Good Morning! Bending Spoons agreed to buy Airtable for $2.25 billion, a stark comedown from its $11.7 billion peak in 2021 and one of the first high-profile SaaSpocalypse casualties. Apollo is halfway toward raising $25 billion for its 11th flagship private equity fund. And Chipotle pulled jalapeños in Minnesota after dozens fell ill in a salmonella outbreak.

Jefferies uncovered new evidence of fake invoices at its beleaguered fund tied to iron ore trader Sapphire Minmetals in the latest private credit woe. SpaceX stock dropped after its first earnings report as AI costs soared. And Blackstone pitched a mega debt package for an Anthropic chip deal.

Plus: Big AI bets are dividing VC and leaving smaller funds behind, NYC's Flatiron building is entering a new era with $58.5 million apartments, and why garbage stocks are a perfect hedge against an AI selloff.

Watch Daloopa’s on-demand webinar to quickly get started building intelligent finance agents with Claude Code.

SQUEEZ OF THE DAY

DIY Hedge Funds are So Chic

Building an automated trading system used to require a small army. To compete with the best and brightest at hedge funds you’d need expensive data feeds, teams of quantitative researchers, enough Ph.D.s to fill a Renaissance Technologies recruiting event. But now some retail traders are finding they can just ask Claude to write the code over the weekend and plug it straight into Robinhood.

And this trend of building DIY hedge funds isn't just one guy on WallStreetBets. A growing number of individual investors are building their own trading bots with AI; things that scan markets, chew through options data, and fire off trades while the owner is at work. Interactive Brokers, Robinhood, Moomoo and Public have all rolled out their own AI tools, and platforms like Alpaca and Tradier are letting retail investors hook up whatever outside model they’ve built directly to their brokerage account. Webull's president called it "zero commission 2.0."

The results so far are all over the place. One trader fed his system bad volatility data early on, lost 25%, rebuilt the whole thing, and says he's now up around 14% this year. Another just lets an AI agent handle his options exits, and swears it's helped him hold winners longer instead of selling out of nerves. Then there's a former Yahoo engineer who credits one of his six Claude-built bots with most of a roughly 50% return this year,  though he still won't let it execute a trade without approving it first. Turns out the most important feature on an autonomous trading system might still be the off switch.

You can see why this is catching on. AI can write code, backtest strategies, and watch hundreds of tickers at once without ever getting tired, scared, or pulled into a Zoom call. Retail already makes up more than 20% of U.S. stock volume, and their options activity has jumped over 150% in six years to something like 36 million contracts a day. Hand that crowd autonomous agents and you get a massive new pool of liquidity, which is just the polite finance word for a bunch of bots buying and selling from each other all day.

The catch is that AI makes quant trading look a lot easier than it actually is. Real firms spend years testing models across every kind of market environment, scrubbing their data, managing leverage, and building in fail-safes for when something breaks. Retail bots, on the other hand, are often trained on similar data and run similar models. That means they can land on similar trades too, which could make rallies and selloffs even more crowded than they already are. An AI agent can strip the emotion out of a trade, but it can also automate a genuinely bad idea and execute it with total confidence before you even notice.

Takeaway: AI is handing ordinary investors tools that used to belong exclusively to sophisticated hedge funds. It is not handing them the risk management that actually makes those tools work. The next chapter of the retail trading boom probably has less to do with Reddit threads and more to do with autonomous agents quietly scalping options while everyone's at their day job. Some of these traders are going to find a real edge. A lot of them are going to learn that losing money feels a lot more efficient when a robot's the one doing it.

PRESENTED BY DALOOPA

Build Intelligent Agents for Financial Workflows

Many financial institutions are building internal research agents and AI-powered workflows, but getting started can be a challenge. 

Firms are using Daloopa’s financial data layer when building finance agents with AI tools such as Claude Code. With Daloopa, they’re also getting a step-by-step education on how to build finance agents that generate accurate and reliable outputs. Tune-in as Daloopa CEO Thomas Li shows exactly how the agents build investor decks and financial models and how they use Daloopa's audit-ready dataset across 6,000+ tickers.

See how Daloopa powers AI research workflows. Watch their webinar today.

HEADLINES

Top Reads

• Bending Spoons to buy Airtable for $1.28B (TechCrunch)

• Apollo draws $12 billion so far for flagship private equity fund (BB)

• Chipotle pulls jalapeños from some restaurants amid salmonella investigation (Guardian)

• Jefferies gets new evidence of fake invoices at beleaguered fund (BB)

• SpaceX's Q2 results top estimates in first-ever quarterly report (Yahoo Finance)

• Blackstone has pitched mega debt package for Anthropic chip deal (BB)

• Big AI bets divide venture capital, leaving smaller funds behind (BB)

• New York City's Flatiron building enters new era with $58.5m apartments (Guardian)

• Garbage stocks may hedge an AI stock selloff (BB)

• Jet fuel made from tropical fruit gets $3 billion backing (BB)

• Thoma Bravo sells majority stake in Command Alkon to Francisco Partners (BB)

• Jeff Bezos just filed to sell $4 billion in Amazon. The shares are falling. (CNBC)

• AI is replacing HR tasks across corporate America (BB)

• Goldman Sachs creates $1 billion reinsurance pool with Talcott (BB)

• Why Texas is betting 'Y'all Street' can take on Wall Street (NPR)

• KKR-backed Infinx Services said to weigh $300 million India IPO (BB)

• Anthropic inks $10 billion computing deal with new cloud startup (BB)

CAPITAL PULSE

Markets Rundown

Market Update

• The S&P 500 and Dow closed at record highs as WTI crude fell near $76 on hopes for a Strait of Hormuz deal.

