Every piece we have published — valuations, the Pakistani economy, and the data behind the numbers. Newest first.
Published: September 3, 2026 | Category: Deals & M&A The broker turns to fresh debt for its largest deal since NFP, handing KKR the exit on a hold it began in 2017 and accelerating the roll-up of America’s mid-sized insurance advisers. Aon has agreed to buy USI Insurance Services from KKR for $17bn, its largest…
Published: August 30, 2026 | Category: Markets Kevin Warsh is steering the Federal Reserve toward its first interest-rate increase in years, and the bond market spent Friday getting ahead of him. The 2-year Treasury yield, the maturity most sensitive to policy bets, jumped about 6 basis points to 4.298% after the Fed chair told the…
Published: August 28, 2026 | Category: Markets Nvidia is once again setting the pace for the AI trade, its shares climbing about 7% in premarket trading on Thursday after a quarter that even jaded investors struggled to fault. The chipmaker reported revenue of $96.2 billion for its fiscal second quarter, up 106% from a year…
Published: August 27, 2026 | Category: Markets Alphabet and Amazon, lifted by tens of billions in unrealized investment gains, account for most of the jump that pushed second-quarter profit growth past 50 per cent. The S&P 500 is on course for its fastest quarterly earnings growth in five years, but most of the acceleration traces…
Published: August 26, 2026 | Category: Economics A years-long squeeze on crop margins meets a fresh energy shock, and the strain is now showing up in court filings. US family-farm bankruptcies climbed to a multi-year high in the year to June, with 336 Chapter 12 filings recorded in the 12 months to June 30, up…
Published: August 25, 2026 | Category: Deals & M&A Italy’s oldest bank turns predator, offering its own shares for two rivals to grow too large for Intesa Sanpaolo to swallow. Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena has launched two all-share offers worth a combined €34bn for domestic rivals Banco BPM and Banca Generali, a defensive…
Published: August 24, 2026 | Category: Deals & M&A The Bloom desk here. When Joshua Kushner and Bob Iger agreed to buy the Los Angeles Lakers at a $12.5 billion valuation, the headline number was the record, but the more revealing figure is the one that never appears in the press release: the share of…
Published: August 23, 2026 | Category: Legal & Regulation Twenty-nine attorneys general accuse the company of designing Instagram and Facebook to hook children, and the figure Meta itself floated in a court filing approaches its entire market value. Meta has told a federal court that penalties in a child-safety case that opened in Oakland on…
Published: August 22, 2026 | Category: Deals & M&A Andrew Spaventa’s funds allegedly marked up shares in SpaceX, Anduril and Anthropic by as much as 91 percent while telling retirees the fees were nearly free. The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged New York broker Andrew Spaventa and three entities he controlled with running a…
Published: August 21, 2026 | Category: Venture Capital Investment triples valuation of dictation app maker in six months, as Big Tech circles the voice interface market Wispr, the maker of the AI dictation app Wispr Flow, has raised $280 million in a Series B round that values the four-year-old start-up at $2 billion, tripling its…
Published: August 20, 2026 | Category: Deals & M&A Silver Lake is negotiating a takeover of Workday that could value the human resources and finance software maker at more than $50 billion, a deal that would rank among the largest software buyouts on record. Shares in the Pleasanton, California company jumped nearly 18 percent to…
Published: August 19, 2026 | Category: Markets More than 10 high-frequency trading firms pay up to $100,000 a month for the Truth API, a service now facing a constitutional challenge in federal court and calls for an SEC inquiry. Trump Media & Technology Group is charging trading firms between $60,000 and $100,000 a month for…
Published: August 18, 2026 | Category: Markets Six investors told the Financial Times the AI company’s revenue run rate will reach $100bn by year end, a case its own executives have not endorsed Anthropic’s investors expect the company to go public in October at a valuation of $2tn or more, which would make it the…
