Jamie Dimon is 70 years old. He’s been chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase for over 20 years and in charge of a big bank for 25. In the modern era of banking, no CEO has come close to that length of tenure. Yet despite surviving both a heart scare and throat cancer, Dimon is not immortal: he won’t lead the bank forever. This month, the board lined up two possible successors and Dimon followed up with a list of qualities they would need to do the job. As well as having flexibility of mind to deal with a growing complex world, he identified the following:

“You want to be good at management, you want to be good at people, you want to be analytical, you want to be detailed, you want to be a culture carrier, you want to be curious, you want to have heart, you want to have grit, you want to have soul, you want to have work ethic, you want to be able to travel, you want to be able to walk in operating centers and deal with CEOs and prime ministers. It’s all of that.”

That’s quite an ask. Not many mortals boast all of those characteristics. The job is made harder by JPMorgan’s complexity. This past quarter, the bank’s balance sheet crossed $5 trillion. While it cautions that notional numbers exaggerate its exposure, it also carries $63.7 trillion of derivative contracts. The Bank for International Settlements measures these things and ranks JPMorgan the most complex bank on the planet, ahead of Barclays and HSBC and BNP Paribas and Goldman Sachs. Its ranking rests on three inputs: those derivative notionals, illiquid “level 3” assets ($29 billion at the end of the first quarter) and trading and available-for-sale securities ($549 billion).

Investor Chris Hohn tells a story about meeting Credit Suisse CEO Brady Dougan before the global financial crisis. “[I] put his balance sheet in front of him from the annual accounts, and said, you have a multi trillion-dollar balance sheet. Can we walk through the line items, because I don’t understand it. He said, ‘I don’t either.’ Very honest guy. I really liked him, yeah, very honest.”

It’s been a while since I met Jamie Dimon, but I reckon he could walk through the line items of his balance sheet with ease, and his successor would be expected to do the same. The difference is that Dimon watched them grow. When he took over as CEO, JPMorgan’s total assets were $1.2 trillion; they’ve grown almost 5x since. Its annual report that year was 144 pages long; this year, it is 364 pages; headcount was 168,847; now it is 320,560.

Dimon’s successor will be tasked with managing a uniquely complex business. To see how it can be done – and how each approach has already been tested at JPMorgan – read on.

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According to his website, Avadhut Sathe is a successful trader with over three decades of experience. Keen to share his insights and with a “vision of achieving financial independence for every class of people in India,” Sathe launched the Avadhut Sathe Training Academy in 2008 to school retail investors in the stock market. Amplified by his YouTube channel, his courses proved popular.

In the ten years through to October 2025, Sathe recruited more than 400,000 individual investors to his academy. Many were eager to emulate the success of former students such as homemaker Lakshmi, who achieved a “1 crore milestone by trading bank Nifty options in 2.5 years,” or ex-banker Smruti, who “consistently earned more than her salary from trading.” With his flagship course, GEO (“Get Edge Over Others”) costing 72,000 rupees ($750), the fees added up: over the period, he collected $63 million.

Indeed, an analysis conducted by Indian regulator, SEBI, shows that training was far more lucrative than trading. Digging into the brokerage accounts of course participants, SEBI concluded that two-thirds lost money during the six-month period after completion of the course. They include ex-banker Smruti who lost 138,000 rupees ($1,445) in the period she was said to have earned more than her salary. And while some came out ahead, returns were generally not as high as marketed. Homemaker Lakshmi made only about 4% of what her testimonials claimed.

Even Sathe lost money. In the 20 months through to November 2025, he lost 43 million rupees ($450,000) in his personal trading account; his company lost another $200,000. His blend of technical analysis, psychology and motivational speaking may have been entertaining but as a system for generating returns, it fell short.

Sathe and his students are not alone. SEBI did a broader review of the equity derivatives market in India and concluded that 91% of participants lose money (so maybe Sathe’s 65% is not so bad?). In the financial year ending March 2025, 9.6 million individuals collectively lost a trillion rupees, equivalent to $11 billion. Cumulatively over four years, they lost $30 billion.

But still they come. Enticed by the promise of quick profits, Indians are opening trading accounts in vast numbers. The number of unique accounts registered with the National Stock Exchange has grown from 39.9 million five years ago to 129.1 million today. Options are especially popular. The opportunity to gain leveraged exposure in a market where it is also difficult to short stocks offers plenty of appeal. Options trading has increased at a rate of 47.5% per year over the past decade.

