M.Feeney @MFValue1

🚨 The S&P just announced they will NOT change eligibility requirements to 'fast track' index inclusion for megacap stocks such as the upcoming SpaceX or Anthropic IPOs. Looks like $SPCX will just have to settle for joining the Nasdaq 100 $QQQ.

Ray Bradbury's timeless advice on rebuilding your attention span

There's a guy on $ubstack named Shitty Situations with a banger post for anyone in credit; all the ways people lie to you and credit can blow up in your face. Some of my favorites:

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A bride leaving her recently bombed home to get married, London, 1940. This is the English spirit 💪🏻🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

$APO Unlike many other Alt GPs facing headwinds / market saturation I believe Apollo can continue compounding at >20% for the foreseeable future Since Athene drives the majority of incremental flows ($82B of inflows in FY25), Apollo is primarily indexed to the demand for retirement products rather than the institutional or retail LP market With a 40% increase in >65 year olds expected over the next 25 years I don't anticipate any slowdown in Athene's ability to originate long-duration liabilities In turn, the flywheel between Athene and its asset management arm enables it to deploy associated equity capital at >20% ROE. I estimate every equity $1 deployed to translate into ~22c of combined FRE & SRE income worth >$3 in market cap increase. This is despite spreads being at all-time tight levels Even if we were to assume regulatory regime changes in Bermuda, Athene should be able to generate mid high-teens ROE – and one could argue that this would result in reduced competition / spread widening benefiting $APO longer term on incremental capital deployment Contrast this model to $OWL which I view as being at best a mean reversion play - interesting if you can buy at close to run-off implied valuations but ultimately capped since its LP flows are cyclical and tend to be inversely correlated to the investment opportunity set

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Origo @origoinvest

2 months ago

x.com/i/article/2035…

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🚨NEWS: UK iPhone users must now prove their age or lose full internet access "It is absolutely outrageous that, overnight, Apple has put a chokehold on Britons' freedom to search the internet, access information and use apps unless they provide sensitive ID documents. This means 35 million Brits who have paid hundreds or even thousands of pounds for Apple tech suddenly now have a child's device unless they comply with invasive demands for personal information that go far beyond what UK law requires. Apple has crossed the Rubicon with this software update which is more like ransomware, holding customers hostage to ID demands that are invasive, exclusionary and unnecessary. Children's online safety is vital but requires better parental controls and thoughtful tech responsibility - not sweeping, draconian, shock demands by foreign companies for all of our IDs and credit cards." - Silkie Carlo [@silkiecarlo]

OpenAl is offering private-equity firms a guaranteed minimum return of 17.5%, as well as early access to models not yet in public release.

A hill I'll die on: Current LLM chat interfaces are a regression from GUIs. Actions that used to be links, buttons, or keyboard shortcuts are now things I have to spell out in conversation. Why?

$CCLFX. $32.5 billion. The largest interval fund in America. In 2021, ZERO borrowers were paying interest in IOUs. By September 2025: 188. And they thought: no losses, no redemptions. Read this. Cliffwater tells investors: "96% first-lien senior secured." "10% distribution yield." "Minimal losses." I parsed every position in their N-CSR filings on SEC EDGAR. All of them. I cross-referenced borrower names across every semi-annual filing. At least 53 borrowers were cash-pay in earlier filings. They used to pay cash interest. Then they couldn't. The loan was amended to PIK to avoid a technical default. Amend and extend. Cliffwater marks most at par. $1.24 billion. Five names that tell you everything: 1. WEALTH ENHANCEMENT GROUP — manages $136B in client assets. Can't service interest on its own subordinated debt. Holds a $23M tranche at 15% PIK — zero cash on that tranche. CW blended mark: 82c. My mark: 42c. The wealth managers can't manage their own leverage. 2. APEX SERVICE PARTNERS — HVAC rollup, 200+ companies, 43 states. Was cash-pay 2021-2024. Now holds 14.25% PIK sub-debt tranches paying zero cash. CW: 90c. My mark: 39c. Your AC repairman's parent company is paying its subordinated lenders in IOUs. 3. CPF DENTAL — dental chain. SOFR + 9.25% plus a 4.25% PIK component. All-in rate: ~18%. Maturity: December 31, 2025. The loan was due three months after the filing date. CW marked it at 99.7 cents. My mark: 64c. 4. PPV INTERMEDIATE HOLDINGS — healthcare. The name is the evidence: "Intermediate Holdings" = structural subordination. Sub debt. 13.75% PIK tranche, zero cash. CW: 97c. My mark: 37c. Behind SBA loans, revolvers, equipment lenders, tax liens, pension obligations, and every operating company creditor. Sixty cents of overstatement on a tranche paying nothing. 5. iCIMS — HR tech/SaaS. Was cash-pay from Mar 2022 through Sep 2024 in every filing. Now 10.07% PIK. The software company can't pay its interest bill. CW: 96c. My mark: 84c. Generous. Very generous. Even with a modest haircut, that's a confirmed credit event they won't recognize. The playbook: Borrower can't pay (SOFR went 0% to 5.3%) --> Amend to PIK (no default recorded) --> Extend maturity --> Mark at par (97% Level 3, no market price, Cliffwater sets its own marks) --> Book PIK as income ($57M of PIK interest in six months ended Sep 2025 alone) --> Collect fees Why they do it — the incentive: Cliffwater charges a 1% annual management fee on net assets. At $32.5B, that's $325 million a year. Every dollar of markdown reduces the fee base. Permanently. The incentive to not mark down is $325M/year. And here's the fund-of-fund layer they don't talk much about: six of their top ten holdings are CLOs, BDCs, and fund vehicles that charge their own fees underneath. Silver Point CLO ($1.4B), Barings Private Credit Corp ($919M), BlackRock Shasta CLO ($600M), Golub Capital, Blue Owl, AGTB. Your grandmother is paying Cliffwater 1% to invest in other funds that charge another 1-2%. Fees on fees on fees. On assets marked by the people collecting the fees. Cliffwater reports a non-accrual rate of 0.42%. I identified at least 53 borrowers that converted from cash-pay to PIK — borrowers that stopped paying cash interest. That is not 0.42%. That is systematic restructuring to avoid classification. Amend the loan before it hits non-accrual, and the number stays low. "First-lien senior secured" — on hundreds of holdco/intermediate/bidco positions, the collateral is equity of the subsidiary. Not the factory. Not the receivables. Not the cash. In liquidation: IRS eats first. Pensions eat. SBA eats. Revolvers eat. Equipment lenders eat. Employee claims eat. MCAs eat. Trade creditors eat. Then maybe the holdco "first lien" gets the scraps. They call that 96% senior secured. 97% of this fund is Level 3 — no observable market price. Cliffwater determines the value. Cliffwater collects the fees. Cliffwater reports the yield. And investors see 10% distributions and think it's safe. Remember that they went after unsophisticated investors. Retirement accounts. Your grandmother's financial advisor put her in this. First out gets the most out due to Cliffwater's bogus marks. Redemption requests just hit 14% in Q1 2026. The fund caps quarterly repurchases at 7%. This is the beginning. Every data point from their own N-CSR filings on EDGAR. CIK 1735964. Verifiable.

