Good Morning! Clearlake co-founder José Feliciano is nearing a record $3.9 billion purchase of the MLB's San Diego Padres. Dunkin' owner Roark Capital has reportedly picked JPMorgan and BofA to lead its $2 billion IPO later this year. And Blue Owl's co-founders have stopped pledging shares for personal loans after the stock dropped over 60% since January 2025.

Private equity is betting big on NYC bagel chains, wagering the breakfast staple can scale nationally. The founder of quantum computing startup Xanadu became a billionaire in days after Nvidia backed the company and pumped the stock 300%. And Sequoia's new leaders raised $7 billion for the VC firm's biggest bets.

Plus: Why the Seychelles is becoming a haven for online trading firms thanks to a complete absence of leverage limits, and 12 ways to stop brain rot.

Looking to invest in real assets to hedge inflation? Explore farmland investing with AcreTrader today.

SQUEEZ OF THE DAY

Private Credit 🤝 Credit Card Debt

Private credit spent the last decade gorging on corporate lending. Now the giants are pivoting to consumers. Fund managers held roughly $350 billion of consumer loan balances last year, up from less than $200 billion in 2019.

The engine is the forward-flow agreement: a deal to buy consumer loans that haven't even been originated yet. Private credit is pre-purchasing future debt, whether that's a credit card balance, student loan, motorcycle financing, or buy-now-pay-later mattress.

The same firms that financed LBOs all decade are now bankrolling Main Street borrowing. And the deals are everywhere:

• KKR and Pimco buy ~two-thirds of Harley-Davidson Financial's new loans as they're originated

• Blue Owl signed ~$18 billion of forward-flow deals across PayPal, SoFi, and LendingClub last year

• TPG agreed to buy $2.4 billion of personal loans from OneMain Financial

• KKR struck a deal with Sallie Mae for at least $2 billion of new student loans annually

• Affirm signed deals worth up to $9.75 billion with Liberty Mutual, PGIM, and New York Life

Roughly a quarter of newly originated personal loans were funded this way last year, up from just 6% the year before.

The Bilt story shows how this works, and how messy it gets. After Wells Fargo exited its credit card partnership, Bilt couldn't find a new bank. Instead, it moved $1.2 billion of card balances into a structure funded by Blue Owl, Stone Point, Goldman, and TD.

The deal nearly blew up. Blue Owl demanded first-loss protection and deeper visibility into Bilt's projections, signing off the night before the transfer was supposed to close.

Takeaway: On paper, the move makes sense. Private credit gets diversification away from software-heavy corporate loan books, a massive addressable market, and yield in parts of the economy that still look healthy. But the risk is familiar. When fresh capital floods into consumer debt, standards slip, leverage builds, and funding that looks stable today can disappear fast.

PRESENTED BY ACRETRADER

Farmland: A Real Asset for the Modern Portfolio

Invest in the one thing they aren’t making any more of: Farmland. These are real assets for a rising-cost world.

The Proterra AcreTrader Farmland Fund LP combines AcreTrader’s expert sourcing and management with the institutional power of Proterra Investment Partners. The Fund provides diversification across high-quality U.S. farmland assets, offering an open-ended gateway into an essential asset class that has historically provided consistent returns.

Why the Proterra AcreTrader Fund?

• Real Assets: Direct access to high-quality U.S. farmland via a tax-efficient private REIT.

• Portfolio Stability: Access a tangible asset with the potential to serve as an inflation hedge, based on farmland's historically low correlation to stocks and bonds.

• Historical Performance: Access an asset class that has delivered a 9.4% average annual return since 1997, with low volatility.*

Learn more here: AcreTrader.com

HEADLINES

Top Reads

• San Diego Padres nearing record $3.9 billion sale to private equity billionaire (WSJ)

• Roark said to pick banks for Dunkin' owner's $2 billion US IPO (BB)

• Blue Owl co-founders no longer pledging shares for personal loans (FT)

• Big money is betting on bagels (NYT)

• Nvidia helps make quantum computing CEO a billionaire in days (BB)

• Sequoia's new leaders raise about $7 billion for firm's biggest bets (BB)

• Seychelles broker boom driven by high leverage, low taxes (BB)

• Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei meets with White House on Mythos as Trump says he had "no idea" (CNBC)

• Iconiq, advisor to tech billionaires, emerges as major AI investor (BB)

• Bill Ackman's family office drama threatens his IPO plans (Puck)

• Wealth tax battle fuels $30,000 payout for signature hunters (BB)

• A private equity billionaire mounts his biggest takeover yet: the Pentagon (WSJ)

• Jamie Dimon sells $40 million of JPMorgan stock (WSJ)

• Oil prices plunge as Iran says Strait of Hormuz "open" during ceasefire (BBC)

• Netflix was long "a builder not a buyer." Is that era over? (CNBC)

• AMD, Oracle, Microsoft and the IGV lead a monster week for tech stocks (CNBC)

• Uber Eats offers return pickup for retail app purchases (CNBC)

