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🍋 Private Credit’s Salt Era

🍋 Private Credit’s Salt Era

Plus: a16z under DOJ investigation, General Atlantic is going public, and Nvidia is backing a $105 billion data center in Ohio.

Short Squeez
August 18, 2026

Together With

“A serious surfer doesn’t plan to go surfing next Tuesday at 2 o’clock. You go surfing when there are waves and wind and the tide is right.” — Yvon Chouinard

Good Morning! a16z is being investigated by the DOJ over whether its partners are improperly serving on the boards of competing AI companies. Growth equity firm General Atlantic is working on an IPO for later this year and has reportedly hired JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley. And Barclays hired BofA's Mike Joo as co-CEO of its investment bank.

Nvidia is backing an Ohio data center for OpenAI with as much as $105 billion. Peter Thiel disclosed a stake in Argentine shale oil exporter Vista. And a restructured Groq raised $350 million at a $3.5 billion valuation.

Plus: How much it costs to live comfortably in every state, the secret word game Bank of America's CEO plays with Wall Street, and Jamie Dimon says too many leaders are sloppy communicators.

AI agents are now competing with Wall Street consensus on earnings forecasts. See their forecasts here.

SQUEEZ OF THE DAY

Private Credit’s Salt Era

It’s been a wild 2026 for private credit, and the latest turn is that lenders are currently fighting each other for the right to finance a company that digs salt out of the ground.

American Rock Salt runs the largest active salt mine in the country and just hired Morgan Stanley to refinance more than $700 million of debt. Moody's rates it Caa2, eight notches into junk territory, but lenders are still circling. Pricing is landing around 500 basis points over the benchmark for the first-lien debt, 800 for the second lien.

The excitement makes sense once you know the joke going around private credit right now: ABS doesn't stand for asset-backed securities anymore. It stands for anything but software.

Private credit spent the last decade in love with SaaS. Between recurring revenue, fat margins, and predictable cash flow, the industry was the perfect borrower on paper. Then AI sparked the SaaSpocalypse earlier this year, and lenders had to actually sit with the question of how durable those businesses really are.

Salt and hard assets in general have a much simpler pitch. If a software company blows up, lenders are stuck trying to figure out what old code and customer contracts are worth. If American Rock Salt blows up, there's still a massive mine full of salt sitting underground that’s not going anywhere. Hard assets are back because in a restructuring, you can point at the thing you actually lent against.

Investors are already up on the trade, and American Rock Salt's $485 million first-lien loan has rallied from 73 cents on the dollar last September to roughly 97 cents today, helped by a brutal winter and a lot of road salt demand. Moody's still flags high leverage and thin liquidity and its ugly credit, but everyone knows exactly what the underlying asset underneath it is.

Takeaway: That clarity is worth a lot after the SaaSpocalypse drove more than $13 billion in redemption requests across nontraded BDCs this year. Managers are rethinking how much of their book they want tied to companies AI could quietly wreck. And after years fighting over ARR multiples and covenant-lite software loans, lenders are rediscovering the appeal of stuff people have needed forever.

PRESENTED BY OPENSTOCKS

AI Agents Are Now Competing with Wall Street on Earnings Forecasts

For a hundred years, a company's earnings have been measured against one bar: Wall Street consensus.

Consensus has always been a human product that carries human problems. Banks publish forecasts on companies that are clients of their other divisions. They cluster coverage around the biggest names, while smaller companies go thinly followed. And models sit untouched for months because analysts are slow to change their view in public.

That consensus has a new competitor; one forecast entirely by AI agents.

AI agents are increasingly active participants in public markets, and market participants need a place to understand AI's view on earnings. OpenStocks is that place, with one rule: no human analysts. Agents forecast company earnings in public, compete on a leaderboard, and get scored against reported results once they're out. Their forecasts compile into the AI Consensus for every company, and it is tracked side-by-side with Wall Street's. Whether the agents are actually better is the open question, and early signs suggest it's going to be a great fight.

See the AI Consensus for the companies you follow, or build your own agent and submit forecasts here.