Published: August 17, 2026 | Category: Earnings / Technology Record revenue and raised guidance lifted the shares 18 per cent, but the AI cloud group now pays more in interest each quarter than it has earned in adjusted operating profit all year CoreWeave reported second-quarter revenue of $2.58bn on Tuesday, more than double the $1.21bn…
Published: August 16, 2026 | Category: Deals & M&A Chancery found the data group’s own handling of FTC questions caused the delay it later used as grounds to terminate Verisk Analytics has been ordered by the Delaware Court of Chancery to resume work on the $2.35bn cash acquisition of AccuLynx that it abandoned in December,…
Published: August 15, 2026 | Category: Hedge Funds Ken Griffin’s Citadel is closing out July with its strongest month in four years, and the reason has a name: Situational Awareness. Citadel’s flagship Wellington multi-strategy fund gained 5.9% in July, its best month since 2022 and its biggest single-month jump this year, after the firm bought…
Published: August 14, 2026 | Category: Venture Capital Chief scientist’s science-automation startup lands backing from Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures as Alphabet reshuffles its AI leadership Jeff Dean, Google’s chief scientist and its 30th employee, is leaving the company after 27 years to launch Discovery Loop, an AI startup aimed at automating scientific experimentation. Alphabet,…
Published: August 13, 2026 | Category: Markets & Compensation Wall Street’s equity traders and dealmakers are heading into 2026 bonus season with the fattest checks in years. Compensation consultant Johnson Associates projects equity sales and trading bonuses will rise 20% to 30% or more, with advisory bankers up 15% to 20%, in a year the…
Published: August 12, 2026 | Category: Venture Capital The autonomous-mining startup, now valued at $1.5 billion, is betting that AI-driven demand for copper and lithium can be met by software rather than by digging more mines the old way. Mariana Minerals has raised $310 million in a Series B round led by Khosla Ventures, bringing…
Published: August 11, 2026 | Category: M&A Talks between the two drugmakers could create the world’s fourth-largest pharmaceutical company, but face early-stage uncertainty and likely antitrust scrutiny on both sides of the Atlantic. AstraZeneca and Bristol Myers Squibb have held early-stage merger talks that could combine the two drugmakers into a company worth roughly $400…
Published: August 9, 2026 | Category: Private Capital / Deals Private capital just had one of its best quarters on record, and the Federal Reserve is looking at meeting less often. Ares Management raised $36.4 billion in the second quarter, its largest quarterly haul ever, pushing total assets under management to $671 billion, up 17…
Published: August 7, 2026 | Category: Public Markets / Technology Space Exploration Technologies is testing new lows just as its first flood of insider shares nears the market. The stock closed at $112.55 on Wednesday, down 50% from its June 16 peak of $225.64 and more than $1 trillion below its post-IPO market value. The…
Published: August 5, 2026 | Category: IPOs / Consumer Sandwich chain’s Wall Street debut values it at $7.3bn, roughly 18 months after Blackstone paid about $8bn for control. Jersey Mike’s Subs and its private equity backer Blackstone raised $1 billion in an initial public offering priced at $23 a share — the midpoint of a…
Published: August 4, 2026 | Category: Restructuring / M&A Here is the thing about bankruptcy court: it turns almost anything into an asset schedule, even 87 bottlenose dolphins, eight manatees and six sea lions. That is exactly what is happening in Wilmington, Delaware, where the estate of The Dolphin Company is asking a federal judge…
Published: August 2, 2026 | Category: Venture Capital / Artificial Intelligence Two labs just soaked up more than 60 cents of every venture dollar in America. This week supplied three reasons to question what LPs are actually exposed to. OpenAI and Anthropic together absorbed more than 60% of all U.S. venture capital dollars in the…
Published: August 1, 2026 | Category: Private Capital / Deals Six transactions worth a combined $20 billion-plus land in five days, spanning energy infrastructure, consumer health, biotech and European logistics. Buyers are moving on scale this week, not scraps. Six transactions worth a combined $20 billion-plus closed in five days, spanning energy infrastructure, consumer health,…
