdaq closed near its record high.
The 10-year Treasury yield ended near its highest level since 2002 after an early drop reversed.
Oil fell about 1.5% as the G7 will release up to 100 million barrels of emergency oil and diesel stocks; Nike fell more than 3% on weak guidance.

Economic Data

Nonfarm payrolls rose 29,000 in September versus 90,000 expected, with prior two months revised down a combined 60,000.
Unemployment edged up to 4.2% from 4.1% on higher labor force participation; wage growth slowed to 3.0%.
The softer data reduces pressure on the Fed to hike in October.

Year-End Outlook

The S&P 500 is up 13% year to date and sits just 1.5% below its all-time high; small-caps fell 5% in September.
Third-quarter earnings season begins with the major banks in mid-October.
Corporate profits are on track to grow roughly 30% this year.

Movers & Shakers

(+) SpaceX ($SPCX) +7% after three launches in 13 hours and Google's first orbital AI experiment.
(+) Tesla ($TSLA) +5% because of strong vehicle delivery numbers and continued investor enthusiasm.
(–) Nike ($NKE) -4% after issuing a weak fiscal 2027 sales outlook that overshadowed a fiscal Q1 earnings beat.

Prediction Markets

At roughly 5.3%, the 10-year is the highest it's been since 2002. Money is expensive.
Trade on real-world events with Kalshi. Use code OWS to get a $10 bonus when you trade $10.

Private Dealmaking

Reverion, a German developer of carbon-negative power plants, raised $175 million
Supabase, a provider of backend tools for building AI apps, raised $150 million
Homeward, a cash-back real estate financing company, raised $120 million
TriGemX Bio, a developer of migraine treatments, raised $94 million
Volantis, an inference semiconductor company, raised $88 million
Fortem Technologies, an airspace security company, raised $50 million

For more PE, VC & M&A deals, subscribe to our Buysiders newsletter.

BOOK OF THE DAY

The Outsiders

Description:
William N. Thorndike Jr. examines eight CEOs who achieved extraordinary shareholder returns by rejecting conventional management wisdom and focusing relentlessly on capital allocation. Rather than celebrating charismatic leadership or rapid revenue growth, Thorndike highlights executives such as Warren Buffett, John Malone, Katharine Graham, and Henry Singleton, whose success came from making rational decisions about acquisitions, share repurchases, dividends, debt, decentralization, and the deployment of excess cash. The book's central lesson is that exceptional CEOs often behave more like investors than traditional managers. Their advantage comes from thinking independently, measuring performance over long periods, and allocating capital where it can generate the highest returns. It is one of the most influential books on capital allocation and a particularly useful framework for understanding how great businesses compound shareholder value.

Book Length: 272 pages
Release Date: October 23, 2012

Ideal For:
CEOs, CFOs, investors, private equity professionals, entrepreneurs, and anyone interested in capital allocation, corporate strategy, M&A, share buybacks, and building businesses that compound value over decades.

“The greatest CEOs don't simply run businesses well. They know exactly what to do with every dollar those businesses generate.”

DAILY VISUAL

10-Year Keeps Ripping

Source: Axios

PRESENTED BY GRANOLA

Your Notes, in the Language of the Call

Coverage calls in London, a management meeting in Frankfurt, an LP update in Tokyo. Your week doesn't happen in one language, and now your notes don't have to either.

Granola, the AI notepad for people with back-to-back meetings, now supports 32 languages. Switch on multi-language mode once and Granola follows along, whether the call is in English, French, German or Japanese. You jot down what matters, Granola transcribes the meeting from your computer, then turns your notes into clear summaries, action items and next steps before your next call.

Download Granola and try it in your next meeting. Free month with the code SHORTSQUEEZ.

DAILY ACUMEN

Ergodicity

Take a coin flip where heads raises your wealth 50 percent and tails cuts it 40 percent. The average outcome per flip is a 5 percent gain, so the bet looks attractive. Play it repeatedly, though, and a typical player loses about 5 percent per round, because 1.5 times 0.6 is 0.9.

The gap exists because the average across many people is not the same as the average over one person's lifetime. A crowd can profit from the bet while almost every individual in it goes broke, since a few huge winners lift the group average.

You only get to live one path. Before taking any bet that looks good on average, ask what happens to you if the bad outcomes arrive early and you cannot play long enough to collect the average.

ENLIGHTENMENT

Short Squeez Picks

Why emotional intelligence is a crucial leadership skill
How to argue and win
Should you try and catch up on sleep on the weekends?
How to spot someone who’s truly secure
Complexity is a unified cognitive kind

MEME-A-PALOOZA

Memes of the Day

📣 Partner With Us: Get in front of an audience of over 1 million finance professionals, business leaders, and policy influencers. Submit a partnership inquiry.

📊 Wall Street Comp & Culture Data: Get the most detailed comp, carry, and culture insights across 1000+ Wall Street firms. Explore the data.

📈 Grow With Us: Work directly with the Overheard on Wall Street team to scale your finance brand. Schedule your free consult.

🧢 Wall Street Shop: Explore our collection of finance-themed apparel and merchandise. Visit the shop.

📬 Deals Newsletter – Buysiders: A curated roundup of major M&A, private equity, and VC activity. Plus access to private deal flow. Subscribe here.

🍋 The Great Protein Squeeze

Short Squeez — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Together With

“The more you want something to be true, the more likely you are to believe it.” — Morgan Housel

Good Morning! Jake Paul's VC firm Anti Fund is seeking to raise $400 million for its second fund, more than 13x the size of the previous fund. Anthropic is targeting an IPO as early as mid-November. And Barbie-maker Mattel rose 19% after drawing takeover interest from Authentic Brands.

Apollo debuted daily private credit marks as the SEC sounded the alarm on valuation transparency. Barclays expanded its use of Anthropic's Claude. And Accenture had its best day ever after showing consultants aren’t being replaced but rather are being hired at record pace to help companies figure out how to use AI.

Plus: VCs watch as the IPO window starts to close, and how to manage a personal brand at work.

Coming full circle, Coverd has launched Coverd Packs; your chance to unlock rare cards like Pokémon and others.

SQUEEZ OF THE DAY

The Great Protein Squeeze

Whey protein has gone from an obscure meal supplement for bodybuilders to becoming a staple that finance bros and Pilates girlies alike use to hit their macros. But the protein craze might have gone a little too mainstream, and whey protein prices have gone off the charts now that Americans want protein in everything from tortilla chips to cold brew.

Whey concentrate prices briefly hit roughly $13 a pound this summer and are still hovering around $11 to $12, well above the sub-$10 levels from earlier this year. Some smaller food companies say they literally can’t find enough whey at any price.

And one protein’s shortage is another protein’s gold rush. Startups are now racing to fill the gap with protein extracted from some pretty unconventional places. New Zealand-based Leaft Foods makes protein from alfalfa leaves and saw sales jump 600% in the year through June.

The Every Co., which makes egg protein through fermentation, sold out its entire 2026 production capacity during the first six months of the year, and orders ran 10x last year’s level. And Finnish startup Solar Foods makes protein by fermenting a microbe originally discovered in a bog.

High whey prices are already changing what ends up on grocery-store shelves. BHU Foods recently reformulated its protein bars around pea protein after finding that organic whey would cost nearly three times as much as organic pea protein. And consumers may be flexible too, with roughly 20% saying they would switch to another protein source if whey prices increased significantly.

There are limits to the protein gold rush, though. Cricket protein still costs around $33 a pound and, perhaps more importantly, requires convincing Americans to eat crickets. Apparently there are still some lines the protein-maxxing community won’t cross.

Takeaway: After decades of whey dominating the market, food companies are starting to realize that relying so heavily on one source of protein can become a problem when everyone decides they need 150 grams a day. America's protein obsession got big enough to genuinely reshape its own supply chain, and whey, the commodity everyone assumed was permanent, is now undersupplied, and fermented eggs, alfalfa leaves, and peas are becoming real substitutes rather than novelty SKUs. We wanted protein in everything, but now apparently everything is becoming protein.

PRESENTED BY COVERD

Pokémon Cards Have Outperformed the S&P 500 for Twenty Years

Pokémon cards have outperformed the stock market for two decades. Card Ladder’s Pokémon index is up 3,821% since 2004, compared with 483% for the S&P 500 over the same stretch. That’s ~18% a year versus the S&P 500's ~8%.

A first edition base set Charizard cost ~$100 on the secondhand market in 2004. A PSA 10 sold at auction this year for $528K, and buyers spent $450 million on Pokémon cards in January alone.

Coverd Packs offers access to Pokémon cards with a built-in safety net. Any card pulled from a pack can be sold back to Coverd right away, so you’re never left holding something you don’t want.

Every pack is backed by real, professionally graded cards, and the Coverd Packs app shows you the value of a “Max Pull” and total value odds. Once opened, you can have Coverd store it, ship it, or sell it back.

Break into the hottest asset class of the Roaring 20s. Open a Coverd Pack today.

HEADLINES

Markets Rundown

Market Update

Stocks rose as the 10-year Treasury yield eased to near 5.24%.
WTI crude climbed to about $93 after China suspended fuel exports for October.
Asia finished mixed overnight, Europe ended mostly lower, and the U.S. dollar strengthened.

Economic Data

The S&P U.S. Manufacturing PMI was revised to 55.9, its highest in more than four years and a 14th straight month of expansion.
The ISM Manufacturing PMI edged down to 54.5, modestly below the 55.0 expectation.
Initial jobless claims fell to 197,000, and continuing claims dropped to 1.70 million, the lowest in three years.

Europe

Eurozone unemployment held steady at 6.4% in September, as expected.
European equities ended mostly lower despite the stable labor reading.
Manufacturing input prices rose on tariffs, energy costs, and material shortages, a pressure point across both U.S. reports.

Movers & Shakers

(+) Mattel ($MAT) +19% after a report that Authentic Brands Group is interested in acquiring the toy maker.
(+) Accenture ($ACN) +16% because the consulting firm reported better-than-expected fiscal fourth-quarter earnings.
(–) Paramount Skydance ($PSKY) -10% after agreed to a two-day, court-ordered settlement conference with the Writers Guild of America.

Prediction Markets

Last week, oil prices saw their first weekly loss in roughly a month.
Trade on real-world events with Kalshi. Use code OWS to get a $10 bonus when you trade $10.

Private Dealmaking

Armadin, a cybersecurity startup led by Mandiant founder Kevin Mandia, raised $255.5 million
Varda Space, an orbital drug manufacturer, raised $251 million
GMI Cloud, a provider of GPU infrastructure and inference services, raised $223 million
CScale, an optical interconnect developer, raised $145 million
AnaCardio, a Stockholm-based heart failure biotech, raised around $67 million
Lightfield, a CRM for companies that run on agents, raised $47 million

For more PE, VC & M&A deals, subscribe to our Buysiders newsletter.

BOOK OF THE DAY

The Spider Network

Description:
David Enrich reconstructs one of the most consequential financial scandals of the modern era: the manipulation of LIBOR, the benchmark interest rate that influenced trillions of dollars in loans and financial contracts. At the center is Tom Hayes, a highly gifted trader who assembled a network of bankers, brokers, and traders who discovered they could manipulate the benchmark to benefit their trading positions. Enrich follows the group's rise, the culture that allowed the misconduct to flourish, and the eventual investigation and collapse of the network. Beyond the scandal itself, the book provides a revealing look at the incentives, personalities, competitive pressures, and institutional failures inside global banking. It reads almost like a financial thriller while explaining how a seemingly obscure number could have enormous consequences throughout the global economy.

Book Length: 528 pages
Release Date: March 21, 2017

Ideal For:
Investors, traders, bankers, finance executives, economists, and readers interested in financial scandals, market manipulation, banking culture, LIBOR, and the hidden mechanics of global financial markets.

“When incentives reward the manipulation of a system, even the most important numbers in finance can become dangerously vulnerable.”

DAILY VISUAL

Q3 Recap

PRESENTED BY MOSAIC

Reverse LBOs are Here

DAILY ACUMEN

Brier Score

Most people who make predictions never keep score, which is why most never improve. A Brier score fixes that. For each forecast, square the gap between your stated probability and what happened (1 if it occurred, 0 if not), then average the results. Zero is perfect, and answering 50 percent every time scores 0.25.

Call something 90 percent likely and it does not happen, and the penalty is 0.81. Being confident and wrong is punished far more than being hedged and wrong, which is the point.

Log even ten forecasts a month and you will learn whether your 80 percent calls really land about 80 percent of the time. That gap is called calibration, and it is one of the most trainable skills in forecasting.

ENLIGHTENMENT

Short Squeez Picks

Stop thinking others are happier than you
The human brain reorganizes itself at 4 distinct ages
How to manage a personal brand at work
4 ways to pick a healthier protein bar
10 conversation habits of highly likable people

MEME-A-PALOOZA

Memes of the Day

📣 Partner With Us: Get in front of an audience of over 1 million finance professionals, business leaders, and policy influencers. Submit a partnership inquiry.

📊 Wall Street Comp & Culture Data: Get the most detailed comp, carry, and culture insights across 1000+ Wall Street firms. Explore the data.

📈 Grow With Us: Work directly with the Overheard on Wall Street team to scale your finance brand. Schedule your free consult.

🧢 Wall Street Shop: Explore our collection of finance-themed apparel and merchandise. Visit the shop.

📬 Deals Newsletter – Buysiders: A curated roundup of major M&A, private equity, and VC activity. Plus access to private deal flow. Subscribe here.

🍋 Ken Griffin University

Short Squeez — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 08:30:00 +0000

Together With

“Europe is basically the Silicon Valley's unpaid internship.” — Damian Boeselager

Good morning! Micron announced blockbuster earnings with data center revenue jumping 11x. Google launched Gemini 4 Argon, which it says is its most advanced AI model. And Sycamore Partners, the private equity owner of Walgreens, is nearing a deal to sell British pharmacy chain Boots to the Weston family for ~$9 billion.

