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: The US Treasury buys yen for the first time since 1998, joining Tokyo’s $59 billion defense of a currency near 40-year lows
- Startups & VC: SpaceX’s lockup cracks open as 911.5 million insider shares hit the market in a single window
- Sports: One week after announcing it, FIFA scraps the World Cup stake sale under threat of a European boycott
- Prediction Markets: The Yankees make Polymarket its biggest sports deal yet, with signage behind home plate
- Music & Film: Accenture buys Whalar in what may be the largest creator economy deal ever
- Crypto: The CLARITY Act runs out of Senate runway days before recess
- Collectibles, Culture and Luxury: A Josh Allen 1/1 sells for a record $1.7 million as the high-end card market keeps climbing
- Private Equity & Private Credit: Receivables and hard collateral move to the core of private credit as lenders chase a $28 trillion market
- Real Estate: Apollo hands Starwood’s gated REIT a $1.02 billion lifeline at the price of 41.5% of its best portfolio
- Precious Metals and Gems: Tungsten has soared 622% since January 2025, triple any other critical mineral
- Farmland: A strengthening El Niño is the agricultural risk markets are underpricing
- Wine, Whiskey & Spirits: America’s biggest whiskey supplier watches sales plunge 59% in a quarter
- Other: Robinhood, Interactive Brokers, and Schwab race to hand the order ticket to AI agents
International Investing
Around the world…
- The US Treasury joins Japan in the first coordinated yen-buying intervention since 1998, after Tokyo spent close to $59 billion in a single session to drag the currency from 164 to 158 against the dollar
- South Korea Hynix posts a 76% operating margin in the most profitable quarter in semiconductor history, then watches its shares crash 11% after offering no guidance and no new shareholder returns, with the KOSPI later plunging enough to trigger Seoul’s sidecar circuit breaker
- China hits Trip.com with a $765 million antitrust penalty for squeezing hotel operators, one of the largest fines ever under its Anti-Monopoly Law
- Australia‘s housing boom has hit a peak, with national prices posting their first quarterly fall in more than three years and Melbourne down 3.1% in a single quarter
Why it matters: America bails out Japan props up the Yen
Japan has burned through tens of billions defending the yen all year, but on Friday the New York Fed bought yen on behalf of the US Treasury, the first joint yen-buying operation since 1998, executed through Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanle.
The move was confirmed by both governments with a promise of more if needed.
Washington’s motives are not charity, since a collapsing yen is a trade and inflation problem for the US as much as a credibility problem for Tokyo.
For alternative investors the weak yen has been the engine behind two trades that run through this newsletter all year:
- Foreigners buying Japanese houses for the price of used cars, and
- Fecord tourist spending propping up everything from Ginza retail to Niseko ski property.
The assets are still cheap, but the decade where the currency did half the work for a dollar buyer may have just found its floor.
Startups & VC
- SpaceX’s first lockup expires and up to 911.5 million insider shares, roughly $123 billion worth, become sellable at once, 140% of the entire public float from June’s record IPO
- The same earnings report shows xAI’s pivot from chatbot to neocloud eating 82.7% of SpaceX’s capex, with AI spending doubling from $7.7 billion to $15.8 billion in a single quarter
- Robinhood files a $200 million publicly traded venture fund that gives retail investors exposure to 80 Y Combinator startups, listing on the NYSE at $25 a share with total annual expenses of 4.18%
- Anthropic signs a $10 billion compute deal with Volta Infra, an Nvidia-backed cloud startup that did not exist in December and is valued at $2.4 billion
- AI insurance startup Corgi raises at $4 billion, its third round in eight weeks, while opening 24/7 cafés as customer acquisition
Why it matters: The most talked-about lockup in IPO history
Every IPO has a lockup expiration. SpaceX’s is different because of the sheer arithmetic.
The June IPO floated about 639 million shares, and the first unlock alone makes 911.5 million more eligible to sell, roughly $123 billion at current prices, with another 1.3 billion after the next earnings report.
The stock went into the event down more than 20% from its highs, and Bernstein found many institutions simply refusing to buy on fundamentals until the overhang clears in December.
The company most people bought as a rocket-and-Starlink business is spending like a data center developer, with 82.7% of this year’s capex, $23.5 billion, going to xAI’s cloud pivot as Grok concedes the consumer AI fight.