Published: July 30, 2026 | Category: Private Equity / Infrastructure Consortium takes 49% stake in state oil pipeline network in largest foreign investment in Gulf state’s history, as Iranian strikes on energy sites continue. Blackstone, Brookfield and KKR have agreed to pay $16 billion for a leasehold stake in Kuwait’s crude oil pipeline network, in…
Published: July 27, 2026 | Category: Private Equity / Markets Private equity dealmaking cooled on both entry and exit in the second quarter, according to a preliminary read of the data from PitchBook. The firm says the megadeal frenzy of recent quarters has “slowed to a crawl”, while year-to-date exits are pacing roughly in line…
Published: July 22, 2026 | Category: Fiscal Federalism The formula that splits Pakistan’s money weights population at 82 per cent and poverty at a tenth, and it has not changed since 2010. Devolution reached Lahore and stopped. Pakistan’s money is divided by a formula, and the formula is old. The 7th National Finance Commission Award,…
Published: July 21, 2026 | Category: Development Six of Punjab’s ten poorest districts lie in the south. Because Pakistan’s poverty index is built mostly from schooling and health, it doubles as a scorecard for provincial service delivery. Poverty in South Punjab is usually explained as a growth lag — a region that industry and irrigation…
Published: July 20, 2026 | Category: Public Finance South Punjab was promised roughly a third of Punjab’s development budget to match its population. The money leaks at three separate joints, and the promise itself supplies the cover. When the Punjab government carved out a South Punjab Secretariat following its 2018 commitments, it attached a number…
Published: July 16, 2026 | Category: Venture Capital, Private Equity & M&A Three storylines dominated this week’s capital markets activity: AI coding tools commanding startup valuations that rival mid-cap public companies, private equity pushing deeper into specialty consumer and compliance niches, and a European takeover fight where the target’s own board is telling shareholders to…
Published: July 15, 2026 | Category: Private Capital / Deals Digital infrastructure set the tone for a crowded week of dealmaking. Switch, the SoftBank and DigitalBridge-backed data-centre operator based in Las Vegas, is in talks to raise about $2 billion at a $50 billion valuation in a round involving Andreessen Horowitz. Germany’s Quantum Systems, a…
Published: July 15, 2026 | Category: Asset Management / Private Equity / Mergers & Acquisitions Venture capital firms buy startups. Pension funds buy stable, cash-generative businesses. This week they teamed up to buy something that is neither: a 90-year-old, Seattle-based asset manager with $416 billion under management — and the price tag says as much…
Published: July 12, 2026 | Category: Markets / Venture Capital & Private Equity Jeff Bezos is opening Blue Origin’s doors to outside money for the first time, and the price of admission values his rocket company at $130 billion — a fraction of what his chief rival just fetched on the public market, but a…
Published: July 12, 2026 | Category: Banking / Mergers & Acquisitions / Europe Andrea Orcel is now close enough to touch what would be Europe’s largest bank merger in nearly two decades — and Berlin is still trying to stop him. UniCredit, the Italian lender Orcel has run since 2021, said this week that its…
Published: July 10, 2026 | Category: Venture Capital & Enterprise Software Trends | Focus: AppSec Asset Consolidation, Sovereign AI Capital Infrastructure, and Fintech Liquidity Tracking The final trading day of the first half of 2026 has delivered a massive wave of activity across the venture capital landscape, highlighted by Belgian cybersecurity unicorn Aikido Security completing…
Published: July 10, 2026 | Category: Venture Capital / Markets American startups raised more money in the first six months of 2026 than investors committed in any full calendar year on record — and the vast majority of it went to a small circle of companies and firms already sitting on the most capital. U.S.…
Published: July 10, 2026 | Category: Macro Investment Banking & Deal Flow Analysis | Focus: M&A Super-Cycles, IPO Windows, and Alternative Data Funding Flows The mid-point of 2026 has delivered a sweeping, unmistakable message to global capital markets: the structural corporate freeze that paralyzed deal-making for the past twenty-four months has permanently thawed. According to…