Influencers like Avadhut Sathe have contributed to the surge – and SEBI, concerned about the losses retail investors are incurring, is fighting a rearguard action to shut them down. In December, it ruled that Sathe breached regulations by offering stock-specific recommendations without being registered as an investment adviser or research analyst. He was banned from selling courses and ordered to disgorge accumulated fees.

In an effort to police investment advice on social media more generally, SEBI has also developed an AI tool – called Sudarshan after the Hindu deity Krishna’s spinning disc – to identify problematic posts and accounts on social media and take them down. That’s on top of more structural measures introduced last year, including increasing minimum contract sizes for index derivatives, cutting the number of weekly contracts each exchange can offer, demanding option premiums upfront and tightening limits. In April this year, the government additionally raised securities transaction taxes.

For National Stock Exchange of India, this could spell bad news. The platform has a 72% market share in equity index options and around a 100% share in single stock options. So big is the market in India that the World Federation of Exchanges estimates it has a 51% share of global equity derivatives by number of contracts traded. In the 12 months through to March 2026, National Stock Exchange earned around 60% of its operating revenue from options trading.

But as it seeks to go public, NSE remains confident growth can continue. Next week it begins marketing ahead of its own exchange listing. What’s on offer is the most profitable exchange in the world, built on a product regulators want less of. To see whether the growth can last, read on.

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“If you plot the ten-year chart, it looks like we’re at the bottom of the latest cycle,” says Michael Saylor whose company, Strategy, is the largest corporate owner of Bitcoin. “I think the headwinds are the lingering Gulf War, the switch toward a more tight monetary policy, the hundreds of billions of dollars of capital that have been pulled into the AI trade by the Google deal, the SpaceX deal, all the other deals. Crypto hasn’t been the hot thing – the hot thing is SpaceX or AI.”

Saylor was in London this week along with a coterie of other crypto kingpins (it wouldn’t have anything to do with Wimbledon, would it?) One headwind he didn’t mention, though, was his own market impact. Strategy owns 847,363 Bitcoin, equivalent to 4% of the total supply, and close to 6% of the number in active circulation. This year alone, the company bought 174,863 Bitcoin for a consideration of $13.7 billion, accounting for roughly 70% of estimated net digital-asset flows year to date, according to estimates from JPMorgan.

Saylor’s purchases have been funded by a credit strategy that may not be sustainable. Last July, the company issued a new security, Stretch, which ranks senior to common equity and pays a variable dividend that management adjusts with the intention of keeping the price at $100 par – or at least that was the plan. Since launch, the company has issued $10.5 billion of Stretch on Nasdaq, where it trades under the ticker STRC alongside $5.0 billion of other Strategy preferred stock.

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Growing up on the South Side of Chicago in a neighborhood of firefighters and cops, Terry Duffy knew little about hog butchering and even less about trading. But a regular at a bar he tended in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, saw something in him and offered him a runner’s job at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

“I said I don’t even know what the hell the Chicago Mercantile Exchange is [but] it’s 1980, it’s raining ugly outside, there were no jobs to be had back then. I thought to myself, I’ll take a look at this. I got a job for $56 a week, and when I heard the bell go off for the first time I thought someone had bombed the exchange.”

Duffy started out in the lean hog pit, shuttling orders for pork futures between the phone clerks and the pit traders on the floor of the exchange. A year later he founded his own firm, TDA Trading, and bought a seat on the exchange. Seats had come down from a peak valuation of $380,000 but still cost more than Duffy could afford, so he persuaded his mother to mortgage the family home to help fund it. Shortly afterwards, he lost it all.

“I was in the pit and I misheard an order and I did the opposite of what I thought I was supposed to do and I lost – originally between $75,000 and $100,000” he said. “I turned the loss into $150,000 trying to make it better.”

It took Duffy three years to claw his way back, trading during the day and working bar jobs at night, his debt guaranteed by the trader who had scouted him. He went on to thrive on the floor, standing on the top stair of the pit in his red trading jacket, filling orders and schmoozing with customers. When CME introduced electronic trading in 1992, he was among the first to embrace it. In 1995, he joined the board and in 2002 became chairman, overseeing the restructuring that took CME public as the first US exchange to do so.