The largest exit in venture history is now a live experiment in what happens when employee wealth, index demand, and an unprecedented supply calendar collide.
Sports
- Gianni Infantino abandons the $20 billion World Cup stake sale days after announcing it, following a threatened European boycott, a senior adviser’s resignation, and UEFA declaring a loss of confidence in his leadership
- LIV Golf says it has signed a term sheet with a lead investor to fund the league through 2030, with Bloomberg pointing to BC Partners and big questions remaining about star players and liabilities for a league that has lost $8.50 for every $1 invested
- The Savannah Bananas’ verified face-value ticket exchange has moved 89,000 tickets in five months and cost professional resellers $13.69 million in markups that never happened
- Padel drew a million US players last year as courts grew from 227 to roughly 1,000, and entrepreneurs from Equinox and Kith alumni to coffee founders are betting it becomes the next pickleball, with Manhattan memberships running $45,000 upfront
Why it matters: The deal sports money could not close
Last week this newsletter called FIFA’s plan to sell 21% of the World Cup’s commercial arm the financialization of the one property nobody thought was for sale.
It lasted eight days. Infantino pulled the deal after UEFA threatened to boycott, his own senior adviser resigned in protest, and NPR reports the retreat came with a loss-of-confidence vote trailing behind it.
Private capital has spent a decade buying everything in sport that could be bought: minority team stakes, league media vehicles, stadium debt. The World Cup sale failed not on valuation but on legitimacy, because the sellers turned out not to fully own what they were selling.
Investors should read the LIV situation through the same lens, since BC Partners’ money is reportedly contingent on stars staying, which is another way of saying the asset walks out the door unless the talent consents to the capital structure.
Prediction Markets
- Polymarket becomes an official partner of the New York Yankees, its biggest sports deal to date, with rotating signage behind home plate visible on YES and Amazon broadcasts through the end of the season
- Prediction markets get their own media company as Eventual launches with Polymarket as exclusive data partner, betting that top traders become the new expert class the way FiveThirtyEight made pollsters famous
- Robinhood’s Q2 shows only 17% of transaction revenue coming from equities, with prediction markets now out-earning stock trading on the platform that promised to democratize investing
- DraftKings gets dragged into the prediction-market lawsuit wave, with class actions alleging its Predictions product is a sportsbook in event-contract clothing, and 70% of volume coming from states where sports betting is illegal
Why it matters: The Yankees put a market behind home plate
A week after the Mets picked tiny sports-only Novig, the Yankees went the other way and took the biggest brand in prediction markets.
Polymarket gets the most valuable signage real estate in baseball, LED branding through the stadium, and hospitality suites, all for a deal that conspicuously runs only through the end of this season.
Teams want prediction-market money but are not yet willing to underwrite multi-year exposure to a category whose legal status is being litigated in real time, as the class actions piling up against DraftKings make clear.
On Robinhood, prediction markets already out-earn equity trading, which means the platforms have every incentive to keep pushing, whatever the courts eventually decide.
Music & Film
- Accenture Song agrees to acquire creator agency Whalar in what its founders call the largest creator economy transaction to date, months after CAA and TPG launched a $250 million creator roll-up vehicle
- Between the buyers and the platforms, a whole credit layer is forming around creator businesses, with the creator income financing market projected to grow from $2.7 billion to $7.4 billion by 2030
- IFPI rolls out global AI eligibility rules for official music charts, backed by every major and a coalition of indies, disqualifying tracks made on models trained without permission
- Spider-Man: Brand New Day posts the biggest domestic opening in history at $360 million, powering the biggest single box office weekend ever at $429 million
- A debut novelist’s $2.4 million crime-thriller deal collapses over unproven suspicions of AI use, the first package of its size killed by accusation alone
Why it matters: The creator economy gets its exit market
For a decade the knock on creator businesses was that they were income streams pretending to be companies: real revenue, no terminal value, nothing to sell.
This summer ended the argument. Accenture buying Whalar puts the industry’s largest transaction ever on the enterprise consolidation path, while CAA and TPG’s Compound Creative runs the private equity roll-up path.
Creator businesses now have two distinct classes of institutional buyer doing price discovery at the same time. And where buyers go, lenders follow, because the moment an asset has a credible exit price it becomes collateral.
This is why the financing layer is suddenly the interesting part: advances against future platform payouts, revenue-share deals, catalog loans, credit lines underwritten on audience data, a market projected to nearly triple to $7.4 billion by 2030.