Bill Ackman is looking to raise third-party capital to boost returns at Howard Hughes, emulating Warren Buffett. Sydney Sweeney-backed prediction market Novig quadrupled its valuation to $2 billion after her viral ad this month. And Goldman's CEO-in-waiting faces the tough task of keeping his deputies happy.

Plus: Private credit firms are tooling up for takeovers as borrower stress builds, the gap between the rich and the very, very rich is getting wider, and 3 steps for dealing with toxic people.

Petrarch is building a new asset class around a company’s operational data. If you are in private credit or distressed assets, learn more about them here.

SQUEEZ OF THE DAY

Ken Griffin University

The ultra-rich are always finding new ways to spend their money and apparently, once you’ve collected the yachts, private islands and T. rexes, the next frontier might be building your own college.

Ken Griffin, the hedge-fund billionaire behind Citadel, is donating $3 billion to Carnegie Mellon University in what will be the largest individual gift in higher-education history. $2 billion of the donation will fund an entirely new 35-acre campus in Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood, and another $1 billion will go to CMU’s flagship campus in Pittsburgh. Griffin will also join the university’s board of trustees, and Carnegie’s computer science school will be renamed after him.

Griffin and CMU have big plans for the Miami campus, which they eventually want to scale to more than 3,500 students and create 900 jobs between professors and staff. The Miami campus will lean heavily into CMU’s bread and butter, including AI and computing. Miami will also specialize in offering national security and climate resilience programs and even offer venture studios.

And if the Miami campus turns into a strong recruiting pipeline for Citadel, might turn out to be a pretty good investment for Griffin too. Citadel already recruits heavily from CMU’s pipeline of computer scientists and quantitative engineers, and bringing thousands of them to Miami could be a strong crop of future Citadel quants.

Griffin has now poured billions into South Florida and has funded everything from hospitals and schools to museums and other cultural institutions. And as Griffin put it, great American cities are anchored by great universities. So rather than waiting decades for Miami to develop another one, he’s spending $2 billion to help bring one of the country’s best tech universities to the city.

Takeaway: Miami has already proven it can attract money. Griffin is betting billions that it can build the institutions and talent to keep it there. Since moving Citadel from Chicago four years ago, he's poured money into Miami's hospitals, schools, museums and public spaces, and now he's helping bring one of America's best computer-science programs to his backyard. Wall Street South is starting to look less like a tax migration and more like Griffin's personal city-building project.

PRESENTED BY PETRARCH

Finding the “Diamond” in Distressed Assets

HEADLINES

Markets Rundown

Market Update

Stocks closed mostly lower as technology led while most other sectors were flat to lower; the 10-year Treasury yield rose to around 5.29%.
WTI crude traded just above $90.
Headline PCE inflation eased to 3.4% year over year in August, from 3.7% in July, with core PCE at 3.0%.

Economic Data

Q2 real GDP growth was revised up to a 2.2% annualized rate from 1.5%.
Real consumer spending rose 0.6% in August, its strongest monthly gain since March of last year.
Real final sales to private domestic purchasers grew at a 4.6% annualized pace, pointing to robust private demand.

Labor Market

ADP showed private payrolls rose 90,000 in September, above the 70,000 expectation, with broad-based hiring.
Friday's nonfarm payrolls report is expected to show 94,000 jobs added, following August's 162,000 gain.
Continued job growth and low layoffs should keep supporting household spending through year-end.

Movers & Shakers

(+) United Therapeutics ($UTHR) +13% after the pharmaceutical company won a critical patent fight for one of its drugs.
(–) Moderna ($MRNA) -5% because Citi downgraded the stock to Sell, prompting investors to lock in gains.
(–) Cerebras Systems ($CBRS) -9% after a report suggested OpenAI's new "Ultrafast" inference tier is not running on Cerebras hardware.

Prediction Markets

ISM manufacturing numbers have been holding strong from month to month. September numbers look to be the same.
Trade on real-world events with Kalshi. Use code OWS to get a $10 bonus when you trade $10.

Private Dealmaking

Hertha Metals, a green steel producer, raised $134 million
Jeeves, a stablecoin-native banking platform for enterprises, raised $110 million
Efficient Computer, a developer of energy-efficient processors, raised more than $97 million
Xapien, a background check and due diligence startup, raised $56 million
HyImpulse, a German launch services startup, raised around $54 million
Conveo, a provider of custom insights for big brands, raised $50 million

For more PE, VC & M&A deals, subscribe to our Buysiders newsletter.

BOOK OF THE DAY

The Greater Game

Description:
Dan Sullivan and John Bowen present a 25-year framework for entrepreneurs who want to move beyond incremental growth and build businesses capable of creating extraordinary value, freedom, and lasting impact. Drawing on Sullivan's four decades of coaching entrepreneurs and Bowen's work with ultra-high-net-worth business owners, the authors introduce frameworks including the 10 Greater Measurements and Entrepreneurial Dashboard. The book focuses on shifting from founder-dependent businesses toward scalable organizations, building greater autonomy, developing teams, strengthening security, and turning entrepreneurial strengths into compounding advantages. Rather than simply setting bigger goals, Sullivan and Bowen argue that entrepreneurs need to fundamentally rethink how they measure progress and design their businesses.

Book Length: 288 pages
Release Date: May 26, 2026

Ideal For:
Entrepreneurs, CEOs, business owners, investors, financial advisors, and executives focused on scaling companies, building wealth, creating greater personal freedom, and designing businesses that can compound in value over decades.

“Exponential growth begins when you stop measuring success by how much more you can do and start designing a system that can create far more without depending on you.”

DAILY VISUAL

IPO Market Appears to Be Cooling

PRESENTED BY STELRIX

Family Offices Grew 31% in Five Years

DAILY ACUMEN

Volatility Drag

A 50 percent loss needs a 100 percent gain to get back to even. Gain 50 percent, then lose 50 percent, and you are down 25 percent, not flat. Averages lie about compounding.

The rule of thumb is that your compound return is roughly your average return minus half the variance. A portfolio averaging 10 percent with 20 percent volatility compounds closer to 8. Cut the volatility to 10 percent and it compounds at about 9.5.

This is why avoiding large losses matters more than chasing large gains. Volatility is not just uncomfortable. It is a direct tax on the return you actually keep.

ENLIGHTENMENT

Short Squeez Picks

Why emotions drive you to spend
How to protect your nest egg when inflation is ballooning
Emotionally intelligent couples ask this question every morning
A 3-step plan for dealing with toxic people
A Yale professor’s 3 rules for happiness

MEME-A-PALOOZA

Memes of the Day

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📬 Deals Newsletter – Buysiders: A curated roundup of major M&A, private equity, and VC activity. Plus access to private deal flow. Subscribe here.

🍋 Piper Weinberg?

Short Squeez — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Together With

"Life rarely changes in a positive way without an increase in responsibility.” — James Clear

Good morning! Oura postponed its ~$15B IPO citing market uncertainty, even after it was reportedly 4x oversubscribed. Morgan Stanley set up a Digital Asset Lab to test the future of Wall Street: stablecoins, tokenization, and DeFi.

Swings in food prices have opened M&A windows across America's grocery aisles. Google co-founder Sergey Brin has now spent $100+ million to defeat a one-time state tax on California's billionaires. And Larry Ellison quietly bought eight homes for staff to live near his sprawling Florida mansion.

Plus: Private equity wrestles with its own generational wealth gap, Barclays watered down its return-to-office mandate after staff backlash, and the 24 new rules for succeeding at work.

For those in NYC: be the first to see the new AI agent built for wealth management, advisory, and client relationships. Register here to join Unique AI’s October 6th event.

SQUEEZ OF THE DAY

Piper Weinberg?

Piper Sandler is reportedly in talks to acquire Perella Weinberg Partners, and if you know anything about investment banking, a bunch of Piper analysts are probably thrilled they finally get to tell their friends they work at an elite boutique. Meanwhile, PWP analysts are probably debating whether this is a bigger prestige hit than when Greenhill got bought by Mizuho.

The economics of the deal make a lot of sense, and it fits the broader wave of consolidation that has swept smaller and middle-market investment banks. Piper doesn't carry PWP's clout in New York, but it has much larger scale. Based in Minneapolis, Piper is worth ~$5 billion and generated more than $1 billion in advisory revenue last year. It also ranks No. 2 in the U.S. by number of announced M&A deals under $2 billion.

PWP is much smaller at just $1.4 billion in market cap, and it never chased scale. It built its business around a small number of superstar bankers with deep CEO relationships and often competes directly with Goldman and JPMorgan for the biggest mandates on Wall Street. For example, PWP advised BlackRock on both its $12.5 billion acquisition of Global Infrastructure Partners and its $12 billion purchase of HPS.

The obvious comp is Mizuho's $550 million acquisition of Greenhill in 2023 which was another prestigious, relatively small boutique. Mizuho bet Greenhill’s blue-chip relationships were worth far more than its balance sheet implied and paid a 121% premium, essentially to buy a roster of senior dealmakers and relationships that would have taken decades to build organically.

Piper already has the scale and platform, but it needs the rainmakers who get the call on $10 billion-plus deals and can compete with Morgan Stanley, Evercore, and Centerview for the biggest mandates on the Street. And PWP gets a bigger platform at a moment when its own revenue slipped from a record $878 million in 2024 to ~$750 million last year.

PWP stock was up 12% on the news, while Piper stock fell 10%.

Takeaway: Investment banks are strange companies to acquire because their most valuable assets can simply walk out the door. Most of PWP’s value comes from a relatively small group of rainmakers with deep CEO relationships, and Piper still has to convince those bankers not to take their Rolodex somewhere else. Acquiring PWP also isn’t the same thing as integrating it, so one of the biggest questions will be whether Piper folds the boutique into its broader platform or just lets PWP keep doing its own thing.

PRESENTED BY UNIQUE AI

Three AI Teammates, One Living Memory

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Each is powered by perpetual memory. Remy builds a “second brain” of client context for advisors, from onboarding to proposals. Casey holds the full case history for compliance, running KYC and Source of Wealth work and flagging risk early. Ivy remembers every investor interaction, turning past RFPs and DDQs into faster, more consistent responses.

The result: grow AUM, cut admin overhead, and improve win rate, retention, and oversight, all with data governance control.

Join Unique AI on Oct 6 in NYC for the live launch with Chief Product Officer Dana Ritter and the executive leadership team. Discover what agentic AI can do across every function at your firm, and connect with peers across wealth and asset management tackling the same questions. Register now.

Who you’ll meet: Unique AI’s leadership team won’t just be on stage, they’ll be in the room. Network with them alongside senior leaders across wealth and asset management, from COOs, CTOs and Heads of AI to the advisors, compliance officers and investor relations teams who’d use these tools every day.

HEADLINES

Markets Rundown

Market Update

Stocks closed modestly lower as the 10-year Treasury yield edged up to 5.23%, while the 2-year eased just below 4.90%.
WTI crude fell below $90 for the first time since late August.
The Conference Board's Consumer Confidence Index fell to 81.9 in September, its lowest since 2014.

Economic Data

August JOLTS job openings fell to 7.1 million, roughly matching the number of unemployed workers.
Friday's payrolls report is expected to show 95,000 jobs added, with unemployment holding at 4.1%.
Markets are pricing roughly a 70% probability of another Fed hike in October.

Labor Market Sentiment

The share of respondents saying jobs are hard to get rose to 21.9% in September, the highest since January 2021.
The share viewing jobs as plentiful fell to 23.6%, the lowest since February 2021.
U.S. investment-grade bonds are down roughly 2.8% this year as yields have climbed.

Movers & Shakers

(+) Carnival ($CCL) +13% after the cruise operator's fiscal Q3 results beat estimates, citing record bookings and customer deposits.
(+) Perella Weinberg ($PWP) +12% because investment bank Piper Sandler has been in talks to combine with the boutique advisory firm.
(–) Fair Isaac ($FICO) -27% after Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will release a rival product to VantageScore and FICO score.

Prediction Markets

These employment numbers signal a stabilizing economy. Numbers come out this morning around 8:30am EDT.
Trade on real-world events with Kalshi. Use code OWS to get a $10 bonus when you trade $10.

Private Dealmaking

Helix Digital Infrastructure, an AI infrastructure company, will raise $1 billion from Samsung
Ortet, a frontier health AI lab, received a $500 million commitment
EliseAI, a housing and healthcare AI automation company, raised $350 million
Bain Capital is investing $250 million in Kahua, a construction tech firm
Webster Equity Partners plans to acquire Lifecore Biomedical, an injectable-grade hyaluronic acid manufacturer, for $663.7 million
Quartermaster, a maritime surveillance startup, raised $100 million

For more PE, VC & M&A deals, subscribe to our Buysiders newsletter.

BOOK OF THE DAY

The Key Man

The Description:
Simon Clark and Will Louch tell the remarkable rise and collapse of Arif Naqvi and Abraaj, the Dubai-based private equity firm that became one of the largest investment groups in emerging markets. At its peak, Abraaj managed nearly $14 billion and had built relationships with some of the world's most powerful investors, philanthropists, corporations, and political leaders. But behind the firm's impressive growth was a deeply flawed financial structure and the misuse of investor funds. Drawing on extensive reporting and interviews with former Abraaj employees and other key figures, the authors reconstruct how Naqvi built an extraordinary reputation, attracted billions in capital, and ultimately presided over one of the most consequential private equity scandals of the era. The book is a compelling case study in ambition, financial engineering, governance failures, and the dangers of charismatic leadership.