Under his leadership, CME grew into a powerhouse. It cemented a near-monopoly in US short-term interest rate derivatives and secured a dominant share in equity derivatives, anchored by its highly liquid E-mini and Micro futures contracts on the S&P 500. It still trades lean hog futures, though agricultural commodities now make up only 7% of daily trading volume. In all, it transacts 28.1 million contracts a day, up from 2.2 million contracts in 2002, earning a fee of around $0.65 on each contract. Margins, which have expanded from 34% to 66% under Duffy, rank among the highest in the S&P 500. Its market cap – $115 billion at its peak a few months ago – has risen 8,000% since the IPO.

But it hasn’t all been smooth. Duffy has had to negotiate shifting regulation, new technologies and the threat of challengers. Recently, a new challenge has emerged via prediction market platforms such as Kalshi. We’ve talked about them before. Beyond their success in sports betting, they see a bigger prize in financial assets. “The vision of Kalshi has always been: we want to build the next-generation exchange,” co-founder Tarek Mansour said this month. And that means going after CME. “Kalshi’s regulated prediction-market exchange combines Wall Street-grade reliability with Silicon Valley speed to create a next-generation CME for the 21st century,” the company trumpets.

It comes at a time Duffy is thinking about retirement. Last week, he announced that he will relinquish the CEO role he has held since 2016 to become executive chairman. But he won’t go quietly. The same week he unveiled his succession plans, he filed suit against his primary regulator, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and its chairman Michael Selig over their decision to grant Kalshi permission to launch perpetual futures, a product that some view as disruptive.

“I’m always up for a good battle,” says Duffy. “I’ve never shied away from one, and I won’t shy away from this.”

To understand what Duffy stands to lose – and whether he can win – read on.

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Thus says sports presenter Gary Lineker on his podcast, The Rest is Football. He then pivots:

“Wise works in over 160 countries with more than 40 currencies. When you’re paying for that flight or grabbing dinner before kickoff, you get the mid-market exchange rate. No markups, no hidden fees. I’ve spent enough time abroad to know how quickly those charges add up. Wise takes care of it so you can get back to what really matters, like debating starting elevens, deciding all-time elevens, and everything in between.”

The segment is part of a marketing campaign launched by payments company Wise to boost customer awareness. The company has around 19 million customers, with 70% coming via word-of-mouth. Now, it is scaling up its marketing effort to drive further growth, spending upwards of 5% of revenue to do so. Like other brands, it sees the World Cup as an opportunity, hiring a campaign manager to oversee tournament marketing. According to the State Department, the competition will bring up to 10 million international visitors to the United States over the next month – many of whom will need to buy US dollars. (Dallas was a blast, by the way).

Catering to travelling fans is a niche market, but Wise’s overall market is a collection of niches. The company’s London-based founders established the service so that they could swap currency exposures – one was paid in pounds but needed Estonian kroon to pay his mortgage back home; the other was paid in kroon but needed pounds to meet his living expenses.

“We’ve got like a real patchwork of different kinds of audiences who it’s great for, for different reasons, in different parts of the world,” said Wise’s former marketing director recently. “For people that are sending money to another country to support friends and family, it’s a fantastic product. For people that just happen to be working in another country, might have a house still in another country they have to pay for, or they’re moving large amounts of money around, even small businesses. So there’s not one coherent audience globally or even within any given market. So, it’s a kind of real conundrum to how do you package that one kind of brand that works for all those different audiences.”

Wise switched its primary listing from London to Nasdaq last month as part of an effort to “bring more of Wise to everyone in the US, as customers and as owners.” We talked about the company when it first listed in 2021, but its strategy has evolved since then as it targets its patchwork of audiences. To find out how the economics of that strategy hold up, read on.

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This year I’ll be travelling to Dallas to watch England play Croatia in the teams’ first group game. In a fit of exuberance I also bought tickets to all of England’s knock-out games conditional on them making it through – a total of five possible additional games. When I purchased them in an all-or-nothing ballot, I reckoned that if I wasn’t able to attend, I would be able to sell my seats on the secondary market. Indeed, attending all the games would be hard. Depending on where England finish in the group stage, they could play in stadiums as far afield as Mexico City, Toronto, Los Angeles and Miami.

