China is repricing American AI

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Highlights

• International Investing: China’s Moonshot ships a model that ​matches US labs for far less​
• Startups & VC: OpenAI and Anthropic alone soak up ​more than half of all 2026 venture funding​
• Sports: The Premier Lacrosse League lands ​$100 million ahead of the 2028 Olympics​
• Prediction Markets: A reality dating show quietly moves ​$24 million on Kalshi​
• Music & Film: Nolan’s Odyssey powers AMC to its ​best quarter in 106 years​
• Crypto: Citadel Securities writes ​Crypto.com’s first institutional check​ at a $20 billion valuation
• Collectibles, Culture and Luxury: Michael Rubin bets ​$90 million on a four-day party​ and draws 200,000 to Fanatics Fest
• Private Equity & Private Credit: Buyout firms rush to ​dump shares before lock-ups expire​
• Real Estate: Ares scoops up ​$473 million of Whitestone retail​ as strip malls draw institutions
• Precious Metals and Gems: Central banks keep ​buying gold near $4,000​
• Artwork: Christie’s posts its ​strongest half in five years​ at $4.5 billion
• Farmland: Farmland’s famously steady returns ​may be less steady than they look​
• Wine, Whiskey & Spirits: A bottle of Yamazaki 50 ​sells for over $1 million​ as Japanese whisky sweeps the tables

International Investing

Around the world…

1. China’s Moonshot ships a model that ​matches US labs for less​
2. Foreign investors scoop up a ​record $60 billion of Japanese stocks​ in the first half, the most ever for a six-month stretch, as the Nikkei strings together record highs
3. Revolut confirms a ​$115 billion valuation​ in a secondary share sale, up from $75 billion less than a year ago

Why it matters: The DeepSeek moment, on repeat

Kimi K3 is the week’s most important repricing, and it has little to do with China winning the AI race. It is about the cost of intelligence collapsing.

Moonshot’s open-weight model matched or beat several top US systems on coding and agentic benchmarks while listing at $15 per million output tokens against roughly $50 for the equivalent Western model.

For markets, the implication is uncomfortable for exactly the companies that just absorbed half of all venture funding: if a well-capitalized challenger can approximate the frontier at a fraction of the price, the moat protecting trillion-dollar valuations is thin.

This is the second time in eighteen months a Chinese lab has forced that question. The trade is not to short the US labs; it is to notice where the value migrates.

Moonshot is already lining up a Hong Kong IPO, DeepSeek is reportedly raising near $70 billion, and the cheapest way to own the efficiency wave may be the Chinese challengers doing the commoditizing, not the incumbents being commoditized.

Startups & VC

• Revolut confirms a ​$115 billion valuation​ in a secondary sale, more than 50% above its mark from under a year ago
• Databricks signs a term sheet for ​$3 billion at a $188 billion valuation​, up 40% in six months and its second raise of the year
• Creator-marketing startup Passionfroot raises ​$15 million from Insight Partners​ to turn brand deals into an AI-run pipeline and expand to the US

Why it matters: Crowdfunding’s one true unicorn

Revolut gets parroted as the greatest equity-crowdfunding success in history, but the more honest framing is that it is essentially the only mega-win the category has ever produced.

Back in 2016, 433 retail backers put a collective £1 million into Revolut through ​Crowdcube​ at a £40 million valuation, an average check of about £2,152, for roughly 2.32% of the company between them.

At $115 billion, holders are sitting on something like an 822x paper return; even after their stake diluted to 1.79% across later rounds, the valuation compounded so much faster that dilution barely dented the outcome, leaving roughly 600x.

But when a 2024 window let those backers sell at $865.42 a share, about 404x, they could ​offload only a portion​ of their holdings, not the whole position.

Sports

• The Premier Lacrosse League lands ​$100 million ahead of the 2028 Olympics​ as it builds toward team ownership and its biggest commercial push yet
• Women’s sports bars quadruple in a year as The Sports Bra raises ​$1.2 million to franchise nationally​, with women’s sports revenue set to top $3 billion in 2026

Why it matters: Buying a lacrosse league before it has franchises

A hundred million dollars is a serious check for a sport most Americans have never watched live.

