Hi there
Welcome to the best of the Altea Community.
Stefan here, we’ve got an extra special issue today
Let’s go 🚀
Table of Contents
👋 New Members This Week
Welcome to the 25 new members this week 👋
A few notable members..
🇯🇵 Miki Bito is co-founder and CEO of CacheAI Technologies in Japan. They build enterprise infrastructure that cuts LLM inference cost and latency by up to 90%. Based in Osaka, Japan and expanding globally.
🌍 Mike Swigunski was employee #4 at Empire Flippers, where he helped scale the company into the world’s largest curated marketplace for buying and selling online businesses, facilitating $120m+ in acquisitions.
He’s a #1 bestselling author and TEDx speaker on location-independent work, founder of Global Career and Dividends, and has visited 107 countries. He’s based in St. Louis.
🧾 Collateral #2 is out
The second issue of Collateral, our occasional newsletter on modern private lending, landed last week.
The part I’m most excited about is that Collateral is becoming collaborative.
Our community is full of sharp, opinionated people who understand the nuances of private lending markets. We want to lift those voices.
On that note, issue # 2 kicked this off with Brian Flaherty questioning whether BB-rated CLO tranches are mispriced.
Brian realized that BB-rated CLO tranches are rated as junk, yet historically they’ve defaulted 6x less often than BB corporate bonds. They still yield nearly double.
Is that genuine mispricing, or a yield trap?
- Have CLO expertise? Brian would love to hear from you!
- Want to contribute to a future issue? Just hit reply
- Want to get Collateral in your inbox? Click below:
💬 New Discussions
Trump’s proposal to save Hollywood filmmaking
Valerie Fristachi broke the news that President Trump is calling for a federal production incentive for film and TV, after lobbying from Jon Voight.
With extremely clever stacking, Wyatt reckons US films could conceivably get 70–80% back. That would make them the most attractive credits in the world, and mean more (and better) collateral for lenders like us.
“A deduction only helps a company with taxable income to offset, and most single-picture production entities don’t have any…
None of it, federal or state, changes whether anyone shows up to see the film. That’s still the risk on equity.”
A few film-industry folks are less convinced this will revamp Hollywood specifically:
“Don’t get too excited… It still needs to be more than the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The UK being the Big One…. and even if that hurdle is cleared then you’ll have the infighting between states, so it doesn’t mean the work will be coming back to Hollywood, just the pockets of the Studios.”
Let’s pinhook some falcons
Inspired by an episode of The Gentlemen, Adrian Boeckeler went deep on Gulf falcon racing as an alternative asset.
His conclusion borrows from Wyatt’s piece on horse pinhooking: the smart money probably isn’t in owning the racer.
“You don’t have to win the race to make money from racing.
Sometimes the better business is finding raw potential, reducing the uncertainty, and selling it to the person who desperately wants to win.”
Sally Hodges called it better than the series that inspired it:
I wish things as interesting as this were always in my inbox on a Monday morning. So good – a LOT better than the series which was the catalyst, although the ‘alt investment’ which underpins it all (literally “under”) is pretty cool. —
Sally Hodges
Kalshi wants margin, and one commissioner may decide
Kalshi has asked the CFTC to allow margin trading on its prediction markets.
Meanwhile, CFTC Chairman Michael Selig is currently the sole sitting commissioner on a five-seat body, and has said he’s prepared to finalize prediction-market rules on his own.
That’s a lot of power over retail investing sitting with one person, and it can work both ways.
🙏 New Asks & Offers
🏀 Two NY Liberty playoff tickets
Daisy has two extra tickets to the NY Liberty playoff game at Barclays Center, Tuesday, Sep 29 at 8:30pm. First come, first served.
Want the tix? Let her know.
🏠 Transactional funding on real estate deals?
Mike S. wants to know if anyone in the community has used true transactional funding for real estate deals.
This is common in states where wholesalers can’t use the buyer’s money to pay the seller, and have to close both sides of the transaction themselves. Without enough capital to do that, they bring in a transactional lender for a very short period, at a high annualized rate.
Have experience with this, on either side of the loan? Chat with Mike.
🎓 Economics internships?
Mandar Mirashi is looking for economics internship leads for his nephew.
Have an opening, or know someone who does? Drop a note on the post.
That’s it for today.
See you next week, Stefan & Wyatt