• The 10-year Treasury yield eased near 4.62%; the U.S. dollar weakened modestly.

• Europe closed higher while Asia finished mixed overnight.

Earnings Season

• Job openings fell to 7.4 million in June, in line with estimates and above the 7.1 million unemployed.

• Nonfarm payrolls are due Friday, with forecasts calling for 100,000 jobs added in July and unemployment steady at 4.2%.

• Manufacturing new orders fell 0.3% in June, while durable goods orders rose 0.5%.

Movers & Shakers

• (+) Wayfair ($W) +30% after U.S. revenue grew 8.7%, its strongest domestic growth since 2020.

• (+) Palantir ($PLTR) +29% because Q2 results delivered what CEO Alex Karp called an “otherworldly” quarter with revenue up 93% YoY.

• (–) Chipotle ($CMG) -10% after pulling jalapeños from stores nationwide over a possible link to a Minnesota salmonella outbreak.

Prediction Markets

• Traders are predicting we’ll see continued manufacturing expansion with the PMI number that comes out today.

• Trade on real-world events with Kalshi. Use code OWS to get a $10 bonus when you trade $10.

Private Dealmaking

• Bending Spoons agreed to acquire Airtable, a relational database company, for $1.29 billion

• KKR agreed to buy a 50% stake in TotalEnergies’ European onshore solar and wind assets for around $1.2 billion

• Valar Atomics, a developer of small nuclear reactors, raised $1 billion

• Nordic Capital agreed to acquire the medical business of BWX Technologies for up to $800 million

• Orix agreed to buy AerFin, a British aerospace parts maker, for around $640 million

• Mariana Minerals, a mining tech firm, raised $310 million

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

BOOK OF THE DAY

How To Fall In Love With Questions

Description:
A thought-provoking guide from Elizabeth Weingarten that challenges our obsession with finding quick answers and instead argues that the most meaningful growth comes from embracing life's biggest questions. Blending behavioral science, psychology, philosophy, and personal storytelling, Weingarten explores how uncertainty can become a catalyst for resilience, purpose, and self-discovery. Inspired in part by the writings of Rainer Maria Rilke, the book offers practical tools for navigating life's transitions and transforming doubt into curiosity.

Book Length: 320 pages
Release Date: April 15, 2025

Ideal For:
Anyone navigating career changes, life transitions, or uncertainty who wants to develop greater resilience, purpose, and confidence without needing all the answers.

The answers may change your circumstances, but the right questions can change who you become.

DAILY VISUAL

4% vs. 91%: The AC Divide Among Rich Nations

PRESENTED BY PRIMER

How to Equip Yourself for the Three Trillion Dollar IPOs

With three trillion dollar companies IPO’ing in the next several months (Anthropic up next?) and a flood of headlines, investment-grade tools are becoming essential for the everyday investor. Very few people can - and have time to - read an S-1 (we did a deep dive here), but now you don’t have to.

Primer, an institutional AI platform for hedge funds, has just launched that same platform for retail. It can read filings, build a model, and compose detailed analyses for any public, or soon-to-be public, company. In analyst modeling tests, it scores nearly twice as well as any other AI model. Conduct institutional-level analysis on SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI, or any other company in your portfolio to find what is real and what is noise.

For a limited time, get your own hedge fund analyst for a free week.

Try Primer today.

DAILY ACUMEN

Stress Tested

Most things break under pressure. A small number do the opposite, growing stronger and sharper because they were exposed to volatility rather than protected from it. Nassim Taleb called this antifragile, and it is different from resilience. A resilient system survives a shock and returns to where it started. An antifragile one comes back better than before.

Muscle works this way, tearing under load and rebuilding denser. Certain lean businesses work this way too, gaining share during downturns that bankrupt their overleveraged competitors, because the stress that destroys the fragile clears the field for whoever was built to exploit it.

The implication is not to avoid volatility. It is to ask honestly whether what you are building gains or loses from disorder. A heavily leveraged position is fragile. A diversified one with dry powder is closer to antifragile, positioned to buy when others are forced to sell. The goal was never to predict the shock. It was to build something that benefits from it.

ENLIGHTENMENT

Short Squeez Picks

• Could AI be conscious?

• Why self-awareness is the key to leadership

• 3 learning habits backed by neuroscience

• Inside America’s most generous 401(k) plans

• How much to exercise for better sleep

MEME-A-PALOOZA

Memes of the Day

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