But it seems I may have misjudged the demand-supply dynamic in this tournament’s ticket market. According to press reports, around 180,000 tickets remain unsold for the group phase of the competition. TV cameras panned across thousands of empty seats at the Korea-Czech Republic match on opening day in Guadalajara. Knock-out games are likely to draw greater demand, but I’m beginning to worry that I may be left long World Cup tickets that I am unable to use.

Fortunately, I have an alternative. We’ve discussed prediction markets here before, in The Wisdom of Crowds in 2024 and then again in Prediction Markets Grow Up in 2025. On the eve of the tournament, these markets had already facilitated bets worth close to $2 billion on which country would win the World Cup. On Polymarket alone, notional volume on the winner has surpassed the Super Bowl, the NBA championship and the Champions League and stands second only to the 2024 US presidential election across all the markets the platform has ever listed. Kalshi, the largest regulated prediction market in the US, is vying for attention with a campaign featuring coach José Mourinho. “I am the special one,” he says, “I see things before they happen.”

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Today it would rank only tenth, but when it came to the market in January 1956, Ford’s was the largest initial public offering in US history.

It was a long time coming. The company had been founded over fifty years before and had remained private throughout. Early investors had long since cashed out so there was no clamor for liquidity. Indeed, their success was legend. Everyone knew the story of James Couzens – later Senator Couzens – who scraped together $2,500 to invest in the new Ford Motor Company in 1903; in 1919, Henry Ford bought him out for $30 million. So when the public were finally invited in, the response was unlike anything Wall Street had seen.

The selling shareholder was the Ford Foundation. To mitigate estate taxes, Henry and his son, Edsel, had transferred almost 90% of the company’s stock into a foundation in 1936. Although technically a philanthropic endeavor, the Fords used it to safeguard family control. Henry died in 1947, Edsel before him in 1943, and by the mid-1950s the Foundation was keen to diversify. Its endowment was substantial – by this time, Ford was one of the largest private companies in America – but its income consisted entirely of Ford dividends, too unpredictable to plan around. Selling shares was the solution.

Yet before an IPO could take place, the Foundation needed to overcome a problem. Its economic interest in Ford didn’t extend to voting rights, which remained firmly in the grip of the family. Foundation president Horace Rowan Gaither didn’t think shares were marketable without them – and the New York Stock Exchange agreed. The family and the Foundation turned to Wall Street for help.

A solution took two years to negotiate but Goldman Sachs senior partner Sidney Weinberg, working with assistant John Whitehead, eventually got there. Operating in total secrecy – Ford was never referred to by name; in all correspondence it was simply “X” – they presented over fifty different proposals. In the end, the family gave up their exclusive voting rights, transferring 60% to a new class of common stock in return for an increased equity stake worth around $60 million.

Goldman leveraged this advisory work into a major role in the IPO syndicate. It wasn’t technically lead bookrunner – that role fell to Blyth & Co – but Weinberg retained significant influence over the process. For their part, Blyth & Co were surprised to win the mandate, the firm’s own head of syndicate admitting he had no idea how they’d done it. “What I do know,” he told journalist John Brooks, “is that one day in November, Mr. Gaither called Mr. Blyth, our chairman, who was in San Francisco, and asked him to fly to New York right away. When the head of an organization that’s about to sell something like half a billion dollars’ worth of stock asks an investment banker to come, he comes.”

Including Blyth and Goldman, seven lead underwriters were appointed as part of a syndicate that stretched to 722 firms. The only names not on the list were Morgan Stanley for its ties to General Motors and Dillon Read for its ties to Chrysler. “The syndicate will include just about everybody who’s in the business and who isn’t, or hasn’t been, in jail,” a Blyth vice-president told Brooks.

These days, it would be difficult to identify 700 firms and indeed many have disappeared – including Blyth, which was absorbed first into PaineWebber and then into UBS. John Whitehead, who later became Goldman chairman, kept a framed copy of the tombstone advertisement listing these firms in his office and would cross off names with a red pen as they failed, merged, or changed name. By the end of his tenure, few were left.

On January 17, 1956, representatives from each of the underwriters (bar one, banned from trading in New York over a shady Alaskan securities promotion) filed through Blyth’s offices to sign their underwriting agreements. On behalf of them all, Blyth agreed to pay the Ford Foundation $63 a share for 10.2 million shares, to be distributed to clients at a $1.50 mark-up.

