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.

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SQUEEZ OF THE DAY

$5k to Skip the Airport

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.

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

Top Reads

• Wall Street weighs prospect of an AI slowdown on data center buildout (CNBC)

• Apollo's Michaels uses $101 million of tariff refund to cut debt (BB)

• The AI shift is turning everyday investors into mini quant funds (WSJ)

• Anthropic pitches new Claude tool for financial advisors (BB)

• Blackstone seeks $8 billion for green infrastructure fund (BB)

• Hedge funds have become an increasingly important force in the US Treasury market (WSJ)

• AI leaders are calling for a slowdown, but Wall Street keeps on buying (WSJ)

• The school where students do farmwork and chores — and pay $40,000 a semester (WSJ)

• The stagnant housing market is about to face a 7% mortgage (WSJ)

• Europe hinges on fall IPOs to beat last year's $17 billion haul (BB)

• 10-year Treasury yield hits highest level since 2007 (Yahoo Finance)

• Samsung backs Nvidia AI chip rival in $230 million funding round as GPU alternatives boom (CNBC)

• Nike co-founder Phil Knight donates $1.1 billion to Oregon medical center (CNBC)

• Tech's nouveau riche suffer 'sudden wealth syndrome' as AI pay explodes (BB)

• AI coding startup Factory more than triples valuation to $5 billion (WSJ)

CAPITAL PULSE

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

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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

Short Squeez Picks

• Wirecutter’s top picks of the month

• Gen-Z can’t figure out how to talk to their bosses

• How to make people want to listen to you

• The simple habit that leads to clearer thinking

• The social media threshold that’s linked to depression

MEME-A-PALOOZA

Memes of the Day

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