Book Length: 368 pages
Release Date: July 6, 2021

Ideal For:
Private equity professionals, investors, entrepreneurs, finance executives, and readers interested in emerging markets, financial fraud, corporate governance, impact investing, and the darker side of high-growth investment firms.

“Reputation can attract billions in capital, but without strong controls, the same trust that creates an empire can ultimately destroy it.”

DAILY VISUAL

New 12-year Low in Consumer Confidence

PRESENTED BY ROADWAY MOVING

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Check them out and use code overheard10.

DAILY ACUMEN

Half Kelly

There is a formula for how much to bet when you have an edge, and the answer is almost always less than people expect. The Kelly criterion says to stake a fraction of your capital equal to your edge divided by the odds. On an even-money bet you win 60 percent of the time, that works out to 20 percent of your bankroll.

The counterintuitive part is what happens beyond that number. Bet more than double Kelly and your long-run growth turns negative, even with a real edge. Most professionals bet half Kelly, which gives up only about a quarter of the growth in exchange for far smaller drawdowns.

Being right is not enough. So remember, when you’re trading, sizing decides whether an edge compounds or destroys you.

ENLIGHTENMENT

Short Squeez Picks

How to build powerful microhabits for your wellbeing
The 24 new rules for succeeding at work
How much you need to exercise for better sleep
Embrace the goalkeeper mindset
5 habits of leaders who make everyone around them braver

MEME-A-PALOOZA

Memes of the Day

📣 Partner With Us: Get in front of an audience of over 1 million finance professionals, business leaders, and policy influencers. Submit a partnership inquiry.

📊 Wall Street Comp & Culture Data: Get the most detailed comp, carry, and culture insights across 1000+ Wall Street firms. Explore the data.

📈 Grow With Us: Work directly with the Overheard on Wall Street team to scale your finance brand. Schedule your free consult.

🧢 Wall Street Shop: Explore our collection of finance-themed apparel and merchandise. Visit the shop.

📬 Deals Newsletter – Buysiders: A curated roundup of major M&A, private equity, and VC activity. Plus access to private deal flow. Subscribe here.

🍋 OpenAI Hits the Brakes

Short Squeez — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 08:30:00 +0000

Together With

“All sorts of people came to me saying, ‘You have to stop DJing if you want to be the CEO of Goldman Sachs’” — David Solomon

Good morning! Nvidia authorized a record-breaking $150 billion share buyback. Goldman is discussing succession plans for David Solomon, with John Waldron lined up as CEO. And a former gay JPMorgan associate claims his manager warned "DEI is not going to save you" before the bank pushed him out.

Morgan Stanley officially picked Dallas for its new regional HQ and unveiled a $1.3 billion project that will bring 3,800 jobs. MongoDB shares fell nearly 20% after Meta poached its CEO to lead Meta Enterprise Platform. And Wall Street strategist David Zervos is joining the Trump administration as a senior adviser to Treasury Secretary Bessent.

Plus: Former Disney CEO Bob Chapek is building a new career in private equity after getting fired four years ago and says he loves his "drama-free" life, and why discipline is not the key to productivity.

Today’s newsletter is brought to you by F2, the agentic operating system for global credit. Golub Capital has selected F2 to power its next $100B in assets, bringing model-agnostic AI to one of private credit’s most prominent firms.

SQUEEZ OF THE DAY

OpenAI Hits the Brakes

OpenAI might be trying to become the most important company in the world. But getting there means walking a very fine line between what could eventually be one of the biggest IPOs ever and accidentally releasing a model it can’t fully control.

A couple of weeks ago, OpenAI ruled out going public in 2026, and Sam Altman blamed it on “everything happening with safety,” saying even a 10% risk of AI-driven human extinction would be unacceptable. And then yesterday, the company scrapped the planned October release of GPT-6.1 Astra after internal testing found the model was more deceptive than its predecessor and more willing to push ahead on tasks without asking permission.

And GPT-6.1 Astra was supposed to be really good. OpenAI planned to roll it out across ChatGPT and Codex in October, moving AI another step closer to AGI that could match or exceed human cognitive abilities. But the problem was that as Astra got better at acting on its own, it also got worse at knowing when to stop.

Yesterday Nvidia also debuted the Open Agent Safety Platform, which apparently quarantines agents that stray outside their boundaries "in milliseconds." Jensen Huang, who has dismissed extinction warnings as fearmongering, put it more diplomatically on X: "Safety is how trust is earned."

It’s unusual for a company to pause the rollout of its most powerful product while planning what will surely become one of the largest IPOs in history. But executives at both OpenAI and Anthropic are warning that labs probably need to slow the pace of model development. Earlier this summer, OpenAI agents ended up breaching Hugging Face, and last week the company paused training after an agent slipped through an internet restriction.

Takeaway: OpenAI's execs are in a tough spot, balancing both speed and existential AI threat. If they move too slowly, OpenAI could lose ground to Anthropic and other rivals. But if they move too fast, the company risks shipping systems its own engineers don't fully trust. What used to be a research problem is quickly becoming a governance and capital-markets problem too. Turns out the hardest part of building a trillion-dollar company is convincing everyone you can turn it off.

PRESENTED BY F2

Golub Capital Chose F2 to Power its Next $100B in Assets

Golub Capital is putting AI at the center of its next chapter. Its investment comes on top of it’s purchase and firm wide rollout of F2, and aims to secure a strategic advantage in agentic solutions for direct lending.

The partnership reflects three priorities for global credit:

Purpose-built AI: F2’s operating system handles the complex workflows of private markets and global credit.
AI sovereignty: F2’s adaptive, model-agnostic harness accesses the latest frontier and open-source models while protecting proprietary data through zero data retention and zero model training.
Unlocking trapped knowledge: F2’s top-bucket deal agent, Adam, acts as a senior MD from day one. He draws on precedent deals and captures future decisions, keeping the firm’s deal history in persistent, proprietary context.

Golub Capital’s investment and rollout mark a turning point for how large firms deploy agentic AI across sensitive, proprietary workflows.

Schedule a Demo with the F2 Team.

HEADLINES

Markets Rundown

Market Update

The S&P 500 fell 0.8% and the Russell 2000 fell 0.6% as Middle East diplomacy stalled; Nvidia jumped 2% on buyback headlines.
The 10-year Treasury yield rose 5 basis points to a new 20-year high.
Gold is down more than 7% in September as rising rates lift the dollar.

Economic Data

September payrolls are due this week, with consensus at 90,000 and unemployment expected to hold steady.
The Fed's preferred PCE inflation gauge is due as part of the August personal spending report, alongside consumer confidence and ISM manufacturing data.
Markets price close to a 70% chance of a 25 basis point Fed hike on October 28.

Middle East

President Trump reportedly rejected Iran's seven-day ceasefire proposal and plans to resume military action after the midterms.
Middle East crude exports are set to reach nearly 13 million barrels per day in September, the highest since the war started.
Rising Strait of Hormuz flows suggest Iran's blockade is becoming less effective, though exports remain 6 million barrels below pre-war levels.

Movers & Shakers

(+) Kodiak Sciences ($KOD) +178% after its pivotal Phase 3 DAYBREAK trial hit its primary endpoints.
(–) MongoDB ($MDB) -18% because CEO CJ Desai abruptly resigned to take a newly created Chief Enterprise Platform Officer role at Meta.
(–) Getty Images ($GETY) -40% after reports the stock-photo company is in confidential talks with lenders over rescue financing.
Prediction Markets

Robinhood hosts their HOOD Summit this week in Houston.
Trade on real-world events with Kalshi. Use code OWS to get a $10 bonus when you trade $10.

Private Dealmaking

Instinct, a developer of general-purpose AI agents, raised $1 billion
SiMa.ai, a physical AI startup, raised $150 million

Firecrawl, a library of official data for AI agents, raised $75 million
Moonwalk Biosciences, a developer of RNAi medicines for obesity and cardiometabolic diseases, raised $70 million
TwoStep Therapeutics, a cancer-focused biotech, raised $62.5 million
ARC, an enterprise device management platform for frontline retail workers, raised $60 million

For more PE, VC & M&A deals, subscribe to our Buysiders newsletter.

BOOK OF THE DAY

Pyramid of Lies

Description:
Duncan Mavin tells the extraordinary story of Lex Greensill and the collapse of Greensill Capital, a fintech company that promised to revolutionize supply-chain finance. Greensill's rise brought him into the orbit of some of the world's biggest banks, corporations, investors, and political figures, including former British Prime Minister David Cameron. But behind the rapid growth was an increasingly risky financial structure involving questionable loans and enormous amounts of other people's money. Mavin, a financial journalist who helped expose the scandal, reconstructs how Greensill went from a relatively obscure Australian entrepreneur to a billionaire financier before the entire empire unraveled. The book provides a detailed look at shadow banking, financial incentives, political access, and how seemingly sophisticated financial businesses can conceal extraordinary risks.

Book Length: 352 pages
Release Date: October 21, 2022

Ideal For:
Investors, bankers, entrepreneurs, private equity professionals, finance executives, and readers interested in fintech, financial fraud, shadow banking, corporate collapses, and the intersection of business and politics.

“The most dangerous financial structures are often the ones that look safest while everything is still going up.”

DAILY VISUAL

Foreign Investors are Loving the U.S. Stock Market

PRESENTED BY UNIQUE AI

Meet Your AI Teammates for Wealth and Asset Management

DAILY ACUMEN

Margin of Safety

Benjamin Graham built an entire investing philosophy around one deceptively simple idea: never buy something at a price that only works out if your analysis is correct. Buy it at a price that still works out reasonably well even if you are somewhat wrong. The gap between what something is worth and what you pay for it is your margin of safety, and it is the only real protection anyone has against their own mistakes.

This matters because every analysis, no matter how careful, is built on assumptions that will turn out to be at least partly wrong. Growth rates come in lower than modeled. Competitors show up that weren't in the spreadsheet. A margin of safety is not a hedge against bad luck. It is an acknowledgment that your own judgment has an error bar, and a refusal to bet as if it doesn't.

The practical test is simple. If the only way your position makes money is for your specific view of the future to be exactly correct, you don't have an investment. You have a prediction with your capital attached to it, and predictions are wrong more often than anyone likes to admit.

ENLIGHTENMENT

Short Squeez Picks

4 30-second habits that could make you calmer
A 5-minute Wednesday habit that can save a bad week
How to explain something complicated
Discipline is not the key to productivity
Why reshaping memories might be key to self-esteem

MEME-A-PALOOZA

Memes of the Day

📣 Partner With Us: Get in front of an audience of over 1 million finance professionals, business leaders, and policy influencers. Submit a partnership inquiry.

📊 Wall Street Comp & Culture Data: Get the most detailed comp, carry, and culture insights across 1000+ Wall Street firms. Explore the data.

📈 Grow With Us: Work directly with the Overheard on Wall Street team to scale your finance brand. Schedule your free consult.

🧢 Wall Street Shop: Explore our collection of finance-themed apparel and merchandise. Visit the shop.

📬 Deals Newsletter – Buysiders: A curated roundup of major M&A, private equity, and VC activity. Plus access to private deal flow. Subscribe here.

Insiders:💰Private Equity Outlook

Short Squeez — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 19:24:01 +0000

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🍋 The Carry Crunch

Short Squeez — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 08:30:00 +0000

Together With

“A lot of financial debates are just people with different time horizons talking over each other.” — Morgan Housel

Good Morning! Millennium's new capital raise attracted more than $30 billion, well above its $20 billion target. Peter Rahal, founder of RxBar and David protein bars, is now a billionaire after his parent company raised $250 million at a $2.25 billion valuation. And Citadel wants to hire more quants and increase its headcount at a “healthy” double-digit rate over the next year.

Oura's IPO is about four times oversubscribed and is on track to raise as much as $2.2 billion. A former JPMorgan algo trading sales associate built a run club side hustle in NYC that brought in $640,000 in 2025. And private equity firms, including CVC, are circling a Japanese company at the center of a 2024 contamination controversy.

Plus: Microsoft packaged its business AI into a single app to compete with Anthropic, Goldman sees hyperscaler AI capex rising 50% next year to $1.2 trillion, and is it better to be a good follower or a bad leader?

Make that hefty NYC monthly rent start working for you. Earn points for it with the Bilt Card. Learn more about it here.

SQUEEZ OF THE DAY

The Carry Crunch

For years, the Wall Street career path for the ultra smart was straightforward. If you graduated from a target school, could survive two years in investment banking, eventually you could jump to a private equity firm where you’d grind just a little bit longer before eventually getting filthy rich off carried interest. But in 2026, some PE professionals are starting to wonder whether they should’ve just stayed in banking.

Both private equity exits and carry are jammed up, which means a lot of PE professionals are still waiting on that promised “one more year” indefinitely. Higher interest rates jammed up the buyout machine earlier this decade, and ever since, firms have been sitting on thousands of companies they bought when debt was cheaper, and valuations were higher.

In the U.S. alone, private-equity firms are sitting on roughly 13,500 unsold companies, and PwC and PitchBook estimate it could take nine years to clear the backlog at the current pace. And since dealmakers generally don’t get their biggest carry payouts until investments are actually sold, a lot of theoretically valuable compensation is still stuck on paper. Blackstone, KKR and Carlyle alone had almost $17 billion of accrued performance compensation tied to unrealized investments at the end of last year, tripling from roughly ~$5 billion in 2018.

That matters because carry was a huge part of the reason people were willing to spend their 20s grinding for 80-100 hours a week and getting yelled at over LBO models. Once a fund clears its return hurdles, PE teams typically receive around 20% of the profits, and senior investors get the biggest slices. Partners at $10 billion-plus funds have an average of roughly $37 million of carry allocated to them over the life of a fund, making private equity one of Wall Street’s most tried-and-true paths to generational wealth.