Published: July 9, 2026 | Category: Aerospace Defense & Strategic M&A Focus: Vertical Integration, Orbital Spectrum Moats, and Space Infrastructure Competition The commercial space economy has officially graduated from its fragmented, speculative launch phase into a mature consolidation cycle. For years, the market was sharply divided between launch providers trading on lift-capacity metrics and s
Published: July 8, 2026 | Category: Consumer Staples & Frontier Market ValuationFocus: Inflation Re-Rating, Pricing Power, and Terminal Value Sustainability in Emerging Market FMCGs The traditional valuation framework for fast-moving consumer goods companies has always rested on a deceptively simple premise: brand loyalty translates into pricing power, and pricing power compounds into terminal val
Published: July 6, 2026 | Category: Industrial Consolidation & Takeover Architecture | Focus: Unsolicited Premium Bidding, Cross-Sector Cyclical Hedging, and Anti-Takeover Poison Pills The building products and industrial materials sector is facing a high-stakes corporate standoff following disclosures that Carlisle Companies (NYSE: CSL) has launched multiple unsolicited acquisition proposals to i
Published: July 5, 2026 | Category: Global Supply Chain Logistics & Cross-Border Capital | Focus: Dual-Listing Arbitrage, Supply Chain Near-Shoring, and Tariff Insulation Chinese electronics manufacturing giant Luxshare, the premier assembly partner behind Apple’s global AirPods supply chain, is moving aggressively to secure up to $3.1 billion via a landmark public listing on the Hong…
Published: July 5, 2026 | Category: Digital Infrastructure & Real Estate Private Equity | Focus: Capital Recycling Dynamics, Hyperscale Tenant Lease Analysis, and Core FFO Accretion Blackstone has finalized a definitive agreement to monetize its equity stakes in three premium Northern Virginia hyperscale data centers, selling the portfolio to publicly traded Digital Realty Trust (NYSE:…
A 12% share surge, two new CEOs, and a cascade of M&A — inside Comcast’s plan to split its cable empire from its media empire, and what happens next.
Rocket Lab is buying Iridium’s 66-satellite constellation for $8 billion — building the end-to-end space infrastructure company that only SpaceX has managed before.
Published: July 3, 2026 | Category: Global Private Markets & Alternative Assets Focus: LBO Model Architecture, Multiple Expansion Decay, and Operational EBITDA Optimization For the better part of two decades, the private equity industry operated on a foundational layout that felt nearly infallible. Institutional sponsors routinely generated 20%+ Internal Rates of Return (IRRs) by exploiting…
Vintage: July 28, 2026 | Market Pricing: Deal data as of late June 2026 | Reporting Currency: Mixed (USD/EUR/JPY) Executive Summary The global transaction markets in late June 2026 are experiencing an unprecedented structural divergence. On one side, public equity markets are seeing a major influx of liquidity, highlighted by a record-breaking Q2 U.S. IPO…
Vintage: June 27, 2026 | Market Pricing: Macro metrics following the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) June release | Reporting Currency: US Dollar (USD) Executive Summary In an era of macro-driven asset pricing, poor economic data often serves as the ultimate catalyst for equity and fixed-income rallies. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) June jobs…
Vintage: July 7, 2026 | Market Pricing: Institutional data through Q2 2026 | Reporting Currency: US Dollar (USD) Executive Summary The optimistic consensus that 2026 would serve as a cyclical turnaround year for global private equity (PE) has hit a significant roadblock. According to PitchBook’s Q2 2026 Global PE First Look report, the anticipated dealmaking…
Vintage: July 6, 2026 | Market Pricing: Asset values as of June 2026 IPO Debut | Reporting Currency: US Dollar (USD) Executive Summary The public market debut of micromobility leader Lime serves as a high-stakes test case for a sector historically left for dead by institutional investors. Raising $167 million in its initial public offering…
From a $13.5 billion industrials mega-deal to a packed IPO week and an AI funding surge — a tour of where capital is flowing in mid-2026.
