Good Morning! Trump threatened Canada with tariffs over wildfire smoke, claiming "willful negligence." Apple briefly edged out Nvidia to reclaim its title as the most valuable publicly traded company in the US, but Nvidia clawed it back by day's end. And Ken Griffin offered $3 million to buy an old cottage across from Citadel's new Miami HQ, because apparently the whole block isn't enough.

Sweetgreen jumped 14% after Taco Bell was linked to an explosive diarrhea parasite, clearing Sweetgreen's name. And Pentagon is dangling $400,000 salaries to recruit Wall Street bankers.

Plus: Anthropic is in early talks with Meta to acquire compute power, and Apollo likens risky private credit to a mere "sprinkle" on a cupcake.

Build custom deployments around your firm’s unique workflows with Endex.

SQUEEZ OF THE DAY

Trump’s Latency Trade

It turns out that, over the last 18 months of TACOing, Trump’s Truth Social posts have been one of the most effective global market movers. And now Trump Media is trying to figure out whether they can monetize and charge hedge funds early access to Trump’s social media posts.

Trump Media is launching Truth API, a real-time data feed that will give financial firms fast access to posts from Truth Social’s most influential accounts. The target customer is high-frequency traders, hedge funds, and algorithmic shops that care deeply about seeing market-moving information a few milliseconds before everyone else.

And the pitch isn't cheap: according to the Financial Times, Trump Media has floated charging as much as $100,000 a month (roughly $1.2 million a year) for the fastest, lowest-latency version of the feed. In other words, a seven-figure annual subscription whose entire value proposition is seeing one man's posts before the rest of the market does.

The business logic is obvious because whenever Trump posts, markets seem to react. Traders and hedge funds alike scan for any edge they can receive over the latest tariff headlines, China restrictions, or Iran peace deal. Trump’s posts have been effective at moving stocks, bonds, currencies, and commodities. And for trading firms, getting that information faster is valuable. And Trump Media, which has yet to turn an annual profit, is looking to diversify revenue streams beyond advertisement and will package that speed into a recurring data product.

To be fair, selling fast data feeds is not new. Traders already pay enormous sums for real-time information because speed is the product and exchanges, news terminals, and social platforms all sell data. The difference is that most data feeds are not built around the sitting president’s personal posting habits.

The optics are also not exactly subtle. Trump is president and is the company’s largest shareholder, with his stake held in a trust managed by Donald Trump Jr. And now the company wants to sell Wall Street faster access to the president’s own market-moving posts. 

Takeaway: Trump Media may have found its cleanest business model yet: monetize the latency between a presidential post and the market reaction. For traders, the pitch is faster Truth posts and more profitable trades. For everyone else, it is a reminder that in modern markets, information is the asset, milliseconds are the edge, and even presidential posting can become a high-margin subscription product.

PRESENTED BY ENDEX

Open Source, Open Season

Last week, Moonshot AI made waves with their Kimi K3 release, an open-source model that shockingly outpaced Anthropic and OpenAI frontier models on key performance benchmarks. This jolted the market into a TSMC, Nvidia, and SoftBank sell-off.

But for enterprises, this reignited discussions around what tasks open-source can handle, open-source safety, and, above all else for many, can open-source cut AI spend?

For Wall Street, top firms are partnering with Endex to cut through the noise. Endex is model-agnostic. It routes every agent request to the model that clears the required quality threshold and reserves frontier models for the select tasks where incremental intelligence produces measurable economic value.

When a new model drops, teams don't have to reevaluate their tooling. Instead, Endex evaluates it and routes to it automatically, keeping them on the frontier as the landscape moves underneath them. Endex brings these agents directly into the Microsoft Office Suite, building custom deployments around each firm's unique workflows.

HEADLINES

Top Reads

• Trump says Canada will face tariffs over wildfire smoke (Hill)

• Apple overthrows Nvidia to reclaim Wall Street's crown (WSJ)

• Griffin wants to buy an old cottage across from new headquarters (BB)

• Sweetgreen shares jump 15% after Taco Bell linked to explosive diarrhea parasite (NYP)

• Pentagon dangles $400,000 salaries to recruit Wall Street bankers (WSJ)

• Taco Bell engulfed in crisis with 'explosive' diarrhea outbreak tied to lettuce (Axios)

• Apollo likens risky private credit to mere 'sprinkle' on cupcake (BB)

• LIS, a luxe new summer camp for adults, costs $12K for two nights (NY Post)

• Anthropic in early talks with Meta to acquire compute power (CNBC)

• Chip stocks tumble into bear market as 105% AI rally fizzles (BB)

• Retail and Wall Street are underwater on SpaceX — but not going down without a fight (CNBC)

• NYC's municipal debt investors are losing patience with Zohran Mamdani (NY Post)

• The tax strategy for people suffering from stock-market success (WSJ)

• Gen Z looks for a cheap date (WSJ)

• Lettuce grower Taylor Farms to recall products tied to parasite (BB)

• Howden plots giant capital raise on path to blockbuster IPO (BB)

• Apple's big lawsuit could disrupt OpenAI's IPO plans (Yahoo Finance)

CAPITAL PULSE

Markets Rundown

Market Update

• Global equities declined, led by continued weakness in semiconductor stocks. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index fell 10% for the week, while Taiwan entered correction territory and South Korea's market remained sharply below its June peak.