Some executives are now borrowing against future carry just to fund commitments to new vehicles or cover major purchases while they wait for exits that keep getting pushed further out.

And some people are deciding they don’t feel like waiting. Mid-level investors are leaving PE to start companies, jump to competitors or even boomerang back into investment banking, where at least the bonuses look a lot more predictable.

One former Palladium VP left the rat race entirely and traded his Midtown office for a truck-equipment company in Oklahoma. Meanwhile, the share of first-year bankers ranking PE among their top three career choices slipped to 86% from 91% in 2024, and interest in corporate development, startups and AI has climbed.

Investment-banking bonuses are expected to rise 10% to 15% this year, versus basically flat pay at middle-market PE firms before carry.

The pain isn’t evenly distributed, and the rich keep getting richer. Blackstone, KKR, and other megafunds are starting to see exits recover, but smaller and middle-market firms are having a much harder time raising new funds and unloading aging investments. So the private equity industry looks a lot more K-shaped because the biggest platforms still have scale and multiple ways to make money, while everyone else is finding out that the golden days of launching a fund might be in the rearview mirror.

Takeaway: Private equity became Wall Street’s dream job because the upside was theoretically unlimited. But the catch is that carried interest only feels like compensation once somebody actually sells something. With thousands of companies stuck in portfolios and exits taking years longer than expected, some dealmakers are discovering that the safest path to getting rich in finance might, for once, be going back to banking and collecting a bonus every February.

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HEADLINES

Markets Rundown

Market Update

Stocks closed higher as Treasury yields stabilized and oil fell on reports Iran proposed a seven-day plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
The 10-year Treasury yield closed slightly lower at 5.16% and the 2-year fell to 4.85%.
The 10-year yield rose more than 0.4 percentage points in September, its highest level since 2007.

Economic Data

Headline durable goods orders were unchanged in August, while core capital goods orders rose 1.6% and 14.9% year over year.
Computer and related product orders rose more than 17% from August 2025, reflecting AI infrastructure investment.
Nonfarm payrolls have increased by 214,000 over the past three months.

Rate Spike History

Since 1990, the 2-year Treasury yield has risen 0.5 percentage points in a month only 16 times, including September.
The S&P 500 fell 2% on average over the following three months, with a median of -0.5%.
Excluding periods of falling payrolls, average returns improved to 0.4% over three months and 9.5% over 12 months.

Movers & Shakers

(+) Microsoft ($MSFT) +4% after launching a new Copilot ‘super app’ that merges AI chat, coding, and Autopilot agents.
(–) Twilio ($TWLO) -8% because HSBC downgraded the communications platform to Reduce.
(–) Zscaler ($ZS) -10% after disclosing in an 8-K that Chief Revenue Officer Mike Rich is stepping down effective October 1.

Prediction Markets

The overwhelming favorite amongst traders is an “overheated” economy (below 5% unemployment with higher than 3.5% inflation).
Trade on real-world events with Kalshi. Use code OWS to get a $10 bonus when you trade $10.

Private Dealmaking

OpenEvidence, an AI search engine for doctors, raised $250 million
Savvy Wealth, a provider of back-office tech for RIAs, raised $100 million
HighLife, a French developer of transcatheter treatments for heart diseases, raised $90 million
Ultraviolette, an Indian developer of EV platforms, raised $85 million
BigHat Biosciences, a protein therapeutics developer, raised $75 million
Mind Security, an Israeli cybersecurity startup focused on preventing corporate data leaks, raised $72 million

For more PE, VC & M&A deals, subscribe to our Buysiders newsletter.

BOOK OF THE DAY

The Curious Case of Mike Lynch

Description:
Katie Prescott chronicles the extraordinary life of Mike Lynch, the British technology entrepreneur who built Autonomy into one of the UK's most valuable software companies before its £11 billion sale to Hewlett-Packard triggered a decade-long legal battle. Prescott follows Lynch from his early life and rise through Cambridge's technology scene to the Autonomy deal, the fraud allegations and his eventual acquittal in the United States. The story then takes an extraordinary final turn: Lynch died in August 2024 when his yacht, Bayesian, sank off the coast of Sicily, only weeks after his acquittal. Drawing on extensive research and interviews, Prescott examines the money, personalities, corporate maneuvering, and legal battles surrounding one of the most consequential stories in British technology.

Book Length: 464 pages
Release Date: November 13, 2025

Ideal For:
Technology executives, entrepreneurs, investors, private equity professionals, and readers interested in software companies, M&A, corporate governance, fraud investigations, and the dramatic history of British technology.

“Great fortunes can be built through extraordinary ambition, but the larger the success, the greater the consequences when trust begins to unravel.”

DAILY VISUAL

Bond sell-off continues as 10-year yield hits 5.19%

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Watch Daloopa CEO Thomas Li demo Scout in action, including building a financial model from scratch using plain-language commands. See how AI can accelerate financial modeling while fitting directly into the Excel workflows analysts already use every day.

DAILY ACUMEN

Already Priced

When people say something is already priced in, they mean the market's current price already reflects what every participant collectively expects to happen, so the event itself, even a genuinely good one, doesn't move the price much when it arrives exactly as anticipated. What actually moves a price is the gap between what happens and what was expected, not the event in isolation.

This is why a company can report record earnings and see its stock fall the same day. The earnings were good. They just weren't as good as what the price had already assumed, and the market is constantly repricing the delta between expectation and reality, not the raw outcome itself.

The practical discipline this teaches is to stop asking whether news is good or bad and start asking what was already baked into the price before the news arrived. A mediocre report can send a stock up if expectations had fallen low enough, and a genuinely strong one can send it down if the bar had been set even higher. The surprise is the only thing that ever really trades.

ENLIGHTENMENT

Short Squeez Picks

Is it better to be a good follower or a bad leader?
How unrealistic workplace expectations cause burnout
How to have a great 1:1 meeting with your boss
Stop thinking others are happier than you
The paradox of trying too hard

MEME-A-PALOOZA

Memes of the Day

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🍋 Private Credit Wants JPMorgan’s Rejects

Short Squeez — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Together With

"Spend your money on the things money can buy. Spend your time on the things money can't buy." — Haruki Murakami

Good Morning! Morgan Stanley is working to contain the damage from a leaked deal list, and regulators in China and India are already investigating the incident. Ken Griffin is running into opposition over plans to build a personal heliport in Miami Beach, even after claiming his helicopter is the quietest model available.

Blackstone is launching a private markets fund for retail clients outside the US for the first time in its history. Leopold Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness hedge fund reportedly paid Goldman Sachs over $200 million, more than any other Goldman hedge fund client. And Trump Jr.'s 1789 Capital is in talks to raise $3 billion in new funds.

Plus: Blackstone shelved a $3 billion collateralized fund obligation deal after months of trying to offload aging PE stakes, and just how gross nail-biting really is.

Mosaic continues to ship upgrades to their modeling platform. See their new accretion/dilution model here.

SQUEEZ OF THE DAY

Private Credit Wants JPMorgan’s Rejects

It's been a rough year for private credit, and it's looking for new places to lend. JPMorgan has an idea for the credit-card applicants it doesn't want: let private credit have them.

The bank is exploring a so-called “second-look” program that would allow outside lenders to approve some applicants JPMorgan rejects for co-branded cards. The cards are tied to partners like United Airlines, Amazon and Marriott, and some private-credit giants like Blue Owl, Blackstone, KKR and Sixth Street have expressed interest.

Airlines and retailers want as many customers as possible approved for their cards because more cardholders mean more spending. But banks, on the other hand, are the ones on the hook for the credit risk if those customers stop paying. That tension has blown up partnerships before, and Walmart ditched Synchrony partly over approval rates, and Goldman's willingness to approve nearly everyone Apple wanted contributed to a much riskier Apple Card book. JPMorgan, which is preparing to take over the Apple Card program, has a pretty obvious incentive not to relearn that lesson the hard way.

JPMorgan can keep its own underwriting standards intact while allowing another lender to take a second look at borrowers it turns down. Roughly 85% of JPMorgan's existing credit-card balances come from consumers with FICO scores of at least 660, so the second-look pool would naturally skew toward borrowers outside the bank's normal comfort zone. And private credit's entire business model, which is all about finding ways to fund loans banks either can't or don't want to keep on their own balance sheets, seems like a pretty good middle-ground.

The private credit industry had a much rougher 2026, with rising defaults in the corporate direct-lending business that made private credit famous. So naturally, the industry is looking for new places to put its enormous piles of capital to work and, rather than making a $500 million loan to one highly leveraged company, firms can fund thousands of credit-card, personal-loan or buy-now-pay-later balances and spread the risk across a much larger pool of borrowers.

Takeaway: Private credit grew up feasting on loans banks backed away from after the financial crisis. Now it may be getting a shot at something even more mainstream: the customers JPMorgan itself says no to. If this goes anywhere, the next frontier for private credit might not be another leveraged buyout; it might be the guy who just got declined for a United card.

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HEADLINES

Markets Rundown

Market Update

Stocks ended little changed as WTI crude rose 3% and Brent stayed above $100, with reports of talks for a phased Strait of Hormuz reopening.
The 10-year Treasury yield hit 5.21%, its highest since 2007, and the 30-year climbed to 5.47%, its highest since 2004.
Diesel prices surged to record highs, adding to broader inflation concerns.

Economic Data

Yesterday's PMI data showed business activity expanding at its fastest pace since 2021, consistent with roughly 5% annualized GDP growth.
S&P 500 earnings are on track for the year to grow 36%.
Rising yields reflect both inflation concerns and stronger growth, per the report.

China Trade and Corporate News

Treasury Secretary Bessent announced the U.S. and China agreed to extend their trade truce two months, through January 10.
The extension precedes planned leader meetings at the APEC summit in November and the G20 summit in December.
Oracle shares fell more than 3% after invoking force majeure on a New Mexico data center project amid regulatory setbacks.

Movers & Shakers

(+) Meta ($META) +5% after unveiling the $1,299 Meta VR headset and a compact AI device called Charm.
(–) Oracle ($ORCL) -3% because the company sent a force majeure notice on its $165 billion Project Jupiter AI data center in New Mexico.
(–) MGM Resorts ($MGM) -11% after Barry Diller's People Inc. withdrew its $18 billion bid to take the casino operator private.

Prediction Markets

After such a busy week, fear seems to be the overwhelming theme this week.
Trade on real-world events with Kalshi. Use code OWS to get a $10 bonus when you trade $10.

Private Dealmaking

Island, an enterprise internet browser and control layer, raised $400 million
Precision Neuroscience, a brain-computer interface startup, raised $250 million
Rightway, a pharmacy benefit management and care navigation startup, raised $155 million
Basecamp Research, a developer of AI models for therapeutic designs, raised $140 million
Pixxel, an Indian hyperspectral imaging startup, raised $100 million
Poseidon Aerospace, a developer of cargo-hauling unmanned aircraft, raised $60 million

For more PE, VC & M&A deals, subscribe to our Buysiders newsletter.

BOOK OF THE DAY

The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State

Description:
Jill Lepore examines how technology, data, automation, and artificial intelligence have transformed the relationship between governments, corporations, and citizens. Drawing on history, political theory, and technology, she traces the roots of what she calls the “Artificial State,” from the rise of technocracy and machine-driven decision-making to today's algorithmic systems and AI. Lepore argues that the growing reliance on machines to govern, predict, persuade, and organize society raises fundamental questions about democracy, human agency, and the role of government. She also explores the environmental consequences of the technological infrastructure behind the digital economy. Rather than treating today's technological transformation as inevitable, Lepore places it within a longer historical trajectory, asking whether societies can understand its origins well enough to reshape its future.

Book Length: 336 pages
Release Date: August 25, 2026

Ideal For:
Executives, technology investors, entrepreneurs, policymakers, historians, and readers interested in AI, democracy, technology, political economy, and the long-term consequences of automation.

“Technology may shape the future, but history reminds us that the systems humans create can also be changed by humans.”

DAILY VISUAL

Hyperscaler Credit Rests on One Consensus Assumption

Source: Apollo

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DAILY ACUMEN

Regret Minimize

Faced with a genuinely hard, high-stakes decision, most people default to weighing the immediate pros and cons: cost, comfort, what feels safer right now. A more useful frame, one associated with Jeff Bezos's decision to leave a stable finance job to start Amazon, is to instead project yourself to 80 years old and ask which choice you would regret not having made.

This reframing does real work because it filters out a specific kind of noise: the short-term discomfort that dominates most decisions but rarely matters on a longer horizon. The awkward conversation, the temporary pay cut, the risk of looking foolish if it doesn't work, all of these carry enormous weight in the moment and almost none from thirty years out.

It is not a framework for every decision, and using it on trivial choices just adds unnecessary drama to picking a restaurant. It earns its keep specifically on the rare, largely irreversible decisions, the ones where the actual question was never whether it's comfortable, but whether you could live with never having tried.

ENLIGHTENMENT

Short Squeez Picks

Why willpower alone won't get you there
Why letting your best people leave might be smart
The management habits quietly killing engagement
Just how gross nail-biting really is
Stop asking whether you're good enough

MEME-A-PALOOZA

Memes of the Day

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🍋 Bro Attached Everything

Short Squeez — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Together With

“You approach staying in a job you don't love very differently if you don't operate from a place of fear and despair.” — Arianna Huffington

Good Morning! Apollo Debt Solutions BDC is limiting redemptions for the third straight quarter and will cap withdrawals at 5% after 14.7% of investors sought to pull their cash. Consolidation is running hot in private capital, with managers buying rivals to juice their share prices. And nearly 10% of American borrowers opted for riskier mortgages last week as rates soar.

The wealthy are pouring billions into longevity to extend their healthspan. IonQ shares rallied after the company announced a major quantum computing breakthrough. And enjoying life is becoming a new marker of financial success for Americans.