Published: July 1, 2026 | Category: Global Equity Research & Advanced Valuation Focus: Sum-of-the-Parts (SOTP) Decomposition, WACC Reverse-Engineering, and Autonomy Implied Probability Tesla Inc. enters mid-2026 commanding a market capitalization of approximately $1.52 trillion, trading at an astronomical trailing price-to-earnings (P/E) multiple of 375x. For a traditional financial analyst utiliz
Published: June 30, 2026 | Category: Global Heavy Industry & Corporate Finance | Focus: Capital Budget Deployment Lag, Balance Sheet Leverage, and Sovereign Deal Covenants More than a year after Nippon Steel finalized its highly contested acquisition of United States Steel Corp in June 2025, the ambitious promise of an American industrial revival remains largely…
Published: June 30, 2026 | Category: Frontier Market Corporate Finance & Equity Strategy | Focus: Currency Mismatch Hedging, Cost of Equity (Kₑ), and PSX Export Valuations Investing in public equities within a frontier economy like Pakistan typically requires absorbing an aggressive macroeconomic penalty. In traditional corporate finance frameworks, the Cost of Equity (Kₑ) for a…
Published: June 29, 2026 | Category: Global Tech Equity Research & Corporate Finance | Focus: AI Capital Expenditures, ROIC Modeling, and Capital Depreciation Cycles As the cumulative infrastructure spend of hyperscalers—primarily Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon—crosses the historic $1.2 trillion threshold, Wall Street finds itself caught in an analytical rift. Equity valuations continue to
A quick tour of the week’s notable money moves — from billion-dollar listings to the funds raising fresh capital.
Two years after Google paid billions to bring a star researcher back, he is walking out the door — exposing the weakness of buying talent.
Swedish buyout firm EQT is taking British testing-and-certification giant Intertek private — a wager that the quiet business of verifying quality is worth billions.
The consulting giant is buying its way deeper into cybersecurity — a sign of how valuable defending critical systems has become.
One of private equity’s biggest names just walked away from a software company it bought for $6.4 billion — a stark lesson in how debt-fuelled buyouts can unravel.
New chair, same rate — for now. The Federal Reserve left borrowing costs unchanged, but its own forecasts suggest the next move could be up, not down.
Two arch-rivals are heading for the public markets through the same two banks — and the arrangement is already testing how Wall Street polices its own conflicts of interest.
Published: June 17, 2026 | Category: Macroeconomic Forecasting & Strategic Finance | Focus: Corporate FP&A Transformation The concept of the annual corporate budget is an outdated relic of a simpler economic era. In today’s volatile macroeconomic landscape, waiting twelve months to review capital allocations, adjust operational budgets, and project multi-year revenue growth is a form…
Category: Executive Profile & Systemic Risk Analysis | Focus: Macroeconomic Leadership Review The successful initial public offering of SpaceX on June 12, 2026, did more than restructure global equity indices; it irrevocably shattered the boundaries of individual wealth aggregation. As the ticker SPCX surged past $193 per share, Elon Musk’s net worth crossed the threshold…
Published: June 14, 2026 | Category: Equity Research & Corporate Finance | Focus: Valuation Workflows & Agentic Modeling For decades, the core architecture of an intrinsic asset valuation remained unchanged. A highly trained human analyst spent days combing through corporate disclosures, manually inputting historical lines into spreadsheets, scrubbing data anomalies, and constructing multi-tiered
Category: Global Institutional Equity Research | Focus: Capital Markets & Valuation Architecture On Friday, June 12, 2026, global financial architecture experienced a paradigm shift that altered the pricing models of mega-cap equities forever. Space Exploration Technologies Corp. crossed the final threshold of corporate maturity, debuting on the NASDAQ under the ticker SPCX. The offering, meticulo
Circular references have haunted financial modelers for decades. Structural design principles, Python in Excel, and automated finance workflows are making the feedback loop extinct.