Lacrosse returns to the Olympics at LA 2028 for the first time in over a century, a scarcity event that hands the Premier Lacrosse League a fixed date on which global attention, broadcast interest, and sponsor budgets all converge.

Paul Rabil’s league is raising directly into that catalyst: It’s a shift away from its single-entity structure, where the league owns every team, toward actual franchises that can be sold to outside owners. It is the same ladder Major League Soccer climbed, where expansion fees went from tens of millions to north of $500 million as the league matured and global tournaments pulled soccer into the American mainstream.

For investors, the PLL is the least crowded corner of the sports-franchise boom. The risk is that lacrosse never crosses over. The asymmetry is that if it does, $100 million today buys in below the ground floor.

Prediction Markets

• Kalshi clears ​nearly $24 million on the Love Island USA finale​ alone, roughly matching the volume of the last Best Picture Oscars race, as reality TV floods event contracts
• Two-thirds of new Love Island traders are women, ​reshaping a platform that otherwise runs 75% male​ and recruiting through TikTok
• The Premier Lacrosse League quietly signs ​an exclusive deal with Polymarket​, putting the platform’s signage on the scorer’s table at its games
• World Cup trading helped prediction markets clear ​more than $50 billion in June​, a 75% monthly jump, with sports the dominant category

Why it matters: Women are driving Love Island activity on Kalshi

A reality dating show just did nearly the volume of the Oscars’ marquee category, and the composition of the traders is the real story.

Kalshi’s entertainment volume has gone from $43 million in 2024 to over $600 million this year, and Love Island did much of the recent lifting.

More striking is who showed up: two-thirds of new Love Island traders are women, on a platform that otherwise skews three-quarters male.

The demand side is unambiguously solved, and the platforms now racing to lock exclusive league deals and female audiences are building the moats that will decide who gets acquired when the exchanges come shopping.

Music & Film

• Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey scores a ​$124.5 million domestic opening​, his biggest ever and 2026’s largest live-action debut, with premium screens supplying nearly 20% of the global gross
• AMC posts ​record revenue and a surprise profit​, its best quarter in a 106-year history, as IMAX and large-format screens drive the beat and attendance climbs 12%
• YouTube weighs how to respond as Netflix keeps ​poaching its biggest creators​, from Ms. Rachel to Mark Rober, in same-day streaming deals
• A judge ​pauses Paramount’s $110 billion Warner Bros. takeover​ while a coalition of states presses antitrust claims

Why it matters: Scarcity has a screen count

A 2,700-year-old poem just handed AMC the best quarter of its 106-year life.

Nolan shot the entire Odyssey on IMAX cameras, and those premium auditoriums, barely 1% of the world’s screens, delivered close to 20% of the film’s global gross and more than half of AMC’s ticket-growth for the title.

Revenue hit a record $1.6 billion, adjusted EBITDA cleared $300 million for the first time ever, and the stock jumped 26% on the day.

A finite number of large-format screens lets theaters charge a premium that streaming cannot replicate, which is why AMC now wants to add extra-large screens in up to 250 auditoriums using third-party capital.

Crypto

• Citadel Securities makes a ​$400 million investment in Crypto.com​, the exchange’s first institutional round in a decade, at a $20 billion valuation
• Movement Labs files for ​Chapter 11 after its token collapses 99%​, months after a market-making scandal, despite raising $141 million
• Morgan Stanley switches on ​Bitcoin, Ether, and Solana trading for E*Trade’s 8.6 million retail clients​ through Zero Hash
• Britain publishes a digital-asset strategy that could add ​up to £33 billion a year by 2035​, courting tokenization to defend London’s edge

Why it matters: The market makers move in

The most price-insensitive buyers in traditional finance are buying the plumbing of crypto

This is Citadel’s second stake in a major retail exchange in under a year, after ​Kraken’s round last November​, and it lands as Crypto.com opens to institutional capital for the first time in its ten-year life at a $20 billion mark.