Plus: Bentley launched its first fully electric car at half the price of Ferrari's, Anthropic leaders are backing a startup developing a system to detect biological threats, and why authenticity at work can backfire.

For those in NYC: be the first to see the new AI agent built for wealth management, advisory, and client relationships. Register here to join Unique AI’s October 6th event.

SQUEEZ OF THE DAY

Bro Attached Everything

Somewhere in Morgan Stanley’s Asia-Pacific investment bank, an investment banker is probably having the worst week of his life.

Mohamed Atmani, the bank's regional head of financial sponsors, may have fired off one of the worst accidental emails of all time: an internal document listing more than 100 deals Morgan Stanley was pitching or discreetly monitoring, sent straight to clients.

The file included IPO candidates spanning China, South Korea and India, the private equity and pension funds backing them, projects that had been shelved, and in parts, price-sensitive information.

He meant to send the client-facing version, which was mostly general sector updates and recent transactions. He tried to recall the message but it was too late, and a blurred version even ended up on Instagram.

It's one of the worst things you can do as a banker if you think about the consequences. Even learning that a company or major shareholder is considering an IPO moves markets, so if investors know a large holder is preparing to sell, they can get out ahead of the extra supply. Showing one client what another client might be planning isn't a "wrong attachment, sorry" problem. It breaks one of Wall Street's core commandments.

The timing is also not great. PE firms are leaning on IPOs and follow-ons to exit aging portfolio companies and return capital to LPs, and those deals live or die on controlling when information reaches the market. It's also a bad look for a bank that has ranked among the top underwriters of Hong Kong stock sales and Asia M&A for years.

Morgan Stanley says it acted quickly and continues to engage with affected parties. Hong Kong's Securities and Futures Commission declined to comment on the incident but said it expects firms to have controls that prevent exactly this. JPMorgan's global head of M&A, Charlie Bouckaert, described the playbook for these situations on Bloomberg TV: run to the fire, own it, and reach out to everyone affected.

Takeaway: Investment banks spend billions on information barriers, cybersecurity, compliance systems and armies of lawyers to protect market-moving information. But when one banker attaches the wrong file, it turns out the final boss was always Outlook. It goes to show that for all the value investment banks claim to bring, their greatest asset might be trust, which in 2026, can be lost with one fat-finger mistake.

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HEADLINES

Markets Rundown

Market Update

The 10-year Treasury yield climbed to 5.11%, its highest since 2007, on strong data, hawkish Fed comments, and a weak Treasury auction.
Energy was the only S&P 500 sector to finish positive; utilities, real estate, communication services, and consumer discretionary lagged.
WTI crude closed near $93, snapping a five-day losing streak.

Economic Data

The U.S. composite PMI rose to 58.4 in September, its highest in more than five years.
The eurozone composite PMI hit 53.1, its highest since April 2023, while the UK composite PMI eased slightly to 51.7.
Input costs rose across manufacturing and services in all three regions, adding to inflation pressure.

Midterm Elections

Since 1970, the S&P 500 has averaged a 3.6% return in midterm years, versus 12.5% annually overall.
The index fell 18.1% in 2022 and 4.4% in 2018, but is up roughly 14% year to date in 2026.
The six months following Election Day have averaged a 15.5% gain, with gains in all 14 midterm elections since 1970.

Movers & Shakers

(+) Securitize ($SECZ) +10% after Cantor Fitzgerald initiated coverage with an Overweight rating and $21.20 price target.
(+) IonQ ($IONQ) +4% because the quantum company unveiled a real-time quantum error decoder it says is a breakthrough.
(–) Novo Nordisk ($NVO) -3% after patients sued GLP-1 makers over sudden loss of vision.

Prediction Markets

Between the UN speech and the Xi Summit, Trump has a big week.
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Private Dealmaking

Tekever, a Portuguese developer of military drones, raised $580 million
Snorkel AI, an AI data development platform, raised $350 million
Enveda, a drug discovery startup focused on medicinal plants, raised $311 million
Hubble Network, a developer of space-based Bluetooth connectivity solutions, raised $200 million
Rainmaker, a cloud seeding startup, raised $100 million
Go.AI, a seller of AI hardware appliances to banks, raised $85 million

For more PE, VC & M&A deals, subscribe to our Buysiders newsletter.

BOOK OF THE DAY

Dumb Money

Description:
Bennett Zamani presents a practical guide to swing trading built around discipline, risk management, and developing a repeatable process rather than chasing hot stocks or trying to predict every market move. Drawing on nearly two decades of trading experience, Zamani walks through the mistakes that commonly hurt traders, including holding losing positions too long, selling winners too early, chasing momentum, and entering trades without a defined plan. The book emphasizes understanding market conditions, identifying setups, managing position size and risk, and developing the psychological discipline needed to execute consistently. Its central message is that successful trading is less about finding a magical stock or indicator and more about creating a process that protects capital and can be repeated over time.

Book Length: 373 pages
Release Date: July 25, 2026

Ideal For:
Swing traders, aspiring day traders, active investors, and anyone looking to improve technical analysis, trading psychology, position sizing, risk management, and the discipline required to trade consistently.

“Successful trading isn't about predicting what happens next. It's about building a process that keeps you disciplined regardless of what happens next.”

DAILY VISUAL

Mortgage Interest Rates Top 7%

Source: Axios

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DAILY ACUMEN

Postal Coupons

In December 1919, a Boston promoter named Charles Ponzi told investors he could double their money in 90 days by exploiting a tiny price gap in international postal reply coupons. Investors did not need to understand the mechanism. They only needed to see their neighbors getting paid, and within months people were lining up around the block to hand him their savings.

At his peak in July 1920, Ponzi was pulling in nearly six and a half million dollars in a single month from over 20,000 investors. A journalist finally did the math and worked out that Ponzi's claimed operation would have required more than a hundred million postal coupons in circulation. Fewer than 30,000 actually existed. He had never really been running the arbitrage at all, just paying old investors with new investors' money.

The scheme collapsed within about a year, costing investors an estimated 20 million dollars, and gave the entire world a name for a fraud that is still being reinvented today. The tell was never hidden. Nobody could explain how the returns were actually generated, and everyone invested anyway because everyone else already had.

ENLIGHTENMENT

Short Squeez Picks

The sleep secret to eating (and living) better
Why debt isn't always the enemy
The biological reason coping with stress changes by season
Why "authenticity" at work can backfire
The unlikely college major top CEOs swear by

MEME-A-PALOOZA

Memes of the Day

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📈 Grow With Us: Work directly with the Overheard on Wall Street team to scale your finance brand. Schedule your free consult.

🧢 Wall Street Shop: Explore our collection of finance-themed apparel and merchandise. Visit the shop.

📬 Deals Newsletter – Buysiders: A curated roundup of major M&A, private equity, and VC activity. Plus access to private deal flow. Subscribe here.

🍋 a16z Is Starting a School

Short Squeez — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 08:30:00 +0000

Together With

“The Golden Rule of AI: Don’t use AI to save yourself time by wasting someone else’s.” — Shane Parrish

Good Morning! Apple is developing a screenless health and fitness tracker to take on Whoop, with Google-owned Fitbit launching its own competitor earlier this year. Peloton launched three new treadmills, including its cheapest one yet that folds.

The PE exit drought is pushing junior partners to leave big firms and launch their own. A rocket-supply crunch is forcing a scramble across the space industry as companies hunt for new ways to get satellites deployed. And Royal Caribbean is nearing a $3 billion deal to take a 50% equity stake in Sandals Resorts.

Plus: Wall Street is growing skeptical of the data center boom, venture capital's role in a major Ponzi scheme, and why you're probably not tough enough to earn huge returns.

Today's newsletter is brought to you by F2, the agentic operating system for private markets. Deal teams on F2 reach conviction in hours instead of weeks. See for yourself and book a demo.

SQUEEZ OF THE DAY

a16z Is Starting a School

Most VC firms in Silicon Valley are competing to meet the next Mark Zuckerberg before the Series A. But Andreessen Horowitz, the venture giant behind Airbnb, Coinbase, OpenAI, Stripe, Anduril and Databricks, is spending tens of millions of dollars to try to meet him before freshman orientation.

Yesterday, a16z announced the Horowitz Andreessen Academy, a San Francisco-based college alternative for recent high school graduates and students who've done up to two years at an elite university.

The founding class of ~50 students arrives in fall 2027 for a tuition-free, one-year program with no traditional grades, tests, or homework. Instead, students will spend most of their time building products and working alongside an absolutely insane group of founding partners: OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia, Stripe, Palantir, Anduril, Coinbase, Replit, Google and Meta.

They'll provide everything from mentors and compute to co-ops and recruiting, with Sam Altman listed among the instructors and ~200 speakers on deck.

Students will also get more than $50,000 in compute credits and a $5,000 research and travel budget. The curriculum is absolutely wild and ranges from AI research to "The Geometry of Luck" and even finding love (which might be needed in San Francisco).

While Peter Thiel has run a similar fellowship for years, a16z's is unique because it combines the school, employers, mentors, and venture capital under one network.

The Academy is a separate for-profit entity that has raised $42 million, including $35 million from a16z, with angels like Tobi Lütke, Garry Tan and Adam D'Angelo. It's unaccredited, so no degree and no transferable credits, and a two-year program planned for 2028 will charge tuition comparable to an elite private university. So a16z is basically investing in a startup whose product is, at least partially, future startup founders.

Academy CEO Gagan Biyani (co-founder of Udemy) says the firm hopes to invest in companies started by students, and dozens of companies including Databricks have signed on to interview or consider graduates.

Takeaway: Most venture firms compete to win the deal, but a16z is trying to build the pipeline that produces the deal. If VC is about getting access to exceptional founders earlier than everyone else, it's hard to get much earlier than senior year of high school. And if you’re a student at Horowitz Andreessen Academy, you never know what professor might walk through that door.

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HEADLINES

Markets Rundown

Market Update

The Nasdaq hit a record high while the S&P 500 was little changed; the 10-year Treasury yield held near 4.95%.
WTI crude extended its decline to near $95 on reports Saudi Arabia is moving added supply through the Strait of Hormuz.
Asian and European equities advanced overnight; the U.S. dollar strengthened against most major currencies.

Economic Data

ADP showed private employers added an average of 20,000 jobs per week for the four weeks ending September 5, up from 16,750.
The unemployment rate held at 4.1%, with 7.3 million job openings above the 7.0 million unemployed.
Continued employment and wage growth should keep supporting household income and spending.

Bond Yields

Bond yields paused after their recent decline alongside falling oil prices.
Market-implied 10-year inflation expectations in TIPS fell 5 to 10 basis points over the past week.
Easing inflation expectations suggest the Fed's rate hike is reinforcing its inflation-fighting credibility.

Movers & Shakers

(+) On Holding ($ONON) +8% after the Swiss sportswear brand unveiled a $1 billion share buyback at its Investor Day.
(+) GameStop ($GME) +6% because CEO Ryan Cohen bought another $26.4 million of company stock in the open market.
(–) Royal Caribbean ($RCL) -6% after the cruise line is nearing a $3 billion deal to take a 50% equity stake in Sandals.

Prediction Markets

Following another doomsday cry, will regulations alter the timeline for Anthropic’s IPO?
Trade on real-world events with Kalshi. Use code OWS to get a $10 bonus when you trade $10.

Private Dealmaking

Cyera, a data security company, raised $400 million
Heidi, an Australian medical scribe and care platform, raised $340 million
Verda, a Helsinki-based AI neocloud, raised $189 million
Kairos Power, a nuclear reactor startup, raised around $100 million
Kanin Energy, a Canadian startup that converts industrial heat into on-site electricity, raised $60 million
Archy, a provider of practice-management software to dental offices, raised $50 million

For more PE, VC & M&A deals, subscribe to our Buysiders newsletter.

BOOK OF THE DAY

A Brief History of Intelligence

Description:
Max S. Bennett explores the evolution of intelligence from the earliest forms of life to modern artificial intelligence. Rather than treating the human brain as a single technological achievement, Bennett identifies five major evolutionary breakthroughs that progressively enabled increasingly sophisticated forms of intelligence: steering, learning, simulating, mentalizing, and language. He then connects each breakthrough to developments in AI, asking what today's machines can already replicate and what remains uniquely difficult about human intelligence. Drawing on neuroscience, evolutionary biology, psychology, and computer science, Bennett presents a compelling framework for understanding both where intelligence came from and where AI may be heading. The result is a fascinating bridge between the history of the brain and the future of intelligent machines.

Book Length: 432 pages
Release Date: October 7, 2025

Ideal For:
AI professionals, technology investors, entrepreneurs, neuroscientists, and anyone interested in artificial intelligence, evolutionary biology, human cognition, and the future of intelligent machines.

“To understand where AI is going, first understand the evolutionary breakthroughs that made human intelligence possible.”

DAILY VISUAL

The Rising Price Tag of Romance

PRESENTED BY PETRARCH

There is a Bidding War for Spirit’s Data

Spirit Airlines stopped flying in May, but they are still hitting news cycles for the value of their operational data. Google bid $10 million for the airline’s internal files, and a startup, Micro1, put in a higher, post-auction bid at $12.5 million. A judge will decide both the buyer and what the buyer in the near future.

The coveted prize is their ordinary record of running a business: years of emails, spreadsheets, and operating files that don’t ever appear on the balance sheet. Almost no company can sell that, because raw files are full of names, addresses, faces, and logos that expose the people in them and the business that made them.

Credit and PE firms are enlisting Petrarch as their partner in distressed assets. They strip out everything traceable and leave the operational knowledge behind, so records that were a liability walk out the door as an asset that pays.

Book some time with them this week to learn more.

