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🍋 Pentagon Capital Partners

🍋 Pentagon Capital Partners

Plus: David Protein faces class action lawsuit for understating calories as much as 83%, Qatari investors eye Papa John’s, and is the slop bowl era over?

Short Squeez
March 12, 2026

Together With

"Investing is not supposed to be easy, and anybody who finds it easy is stupid." — Howard Marks

Good Morning! JPMorgan is cutting borrowing capacity for private credit firms by marking down their collateral, a preemptive move tied to market valuations, not loan losses. David Protein is getting sued for allegedly understating calories by 83%. And a Qatari-backed fund has bid to take Papa John's private at a ~50% premium.

SPV buyers chasing OpenAI and SpaceX stakes are finding some funds don't actually own any shares. Apollo plans to start valuing private credit daily in response to growing pressure. And Jefferies is facing lawsuits over a string of soured private credit bets.

Plus: Consultants are cashing in on the AI boom, a wealth fund is betting on turning the New Mexico desert into a tech hub, and slop bowls are losing their appeal.

Having trouble keeping up with the latest LLM updates? Use a trusted tool that works across all of them. Access Endex today.

SQUEEZ OF THE DAY

Pentagon Capital Partners

The Pentagon is making a new recruiting pitch, and this time they're going to Wall Street to hire actual investment bankers.

The Defense Department is quietly assembling a 30-person unit of bankers and investors tasked with deploying roughly $200 billion into defense and national-security investments over the next three years.

According to a recruiting brief prepared by Heidrick & Struggles, the Pentagon is targeting talent from Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America.

The pitch isn't framed as a career change but as a "two-to-three-year secondment program." Spend a few years deploying capital for national security, then return to private markets.

The selling points are exactly what you'd expect to appeal to bankers: deploy more capital than most investors handle in an entire career, sell stock tax-deferred while serving, and gain direct access to senior government officials.

The unit reports to former Cerberus executives David Lorch and George Kollitides and ultimately to Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg, Cerberus's billionaire co-founder.

The bigger idea is strategic. Washington increasingly views economic competition with China as the central geopolitical challenge of the next decade, and capital, not just weapons, will shape the battlefield.

The Pentagon has the authority and the money, but lacks Wall Street's core skill: sourcing, structuring, and executing deals. The result is a Defense Department that looks less like a bureaucracy and more like a sovereign investment arm.

Takeaway: Washington has spent decades letting markets allocate capital. Now it's recruiting Wall Street to direct it. The Pentagon isn't just buying weapons anymore, it's building a deal team.

What's really happening is a structural shift in how American power gets deployed. In a competition with China that's as much economic as military, the ability to move capital into the right industries fast may matter more than any weapons system.

PRESENTED BY ENDEX

As LLM Race Accelerates, Wall Street Leaders Fear Model Lock-In

Google just dropped Gemini 3.1 Pro. Anthropic dropped Claude Opus 4.6. OpenAI dropped GPT-5.4.

Each foundation model is demonstrating unique capabilities across Excel and PowerPoint. New models are landing faster than firms can evaluate them - let alone integrate them.

Private equity, banking, and corporate finance teams are utilizing Endex to capitalize on model breakthroughs. Endex is an AI-Native Analyst Suite that is built model agnostic by design. Analysts are able to access every model across their suite of tools.

Request access to Endex today.

HEADLINES

Markets Rundown

Market Update

U.S. equities were mixed as rising oil prices continued to dominate market sentiment
Dow Jones –0.7% and Russell 2000 –0.4%, while strength in technology lifted the Nasdaq slightly higher
S&P 500 declines were limited by gains in tech stocks
Asian equities rallied overnight, while European markets closed lower
WTI crude rose to about $88 per barrel amid ongoing Middle East disruptions
Treasury yields climbed further, with the 10-year reaching 4.22%

Policymakers Tap Strategic Oil Reserves

The International Energy Agency (IEA) announced a 400 million barrel release from strategic reserves
The release is the largest in history, more than double the reserve release during the Russia–Ukraine invasion
It represents roughly one-third of total strategic stockpiles among member countries
Energy disruptions continue around the Strait of Hormuz, which carries roughly 20% of global oil and LNG supply
Regional producers have reduced output amid security risks and infrastructure disruptions
Iran indicated a potential ceasefire would require international guarantees against future strikes