Market makers invest in exchanges for the order flow, and their arrival signals that the retail crypto rails have become reliable enough infrastructure to underwrite. Set it beside Morgan Stanley ​flipping on spot trading for E*Trade​‘s millions of accounts and Britain building a tokenization strategy to keep London competitive, and the pattern is unmistakable: the institutions that spent the last cycle skeptical are now integrating crypto as a permanent asset class rather than a trade.

Boring, regulated, cash-generative infrastructure is getting institutionalized and repriced upward, while the casino tokens on top keep going to zero.

If anything, own the exchange, not the meme coin.

Collectibles, Culture and Luxury

• Michael Rubin spends ​$80 to $90 million on Fanatics Fest​, drawing nearly 200,000 fans and 500-plus athletes to a four-day sports-collectibles spectacle timed to the World Cup final
• A jersey Jalen Brunson wore in the Knicks’ first title run in 53 years sells for ​a record $1.02 million​ at Sotheby’s, the priciest Knicks piece ever
• Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber from The Empire Strikes Back, severed hand attached, sells for ​$3.75 million at Heritage​, the most ever paid for a prop used in a Star Wars film
• Rally winds down its fractional platform for the NYSE-bound PIKA fund, and investors are ​already mourning the model and questioning the discount​, with SEC filings flagging going-concern risk and an inflated stated NAV
• Location-based VR finds its footing as Sandbox VR ​scales past 80 venues​ and at least 20 major immersive venues, from Cosm to Netflix House, are set to open in 2026
• Jensen Huang’s signature leather jacket fetches ​$960,000 at Sotheby’s​, roughly 16 times its high estimate, on the cult of the tech-CEO founder

Why it matters: Price discovery for culture

Fanatics could lose tens of millions of dollars over four days and still count the weekend a success, which tells you it is not running an event business.

Rubin doubled his budget to $90 million, rented a million square feet of the Javits Center, and paid roughly ​$10 million to hundreds of athletes​, then let the crowd do the rest, with stars like Brunson selling out $1,000 photo ops before the doors opened.

Only about $15 million of revenue comes from tickets; the real value is 200,000 of the most engaged collectors in America under one roof, generating the pricing signals and cultural momentum that flow back into Fanatics’ cards, memorabilia, and betting businesses all year.

The same current is minting new venues entirely, from ​women’s sports bars going from zero to two dozen​ in three years to a lacrosse league raising nine figures on an Olympic bet.

Collecting is becoming a spectator sport, and Fanatics Fest is becoming its trading floor. Watch whether Rubin exports it to Los Angeles, London, and Tokyo.

Private Equity & Private Credit

• Buyout firms are ​rushing to offload post-IPO shares​ inside the lock-up window, with Neos and Forgent unwinding roughly $7 billion of stock across three offerings in five months
• Nontraded closed-end funds reach ​$261 billion in net asset value​, with private equity and venture strategies leading both flows and performance
• Goldman Sachs builds a ​private-markets platform for the wealthy​ chasing direct stakes in the next SpaceX and Stripe
• Greenbacker agrees to be acquired by MN8 Energy in a ​$375 million clean-power deal​, creating a top-three US platform as AI demand reshapes power

Why it matters: Lack of conviction

There is an unwritten rule that insiders wait out a six-month lock-up before selling, and a handful of sponsors just tore it up.

Neos Partners took Forgent Power public in February, then ran three follow-on offerings inside the 180-day window, moving roughly $7 billion of stock and cutting its voting stake from 81% to below 50% in five months.

Nothing about it is illegal, but it inverts the signal an IPO is supposed to send. When a sponsor lists a company and then sprints for the exit, the market reads it two ways:

• Either the pressure to return cash to LPs has become so acute that speed beats price discipline
• Or the sponsor simply does not believe in the multiple it just sold you.

Both readings should make public buyers cautious about this vintage of PE-backed listings. Capital is pouring in at exactly the moment sophisticated sellers are accelerating their way out.