DAILY ACUMEN

Nobel Curse

In 1973, Fischer Black and Myron Scholes published a formula for pricing options that had eluded economists for decades. Robert Merton extended it further the same year. Together the three of them solved a problem that made modern derivatives markets possible, and their work became so foundational that it is simply called the Black-Scholes formula today.

In 1997, Scholes and Merton traveled to Stockholm to accept the Nobel Prize in Economics for the discovery, Black having died two years earlier and made ineligible by the rule against posthumous awards. It was, by any measure, the summit of a career in economics.

Less than a year later, the hedge fund both men had joined as partners, Long-Term Capital Management, blew up so violently it required a Federal Reserve-organized rescue to stop it from taking the global financial system down with it. The same minds that had solved how markets should behave under their assumptions were undone by exactly how badly markets can behave outside them.

ENLIGHTENMENT

Short Squeez Picks

The word that turns dreaming into doing
The stomach it actually takes to earn market-beating returns
Your smartwatch is lying to you about calories burned
Why September feels like a second January
Why the 8-hour workday doesn't actually work

MEME-A-PALOOZA

Memes of the Day

📣 Partner With Us: Get in front of an audience of over 1 million finance professionals, business leaders, and policy influencers. Submit a partnership inquiry.

📊 Wall Street Comp & Culture Data: Get the most detailed comp, carry, and culture insights across 1000+ Wall Street firms. Explore the data.

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📬 Deals Newsletter – Buysiders: A curated roundup of major M&A, private equity, and VC activity. Plus access to private deal flow. Subscribe here.

🍋 BofA’s AI Bet Backfires

Short Squeez — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 08:30:00 +0000

Together With

“VCs can be the worst enemies of entrepreneurs. Often, they kill off what's different, special, and full of potential.” — Michael Bloomberg

Good Morning! Semiconductor stocks soared after Meta's new AI agent became one of the most downloaded apps in the App Store and boosted investor optimism around chip demand. Oura and its backers are seeking to raise as much as $2.2 billion in a US IPO. And Gen Z is shunning private equity's restaurant takeover.

The Yankees are nearing a deal to hand a 16% stake to Apollo at a $12 billion valuation. Nscale crossed $103 billion in data center contracts, a 1,000-fold increase over three years driven by Microsoft and Anthropic. And Bitcoin topped $85,000 as the crypto rally extends, with some experts declaring crypto winter officially over.

Plus: Silver Lake is asking a judge to rule that Carl Icahn and hedge funds colluded to fight its $13 billion Endeavor acquisition, Newark, NYC, and Philadelphia flights were grounded after a worker cut a Verizon fiber cable, and why CEOs need to stop bragging about 4am alarm clocks.

Make that hefty NYC monthly rent start working for you. Earn points for it with the Bilt Card. Learn more about it here.

SQUEEZ OF THE DAY

BofA’s AI Bear Bet Backfires

Bank of America was Wall Street's quiet skeptic on AI spending over the past couple of years. While basically every other big bank threw itself at data center financings, BofA kept asking how long money-losing AI companies could actually sustain the burn. So, consequently, the firm sat out some of the biggest deals of 2025 and 2026.

But it turns out being right about the risk and being right about the trade are two very different things.

It's been an absurd year for banks underwriting and trading AI infrastructure debt, and more than $400 billion of it has hit the market in 2026 alone. Apollo says AI-related deals now make up almost 40% of new debt supply, and tech companies and hyperscalers account for more than 20% of the investment-grade index for bonds maturing 10-plus years out.

BofA sat most of that out, and CEO Brian Moynihan now expects trading revenue to be roughly flat this quarter. And it’s all thanks in part to the fact that his bank simply wasn't positioned for the boom everyone else was riding.

BofA missed Blackstone-backed QTS's $3.9 billion bond sale last quarter and currently sits third in both U.S. investment-grade and high-yield issuance, behind JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley. And when banks sit out the high-profile deals, they’re not just missing an underwriting fee. Once these bonds start trading hands between asset managers, hedge funds, and insurers, the banks closest to the market get repeated shots at making money off the same debt, over and over. And while JPMorgan expects trading revenue up mid-to-high teens this quarter and Citi's guiding to mid-single digits, BofA is fighting just to keep its 16-quarter growth streak alive.

Takeaway: In the latter half of 2026, BofA changed its mind, fast. The firm extended a $520 million credit line to OpenAI earlier this year, helped sell $14 billion in bonds financing an Oracle data center in Michigan, and committed $250 billion toward U.S. critical infrastructure including data centers and compute capacity. The problem is that deciding you want back in is the easy part; rebuilding the relationships and deal flow you skipped for two years is a lot harder, and right now the results show it.

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HEADLINES

Markets Rundown

Market Update

The Nasdaq rose more than 2% and the S&P 500 gained 1.5% as WTI crude fell to $96.
10-year European government yields fell 5 to 10 basis points, while the 10-year Treasury yield eased to 4.96%
Asian and European equities rallied overnight on hopes for progress on Middle East diplomatic shipping efforts.

Economic Data

The preliminary U.S. PMI is due Wednesday, followed by Thursday's durable goods orders and new home sales data.
Chicago Fed's Goolsbee and St. Louis Fed's Musalem struck hawkish tones, warning further hikes may be needed.
A quiet data week overall following last week's Fed rate hike.

China and Diplomacy

Trump and Xi Jinping meet Wednesday, Xi's first U.S. trip since 2023, expected to extend the trade truce set to expire in November.
Trump said he'd "probably" be open to meeting Iranian President Pezeshkian at the UN General Assembly this week.
Trump is also expected to meet other Gulf state leaders to discuss easing the energy supply crunch.

Movers & Shakers

(+) Meta ($META) +11% after launching Muse, a personal AI agent, as investors bet the product will drive meaningfully higher chip demand.
(+) AMD ($AMD) +10% because Meta's Muse AI launch fueled a chip-sector rally that pushed AMD above a $1 trillion market cap.
(–) Novo Nordisk ($NVO) -8% after the drugmaker's Capital Markets Day framed 2026-2030 growth as roughly in line with peers rather than a breakout acceleration.

Prediction Markets

Trump is scheduled to speak at 9:50am EDT. There’s an 79% chance that Trump says “Trump”.
Trade on real-world events with Kalshi. Use code OWS to get a $10 bonus when you trade $10.

Private Dealmaking

Delos Data, a semiconductor and software startup, raised more than $100 million
Sequen, a real-time ranking and relevance platform, raised $90 million
Inspiren, a senior living tech startup, raised $70 million
Superluminal Medicines, an obesity drug developer, raised $60 million
Bluecore Energy, a developer of small nuclear reactors on barges, raised $50 million
Guardio, a consumer cybersecurity company, raised $40 million

For more PE, VC & M&A deals, subscribe to our Buysiders newsletter.

BOOK OF THE DAY

The Baron of Wall Street

Description:
William R. Loomis Jr., former CEO of Lazard, tells the story of Clarence Dillon, one of the most influential and least-known figures of 20th-century American finance. Dillon rose to prominence during the Roaring Twenties, building a financial empire through investment banking, mergers and acquisitions, restructuring, and major corporate transactions. Loomis explores Dillon's role in pioneering techniques that would later become central to modern finance, including leveraged buyouts and sophisticated corporate reorganizations. The book also moves beyond Wall Street, examining Dillon's relationships with figures ranging from Thomas Edison and Charlie Chaplin to Joseph P. Kennedy and Franklin D. Roosevelt. It provides a window into how Wall Street, corporate power, politics, and wealth became increasingly intertwined during a formative period in American financial history.

Book Length: 336 pages
Release Date: November 4, 2025

Ideal For:
Investors, investment bankers, private equity professionals, entrepreneurs, finance executives, and readers interested in Wall Street history, M&A, capital allocation, corporate finance, and the evolution of modern financial markets.

“Understanding modern Wall Street requires understanding the people who learned how to turn capital, relationships, and corporate complexity into power.”

DAILY VISUAL

AI Overtakes All

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DAILY ACUMEN

Vanishing Value

In January 2019, WeWork was privately valued at 47 billion dollars, a number built almost entirely on aggressive growth funding rounds rather than anything resembling a traditional profitability metric. It rented office space on long leases and subleased it in smaller pieces, a business investors had been pricing like a technology company.

When the company filed to go public that August, its full financial picture became visible to outside eyes for the first time, including losses of roughly 1.6 billion dollars the prior year against revenue of 1.5 billion, and a founder whose personal conduct raised its own set of alarms. Public market investors, who unlike private ones actually had to read the filing, refused to buy in anywhere near that price.

Within six weeks, the IPO was withdrawn entirely, the founder was pushed out, and the company that had been worth 47 billion dollars on paper was rescued in a deal valuing it at under 8 billion. Nothing about the actual office space had changed. What changed was who was finally allowed to ask what it was really worth.

ENLIGHTENMENT

Short Squeez Picks

How we create career ceilings
CEOs need to stop bragging about 4am alarm clocks
The phrases high-integrity people use to shut down mean people
The data-center dividend for workers
Should you pay off your mortgage early?

MEME-A-PALOOZA

Memes of the Day

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🧢 Wall Street Shop: Explore our collection of finance-themed apparel and merchandise. Visit the shop.

📬 Deals Newsletter – Buysiders: A curated roundup of major M&A, private equity, and VC activity. Plus access to private deal flow. Subscribe here.

🍋 Buffett Bows Out

Short Squeez — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 08:30:00 +0000

Together With

“Most fortunes are built by entrepreneurs who started with nothing.” — Michael Bloomberg

Good Morning! Investors are expecting more rate hikes this year, with a 55% chance of one as soon as next month. The NBA is amending its PE policy to allow a firm and its executives to invest in a franchise at the same time, to accommodate the new Lakers deal. And global M&A is on track to snap a six-quarter streak above $1 trillion, with Q3 volume down 49% and deal count down 39%.

The uber-rich and the not-quite-rich-enough are fighting over low-flying Hamptons helicopters. On signed Kylian Mbappé to take on Nike and Adidas in football. And Anthropic is expected to top $100 billion in annualized revenue ahead of an IPO.

Plus: How a Goldman M&A banker helped bring the Olympics to LA, why Fort Lauderdale is booming with luxury condos and corporate tenants as Miami runs out of space, and the science of emotional regulation.

Daloopa enables investment firms to reliably use AI tools for research workflows. Check it out today.

SQUEEZ OF THE DAY

Buffett Bows Out

It was a legendary 60+ year run, but Warren Buffett officially stepped down as chairman of Berkshire Hathaway on Friday. And after he stepped down as CEO last year, it’s officially Buffett’s final departure from the company he turned into a $1 trillion-plus conglomerate.

Buffett, 96, is keeping it close in the family and he’ll be replaced as chairman by his son Howard. The transition comes less than a year after handing the CEO job to Greg Abel. Buffett will still remain on Berkshire's board as chairman emeritus and said he still plans to offer his "judgment and perspective" when asked. But after more than six decades running Berkshire, the succession plan is finally complete. "Father Time always wins," Buffett wrote to shareholders. "He has, however, been generous with me."

Howard's appointment has also been in the works for years, and his job is intentionally pretty narrow. Abel runs Berkshire and makes the capital-allocation decisions, and Howard, who has served on Berkshire's board since 1993, is there largely to protect the culture his father spent decades building. Buffett described his son as "a policy the shareholders own and hope never to claim against."

And Berkshire does have a unique culture that Howard will be in charge of owning. Berkshire owns everything from Geico and BNSF Railway to utilities, manufacturers, and retailers alongside a massive stock portfolio, yet operates with a tiny Omaha headquarters and gives its businesses enormous autonomy. For decades, the glue holding that strange collection together was Buffett himself. But now the company is selling investors on the idea that Abel can run the machine while Howard makes sure nobody starts messing with what made it work in the first place.

Investors are already getting an early look at Berkshire without Buffett at the controls, and so far the market hasn't exactly handed out a succession premium. Berkshire shares are up roughly 1% this year versus about 12% for the S&P 500, and the company has slightly trailed the index over the past decade. That's a huge change from the Buffett era as a whole: since 1965, Berkshire has beaten the S&P 500 by nearly 10 percentage points annually.

Takeaway: There was never going to be another Warren Buffett, so Berkshire isn't really trying to find one. Abel runs the company, Howard protects the culture and Buffett will remain nearby without being the guy in charge. After more than six decades with Buffett at the top, Berkshire's succession plan is no longer a plan; it’s officially the company investors own. Happy Retirement 🐐.

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HEADLINES

Markets Rundown

Market Update

The Nasdaq rose, led by semiconductors, while the Dow slipped slightly following the post-Fed rally.
The Bank of Japan raised rates a quarter point to 1.25%, its highest since 1995, though the yen weakened on two dissenting votes.
The S&P 500 was little changed for the week as gains in communication services, healthcare, and technology offset weakness in utilities and financials.

Economic Data

Long-term yields stabilized near multi-year highs after the Fed's first hike since 2023, with officials signaling one more hike this year.
The Fed's base case is a mid-cycle adjustment, unwinding last year's cuts while leaving 2024 cuts in place.
The oil-yield correlation has strengthened to its highest level since 2020 amid Middle East-driven inflation.

Calendar

President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping meet September 24, Xi's first U.S. trip since 2023, expected to extend the trade truce set to expire in November.
Trump is also expected to meet Gulf state leaders to discuss the Iran conflict.
The preliminary U.S. PMI is due Wednesday in an otherwise quiet economic week.

Movers & Shakers

(+) Strategy ($MSTR) +16% after the House advanced the American Reserve Modernization Act, fueling a rally in bitcoin.
(+) Sandisk ($SNDK) +11% because the stock will be added to the S&P 100 index effective September 21.
(–) Netflix ($NFLX) -5% after Wells Fargo slashed Netflix to Underweight with a $57 target, citing softening engagement.