• EQT warns of exit risks for alternative energy assets held by PE (BB)

CAPITAL PULSE

Markets Rundown

Market Update

• Stocks closed the week strong, with the S&P 500 and Nasdaq hitting fresh record highs

• Consumer discretionary and industrials led gains as risk sentiment improved

• Bond yields moved lower, reflecting easing inflation concerns

• The U.S. dollar weakened, as safe-haven demand faded

• Global markets were mixed, but tone shifted clearly risk-on into the weekend

Oil Pullback Changes the Narrative

• Oil prices dropped sharply as the Strait of Hormuz reopening eased supply fears

• A meaningful portion of the geopolitical risk premium came out of energy markets

• Forward markets now point to lower oil prices into year-end, if stability holds

• Falling energy costs could relieve pressure on inflation and corporate margins

• This shift is a key tailwind for fuel-sensitive and cyclical sectors

Earnings Start Strong

• Early results, particularly from banks, beat expectations and set a positive tone

• Earnings growth expectations have moved higher as the season begins

• Strength is not limited to one area, with broad participation across sectors

• Technology remains the standout, but other sectors are contributing meaningfully

• A wider earnings base supports more durable and balanced market performance

Movers & Shakers

• (+) Strategy ($MSTR) +12% after the Bitcoin treasury company continues to buy the crypto dip, purchasing an additional 13,927 BTC for ~$1B.

• (+) Royal Caribbean ($RCL) +10% because Iran declared the Strait of Hormuz open to all commercial vessels, sending oil prices lower.

• (–) Figma ($FIG) -7% after Anthropic's CPO departed its board because of a competing product in development.

Prediction Markets

• With speculation that the Strait of Hormuz is opening up, what does the price of oil do by the end of the month?

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

Private Dealmaking

• Plata, a Mexican digital bank, raised $405 million

• International Paper agreed to acquire North Pacific Paper Co. for $360 million

• Factory, an enterprise AI coding startup, raised $150 million

• Zūm, a student mobility platform, raised $100 million

• nEye, a developer of optical circuit switches, raised $80 million

• Turion Space, a spacecraft maker, raised $75 million

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

BOOK OF THE DAY

A Short, Strange Trip

Description:
A vivid, deeply personal journey from John O'Connor that explores the intersection of psychedelics, identity, and the search for meaning. Set against the backdrop of the Amazon, the book blends memoir with philosophical inquiry, examining how extreme experiences can challenge perception, unravel assumptions, and reshape one’s understanding of purpose, sanity, and self.

Book Length: 272 pages
Release Date: April 14, 2026

Ideal For:
Readers interested in introspective journeys, altered states of consciousness, and the pursuit of meaning through unconventional paths.

Sometimes you have to lose your sense of reality to find a deeper sense of truth.

DAILY VISUAL

Continued Rise in Business Formation

PRESENTED BY MOSAIC

How Reliable Are LLMs for Financial Modeling?

AI has transformed Wall Street's language work: summarizing earnings calls, processing CIMs, drafting memos. But financial modeling is a different problem entirely.

LLMs are probabilistic. Run the same model twice, get two different answers. For an expert call summary, that's fine. For an LBO backing a multi-billion dollar decision, that's a structural flaw. A 99% accurate LBO is still a wrong LBO.

What firms need is purpose-built software where the math never varies. That's Mosaic.

Read the full article here.

DAILY ACUMEN

Quiet Exits

The most important relationships you will ever end will not end with a confrontation. They will end with a slow, quiet distancing that both people pretend not to notice, a gradual reduction in effort that neither party names, and eventually a silence that becomes permanent without anyone ever having made the decision out loud.

This is not always a failure. Some relationships are meant to be seasonal, and forcing permanence onto something that has run its course is its own kind of dishonesty. But some of them are worth fighting for, and the quiet exit is what happens when neither person wanted to be the one to do the fighting.

Pay attention to the relationships currently drifting. One version of the future is that you let them go. Another version is that you decide, right now, which ones are worth the uncomfortable conversation.

ENLIGHTENMENT

Short Squeez Picks

• The app that shows your net worth insights**

• The 2-minute decluttering rule

• Why billionaires should give their money away

• Greek monks have a healthy eating habit

• How to wait without getting bored

• 12 ways to stay sharp in a mind-frazzling world

MEME-A-PALOOZA

Memes of the Day

📣 Partner With Us: Get in front of an audience of over 1 million finance professionals, business leaders, and policy influencers. Submit a partnership inquiry.

📊 Wall Street Comp & Culture Data: Get the most detailed comp, carry, and culture insights across 800+ Wall Street firms. Explore the data.

📈 Grow With Us: Work directly with the Overheard on Wall Street team to scale your finance brand. Schedule your free consult.

🧢 Wall Street Shop: Explore our collection of finance-themed apparel and merchandise. Visit the shop.

📬 Deals Newsletter – Buysiders: A curated roundup of major M&A, private equity, and VC activity. Plus access to private deal flow. Subscribe here.