The unresolved question is underwriting, since a creator’s cash flows are part royalty, part small business, and part key-person risk, and as one analysis puts it, buyers have learned to price these companies but lenders have not. Whoever cracks that underwriting problem owns the pipes of a category compounding at 22% a year.
It is exactly the conversation we are convening in LA on October 6, because the gap between what creators earn and what they can borrow against is one of the widest spreads in private credit.
Backing Creators Through Debt & Equity, Live In LA
Creators are building real businesses, and a whole new private financing layer is emerging to fund them: advances, revenue-share deals, credit lines, catalog loans, film gap financing.
On October 6 we’re bringing the people writing those checks (and the people taking them) together in Los Angeles for an intimate evening of straight talk on how creator lending actually works.
Fifteen to twenty seats, dinner included, free for paying Altea members and $50 for everyone else. RSVP early to hold a spot.
Crypto
- The CLARITY Act heads into the Senate’s last working day without a floor vote scheduled, and the possible outcomes narrow to slim as ethics provisions and illicit-finance language remain unresolved before the August recess
- Even with a vote locked in, the bill faces a 60-vote threshold that looms large, and Bernstein has cut its odds of passage this year, with Coinbase warning that innovators are already moving offshore
- Elon Musk’s X launches X Money on Cross River Bank rails, embedding FDIC-insured accounts, a Visa card, and 6% APY directly into a US social media platform for the first time
- GENIUS Act implementation grinds forward as the OCC, FDIC, and Treasury publish the proposed rules that will govern stablecoin issuers, with the framework fully effective by January 2027
Why it matters: The market structure bill that keeps almost passing
Crypto’s defining regulatory question was never stablecoins, it was who regulates everything else, and that is the question the CLARITY Act answers.
Which is why it matters that the Senate is about to leave town with the bill unscheduled and the clock at zero. Miss the window before recess and momentum stalls into 2027, an election year, where controversial bills go to die.
The sticking points are the same ones from July: ethics language barring federal officials from profiting off digital assets, enforcement mechanics, and a 60-vote threshold that requires Democratic votes the ethics fight keeps burning.
Meanwhile, the GENIUS Act’s implementation machine is running on schedule and the result is visible in product launches like X Money, which put a bank account inside a social network the moment the rules were legible.
Collectibles, Culture and Luxury
- A Josh Allen National Treasures rookie patch autograph 1/1 with the NFL Shield sells privately for $1.7 million, a record for any Allen card, topping the $1.35 million mark set in May
- A year after peak Labubu mania the plush demons have cratered on the resale market, but toy sales are up 13% as squishies become the new blind-box obsession for kids and adults alike
- WK Kellogg brings toys back to cereal boxes after a decade, a nostalgia play aimed at parents who grew up digging for them
Why it matters: The $1.7 million card with no auction
The detail worth sitting with in the Josh Allen sale is not the price, it is the venue.
This was a private sale brokered by Alt, a platform whose pitch is cash advances, vault storage, weekly auctions, and borrowing against your collection. Record cards used to need a Goldin auction and a press cycle; now they change hands like blocks of stock, quietly, between parties who both know the comps.
That is what a maturing market looks like, and the composition of the record matters too, since Allen is an active player whose card just joined Brady and Mahomes territory while he is still adding to the story that backs the asset.
Active-player cards are growth stocks, priced on trajectory rather than settled legacy, and the market is currently paying growth multiples.
The Labubu collapse a shelf over is the other half of the lesson. Manufactured scarcity with infinite sequels reverts to zero the moment attention moves, and the same collectors have already moved on to squishies.
Private Equity & Private Credit
- Asset-backed finance, lending against receivables, equipment, royalties, and consumer loans, is moving to the core of private credit, with managers eyeing a $28 trillion market that could eventually overtake direct lending
- Cerulli projects adviser allocations to alternatives will grow by $2 trillion within five years, nearly doubling to $4.2 trillion as the BDC-to-REIT rotation continues
- T. Rowe Price and Goldman Sachs launch an interval fund that opens private markets to nonaccredited investors at a $2,500 minimum, with daily pricing and 1099 tax reporting
- Jonathan Bock resigns as co-CEO of Blackstone’s $78 billion BCRED and BXSL in a Friday-evening filing, weeks after the fund’s COO departed
- UBS’s family office survey finds alternatives at 42% of portfolios across 307 offices averaging $2.7 billion in net worth, with the mix shifting from buyouts toward private credit and secondaries
Why it matters: Lending against the invoice, not the company
Private credit’s first act was direct lending, which is a bet on a company’s enterprise value staying ahead of its debt. Its second act is shaping up to be a bet on something narrower and older: the receivable.