Prediction Markets

In honor of last week’s rate hike, how many will we have this year?
Trade on real-world events with Kalshi. Use code OWS to get a $10 bonus when you trade $10.

Private Dealmaking

Crusoe, a data center developer, raised $3.9 billion
Emulate, a British AI lab, is raising up to $700 million
Angle Health, a healthcare benefits platform, raised $600 million
ElevenLabs, an AI audio startup, is raising more than $500 million
Fever, the owner of live entertainment ticketing platform Dice, raised $250 million
Nex, a gaming console maker, raised $150 million

For more PE, VC & M&A deals, subscribe to our Buysiders newsletter.

BOOK OF THE DAY

Pick Stocks That Go Up

Description:
Danial Jiwani lays out 12 principles for identifying companies with the potential to generate exceptional long-term returns. Rather than focusing primarily on market timing or short-term price movements, Jiwani emphasizes business quality, cash flow, industry selection, valuation, and disciplined research. He draws lessons from successful investors and uses examples from companies such as Apple, Meta, and Amazon to illustrate how investors can identify businesses capable of compounding significantly over time. A recurring theme is that stock-market wealth creation is highly concentrated, meaning investors need to be selective about the companies they own. The book presents a straightforward framework for researching individual stocks and making investment decisions without getting distracted by market hype.

Book Length: 274 pages
Release Date: August 1, 2025

Ideal For:
Individual investors, stock pickers, value investors, and anyone looking to develop a more systematic approach to fundamental analysis, cash-flow investing, industry selection, and long-term stock picking.

“Exceptional investment returns usually come from owning exceptional businesses, not from constantly trying to predict the market.”

DAILY VISUAL

Not Tech, Not Wall Street

Source: Apollo

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DAILY ACUMEN

Just Enough

Jim Simons left a career as a celebrated mathematician and Cold War codebreaker to start a hedge fund built entirely on statistics, hiring physicists and codebreakers instead of traditional Wall Street analysts. His flagship Medallion Fund went on to average around 66 percent gross annual returns from 1988 to 2018, a record no other fund in history has come close to matching.

The strange part is how thin the actual edge was. One of the firm's own leaders once said the fund was only right on about 50.75 percent of its trades, barely better than a coin flip. What made that sliver of an edge worth tens of billions of dollars was volume, discipline, and never letting a single trade's outcome carry any emotional weight.

The lesson runs against most people's instinct about what winning looks like. You do not need to be right most of the time. You need a real, repeatable edge, applied at scale, with the discipline to keep applying it exactly the same way on the boring days as the terrifying ones.

ENLIGHTENMENT

Short Squeez Picks

Check your net worth and fix your spending habits*
Running can be good for osteoarthritis
The science of emotional regulation
The leadership habit that could be costing you new recruits
Steve Jobs on the power of perseverance
What is 'career minimalism' and what are the potential rewards and risks?

MEME-A-PALOOZA

Memes of the Day

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🧢 Wall Street Shop: Explore our collection of finance-themed apparel and merchandise. Visit the shop.

📬 Deals Newsletter – Buysiders: A curated roundup of major M&A, private equity, and VC activity. Plus access to private deal flow. Subscribe here.

🍋 PE’s Exit Problem Just Got Worse

Short Squeez — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 08:30:00 +0000

Together With

"I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, 'Now I’m looking back on my life. I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have.'"— Jeff Bezos

Good Morning! US regulators are hunting for evidence of wrongdoing at CEO Mark Walter's business empire and are seeking interviews with Guggenheim employees. JPMorgan analysts say they're unsure how to model oil as the Iran war drags on. And Palantir CEO Alex Karp says AI developers need to be held liable for their own work rather than leaning on government regulation.

The SEC is opening the door for crypto-style trading of US stocks. Blackstone is attempting to facilitate a secondary sale for one of its major real estate funds. And private credit defaults are either 1%, 6%, or 19%, depending on who you ask.

Plus: Barclays hit by staff backlash over return-to-office rules, how Bain Capital Ventures plans to deploy its fresh $1.6 billion fund, and why you should treat your career like an elite athlete.

Petrarch is building a new asset class around a company’s operational data. If you are in private credit or distressed assets, learn more about them here.

SQUEEZ OF THE DAY

PE’s Exit Problem Just Got Worse

PE firms went into 2026 hoping Kevin Warsh would be their guy. Private equity spent the last few years waiting for lower interest rates to finally unlock the hundreds of billions of dollars of companies it can't sell. But this week, the Fed started hiking again.

It’s brutal timing for an industry already sitting on a record pile of aging investments. U.S. private-equity funds that are at least a decade old were still holding $348.5 billion of assets at the end of 2025, up ~65% from 2021.

These funds are called zombie funds and managers are struggling to sell companies they bought when valuations were higher and money was a lot cheaper. Another roughly $500 billion is sitting in funds that are seven to 10 years old, meaning today's record zombie pile has a pretty healthy pipeline behind it.

Apollo's co-president warned this week that the industry is heading for a shakeout, with weaker firms increasingly likely to disappear and go extinct as LPs concentrate money with managers that can actually return it.

Higher rates attack the model from both ends. Buyout firms finance acquisitions with large amounts of debt, much of it floating-rate that moves in lockstep with the Fed, so rate hikes eat directly into portfolio company cash flow. And the next buyer has to finance the purchase at those same higher rates, which caps what they'll pay. The exit gets harder exactly as holding gets more expensive.

And buyout returns came in around a paltry 7% last year, while 2025 marked the weakest fundraising environment since 2020, and the mechanics are making it difficult for LPs to recycle money they haven't gotten back.

Then there's the software problem. PE spent the cheap-money era loading up on software companies at enormous multiples, only to hit something nobody was underwriting in 2021: AI.

Thoma Bravo's ~$5 billion investment in Medallia ended this year with lenders taking control through a recapitalization, and debt tied to other sponsor-backed software names has traded at steep discounts. Much of the 2020-2021 vintage debt comes due in 2027 and 2028, so sponsors will be refinancing highly levered companies at today's rates while working out whether AI has permanently reset what those businesses are worth.

Takeaway: PE's escape route was always cheaper debt. Instead the Fed hiked for the first time since July 2023 and signaled more could come, which leaves an industry with $348.5 billion stuck in decade-old funds holding assets it can't sell at prices it can't accept. Turns out the hardest part of the buyout model isn't the buying.

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HEADLINES

Markets Rundown

Market Update

Stocks rose as the 10-year Treasury yield eased to about 4.93% and WTI crude fell to about $101.
The Bank of England held its policy rate at 3.75%, as expected, lifting European equities.
The U.S. dollar weakened modestly against most major currencies.

Economic Data

Initial jobless claims fell to 196,000, a two-year low, well below the 206,000 expectation.
Continuing claims dropped to 1.73 million, the lowest since January 2024.
Resilient employment gives the Fed more flexibility to stay focused on inflation.

Housing

Housing starts fell to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.27 million, below the 1.32 million estimate.
Building permits came in at about 1.39 million, also short of forecasts.
The 30-year fixed mortgage rate has risen to 6.95%, tracking higher Treasury yields.

Movers & Shakers

(+) Generac ($GNRC) +18% after the backup generator maker signed a long-term supply deal with Amazon worth up to $8 billion.
(+) Vital Farms ($VITL) +17% because the pasture-raised egg producer is exploring a potential sale or take-private deal.
(–) DraftKings ($DKNG) -8% after Kalshi captured 76% of NFL Week 1 sports betting volume among tracked operators.

Prediction Markets

The iPhone 18 Pro goes on sale today, but there’s still no timeline for the baseline release.
Trade on real-world events with Kalshi. Use code OWS to get a $10 bonus when you trade $10.

Private Dealmaking

Advent International agreed to invest around $328.5 million into Yatharth, an Indian hospital operator
Impulse Space, a developer of highly maneuverable spacecraft, raised $308 million in Series D extension funding
Mazama Energy, a superhot geothermal energy developer, raised $135 million
Sling Therapeutics, a developer of oral treatments for thyroid eye disease, raised $123 million
Perry Weather, a provider of weather monitoring software, raised $110 million
Payward, the parent company of Kraken, raised $100 million from Nasdaq

For more PE, VC & M&A deals, subscribe to our Buysiders newsletter.

BOOK OF THE DAY

Stop Buying The Hype

Description:
J. F. Dodaro explores how investors can recognize and profit from the recurring cycle of market bubbles, hype, and crashes. Rather than attempting to predict every market move, the book focuses on identifying when investor enthusiasm has pushed asset prices far beyond underlying business fundamentals. Drawing on historical market bubbles and decades of financial data, Dodaro develops a quality-value framework designed to help investors distinguish genuine long-term value from speculative excitement. The approach emphasizes valuation, business quality, and disciplined decision-making over following headlines or chasing popular stocks. The book's central lesson is that market manias tend to follow recognizable patterns, creating opportunities for investors who can remain rational when the crowd becomes emotional.

Book Length: 240 pages
Release Date: September 1, 2026

Ideal For:
Long-term investors, value investors, stock pickers, and anyone interested in market bubbles, crashes, behavioral finance, valuation, and developing a more disciplined approach to investing.

“When the crowd is driven by hype, discipline becomes an investor's greatest advantage.”

DAILY VISUAL

Europe’s AI Buildout Is Missing a Financing Market

Source: Apollo

PRESENTED BY UNIQUE AI

Meet Your AI Teammates for Wealth and Asset Management

DAILY ACUMEN

Retail Options Trading

Say you buy call options on a stock the night before its earnings report, convinced the numbers will come in strong. The report lands exactly as you predicted. Revenue beats, guidance rises, the stock jumps several percent the next morning. You were right. Nice work!

You open your account and you are down more than half your money anyway.

That is not a hypothetical. It is the most common experience in retail options trading, and almost nobody explains why it happens before it happens to them.

The reason has nothing to do with being wrong about the stock. It has to do with what an option actually is.

The night before an announcement, nobody knows the number, so the option carries a real premium, pricing in a specific expected move. The morning after, everyone knows the number, so that premium evaporates almost instantly, regardless of which direction the stock went.

You were never really betting on the company. You were renting uncertainty for one night, and uncertainty has a price that collapses the moment it resolves, win or lose.

Being right about the news and being right about the price you paid for that bet are two completely different questions, and only one of them decides whether you make money.

ENLIGHTENMENT

Short Squeez Picks

Why you should treat your career like an athlete
Why resilient optimism beats positive thinking
How Somatics became the solution to modern life
Rich people more likely to steal children’s sweets
How the brain of a fly may help explain human behavior

MEME-A-PALOOZA

Memes of the Day

📣 Partner With Us: Get in front of an audience of over 1 million finance professionals, business leaders, and policy influencers. Submit a partnership inquiry.

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📈 Grow With Us: Work directly with the Overheard on Wall Street team to scale your finance brand. Schedule your free consult.

🧢 Wall Street Shop: Explore our collection of finance-themed apparel and merchandise. Visit the shop.

📬 Deals Newsletter – Buysiders: A curated roundup of major M&A, private equity, and VC activity. Plus access to private deal flow. Subscribe here.

🍋 Warsh Hikes

Short Squeez — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 08:30:00 +0000

Together With

“There’s a lot of noise, a lot of critics, the town criers are proclaiming a global crisis – and then nothing happens.” — Blackstone President Jon Gray on private credit

Good Morning! Silicon Valley hardware is having a moment again as VC flows into startups building robots and semiconductors. Jalen Brunson is launching a new management group with his mom and sister focused on his ‘off-court business.’ And BlackRock is planning to make the corporate 401(k) look more like a pension.

Apollo warned that credit default swaps for hyperscaler debt show the bonds have grown riskier. Companies are struggling to explain their own AI investment returns. And airline pilots are becoming millionaires, but their finances remain highly volatile.

Plus: Blackstone is working through a backlog of withdrawal requests from its flagship private credit fund and says it's confident the asset class will recover, OpenAI considering pre-IPO funding at a $1.2T valuation, and why we hesitate to contact old friends.

Make that hefty NYC monthly rent start working for you. Earn points for it with the Bilt Card. Learn more about it here.

SQUEEZ OF THE DAY

Warsh Hikes

Kevin Warsh's first major decision as Fed chair turned out to be a consequential one: the Fed is raising interest rates for the first time in more than three years. And it comes at a time when the president who appointed him is demanding rates go in exactly the opposite direction.

The Fed unanimously raised rates 25 basis points yesterday to 3.75%-4%. It's the first hike since July 2023, and policymakers pointed to stubborn inflation as the reason for the shift back into tightening mode. Warsh said the Fed was removing a "dose of accommodation" and needed to show it was serious about getting inflation under control.

With core inflation above 3% and energy prices surging, the Fed now expects headline inflation to finish the year at 3.7%, with 2% not arriving until 2029. More importantly for markets, officials' median year-end rate forecast jumped from 3.8% in June to 4.1%, with 16 of 18 policymakers expecting at least one more hike this year.

Higher rates usually aren't great news for stocks because they make borrowing more expensive and raise the discount rate investors use to value future earnings. But markets didn't tank, and investors read the move as the Fed trying to convince bond buyers that inflation won't be allowed to run away. With the 10-year Treasury recently crossing 5%, Wall Street is betting that letting those fears become entrenched would be far worse than another quarter-point hike.

The Fed also doesn't think it's hiking into a collapsing economy. Officials raised their 2026 growth forecast to 2.3% and lowered their unemployment forecast from 4.3% to 4.1%, essentially arguing the economy can handle more tightening. So Warsh has to thread the needle of bringing inflation down without breaking an economy that still looks resilient.

Trump spent years publicly pushing Jerome Powell to lower rates, then appointed Warsh expecting policy to get easier. Hours after the decision, Trump said U.S. rates should be 1% or lower and demanded they come down quickly. Warsh was asked what message he had for Trump and declined to answer, but the message from the rate decision itself wasn't hard to read: for now, the inflation data won.