Real Estate

• Ares adds ​$473 million of former Whitestone retail centers​ to its nontraded REIT, part of a $1.7 billion take-private, as its NAV climbs to $3.89 billion
• Fed-up travelers drive a ​bed-and-breakfast comeback​ as Airbnb grows more hotel-like, with the boutique lodging market rebranding around service and charm
• The typical starter home has jumped from ​$256,000 to $344,000 since 2019​, leaving 300,000 fewer affordable listings and squeezing first-time buyers even as inventory slowly rebuilds
• US construction costs keep climbing toward ​an 8% annual pace​ as tariffs and labor shortages bite, pricing out the supply response that normally caps a housing recovery

Why it matters: Strip malls are a quiet retail winner

The most contrarian trade in real estate right now is the one nobody was supposed to want: strip malls.

Ares just took Whitestone private for $1.7 billion and moved nine grocery-anchored and service-oriented centers worth $473 million into its nontraded REIT.

It is not an outlier. Retail real estate transaction volume rose 5% year over year, retail now accounts for 14% of all commercial activity, the highest share in a decade, and strip malls and senior housing were the two sectors where cap rates actually compressed, lifting values while everything else held flat.

Almost no new retail has been built since the e-commerce scare, vacancies sit near record lows, and the tenants that survived are the ones Amazon cannot replace: groceries, medical, services, food. That is durable, inflation-linked income trading at yields that still look generous because the sector spent a decade in the penalty box.

For allocators, the move is to buy the unloved cash flow while the narrative still says retail is dead, because by the time the consensus notices, the cap rates will already have moved.

Artwork

• Christie’s books ​$4.5 billion in first-half sales​, with auction sales up 71% and a 91% sell-through rate, its strongest six months since 2021
• London’s Old Master sales bring ​about $102 million across Christie’s and Sotheby’s​, led by a record £9.67 million Thomas Lawrence portrait of the Duke of Wellington
• Roughly a fifth of buyers at Sotheby’s Old Masters evening sale were ​new to the house​, with tech wealth chasing paintings that predate the steam engine
• A seven-ton Frank Gehry glass desk nicknamed Icehenge sells for ​$243,200​, a record for the architect’s design objects

Why it matters: Rotation into Old Masters

Christie’s just posted its strongest half in five years with auctions up 71% and a 91% sell-through, and while a $631 million single-owner collection did heavy lifting, the recovery reached far past the trophies.

Old Masters, the category left for dead a decade ago, is where the most telling money is moving: London sales cleared roughly $102 million, a Thomas Lawrence set a record, and a fifth of Sotheby’s evening buyers had never transacted with the house.

The rotation has a clean logic. Contemporary art spent years behaving like venture capital with paint, unlimited supply and momentum pricing, and buyers exhausted by that sameness are rediscovering the one thing the primary market cannot manufacture, which is closed supply.

Nobody graduates from art school and becomes another van Huysum, and below the trophy tier a four-century-old masterwork often costs what a mid-career fair booth does.

The auction houses have adapted faster than the rest of the market, and the smart buyers are following them into supply that cannot be printed.

Precious Metals and Gems

• Gold holds ​near $4,000 an ounce​ after correcting from January’s record, with central-bank demand cushioning every dip
• Central banks keep ​buying at record prices​, and a record 45% plan to add to reserves over the next year while 89% expect official holdings to rise
• Silver whipsaws from a ​record $121 in January to roughly $58​, a reminder that the monetary metal and the industrial one trade on very different clocks
• JPMorgan holds a ​path toward $6,000 gold​ by decade’s end even after the metal’s blistering 2025 run

Why it matters: The buyer who never sells

Gold corrected hard from its January record, and the most price-insensitive buyers on earth used the dip to keep accumulating.

Central banks bought 863 tonnes in 2025, roughly double the pre-2022 average, and the World Gold Council’s survey shows a record share ​planning to add more​, with gold now outweighing US Treasuries in global reserves for the first time since the 1990s.

Silver’s violent round trip, from $121 to $58 in months, shows why the industrial metal trades on positioning and cycles that mean-revert, while gold’s bid is sovereign and patient.