Asset-backed finance, everything from invoice pools and equipment leases to royalties and consumer loans, is moving from the periphery to the core of private credit, and the addressable market managers cite is $28 trillion, against a private credit industry only now crossing $2 trillion.
The appeal is structural. A loan against a diversified pool of receivables self-liquidates as invoices pay, carries collateral that can be verified and seized, and does not depend on a sponsor’s mark or a refinancing window.
The same logic is climbing into stranger collateral, and this is where it connects to everything else in this issue: creator advances are receivables financing, music catalog loans are receivables financing, and securitization is increasingly built into deals at the point of acquisition rather than bolted on later.
The winners in the next cycle will be the underwriters who can price a stream of future payments, whatever the payer looks like.
Creators are building real businesses, and a whole new private financing layer is emerging to fund them: advances, revenue-share deals, credit lines, catalog loans, film gap financing.
On October 6 we’re bringing the people writing those checks (and the people taking them) together in Los Angeles for an intimate evening of straight talk on how creator lending actually works.
Fifteen to twenty seats, dinner included, free for paying Altea members and $50 for everyone else. RSVP early to hold a spot.
Real Estate
- Apollo pays $1.02 billion for 41.5% of Starwood REIT’s affordable housing portfolio, a roughly 120-property joint venture that hands the gated $22.5 billion fund badly needed liquidity
- JPMorgan commits to deploying $750 billion into US housing over the next decade, targeting a million affordable units and a 45% jump in mortgage originations
- Nontraded REIT fundraising climbs more than 20% year over year through June even as the sector’s redemption fights drag on
- American buyers of traditional Japanese kominka houses are disassembling them beam by beam and rebuilding them in the US, an import trade running on a weak yen and empty heritage housing stock
Why it matters: The price of liquidity is 41.5% of your best asset
Starwood’s REIT spent 2026 doing everything possible to avoid selling assets into a soft market, gating redemptions rather than crystallizing prices.
This week it found out what liquidity actually costs: 41.5% of a stabilized affordable housing portfolio, sold to Apollo for $1.02 billion, with proceeds going straight to paying down the credit facility.
SREIT kept operational control and negotiated a call option to buy Apollo’s stake back, capped at a 7% IRR in years five through ten. Apollo, for its part, gets bond-like cash flows from government-supported rents at a moment when JPMorgan is pledging $750 billion to the same end of the market, which tells you where institutional conviction in US property actually lives right now.
It is not offices and it is not luxury towers, it is the least glamorous housing in the country, where demand is structural and the government helps pay the rent.
Artwork
- Sotheby’s reports a record $4.4 billion first half, with private sales hitting an all-time high of $826 million as luxury and trophy lots fuel the rebound
- Pace, Emmanuel Di Donna, and Sotheby’s private-sales chairman David Schrader open a new secondary-market conglomerate on the Upper East Side, built to trade blue-chip works outside the auction room
- The Coeur d’Alene Western art sale clears $16.6 million at a 95% sell-through, led by a world-record $1.12 million John Clymer
- Analysts credit the auction houses’ record half to newly minted AI and tech wealth, the same money bidding up cards, watches, and memorabilia
Why it matters: The art market goes off the podium
The headline is Sotheby’s best half ever, but the fastest-growing line is the one nobody can see.
Private sales hit a record $826 million, and the industry’s most connected dealmakers are betting that is where the market is headed: Pace, Di Donna, and the executive who ran Sotheby’s private sales just opened a gallery built for off-market trades in blue-chip material.
The logic is straightforward from the seller’s side, since a private sale carries no reserve drama, no burned-picture risk, and no public record if the price disappoints.
Public auction results are the price discovery the whole alternative asset world free-rides on. The more the best material trades in private, the more the published comps describe the leftovers.
