Good morning! Democrats won full control of Congress, and Elon Musk responded that “data centers in space” are looking pretty appealing. Bill Ackman thinks the stock market might be “broken” and is starting to look like a casino. And quant pioneer D.E. Shaw is tweaking its famously secretive money machine.

Morgan Stanley is offering $2.3 billion in debt to help finance the Dell family office’s acquisition of insurance broker Baldwin Group. Elite forward-deployed engineers are commanding pay packages of $586,000 to $1.45 million a year. And private equity investors are getting frustrated with continuation deals that they say leave them little room to negotiate.

Plus: College admissions offices turn on the charm as applications dry up, Apollo lends a record $114 billion as it piles into AI financing, and what AI personal assistants still can’t do.

Granola can now transcribe your spoken words in any app. Try Granola today.

If you want a picture of where markets are right now, the hottest new acronym on the Street is apparently FOGO, the fear of getting obliterated in the market.

The term was coined by Paul Singer's Elliott Management, the $80B hedge fund, in its October letter to investors. Elliott warned that one or two shocks could flip investors from FOMO, the fear of missing out, to FOGO. It said "virtually every alarm bell warning of a substantial bear market ahead is ringing," and compared today's markets to the Roaring '20s, the boom that ended in the 1929 crash and the Great Depression.

Elliott pointed to circular deals between AI model companies and the infrastructure makers they buy from, where the same money moves back and forth between companies. It also flagged debt-funded spending on data centers and a growing anti-AI movement. It warned that the fallout from lower AI expectations "could be historic, or at least as severe as any bear market in the last few decades."

The fund also called out US budget deficits, persistent inflation and risks in private credit portfolios. It said zero-day options, which expire the same day they're bought, and meme stock bets look more like gambling than investing.

Elliott says it's focused on protecting its money and keeping cash ready to buy bargains when markets turn. So far that caution has cost it. The fund returned just under 2% through September, compared with nearly 13% for the S&P 500 and nearly 3% for short-term Treasury bills.

Takeaway: Bearish calls from big-name investors are common, and being early can look a lot like being wrong. Elliott has given up most of this year's rally to stay cautious, so its next few letters will show whether that bet starts to pay off. Either way, coming up with this acronym may be Paul Singer's greatest contribution to finance.

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Now that we have the S-1, Anthropic is expected to go public in November in what could be the largest IPO on record. Revenue rose nearly twelvefold to $4.6 billion in 2025, while net losses reached $42 billion, including a $34.3 billion fair-value accounting expense¹. Reuters reports it is seeking to raise up to $100 billion²; some investors now value it around $1.5 trillion, below earlier expectations near $2 trillion³.

So the clear debate is that nothing is clear. One side sees the company defining the AI era; the other sees costs growing faster than revenue.

Leverage Shares by Themes* is building a fund for each side. ANUU, the 2X Long Anthropic Daily ETF, will seek 200% of Anthropic's daily performance. ANDD, the 2X Short Anthropic Daily ETF, will seek -200%.

Neither fund is trading yet, but get notified the moment they are.

An investor who held the S&P 500 from January 3, 2005 through December 31, 2024 turned $10,000 into $71,750, or 10.4% a year. Missing just the 10 best days, out of roughly 5,000 trading days, cut that to $32,871, or 6.1% a year.

Most of those best days don’t come in calm times. According to J.P. Morgan’s data, seven of the 10 best days fell within two weeks of the 10 worst days.

If you sell after the worst days, you are likely to miss the best ones. The rebound arrives while the fear is still fresh.

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