Published: June 11, 2026 | Category: Capital Markets & Quantitative Strategy | Focus: Alpha Generation & Predictive Analytics The divide between traditional fundamental equity research and quantitative algorithmic trading has officially dissolved. For the past decade, quantitative hedge funds maintained an elite market edge by deploying complex mathematical algorithms to exploit microsecond pricin
In high-growth tech, intrinsic DCF models and narrative-driven market pricing rarely agree. The framework that reconciles them — and the three questions every analyst must ask before assigning a value.
Inside the $1.77 Trillion SpaceX IPO For years, the financial world treated a public listing of SpaceX as a distant, borderline mythical event. Elon Musk frequently insisted that his aerospace powerhouse would remain private until humanity was firmly on the path to colonizing Mars. The paradigm has officially shifted. Moving with staggering speed following a…
Published: June 8, 2026 | Category: Financial Sector Labor Economics | Focus: Workforce Automation & Junior Banker Attrition The investment banking bullpen—once characterized by glowing monitors, sleep-deprived junior analysts, and 100-hour workweeks dedicated to formatting pitchbooks and auditing formulas—is falling silent. The traditional entry-level corporate finance job description has been sy
The SBP raised rates in April 2026. The effect on your fixed deposit, savings account, and floating-rate loan is real — but the timing is not what most people expect.
Published: June 5, 2026 | Category: Financial Philosophy & Market Psychology | Focus: The New Human Role in Financial Architecture Now that the dust has settled on the first massive wave of AI integration, the true shape of modern corporate finance has finally become clear. The fear that artificial intelligence would completely eliminate the human…
A discounted cash flow values a business on the cash it can generate, not the prevailing narrative — the logic in plain terms, and the three assumptions that decide the answer.
The SBP raised its policy rate by 100 basis points in April 2026 — surprising a market that had priced a hold. The reasoning runs deeper than the headline inflation number.
The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor has completed 43 projects worth $24.7 billion under its first phase, which focused heavily on power generation and road infrastructure. Phase Two, now fully underway, is a different kind of programme — less about megaprojects and more about industrialisation, supply chain integration, and converting completed infrastructure into productive economic activity. Wh
A balance sheet is a snapshot of what a company owns, what it owes, and what is left over for shareholders at a single point in time. Every listed company on the Pakistan Stock Exchange publishes one quarterly and annually. Most investors skip past it to the income statement. That is a mistake — the…
Pakistan’s total external debt and liabilities stood at approximately $138 billion as of late 2025, according to State Bank of Pakistan data. Public external debt — the portion owed by the government and public sector entities — reached $91.8 billion as of end-June 2025, a 6% increase year-on-year. Understanding the structure of that debt —…
Two numbers define Pakistan’s monetary moment. The State Bank of Pakistan’s policy rate stands at 11.5% following a 100 basis point hike in April 2026. CPI inflation, as measured by the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics, was 11.7% in May 2026. The arithmetic is simple: Pakistan’s real interest rate is approximately −0.2%. Essentially zero. For an…
The KSE-100 index recently hit an all-time high of 170,719 points. In PKR terms, the index has delivered extraordinary returns for investors who held through Pakistan’s 2023 crisis period. The question now is whether the index is still a value play — or whether the easy money has been made. Where the P/E sits The…
Pakistan’s Federal Board of Revenue collected Rs 11.744 trillion in FY2025 — a record figure and a 26.3% jump from the Rs 9.299 trillion collected in FY2024. The headline number looks like progress. The underlying ratio tells a harder story. Tax revenues as a share of GDP reached 10.6% in FY2025, up from roughly 8.5%…