Good Morning! Trump is promising a $5,000 dividend for US voters if Republicans win the midterms. OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT for Financial Services, built with design partners Morgan Stanley and Evercore. And billionaire financiers Mark Walter and Todd Boehly are nearing a deal to sell their Chelsea FC stakes to majority owner Clearlake Capital.

Bending Spoons agreed to buy workplace collaboration platform Miro for $1.36 billion. Barclays traders are grappling with repeated risk-platform outages. And Apple announced its first foldable phone alongside the iPhone 18 Pro.

Plus: How Jason Carroll built Hudson River Trading and a $27 billion fortune, and does golf really count as exercise?

Play games and check your net worth in the same app. Download Coverd and see how you stack up.

SQUEEZ OF THE DAY

Florida's New VC Boom

South Florida has pulled off a wild VC rebrand in five years. During the pandemic and meme-stock era, Miami wanted to be America's crypto capital and was throwing money at founders, funds, and a wave of guys who suddenly owned more Solana than business-casual clothing. VC firm Andreessen Horowitz rode that wave too and opened a Miami office during the boom and quietly shut it two years later. 

But while Crypto Miami didn't last, a16z is suddenly back in Florida. This time it has nothing to do with crypto. The firm is moving its $1.18 billion American Dynamism fund to a new West Palm Beach headquarters as Florida tries to become a hub for defense tech, aerospace, and the fast-growing category of startups building things the U.S. government actually wants to buy. 

The timing lines up almost too well because Washington is pouring money into drones, autonomous systems, AI, and missile defense, and the Pentagon is explicitly trying to make it easier for newer tech companies to sell into the military.

Defense used to be a niche corner of venture where startups burned years navigating procurement before finding out whether the government would ever actually buy anything. But now, VCs are treating the Pentagon like one enormous customer with a $3 trillion budget that's finally shopping.

Once you look past the beaches and weather, Florida actually makes sense for this. The state has 21 major military installations, three U.S. combatant commands, and an existing defense industry generating roughly $102.6 billion in economic impact.

Founders building defense tech there are down the street from the people who buy it, including the Pentagon's AI chief, who lives in Miami.

Others are joining in too. Palantir relocated its global headquarters to Miami. Vanderbilt is doubling its planned West Palm Beach graduate campus to 2,000 students, adding defense tech and national security studies. Add no state income tax and years of poaching talent from New York and California and you get a flywheel: defense companies attract investors, investors attract founders, founders need engineers, and the customers were already sitting there.

Takeaway: Miami's crypto moment was mostly founders and investors deciding it'd be more fun to run a fund from Brickell than San Francisco, between vibes, sunshine, and a tax break, stacked on top of an industry that could evaporate overnight. Defense tech gets the same sunshine and the same tax arbitrage. But it also gets an actual industrial base underneath it that isn't going anywhere. Now if anyone at a16z is reading this, I'm available to start tomorrow.

PRESENTED BY COVERD

“Am I Rich?”

It’s a question people ponder but don’t typically have a tangible answer for.

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The Coverd credit card is the first to ever offer up to 100% cash back on every purchase. Card holders can play the aforementioned in-app games using their points.

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HEADLINES

Top Reads

• Trump's $1 trillion-plus midterm dividend plan meets bipartisan pushback (CNBC)

• OpenAI targets work of Wall Street junior bankers with new ChatGPT for Financial Services (CNBC)

• Walter and Boehly to sell stakes in Chelsea FC to Clearlake Capital (BB)

• Bending Spoons agrees to buy workspace Miro for $1.36 billion (BB)

• Barclays traders grapple with repeated risk-platform outages (BB)

• Little-known UAE investor adds to over $40 billion bet on Musk (BB)

• Apple makes biggest change to iPhone release cadence in 7 years in Ternus' first showcase as CEO (CNBC)

• Hired to code, he built Hudson River Trading and a $27 billion fortune (BB)

• The IPO that asks you to buy AI hype today and get paid years later (WSJ)

• The likelihood of a Fed interest rate hike next week just got a lot higher (CNBC)

• When private equity plays hardball, loans end up costing more (BB)

• DOJ probes Nvidia's $17B deal with Groq (Axios)

• Abu Dhabi's $1 trillion fund ups private equity, hedge fund bets (BB)

CAPITAL PULSE

Markets Rundown

Market Update

• The 10-year Treasury yield hit 4.96%, its highest in nearly three years, as WTI crude approached $103.

• The European Central Bank raised its deposit rate to 2.5% from 2.25%, as expected, weighing on European markets.

• The U.S. dollar strengthened against most major currencies, supported by higher yields.