Takeaway: Warsh inherited the same uncomfortable job Powell had. Wall Street would love cheaper money, the White House is publicly demanding it, and inflation isn't cooperating. His first move was to side with the data and hike anyway. If that restores enough Fed credibility to keep long-term yields from running away, 25 basis points could eventually look like cheap insurance. But if inflation stays hot and the 10-year keeps climbing, investors get the much uglier combination of higher Fed rates and higher borrowing costs everywhere else.

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HEADLINES

Markets Rundown

Market Update

The Dow fell 1.2%, the S&P 500 fell 0.5%, and the Nasdaq was flat after the Fed raised rates for the first time in three years.
The 2-year Treasury yield rose 7 basis points while the 10-year was broadly unchanged.
WTI crude slid almost 4% to $102 on headlines that Middle East supply outages might be resolving.

Economic Data

Retail sales rose 1.2% in August, more than reversing July's 0.5% decline.
Spending was broad-based, with all subsectors except building materials posting gains.
The rebound points to resilient consumer spending despite higher rates and oil prices.

The Fed

The FOMC raised rates 25 basis points unanimously, with 16 officials penciling in at least one more hike this year.
Chair Warsh called the move "removing a dose of policy accommodation," signaling he doesn't see policy as restrictive yet.
The 2027 median rate forecast is 4% to 4.25%, though 8 members see rates higher.

Movers & Shakers

(+) SpaceX ($SPCX) +5% after confirming its Starship rocket's next orbital test flight is scheduled for September 22.
(–) Robinhood ($HOOD) -5% because the U.S. Attorney's Office charged two of the trading platform's engineers with fraud.
(–) JB Hunt ($JBHT) -13% after the trucking and logistics company warned that Q2-to-Q3 earnings could fall 5–10% due to surging diesel.

Prediction Markets

Bank of Japan rate decision comes tonight around 11pm EDT.
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Private Dealmaking

Brookfield Asset Management agreed to acquire Reliance Worldwide, a plumbing supplies manufacturer, for $2.9 billion
Factory, an AI coding startup, raised $200 million
Euclyd, a Dutch chipmaker, raised over $215 million
Wonder raised $125 million in Series D funding
Caddi, a manufacturing automation firm, raised $114 million
Thatch, a health benefits company, raised $108 million

For more PE, VC & M&A deals, subscribe to our Buysiders newsletter.

BOOK OF THE DAY

The Everywhere Millionaire

Description:
Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick uncover a largely overlooked source of American wealth: the owners of successful private businesses on Main Street. Drawing on a decade of research and unprecedented data linking private businesses to their individual owners, the authors show how fortunes have been built through businesses such as auto dealerships, restaurants, convenience stores, manufacturing companies, and other often-uncelebrated enterprises. Rather than focusing on famous billionaires from Wall Street or Silicon Valley, the book examines the entrepreneurs who quietly accumulated substantial wealth through ownership, cash flow, tax structures, and long-term business building. It also explores how these fortunes influence economic opportunity, inequality, and political power, offering a different perspective on who actually holds wealth in America and how they got there.

Book Length: 368 pages
Release Date: September 15, 2026

Ideal For:
Entrepreneurs, investors, business owners, economists, private equity professionals, and anyone interested in wealth creation, small businesses, taxation, inequality, and the economics of entrepreneurship.

“Some of America's greatest fortunes aren't built in Silicon Valley or on Wall Street. They're built quietly by owning ordinary businesses for a very long time.”

DAILY VISUAL

Investors Are Now Paying Close Attention to Rates

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More than 80,000 readers rely on Semafor Business for insightful reporting on the companies, power players, and deals shaping the financial world. Get sharp, timely analysis from Liz Hoffman — one of Wall Street’s best-sourced reporters — delivered to your inbox twice weekly. Subscribe for free.

DAILY ACUMEN

Programmed Panic

By October 1987, a hedging strategy called portfolio insurance had become enormously popular among institutional investors, managing tens of billions of dollars. The idea was simple and individually sound: if the market started falling, computer programs would automatically sell stock index futures to limit the damage to each portfolio holding it.

On October 19, a day that became known as Black Monday, the market began to dip, and those programs did exactly what they were built to do. They sold. That selling pushed prices down further, which triggered more automated selling from the same programs across different firms, which pushed prices down again, in a feedback loop that had never been tested at scale. By the end of the day the Dow had fallen 22.6 percent, still the largest single day percentage decline in its history, erasing roughly 500 billion dollars in a single session.

Every individual portfolio's hedge had been rational in isolation. Nobody had modeled what happens when thousands of identical hedges fire at the exact same moment. Protection that works perfectly for one participant can become the mechanism of collapse the instant everyone is running the same protection simultaneously.

ENLIGHTENMENT

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Memes of the Day

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Insiders:💰 How To Live Off Of Your Portfolio

Short Squeez — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 15:50:51 +0000

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🍋 $5k to Skip the Airport

Short Squeez — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 08:30:00 +0000

Together With

“Being too far ahead of your time is indistinguishable from being wrong.” — Howard Marks

Good Morning! Wall Street is weighing what an AI slowdown would do to the data center buildout, with GE Vernova, Caterpillar, CoreWeave and Dell all in the crosshairs. Apollo-backed Michaels used a windfall from tariff refunds to help cut its leverage.

Anthropic pitched a new Claude tool for financial advisers. Blackstone is seeking $8 billion for a green infrastructure fund. And hedge funds have filled the void in the Treasury market as pensions and other long-term holders pull back in search of higher returns.

Plus: Americans are vibe-coding trading algorithms and handing over their stock portfolios to AI agents, the school where students do farmwork and chores for $40,000 a semester, and how to make people want to listen to you.

October 5: Enroll in the upcoming PE Certificate Program from Wharton Online + Wall Street Prep - 8 weeks, online.

SQUEEZ OF THE DAY

$5k to Skip the Airport

Miami International Airport New Private Luxury Terminal

The rich used to have two options at the airport. The first? Get an Amex Platinum and hang out in the lounge. And the second option was to actually get rich and fly private. But someone finally spotted the gap in between and built a whole business out of it.

A company called PS is trying to sell you on a private terminal complete with breezing through your own security line, and a BMW waiting to drive you across the tarmac straight to the jet bridge. And while you still fly on the same Delta flight as everyone else with the same seat and overhead bin, you can basically skip the entire airport to get there.

And the price tag is probably as steep as you’d guess at $4,850 a year to join and $1,295 to walk in without a membership. And while it’s absurd money to avoid a security line, it’s still a rounding error next to NetJets, where the buy-in starts at $215,000. So PS found the space between an Amex lounge and a Gulfstream, and found it’s full of people rich enough to hate commercial airports but not quite rich enough to never see one again.

And there are a lot of those people. PS's client base grew 21% last year, past 89,000 customers and has built terminals in LA, Atlanta, Dallas, and Miami. And PS is eyeing expansion; Dulles in DC just signed a 20-year, $125 million deal for its own, and San Francisco's taking bids for one that opens in 2028. The opportunity makes sense: the richest 26% of travelers account for 57% of airport spending, so why fight them for another $18 cocktail when you can just build them their own building.

PS’s three offerings

The business model makes sense because airports sit on land nobody else can buy. So PS is agreeing to build the terminal, run it, and pay rent plus a cut back to the airport. PS gets customers who've already proven they'll pay almost anything for convenience, and the airport gets free money it didn't have to lift a finger for. Everybody wins except the guy still stuck in TSA PreCheck.

Takeaway: Credit cards basically created this opportunity for PS because lounges used to mean something, until Amex and Chase and every airline handed status to half the country. Suddenly there were lines to get into the place you were paying to skip lines. One PS regular said she rode the Amex Platinum wave for years until her lounge got so packed it stopped being worth it, so she just started paying PS instead. It’s a lesson that exclusivity never actually dies; it just gets more expensive and moves up a rung.

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HEADLINES

Markets Rundown

Market Update

Stocks closed lower as the 10-year Treasury yield finished around 5% and the 30-year rose to 5.37%.
Energy and materials were the only S&P 500 sectors to gain; Asian and European markets also closed lower.
WTI crude climbed to around $106 amid continued Middle East uncertainty.

Economic Data

Markets assign a 92% probability to a 0.25 percentage-point rate hike at tomorrow's Fed meeting.
Core CPI stands at 2.4% in August 2026, versus 6.5% in March 2022 at the start of the prior tightening cycle.
Job openings modestly exceed unemployed workers, compared with roughly two openings per unemployed worker at the 2022 peak.

Bond Yields

Japan's 10-year government bond yield hit a fresh 30-year high overnight.
The 10-year Treasury yield is near its highest level since 2007, driven by inflation, deficits, and heavy issuance.
Higher starting yields are seen improving the multiyear return outlook for investment-grade bonds, supporting a neutral duration stance.

Movers & Shakers

(+) Radiant Logistics ($RLGT) +19% after the freight and logistics company's fiscal Q4 EPS of $0.15 beat estimates by 50%.
(–) Circle ($CRCL) -11% because the Crypto Clarity Act flames out in a failed U.S. Senate vote.
(–) Dave & Buster’s ($PLAY) -19% after the entertainment and dining chain posted an unexpected quarterly loss.

Prediction Markets

Fed decision is today around 2pm EDT.
Trade on real-world events with Kalshi. Use code OWS to get a $10 bonus when you trade $10.

Private Dealmaking

KPS Capital Partners agreed to sell Metra, an Italian aluminum profile manufacturer, to Grupa Kęty for around $700 million
Temporal, a microservices orchestration startup, raised $550 million
KKR sold its 19.9% stake in First Gen, a Philippine power producer, for around $410 million
Exein, an Italian provider of cybersecurity solutions for connected devices, raised $270 million
Cornelis Networks, a data center infrastructure startup, raised $205 million
Profound, an AI marketing startup for brands, raised $180 million

For more PE, VC & M&A deals, subscribe to our Buysiders newsletter.

BOOK OF THE DAY

Warren’s Mistakes

Description:
Porter Stansberry offers a provocative critique of Berkshire Hathaway and the legacy of Warren Buffett. Stansberry argues that Berkshire's immense size, complex collection of operating businesses, and capital allocation structure have made it increasingly difficult for the company to outperform the broader market. The book examines Berkshire's evolution from a nimble investment vehicle into one of the world's largest conglomerates and explores questions around succession, capital deployment, corporate structure, and the challenges of managing extraordinary scale. While readers may or may not agree with Stansberry's conclusions, the book raises broader issues relevant to investors: whether great businesses can become too large, how conglomerates create or destroy value, and what happens when a company outgrows its original model.

Book Length: 304 pages
Release Date: September 29, 2026

Ideal For:
Investors, Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, value investors, capital allocators, and readers interested in conglomerates, corporate strategy, succession planning, and the long-term challenges of managing massive businesses.

Even the greatest systems must adapt when the conditions that made them successful begin to change.

DAILY VISUAL

AI fears send cybersecurity stocks higher

Source: Axios

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DAILY ACUMEN

Broke England

In the summer of 1992, George Soros became convinced that Britain's currency was trapped at an unsustainable exchange rate inside Europe's monetary system. Through his Quantum Fund, he built a short position against the British pound that eventually grew to roughly ten billion pounds, a scale few traders in history had ever attempted on a single conviction.

On September 16, 1992, a day now remembered as Black Wednesday, the Bank of England raised interest rates twice in a matter of hours trying to defend the currency and spent billions of pounds buying its own currency to prop up the price. It was not enough. By that evening, Britain was forced to withdraw from the exchange rate mechanism entirely, and the pound fell roughly 15 percent against the Deutsche Mark.

Soros personally profited by an estimated one billion pounds in a single trade, earning him the nickname the man who broke the Bank of England.

ENLIGHTENMENT

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Short Squeez

🍋 OpenAI’s $20B Footnote

SQUEEZ OF THE DAY

OpenAI’s $20B Footnote

PRESENTED BY BILT

Earn Points on Your Rent and Mortgage

HEADLINES

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CAPITAL PULSE

Markets Rundown

BOOK OF THE DAY

When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows

DAILY VISUAL

AI This, AI That

PRESENTED BY MOSAIC

Reverse LBOs are Here

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Simpson’s Paradox

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🍋GPU-Backed Securities

SQUEEZ OF THE DAY

GPU-Backed Securities

PRESENTED BY STELRIX

Family Offices Grew 31% in Five Years

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Markets Rundown

BOOK OF THE DAY

101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think

DAILY VISUAL

Wall Street on Track for Record Profits

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Every Deal Your Firm has Done Should Make the Next One Smarter

DAILY ACUMEN

Crowd Wisdom

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🍋 Barbarians at the Bunk Bed

SQUEEZ OF THE DAY

Barbarians at the Bunk Bed

PRESENTED BY UNIQUE AI

Your AI Teammate Across the Client Lifecycle

HEADLINES

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Markets Rundown

BOOK OF THE DAY

Private Equity’s Best Kept Secret

DAILY VISUAL

Since the Fed Started Hiking, Multiple Expansion Has Nearly Vanished as a Source of PE Value

PRESENTED BY PETRARCH

Finding the “Diamond” in Distressed Assets

DAILY ACUMEN

Real Options

ENLIGHTENMENT

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🍋 Citi Tries to Kill Two-And-Out

SQUEEZ OF THE DAY

Citi Tries to Kill Two-And-Out

PRESENTED BY STUUT

Give Your Cashflow a Raise

HEADLINES

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BOOK OF THE DAY

Humble Power

DAILY VISUAL

Euro Falls to a 17-month Low

PRESENTED BY BUYSIDERS CLUB

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DAILY ACUMEN