Hello and welcome to Alts Cafe.
A curated pour of the week’s most important alt investing stories, customized and brewed to your liking.
Table of Contents
Highlights
- International Investing: South Korea overtakes India as the world’s sixth-largest stock market on an AI memory chip rally
- Startups & VC: VC secondaries hit a record $112 billion and now outpace traditional IPOs as a path to liquidity
- Sports: Members of the Glazer family are studying a sale of their Manchester United stake
- Prediction Markets: The CFTC clears the first US-regulated crypto perps at Kalshi and Coinbase
- Music & Film: Spotify and Universal greenlight fan-made AI covers, sending Spotify up 13%
- Crypto: Strategy sells 32 Bitcoin, breaking Saylor’s “never sell” vow
- Collectibles, Culture and Luxury: Ferrari stock slides after its $640,000 Jony Ive EV reveal
- Private Equity & Private Credit: Private credit posts its steepest paper losses since 2022
- Real Estate: Sellers yank homes off the market at a near-record pace
- Precious Metals and Gems: Gold holds near $4,500 as central banks keep buying
- Artwork: A Lucian Freud nude could fetch up to $47 million
- Farmland: New cases of screwworm are appearing in the US
- Wine, Whiskey & Spirits: Georgia uncorks Stalin’s 40,000-bottle cellar
International Investing
Around the world…
- 🇲🇦 Morocco ends South Africa’s 15-year run as Africa’s most industrialized economy, as automaking and aerospace exports reshape the continent’s investment map
- 🇰🇷 South Korea overtakes India as the world’s sixth-largest stock market, powered by an AI memory chip rally that has Samsung and SK Hynix driving the KOSPI to record highs
- 🇨🇴 An outsider calling himself “El Tigre” stuns the establishment in a first-round Colombian election upset, rattling markets that had priced in a leftist frontrunner
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Startups & VC
- VC secondaries hit a record $112 billion and now outpace traditional IPOs as a path to liquidity
- More than 220 US unicorns have fallen below their billion-dollar marks, with 2021-vintage startups now worth 68% less as AI splits winners from losers
- Robinhood now lets customers turn loose AI agents to trade stocks and make credit card purchases, with isolated accounts, trade notifications, and a one-tap kill switch
- AI coding startup Cognition raises $1 billion at a $26 billion valuation, more than doubling in eight months as its Devin agent now writes 89% of the company’s own code
- Defense tech posts a record Q1 with $19.8 billion across 262 deals, as 22-year-old Mach Industries quadruples to a $1.8 billion valuation in a year on the drone boom
- Tom Mueller’s Impulse Space raises $500 million at $4.26 billion to build the in-orbit “last-mile” tugs that move satellites after launch
- Biotech exit activity reaches its highest level since 2021 at $13.3 billion, led by Kailera and Avalyn as investors diversify away from AI-heavy portfolios
Sports
- Members of the Glazer family are studying a sale of their Manchester United stake, potentially handing Jim Ratcliffe a path to full control
- The Knicks’ first Finals run in decades is on track to generate over $140 million for MSG Sports across tickets, suites, and sponsorships
- The attorneys general of New York and New Jersey open a probe into FIFA’s World Cup ticket pricing after dynamic pricing pushed MetLife final seats toward $33,000
Fernando Tatis Jr. owes $3.7m to Big League Advance investors
Big legal story in the world of athlete investing
In 2017, an 18-year-old Fernando Tatis Jr. was a nobody minor leaguer. He needed cash.
Big League Advance, a platform for investing directly in athletes (via income share agreements) gave him $2m upfront in exchange for 10% of his future baseball earnings over 25 years (essentially his lifetime earnings)
Four years later, Tatis signed a $340m contract with the Padres, meaning the 10% slice is worth ~$34 million. BLA is owed that money, Tatis has been fighting it ever since.
Prediction Markets
- Coinbase is cleared to list perpetual futures through its Bermuda subsidiary, letting US customers post Bitcoin, ether, and stablecoins as margin collateral
- The CFTC opens the door to the first US-regulated crypto perpetual futures, approving Kalshi’s BTCPERP contract in the biggest expansion of domestic crypto derivatives access since the spot Bitcoin ETFs
What are perps?
A perpetual future (“perp”) is a bet on the price of an asset that never expires.
A normal futures contract has a settlement date: you agree today to buy Bitcoin at a set price on, say, December 31, and on that date the contract closes out.