Economic Data

• Initial jobless claims eased to 206,000, while continuing claims held near 1.77 million, both signaling limited layoffs.

• PPI rose to 5.4% year over year in August, up from 4.8%, with core PPI at 4.6%.

• Fed rate-hike odds for next week rose to 73%, up from 61% yesterday.

Geopolitics and Oil

• WTI crude climbed toward $103 amid continued disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz.

• Energy prices rose 4.2% in August, driving most of the month's 1.1% increase in goods prices.

• Persistent core inflation combined with renewed energy pressure is complicating the Fed's path toward price stability.

Movers & Shakers

• (+) AeroVironment ($AVAV) +4% after the U.S. Army awarded the drone and defense technology maker a $465 million contract

• (–) American Eagle Outfitters ($AEO) -14% because the teen apparel retailer's Q2 comparable sales declined more than analysts expected.

• (–) Navan ($NAVN) -22% after the business travel and expense software company announced its acquisition of BoomPop.

Prediction Markets

• The finals for the men’s and women’s US Open are this weekend.

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

Private Dealmaking

• The Boring Co., Elon Musk's tunneling startup, raised $3 billion

• Bending Spoons agreed to buy Miro, a workplace collaboration platform, for $1.36 billion

• Analog Devices agreed to acquire Alif Semiconductor, a provider of microcontrollers and fusion processors, for $1.35 billion

• Positron AI, an AI inference hardware company, raised $875 million

• Mach Industries, an aerospace defense-tech startup, raised $600 million

• Harvey, a legal AI platform, raised $550 million

• Accel-KKR agreed to acquire Eleco, a provider of construction software, for around $265 million

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

BOOK OF THE DAY

The Compounders

Description:
Oddbjørn Dybvad, Kjetil Nyland, and Adnan Hadžiefendić examine a powerful but underappreciated model of long-term value creation: publicly traded companies that systematically acquire small businesses and compound the resulting cash flows over decades. The authors profile nine acquisition-driven compounders, including Constellation Software, HEICO, Lifco, Indutrade, and Bergman & Beving, showing how disciplined capital allocation, decentralized operations, entrepreneurial autonomy, and patient reinvestment can produce extraordinary shareholder returns.

The book is particularly interesting for investors because it goes beyond traditional conglomerate analysis and explains the organizational and financial structures that allow these companies to repeatedly make successful acquisitions without sacrificing returns on capital.

Book Length: 236 pages
Release Date: September 2, 2025

Ideal For:
Long-term investors, private equity professionals, entrepreneurs, CFOs, and anyone interested in M&A, capital allocation, compounders, Constellation Software, or finding the next generation of exceptional public companies.

Great compounders don't need one spectacular investment. They build a system that lets thousands of good decisions compound for decades.

DAILY VISUAL

Purchase Price Matters

PRESENTED BY PETRARCH

Fitch Logged Its Highest Private Credit Default Reading Yet

Fitch reported in May that the US private credit default rate reached 6.0%, the highest reading since the firm began tracking the market. 

Most of those defaults were deferred interest and restructured terms. These keep a struggling borrower upright without fixing what is wrong. Some of those companies will recover. The rest wind down eventually and are forced to search for a buyer.

Inventory, real estate, receivables, and intellectual property all have one. The operational records a company generated every working day for years never have, until now... 

Petrarch has built the infrastructure to anonymize and assetize a company’s operational records. They buy those records, clear the rights, de-identify the material (remove logos, names, secrets) on premise, and restructure it into an asset with a defined value.

If you are in private credit or distressed assets, learn more about them here.

DAILY ACUMEN

High Plateau

On October 15, 1929, Yale economist Irving Fisher, one of the most respected economic minds in America, told a room full of financiers that stock prices had reached a permanently high plateau. He was not a crank. He had spent decades building mathematical models of markets and was widely regarded as the best forecaster of his generation.

Nine days later, the crash began. Within weeks the Dow had lost nearly half its value, and Fisher personally lost an enormous fortune, along with the reputation of a lifetime. He spent his remaining years trying to explain what happened and was largely ignored until long after his death.

The unsettling part is that Fisher was not careless. He was the most credentialed person in the room, reasoning from real data, at the exact moment the data stopped meaning what it used to mean. Expertise tells you a great deal about the past. It offers no immunity from the future.

ENLIGHTENMENT

Short Squeez Picks

• Does golf really count as exercise?

• The one habit successful people have in common

• How to tell if someone is being nice or emotionally manipulative

• Where to eat in NYC right now

• Why your ability to cope with stress changes with time

MEME-A-PALOOZA

Memes of the Day

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