Precious Metals and Gems
- Tungsten prices have soared 622% since January 2025, more than triple any other critical mineral, as China’s export controls collide with defense and aerospace demand
- The US Army awards leases to four companies to build critical mineral processing plants on military bases in Alabama, Arkansas, Texas, and Utah, with heavy rare earth refining at Tooele Depot racing a January 2027 ban on Chinese magnets in US defense systems
- Washington’s rare earths push has become a five-week funding surge spanning grants, equity stakes, and offtake deals as the US rebuilds a supply chain outside China
Why it matters: A 622% move nobody’s portfolio owns
Gold gets the headlines, but the most violent bull market in metals is in a gray industrial element most investors could not place on the periodic table.
Tungsten is up 622% since the start of 2025, triple the move in any other critical mineral the IEA tracks, and the cause is a clean collision between physics and politics: the hardest practical metal on earth, essential to cutting tools, munitions, and aerospace, with supply concentrated in a country that has turned export licenses into foreign policy.
The policy response is escalating from paperwork to poured concrete. The Army putting processing plants on its own bases with a January 2027 deadline on Chinese magnets is the clearest possible signal that Washington now treats mineral processing as defense infrastructure, and the funding is arriving in surges rather than white papers.
For investors the awkward truth is that this rally has been nearly impossible to own, since tungsten has no liquid futures market and the pure-play miners are tiny, which is why the trade has expressed itself through prices rather than portfolios.
Farmland
- NOAA confirms a strengthening El Niño with 63% odds of a very strong event, and analysts warn it is the agricultural risk markets are underpricing as it converges with fertilizer shortages
- Rice, wheat, sugar, and cocoa top the exposure list, with Australian wheat production potentially falling 9 million tonnes and past El Niños cutting Indian and Thai sugar output 20% to 30%
- Visual Capitalist ranks the world’s largest agricultural economies, a reminder of how concentrated global food production remains among a handful of countries
- The EU’s own forecasts point to staple crop price increases through the El Niño cycle, with the full effect reaching retail shelves in 2027
Why it matters: The weather trade arrives before the weather
NOAA has 63% odds on a very strong episode peaking this fall, history says the crop damage follows over the subsequent two seasons, and the price effect lands on consumers in 2027.
The pattern’s fingerprints are specific: drought across Australia, India, and Southeast Asia, flooding in the Americas, which maps to wheat down as much as 9 million tonnes in Australia and sugar historically down 20% to 30% in India and Thailand.
What makes this cycle different from 2015 or 1997 is the base it lands on, since fertilizer supply chains are already strained, biofuel mandates now compete with food for the same acres, and a warmer baseline amplifies every anomaly.
For farmland owners, supply shocks elsewhere raise the value of reliable production, which is why irrigated US ground with documented water rights tends to appreciate through global weather disruptions rather than despite them.
The commodity trade is crowded and timing-dependent. The land trade is the same thesis with a slower clock, and the EU is already forecasting the staple price inflation that makes it pay.
Wine, Whiskey, and Spirits
- MGP Ingredients, the distillery behind a huge share of America’s craft whiskey, reports brown goods sales down 59% in Q2 as customers work down barrel inventories in a badly oversupplied market
- MGP had already switched distributors just before RNDC went bankrupt, escaping the collapse of one of the country’s largest liquor distributors with weeks to spare
- Campari takes on Big Beer’s stadium monopoly, and after selling 22,000 Aperol Spritzes on tap at a single Bad Bunny show in Milan it is rolling the playbook into sporting venues, with Aperol sales up 3.3% in a declining category
Why it matters: The whiskey glut finds its epicenter
MGP is the most important whiskey company most drinkers have never heard of, the contract distiller whose Indiana barrels quietly fill hundreds of craft labels.
When its whiskey sales fall 59% in a quarter, on top of a 25% drop announced last November, the message is that the brands downstream are sitting on years of barrel inventory they bought during the boom and no longer need to replenish.
The company has paused production at two Kentucky distilleries, which is what capitulation looks like in an industry where the product takes four years to become sellable.
For cask investors this is the moment the market splits in two, because a glut of young, undifferentiated distillate is a disaster for anyone holding generic barrels bought at 2022 prices, while doing almost nothing to closed-distillery and age-stated stock whose supply was fixed years ago.
The same barbell has already played out in Scotch and Japanese whisky, where the bottom half loses money in real terms while the good stuff compounds.
Japan trip: 75 days away.
Three nights in Tokyo. One night in the Nagano highlands.
Our Japan trip is 75 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.
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 was sponsored by Institutional 1031
- has no sponsors and contains no affiliate links.