A perp strips out the expiry. You can hold the position forever, which makes it behave like just owning the asset, except you never have to actually take delivery of any Bitcoin.
Two things make them attractive, and risky:
First, leverage. You put down a small slice of collateral (margin) and control a much larger position, often 10x, 20x, even 100x. A 1% move in Bitcoin becomes a 20% swing in your account at 20x. That cuts both ways, and you can get liquidated, wiped out, fast.
Second, the funding rate. Because there’s no expiry date to pull the contract’s price back toward the real (“spot”) price, the exchange uses a periodic payment between longs and shorts to keep them tethered. If more traders are betting up than down, the longs pay the shorts a small fee every few hours, and vice versa. That funding mechanism is the clever bit that keeps a never-expiring contract honest.
Why it matters here: perps are the single highest-volume product in all of crypto, but for years US traders couldn’t legally touch them; the action lived on offshore venues like Binance and Bybit.
The CFTC just cleared Kalshi and Coinbase to offer them onshore.
Music & Film
- Spotify and Universal strike a deal licensing fan-made AI covers and remixes, sending Spotify shares up 13% as the majors move to monetize rather than fight AI
- Bill Ackman’s $64 billion takeover bid for Universal Music gets rejected, underscoring how richly the market still values blue-chip catalog
- A24’s “Backrooms” opens to a record $81 million, crowning the youngest director ever to top the box office and proving the internet-horror IP pipeline
Crypto
- Strategy sells 32 Bitcoin for $2.5 million, breaking Michael Saylor’s “never sell” ethos and spooking investors as BTC slips below $70,000 amid an 11-day ETF outflow streak
- Stellar’s XLM token jumps roughly 80% after the DTCC selects it to pilot tokenization of $114 trillion in custodied assets, with the rollout targeted for the first half of 2027
- Securitize brings Hamilton Lane’s HLSCOPE private credit fund onto the Tron blockchain, its first issuance on a network hosting roughly $90 billion in stablecoins
Collectibles, Culture and Luxury
- Ferrari stock falls 5% after unveiling Luce, a $640,000 EV designed by Jony Ive, as investors question the brand’s electric pivot
- GameStop posts a record quarterly profit and launches a $2 billion buyback, with collectibles like trading cards now nearly 42% of total revenue
- Pele’s match-worn shirt from the 1958 World Cup final heads to Sotheby’s with a $6 million estimate, set to become the most valuable piece of memorabilia ever sold from the three-time champion
- A pristine first-edition paperback of “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” sets a new world record at nearly $23,000, one of only 5,000 originally printed
Private Equity & Private Credit
- Unrealized losses at US private credit lenders deepen to 2.35% of net asset value, the steepest paper losses since 2022 as scrutiny of the asset class intensifies
- Apollo’s president warns that wealthy individual investors keep fleeing private credit funds, reversing the retail inflows that fueled the sector’s boom
Real Estate
- America’s luxury housing boom is now essentially just a Bay Area story, with AI wealth concentrating high-end demand in a single region
- Sellers pulled 5.8% of US listings off the market in April, a near-record delisting pace as homes linger and price expectations drift out of line with a buyer’s market
- US investor home purchases fall 6% year-over-year to their lowest level since 2020, with the sharpest drops in condos and lower-priced properties
- A San Francisco developer lists a $2.995 million Duboce Triangle home and will accept OpenAI or Anthropic stock as payment, a play for paper-rich, cash-constrained AI employees
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Resources
Artwork
- Lucian Freud’s “Sleeping by the Lion Carpet” hits the block for the first time at a London modern art sale with a high estimate of $47 million
- Christie’s and Sotheby’s New York Old Masters sales generate $13.4 million combined, with roughly 90% sell-through and several lots clearing well above estimate
Precious Metals and Gems
- Gold holds near $4,500 an ounce after January’s record, with central banks set to buy another 755 tonnes in 2026 and Goldman Sachs targeting $5,400 by year-end
Farmland
- New cases of screwworm are appearing in the US
Wine, Whiskey, and Spirits
- Georgia will auction Stalin’s 40,000-bottle wine cellar, a Soviet-era trove whose provenance could command a steep historical premium
- The world’s oldest known Scotch, a Blair Castle whisky bottled in 1841, returns to auction via Whisky Auctioneer at around $22,000
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See you next time, Stefan
Disclosures
- This issue was sponsored by Institutional 1031
- This issue contains no affiliate links.