Economic Data Highlights

February CPI came in largely as expected
- Headline CPI: +0.3% MoM
- Core CPI: +0.2% MoM
Shelter inflation continued to cool, helping offset pressure from tariff-related goods prices
However, the surge in oil prices is likely to push energy inflation higher in coming months
As a result, headline CPI may reaccelerate temporarily, even as underlying inflation trends improve
Energy-driven inflation shocks typically create one-time price effects rather than sustained inflation
The recent oil spike may cause the Fed to keep rates on hold longer, with further rate cuts likely pushed later into 2026

Movers & Shakers

(+) Papa John’s ($PZZA) +19% after a Qatari-backed fund submitted a formal bid to take the pizza chain private at $47 per share.
(+) Oracle ($ORCL) +9% because the tech giant beat Q3 earnings expectations, with cloud infrastructure revenue surging 84% year over year.
(–) Campbell’s ($CPB) -7% after the food company cut its full-year profit outlook, citing weak snack sales and supply constraints.

Prediction Markets

It’s a tight race for the largest IPO ever.
Trade on real-world events with Kalshi. Use code OWS to get a $10 bonus when you trade $10.

Private Dealmaking

Cintas will acquire UniFirst for about $5.5 billion
Nexthop AI, an AI networking startup, raised $500 million
Rhoda AI, a robot training startup, raised $450 million
Eridu, an AI networking startup, raised over $200 million
Kai, an agentic AI cybersecurity platform, raised $125 million
Alan, a digital health insurer, raised about $109 million

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

BOOK OF THE DAY

Unspeakable Things

Description: A powerful examination of how silence and shame shape the narratives individuals and institutions tell about themselves. Journalist Brooke Nevils draws on investigative reporting and personal insight to explore the cultural forces that allow harmful behavior to remain hidden. The book examines how power, reputation, and social pressure influence what stories are told, what truths are ignored, and how accountability can finally emerge.

Book Length: 320 pages
Release Date: February 3, 2026

Ideal For: Readers interested in investigative journalism, media culture, power dynamics, and the social forces that shape public narratives.

Silence often protects power. Change begins when people challenge the stories they have been taught not to question.

DAILY VISUAL

YouTube is Bigger than Disney

Source: Chartr

PRESENTED BY MOSAIC

LBO to IB and PC

After perfecting its LBO modeling platform, Mosaic is bringing institutional-grade modeling infrastructure to investment banking and private credit.

The platform enables bankers and credit analysts to apply Mosaic’s proprietary deal engine directly within their workflows, generating high-quality, fully auditable Excel models in minutes.

Gone are the days of late nights trying to find model errors because your intern plugged cash. Just upload your inputs to Mosaic and receive a structured, fully auditable model ready for review.

Evercore has integrated Mosaic into its modeling suite, with additional firms currently onboarding.

In addition, Mosaic is expanding its banking and private credit teams and is looking for ex-bankers and credit analysts who want to reshape the industry.

Apply today or book a demo.

DAILY ACUMEN

Japanese Edge

Japan has one of the highest life expectancies on earth, the largest concentration of centenarians, and some of the lowest rates of chronic disease in the developed world. They did not achieve this by optimizing their morning routines or downloading a wellness app.

Seven concepts. No program to buy. No guru to follow. Just a set of quiet philosophies passed down through generations that describe, with almost uncomfortable simplicity, what it actually looks like to not destroy yourself on the way to a life worth living.

Eat until you're almost full. Improve in increments so small they feel meaningless. Find the thing that makes you forget to check your phone. Decide slowly. Accept that broken things still hold beauty. Stop measuring your timeline against someone else's.

The reason this feels radical in 2026 is not because it's foreign. It's because every system around you is designed to make you do the exact opposite. Eat past full, improve overnight, find your passion by Friday, decide instantly, hide your flaws, and keep up or fall behind. The modern world is essentially a direct assault on every single one of these principles.

These ideas are not ancient wisdom dressed up for a motivational poster. They are survival strategy. The people who actually live by them are not the loudest people in the room. They are just, consistently and without much fanfare, the last ones still standing.

ENLIGHTENMENT

Short Squeez Picks

The spaghetti method is a simple way to discover your purpose
The allure of slop bowls is fading
7 home organization tips from experts
Waking up at 5a can make you more productive, with a catch
The big 5 predictors of success

MEME-A-PALOOZA

Memes of the Day

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