The Week Ahead

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The week ahead of us 🔍

Here’s a look at earnings coming up this week, we mainly have retailers closing out earnings season.

• Tuesday: HEICO, Cava

• Wednesday: Salesforce, BMO, HP, UHaul, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Viking, American Eagle, Abercrombie & Fitch, Chewy, Advance Auto Parts, Capri, Victoria’s Secret

• Thursday: Costco, National Grid, Marvell, Dell, Dollar General, MongoDB, Zscaler, Ulta, Best Buy, Birkenstock, Gap, Burlington, SentinelOne, Nordstrom, Kohl’s, Foot Locker,

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Headlines 🔍

• DoJ and 30 state attorney generals have filed an antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation, seeking to break up the company and its Ticketmaster subsidiary over allegations of monopolistic practices. The lawsuit claims Live Nation has abused its dominant position in ticketing, venue management, and concert promotion to stifle competition, resulting in higher prices and poorer service for fans.

  • The disastrous pre-sale for Taylor Swift’s Era’s Tour was an early catalyst for intense scrutiny of TicketMaster. Word on the street suggests that Swifties’ rage was a tipping point for the DoJ

• Elon Musk’s xAI raised $6B of Series B financing at a $18B Valuation. OpenAI has some fresh competition. Elon’s AI startup, which is less than a year old, includes a similar investor base to those who joined him in the Twitter deal. This includes including Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Fidelity, and Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal. The AI system, Grok, is integrated within X for paid users. The full story is here.

• Inside the Mass Exodus at Barings: Here’s the long awaited BBG report on what went down with the senior direct lending professionals who left Barings to go join Corinthia. In total, 22 heads shockingly quit Barings back in March! Barings professionals didn’t feel so hot about MassMutual’s backing, and wanted the opportunity to go out and try to earn more on their own. Barings has told LPs they’re “open for business”, while remaining juniors are floating resumes around, and other direct lenders are trying to refi them out of deals…quite the drama 🍿 

• Oaktree now owns Inter Milan: After failing to repay a 395mm loan to their creditor Oaktree, the Chinese owner of Serie A soccer club Inter Milan, Suning Holding, handed the keys over to Oaktree. This may not be only distressed soccer club deal to play out over the medium term - English soccer team, Everton, is expected to be acquired by another party should the 777 Partners deal fall apart.

• Google AI’s seems to be pretty useless (for now) - at the moment, Google AI is telling users to do terrible things such as the examples below…

• Goldman wasn’t as savvy during the blowup of Archegos as everyone thought… it turns out Archegos accidentally sent $470 million to Goldman instead of withdrawing that amount….This mistake helped Goldman avoid major losses, while Credit Suisse in particular took a $5.5B hit.

• Boeing saw a six-fold rise in employee concerns on product safety and quality. Post the Alaska Airlines debacle in March there’s an (unsurprising) “disconnect” between senior management and those building the planes, the company’s CEO noted.

• Intuit, the owner of TurboTax saw 1 million fewer users using their free-service for tax filing y/y, down to 10 million people using the free-service. Despite the loss of low-value customers (those “bouncing around looking for free[bies]” as Intuit’s c-suite described them), revenue grew 12% YoY.

• McKinsey was caught authoring a 300-page primer on how to dominate future war tech….for the Chinese Communist Party.

• X, formerly Twitter, will start hiding likes soon. This is pretty lame IMO.

• Most Americans think we’re in a recession and the S&P 500 is down this year: Well this isn’t true, lol. A very easy google search shows that the S&P 500 is up 12%+ YTD … this seems like a good reminder to fade certain parts of consumer sentiment (and Biden’s P.R. team) …

• Vivek Ramaswamy acquires an activist stake in BuzzFeed.

• An Ohio billionaire plans to take $20 million sub to Titanic site to prove industry’s safer after OceanGate implosion - per the New York Post

• Equinix Exposed: Major Accounting Manipulation, Core Business Decay and Selling an AI Pipe Dream as Insiders Cashed Out Hundreds of Millions

• Here’s the 2024 analysis on electricity usage and the forecast to 2026. A couple highlights:

  • Global data center energy demand could double by 2026, according to the IEA

    

     

  • Emerging economies (especially China and India) are primary drivers of sustained global energy consumption

  • Industrial production slowdown in Europe (especially among small to medium sized businesses hurt by the 2022 oil price shock) is driving down energy demand in the region

M&A Transactions💭 

Mirus Bio, provider of gene transfer technologies, has reached a definitive agreement to be acquired for $600.00M by Merck Biopharma.

Loopia Group, provider of internet hosting and domain registration services, was acquired for $381.25M by team.blue.

HI-Bio, developer of precision medicines intended to treat people suffering from autoimmune and inflammatory diseases, has reached a definitive agreement to be acquired for $1.15B by Biogen (NAS: BIIB). Goldman Sachs advised on the sale.

Admiral Acquisition (LON: ADMR), a blank check company, has reached a definitive agreement to be acquired for $1.85B by Acuren. Jefferies Financial Group and UBS Investment Bank advised on the sale.

KOC Electric, manufacturer of electrical transformers and electronic systems, was acquired for $433.24M by LS ELECTRIC (KRX: 010120).

Elector, provider of real estate services, was acquired for $114.70M by Motor Oil Hellas (ATH: MOH).

AuditBoard, developer of a cloud-based audit automation software, has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired for $3.0B by Hg. Goldman Sachs advised on the sale.

Private Placement Transactions💭

DeepL, developer of an artificial intelligence translator and writing tool, raised $300.00M of venture funding led by Index Ventures at a pre-money valuation of $1.7B.

Cargo Beamer, operator of an intermodal transport system, raised $150.79M of Series B venture funding led by Swiss Federal Office of Energy, Nordwind Ventures and Federal Railway Authority.

Grey Wolf Therapeutics, developer of drug discovery platform, raised $124.30M of Series B venture funding led by Pfizer Ventures, Intermediate Capital Group, and Earlybird Venture Capital.

MAR Mining, developer of a could mining company, raised $100M of venture funding led by Nomad Capital, No Limit Holdings, and Sky9 Capital.

Flipkart, operator of an e-commerce shopping portal, raised $1.0B of venture funding led by Walmart at a pre-money valuation of $35.0B.

Noteworthy Chart 🧭

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