In a summer when leverage blew up in Korea, tokens went to zero in crypto, and PE sponsors sprinted for the exits, the asset whose largest holder has no intention of selling looks more like ballast.

Farmland

• A closer look argues farmland’s famously steady returns ​may be less steady than they look​, with smoothed appraisals masking real dispersion beneath the asset class
• UBS makes the institutional case in ​Farmland beyond the narrative​, arguing diversification across region, crop, and operating structure separates resilient portfolios from fragile ones
• After a 2024 dip, values are stabilizing as ​institutions crowd into Grade A soil​, paying premiums for documented tile maps, water rights, and proven yields
• The 2026 land outlook points to ​continued consolidation​, with solar, carbon, and alternative revenue streams underwriting demand even as interest rates stay elevated

Why it matters: The smooth line is a story

Farmland’s pitch to institutions is the flat, uncorrelated return line. But as money crowds in, buyers are bidding up documented, high-fertility, well-watered land to premiums while lesser ground lags.

The read for allocators is to treat farmland like the credit asset it actually resembles:

• Underwrite the specific collateral
• Diversify across region and crop and lease structure
• Discount the marketing chart that implies bond-like smoothness.

Steady is a feature of the accounting, not a guarantee.

Wine, Whiskey, and Spirits

• A bottle of Yamazaki 50 Year Old sells for ​more than $1 million​, the highest price ever for a single bottle of Japanese whisky
• Two casks from the silent Karuizawa distillery fetch ​a record $5.7 million​ at Christie’s, the last of a legend that stopped distilling in 2000
• Buckfast, the tonic wine made by Devon monks, grows profits ​roughly 12% to about $82 million​ despite a new UK alcohol duty
• The all-time auction leaderboard is now ​dominated by Macallan and Japanese distilleries​, with Karuizawa and Yamazaki firmly among the trophies

Why it matters: Japan’s closed-supply liquid trophies

While the broad whisky market spent two years digesting a cask glut, the very top of the Japanese category kept setting records.

A single Yamazaki 50 cleared a million dollars and a pair of Karuizawa casks fetched $5.7 million. Karuizawa stopped distilling in 2000, so every bottle sold permanently shrinks the supply, and Yamazaki’s oldest expressions exist in quantities you can count.

That is the same closed-supply logic pushing new money into Old Masters, applied to liquid, and it connects to the larger Japan theme running through this issue, where a weak yen makes every scarce Japanese asset look like a clearance sale to dollar buyers.

Buy the bottles the world cannot make more of, and let scarcity, not sentiment, set the exit.

Japan trip: 90 days away!

Three nights in Tokyo. One night in the Nagano highlands.

Our Japan trip is 90 days away, and we’re excited to share the trip is taking shape.

Updates:

• Hotels locked in: ​Cerulean Tower Tokyu Hotel​ (Shibuya) for 3 nights, ​Hotel Silk (Madarao)​ for our night in Iiyama
• Bonsai Day is fully confirmed: ​Shunkaen Bonsai Museum​, a traditional tea ceremony, and a private live bonsai performance with renowned artist ​Mr. Saeki​
• Sumo show is set. This is gonna be epic.
• Traditional tea ceremony in ​Shinjuku​ (matcha and sencha)
• Nagano day: Now includes the ​Jigokudani Snow Monkey Park​ before our distillery tour and tasting at ​Kiyokawa​
• Vinyl hunting in Shimokitazawa added for those sticking around before departure

More details to come as we lock in the final pieces.

Only 4 Spots Left

Tokyo, sumo, bonsai masters, snow monkeys, sake at a private distillery — this trip is going to be epic.

Early bird pricing is over, but you can still lock in before it’s fully booked.

• Price: $3,999
• Bring a guest: +$2,999
• Includes: All meals, drinks, activities, events, and transportation. Everything except flights.

Don’t wait, once the 12 spots are gone, they’re gone.

​Lock in your spot with a $1,000 deposit​. Fully refundable up to 60 days before departure.

Disclosures

• This issue has no sponsors and contains no affiliate links.