HEADLINES

Markets Rundown

Market Update

Stocks closed lower as longer-term Treasury yields rose; the 10-year yield climbed above 4.7% and the 30-year topped 5.3%, its highest since 2007.
The NAHB Housing Market Index edged up to 35 in August from 34, still well below its ~51 long-term average.
WTI crude traded around $84 per barrel amid ongoing Middle East uncertainty.

Earnings Season

Home Depot reports today, followed by Lowe's, Target, and TJX Wednesday, then Ross Stores and Walmart Thursday.
About 91% of the S&P 500 has reported, with 85% posting positive surprises and earnings on pace to grow 48% year over year.
The U.S. posted a $432 billion July budget deficit, the largest monthly shortfall since March 2021.

Movers & Shakers

(+) Intuitive Machines ($LUNR) +7% after disclosing a customer-issued authorization to proceed on a $600 million multi-satellite program.
(+) Vista Energy ($VIST) +6% because Peter Thiel’s fund Thiel Macro disclosed a $76 million stake in the Argentine shale oil producer.
(–) Meta ($META) -4% after oral arguments began in a unified case brought by 29 state attorneys general, led by California’s AG.

Prediction Markets

The chart reflects 1.4M permits (34% chance). Building permits are a leading indicator.
Trade on real-world events with Kalshi. Use code OWS to get a $10 bonus when you trade $10.

Private Dealmaking

Higgsfield, an AI video generation startup, raised $400 million
Groq, an AI inference neocloud, raised $350 million
Wispr, a voice dictation tool maker, raised $280 million
Gravis Robotics, a Swiss developer of construction robots, raised $200 million
NavVis, a German digital twin platform, raised $85 million
InduPro, an oncology biotech, raised $77 million

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

BOOK OF THE DAY

The Bezos Letters

Description:
A practical business and leadership guide from Steve Anderson and Karen Anderson that extracts 14 principles from Jeff Bezos's annual shareholder letters and Amazon's evolution. The authors show how Amazon repeatedly used customer obsession, long-term thinking, experimentation, high standards, and calculated risk-taking to build a massive company. Rather than simply recounting Amazon's history, the book translates Bezos's thinking into actionable lessons that entrepreneurs and executives can apply to their own organizations.

Book Length: 240 pages
Release Date: March 5, 2019

Ideal For:
Entrepreneurs, executives, investors, and business leaders interested in Amazon's strategy, Bezos's decision-making framework, and the principles behind building and scaling an enduring company.

The greatest companies don't just pursue growth, they continually reinvent the way they create value for customers.

DAILY VISUAL

Biggest Trading Losses of All Time

Source: Financial Times

PRESENTED BY STELRIX

How the Rich Borrow Until They Die

ProPublica once calculated that America's 25 wealthiest paid a “true tax rate” of 3.4% on $401 billion in wealth growth*. Their playbook has three steps. 1. Buy assets that appreciate. 2. Borrow against them when cash is needed. Since loan proceeds aren't income, no tax bill arrives. 3. Then die, because heirs inherit at a stepped-up basis, meaning decades of embedded gains are wiped clean for tax purposes and the estate simply settles the loans. Larry Ellison has pledged billions in Oracle stock this way for years. Stelrix introduces the borrow step, with an investment-backed credit card, to portfolios without a private banker.

Explore Stelrix's Instagram for more luxury and finance news and sign-up for their waitlist today.

DAILY ACUMEN

Fungible Money

Money is completely fungible. A dollar from a bonus and a dollar from a paycheck spend exactly the same way at the register. Yet almost nobody treats their money that way.

People mentally sort dollars into separate buckets, a vacation fund, bonus money that feels like house money, a refund treated as free, and each bucket gets different rules despite being the identical currency in the identical account.

This produces some strange behavior. People carry high interest credit card debt while holding low interest savings in a separate labeled account, because the mental wall between the buckets feels real even though the math says otherwise. Windfall money gets spent more recklessly than earned money, despite identical spending power, because it arrived marked as less serious.

The correction is to treat every dollar as identical, because it is. The labels you have quietly assigned to different piles are costing you more than you realize.

ENLIGHTENMENT

Short Squeez Picks

Jamie Dimon says too many leaders are sloppy communicators
How financial stress affects the brain over the long term
How to have better conversations
3 questions to pressure-test your priorities
How appearance influences confidence and success

MEME-A-PALOOZA

Memes of the Day

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