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▪️ Twitter: afinancebro_
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On the morning of October 19, 1987, the men who ran Wall Street arrived at their desks in pressed shirts and power ties, convinced the longest bull market in a generation was intact. By the closing bell, the Dow had fallen 508 points, a loss of 22.6% in a single session. Nothing in the history of modern markets had ever moved like that in a single day. Not the crash of 1929. Not any war, any assassination, any act of God. Black Monday was its own category of catastrophe, and the men in those offices watched it unfold in real time with no ability to stop it and no framework to understand what they were seeing.

The proximate cause was portfolio insurance, the institutional hedging strategy that was supposed to protect pension funds from exactly this kind of decline. Instead it became the accelerant. As markets fell, automated sell programs triggered more selling, which triggered more programs, which triggered more selling. The feedback loop was total. Options traders who had sold puts for months on the assumption the market would keep climbing watched their positions become catastrophic in real time. There are accounts of men who arrived wealthy and left with nothing. Several never returned to the industry.

The fallout reshaped Wall Street permanently. Alan Greenspan, Fed Chairman for just two months, injected liquidity with a one-sentence statement that remains one of the most consequential in central banking history. Circuit breakers were introduced. Portfolio insurance as a strategy was finished. And a generation of traders who believed markets moved in orderly, rational increments learned in a single afternoon that they do not. The men who survived Black Monday carried it with them for the rest of their careers. It became the thing they measured everything else against.

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The most romantic gesture of 2026 is not a diamond ring. A Chinese bride surprised her groom at their wedding with a $12,000 Nvidia RTX 5090 GPU, reducing him to tears in front of their guests. In an era where AI compute is the most coveted resource on the planet, apparently the way to a tech man’s heart is through his VRAM.

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CFA Level I pass rates just rebounded to 43% in August, back above the ~40% decade average, but the data reveals something worth knowing before you register: candidates who took the exam in February passed at 45%, while those who waited until May dropped to just 39%. If you’re studying for Level I, timing your test date might matter more than you think.

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Gym bros are getting humbled, and the fitness industry is cashing in. Viral videos of ripped athletes shaking and collapsing on Pilates reformers have racked up millions of views, and rather than staying away, men are showing up to find out what the fuss is about. Solidcore, the high-intensity reformer studio backed by L Catterton, has seen a meaningful surge in male membership as the trend moves from social media punchline to mainstream fitness staple. The workouts use slow, controlled movements on a Megaformer designed to break muscles to failure. Low impact, brutally effective, and apparently far harder than anything most gym bros have encountered under a barbell.

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The numbers back it up. The global Pilates industry was valued at $178 billion in 2024 and studios like Solidcore and Club Pilates are expanding aggressively to meet demand from a demographic that barely registered five years ago. Instructors report fuller classes, longer waitlists, and a noticeably different room. The workout once dismissed as easy or feminine is now the one leaving elite athletes walking out sideways.

The viral humbling of gym bros has done more for male Pilates adoption than any marketing campaign. When a 250-pound powerlifter admits he could not finish a 50-minute reformer class, it removes the stigma and replaces it with curiosity. For boutique fitness brands that spent years trying to attract men, the algorithm did the work for free.

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Private equity is engineering its way through a deal drought, and the latest tool is structured debt stacked on top of more structured debt. Secondaries funds, which buy stakes in mature buyout funds from cash-strapped investors, are turning to collateralised fund obligations and tranched NAV loans to lower their cost of capital. CFO issuance by secondaries funds has surged from $400 million in 2021 to $6.5 billion in 2025, a sign of how aggressively the industry is leaning on financial engineering to compensate for a dealmaking environment that has not recovered since 2022.

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The mechanics are deliberate. Both structures slice debt into senior and junior tranches, allowing insurers to take the lower-risk senior piece while private credit funds absorb the riskier junior slice. The result is a broader investor base, lower blended borrowing costs, and more firepower to buy fund stakes or return capital to backers. Blackstone explored a CFO against $2B+ of LBO fund stakes this year, and Franklin Templeton’s secondaries arm closed a $1.5B CFO in August.

The concern is leverage on leverage. Portfolio companies inside buyout funds already carry significant debt. Layering CFOs and tranched NAV loans on top adds another tier of complexity to assets that are already stretched. The influx of insurance capital is providing real liquidity to a market that needs it, but in a stress scenario, the chain of exposure between secondaries funds, insurers, private credit lenders, and underlying portfolios becomes increasingly difficult to unwind.

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Pros and cons anybody?