• Renewed U.S.-Iran tensions pushed WTI crude oil above $81 per barrel, lifting the energy sector while technology and communication services lagged.

• Treasury yields declined, with the 10-year Treasury yield falling to 4.55%, providing some support to fixed income.

Technology

• AI-related stocks remained under pressure as investors questioned the pace and returns of AI spending, with concerns amplified by advances in open-source AI models from China.

• Corporate earnings have not yet shown a slowdown in AI demand or investment, but concentration in technology remains elevated.

• Alphabet and Tesla report earnings this week, with investors focused on AI spending, profitability, and future capital expenditure plans.

Economy & Earnings

• This week's economic data remained constructive, with cooler-than-expected CPI and PPI inflation, solid retail sales, and strong bank earnings.

• S&P 500 earnings are expected to grow approximately 23% year over year, with 12% revenue growth.

• Technology and energy are expected to account for roughly 80% of total S&P 500 earnings growth this quarter.

Movers & Shakers

• (+) Sweetgreen ($SG) +14% after regulators traced the explosive-diarrhea cyclosporiasis outbreak back to Taco Bell restaurants, clearing Sweetgreen's name.

• (+) Travelers ($TRV) +9% because the insurance company crushed Q2 earnings on improved catastrophe-loss performance.

• (–) Netflix ($NFLX) -7% after issuing guidance that came in below Wall Street forecasts, spooking investors on near-term revenue growth.

Prediction Markets

• It was Opening Weekend for The Odyssey. This market closes this morning at 10am EDT.

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

Private Dealmaking

• Wonder, a cloud kitchen company, raised $650 million

• Crypto.com received a $400 million investment from Citadel Securities

• Alpaca, an embedded trading startup, raised $135 million

• Lumin, a digital bank, raised $115 million

• American Growth Insurance, an AI insurance brokerage roll-up, raised $70 million

• Fora, a travel booking platform, raised $60 million

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

BOOK OF THE DAY

The Soccer of Success

Description:
A practical leadership and personal development guide from Ciarán McArdle that applies the principles behind the world's most popular sport to success in business and life. Using lessons from elite teams, legendary managers, and the culture of soccer, the book explores leadership, teamwork, resilience, preparation, and strategic thinking. It demonstrates how consistent execution, trust, and adaptability, not just individual talent, are the foundations of sustained high performance.

Book Length: 256 pages
Release Date: January 28, 2025

Ideal For:
Sports fans, leaders, entrepreneurs, and professionals looking to apply the mindset and lessons of elite teams to business, leadership, and personal growth.

Championships are won long before the match begins through preparation discipline and the commitment to improve every day.

DAILY VISUAL

Tariffs 6 7

PRESENTED BY BLUEFLAME AI

Private Equity Drops $4 Billion Just to Turn AI On

TPG, Advent, Bain Capital, and Brookfield recently put more than $4 billion into a joint venture with OpenAI. It’s not to buy a company but simply to get AI deployed. Blackstone and Goldman answered the same day with a $1.5 billion Anthropic version.

The biggest names in private markets are paying billions for deployment, because these chatbots lack the industry expertise to execute the work at excellence. A chat window can’t tear through a data room or build an LBO.

Deal teams are partnering with the freshly rebranded Blueflame, whose new agent, Amp, runs deal work end to end, from data room reviews to model builds and IC memos. It routes each task to the right model and only pauses where human judgment is needed.

See what AI built for finance can do for your firm.

DAILY ACUMEN

Matthew Effect

Small early advantages do not stay small. The extra bit of capital, the marginally better reputation, the slightly earlier start, all of it compounds into a gap that eventually looks like a difference in talent when it was actually a difference in timing.

The uncomfortable part is how invisible the mechanism is from either end. The person pulling ahead genuinely believes their growing lead reflects growing skill. The person falling behind assumes the same, and quietly downgrades their own ability to match.

Before crediting genius in an outsized outcome, check for a head start instead. And if you are early in something that matters, protect that small edge now, because the whole game rewards whoever gets compounding on their side first.

ENLIGHTENMENT

Short Squeez Picks

• Is too much sleep as bad as too little?

• Why burned out Gen-Zers are joining lie down clubs

• 6 ways leaders harness stress

• 5 hidden pitfalls of fitness tracking

• How to survive mid-career burnout

• A new card to get 100% cashback on your purchases

MEME-A-PALOOZA

Memes of the Day

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