Hard to be bearish on a company when the CEO literally tells you that he will use every last dollar of his pay to buy the company’s stock for as long as he is there Wish more management teams operated in the same way Great act of shareholder and executive incentive alignment

Kevin Carpenter @kejca

3 months ago

Berkshire Hathaway CEO joined CNBC's Squawk Box this morning and shared two big pieces of news: (1) Berkshire started repurchasing shares yesterday for the first time since May 2024. Abel consulted with chairman Warren Buffett before making this decision. (2) Abel used his

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The worst segments of private credit (hint: it's not software*): Amazon aggregators Dental roll-ups Veterinary roll-ups Soccer teams Education *except for Pluralsight, which may be the worst private credit deal of all time

it’s your promotion year at Blackstone and Jon Gray calls and asks if you wanna buy some SaaS loans at 98 cents: ft.com/content/7dadc5…

Yesterday, we went down to Brixton tube station for the last ever day of Brixton News, one of the capital's last specialist news stands. TfL are raising the rent on the unit Pritesh Patel and his brother run from £40,000 a year to £125,000 a year, something they cannot afford.

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They created a new embankment in London! Should we fill it with: A) Trees, nice flowerbeds, maybe a little cafe? B) Brooding black modernist obelisks, unusable disturbed bench "things" Obviously they went with B

Fascinating piece by @megbaynes on how risk-averse British pension schemes are. The £73bn universities pension scheme has been delivering an insanely pedestrian *1.7%* return for its members over the past 5 years thetimes.com/article/1b7a1f…

@paulswaney3 Interested

NEW: Under UK Legislation anyone developing end-to-end encryption is now labelled as a “hostile actor”

Avant / Après la piétonisation de la Rue Pavée dans Paris Centre

Elon e-mail from 2013 on why SpaceX should stay private until it’s reached certain technological milestones: ▫️ “Public company stocks, particularly if big step changes in technology are involved, go through extreme volatility, both for reasons of internal execution and for reasons that have nothing to do with anything except the economy. This causes people to be distracted by the manic-depressive nature of the stock instead of creating great products.” ▫️ SpaceX was valued at $5B in 2013 and he thought if Dragon and Falcon 9 were well executed the business could be worth $15B. Meanwhile, the company would keep offering secondary sales for employee liquidity and this was his recommendation on whether or not to sell: ▫️ “Below is my advice about selling SpaceX stock or options. No complicated analysis is required, as the rules of thumb are pretty simple. If you believe that SpaceX will execute better than the average public company, then our stock price will continue to appreciate at a rate greater than that of the stock market, which would be the next highest return place to invest money over the long term. Therefore, you should sell only the amount that you need to improve your standard of living in the short to medium term. I do actually recommend selling some amount of stock, even if you are certain it will appreciate, as life is short and a bit more cash can increase fun and reduce stress at home (so long as you don't ratchet up your ongoing personal expenditures proportionately).” ▫️ The concept of Starlink was unveiled in 2015. The first constellation was launched in 2019. Starlink is projected to do $20B+ sales next year, steady revenue (on top of world-beating launch business) for a potential IPO to raise $30B at a $1.5T valuation in 2026. That will *definitely* limit volatility as a public co to pursue next big tech changes (eg. AI data centre opportunity).

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Powerful writing

Gideon Rachman @gideonrachman

7 months ago

I hesitate to call any piece FT piece “important” because it sounds self important BUT this by ⁦@RobinBHarding⁩ is genuinely important. And I think will have a big impact on.ft.com/4rlwqWz

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