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen confirmed in her State of the Union address to the European Parliament this week that Brussels is opening the door for Canada to become the first-ever associate member of the EU, telling lawmakers “we want to bring the relationship with Canada to the highest level possible.” The status does not currently exist in the EU’s framework and would need to be created from scratch, but von der Leyen’s statement moves this from a WSJ leak into an actual policy commitment from the top of the European Commission.

Canada’s trade relationship with the US has collapsed into a full tariff war, with 50% US tariffs on Canadian goods answered by Canadian retaliation on $20 billion of American products, pushing Ottawa to diversify away from a neighbor it can no longer treat as a stable trading partner. An associate membership would reportedly include visa-free live-and-work access for Canadians across the EU and deeper cooperation on energy, AI, defence, and critical minerals, without the political entanglement of full membership. Norway and Iceland have both stayed close to the EU economically while declining full membership for decades. Canada may be about to become the first country to get a bespoke tier between the two.

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#finance #financememes #investing #stock #investmentbanking

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Some men are remembered for what they built. Todd Beamer is remembered for the fight he chose in his final minutes.

He was 32. An Oracle account manager. A husband. A father of two, with a third child on the way he’d never meet. On the morning of September 11, 2001, he boarded United Flight 93 for what should have been a routine business trip to San Francisco. It wasn’t.

When hijackers took the plane, Todd didn’t freeze. He got on the phone with a GTE operator, calmly described what was happening onboard, prayed the Lord’s Prayer with her, and asked her to tell his wife and sons he loved them. Then he made the decision that defined him. He turned to the passengers around him and said the words that would outlive him: “Are you guys ready? Let’s roll.”

They didn’t go down without a fight. Todd and a group of ordinary passengers stormed the cockpit, fighting hijackers with their bare hands to take the plane back. Flight 93 went down in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, still fighting until the very end. Investigators believe the hijackers were headed for the U.S. Capitol. Todd Beamer, and the people who stood beside him, made sure they never got there.

His Rolex Datejust Turn-O-Graph was recovered from the wreckage. The crystal is shattered. The hands are gone. But the date window, untouched by time since that morning, still reads “11.” A single number, frozen forever, marking the exact date a handful of ordinary people refused to go quietly.

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Goldman Sachs’ wealth-management business is benefiting from an unusual pipeline into NBA wealth. Matt Kennedy, a former Villanova teammate of Jalen Brunson, Josh Hart and Mikal Bridges, now works in Goldman’s private wealth unit, and his team advises some Knicks players. Kennedy previously worked in fixed income before moving into wealth management about two years ago.

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The broader opportunity is significant. Goldman’s asset and wealth management division oversees more than $4 trillion, while professional athletes often have long investment horizons and growing interest in private and illiquid assets. For the bank, Kennedy’s long-standing relationships show how personal networks can become a powerful client-acquisition advantage in private wealth. Goldman Sachs pipeline to NBA wealth

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CVC has raised $10 billion for its latest secondaries fund, nearly double the $5.8 billion raised by its 2023 predecessor and almost four times the $2.7 billion raised in 2019. The fund attracted more than 200 investors and reflects how secondaries have evolved from a niche corner of private markets into a much larger institutional allocation.

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The backdrop is a growing backlog of unsold private-equity assets. Secondary-market deal volume reached a record $121 billion in H1 2026, while trillions of dollars remain tied up in portfolio companies that sponsors have struggled to exit. That creates a large opportunity for buyers like CVC, which can acquire stakes from investors seeking liquidity and from PE firms looking to extend ownership of mature assets. CVC raised $10 billion for its secondaries fund

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Hundreds of colleges across the US are now sending acceptance letters to students who never applied, a practice known as direct admissions that is quietly reshaping how higher education recruits. Schools are pulling student profiles from platforms like Common App and Niche, identifying qualifying candidates, and proactively offering them spots, sometimes with significant scholarship money attached. Wingate University told thousands of students they were already accepted into the class of 2030 with $24,000 in aid. Over 160 institutions now offer the practice, with three quarters of participants on Common App’s direct admissions platform being private colleges.

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The driver is a deepening enrollment crisis. SUNY has seen a 21% enrollment decline since 2012, with community colleges down nearly 35%. California State University piloted the program by sending 17,400 unsolicited acceptance letters to Riverside County seniors and saw a 9% enrollment jump, prompting California to authorize a statewide expansion. The root cause is structural. Fewer students are choosing college as trade schools and apprenticeships gain appeal, the ROI on a humanities degree is being questioned more loudly than ever, and tuition discounts have reached 57% for first-time students at private institutions. Colleges that once made students fight for a spot are now fighting to fill them.

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