By then, prospectuses had been mailed (half a million copies of a preliminary prospectus plus more than a million of the final prospectus), ads placed (in 120 newspapers), a due diligence meeting convened (where people scrambled to catch a glimpse of Henry Ford II) and demand gauged. It was to be “a landmark in the history of public ownership,” declared the president of the New York Stock Exchange, “as hot as a firecracker,” Blyth’s head of syndicate told Brooks.

Unsurprisingly, the deal was oversubscribed. Around 5-10% was reserved for institutional investors, 10% for Ford dealers and employees, and the rest would go to the public. Normally so disdainful of IPOs, even Warren Buffett bought in. “I haven’t bought an initial public offering since 1955,” he said a few years back. “I bought 100 shares of Ford when it came out. Gus Levy [Goldman’s head of trading] was running it. As a favor, he gave me 100 shares and I have to admit it now – I think the statute of limitations has expired – I took a free ride on 100 shares and made $500 and it’s the only time I’ve ever done that.” (He was making $12,000 a year at the time, he said, and $500 looked very good.)

Ford stock opened for trading on January 18 (ticker: F) with around 300,000 new owners. It traded up to $70.5 that day, handing them an immediate gain of 9.3%. But over the next few months the price drifted down into the forties as Ford dealers, who had overextended themselves to buy stock, rushed to sell.

By then, the banks had made their money. Their $1.50 per share mark-up rewarded them with fees of $15.3 million, equivalent to 2.33% of the funds raised. After expenses, they were left with 2.17%. As a high profile deal this fee rate fell on the low side. A few years later, Blyth brought publishing house Grosset & Dunlap to market for a 5.5% fee. Smaller deals attracted fees as high as 15% and often included warrants and expenses charged to the issuer that could push rates above 25%.

Goldman earned an additional fee of $250,000 for its advisory work and while this, too, was low – the work was thought to be worth $1 million – it set the firm up for a long business relationship with Ford. Weinberg hung a note he received from Henry Ford II on his office wall: “Without you, it could not have been accomplished.” He joined the Ford board and for nearly half a century Ford would become Goldman’s most prestigious investment banking client.

When Goldman itself IPO’d in 1999, Ford played a part. William Clay Ford Jr., then the carmaker’s CEO, was given an allocation of 400,000 shares – the largest allocation to an individual. A Ford shareholder sued, alleging the allocation was a reward for Ford’s business with Goldman Sachs and claiming that any gain on the shares belonged to the company. Ford agreed to settle, receiving $10 million from Goldman Sachs, and Bill sold his shares, donating the $4.5 million profit to charity.

Goldman has done a lot of IPOs over the years. It is leading the upcoming SpaceX IPO and has just been picked to lead on Anthropic. The record-breaking $85 billion secondary offering it organized for Google this week adds to its capital markets pedigree. Some things have changed since Ford – others have not. To see how the IPO business has evolved, and what the SpaceX IPO heralds, read on.

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If Forbes ran a 30 under 30 list in 1957, Gerry Tsai would have been on it. Already well regarded within Fidelity, the young portfolio manager wrote a memo to Ted Johnson, the firm’s founder and his boss, proposing he launch a new fund focused on growth stocks. Johnson handed him $200,000 and told him to go for it.

By the end of 1961, Tsai was managing $160 million, a six-fold increase over the previous 12 months. A market correction in 1962 hurt, but when the Cuban Missile Crisis was resolved that October, Tsai reacted quickly, buying $26 million in stocks over six weeks. His fund jumped 68% in three months, and by August 1963 had recovered all its losses. “All of Wall Street now watched Gerry Tsai’s every move, always certain the young manager was right,” journalist Justin Baer writes in his new book, House of Fidelity. “Tsai was a star, in many respects the mutual-fund industry’s first.”

Reflecting his prominence, Tsai was rapidly promoted. He was named a vice president in October 1960 and was given an opportunity to buy non-voting shares in FMR, Fidelity’s investment management company. In 1963, Johnson upped his shareholding to 20%, equivalent to about half his own stake.

By now the firm was approaching 20 years old and Johnson was nearing retirement. Tsai began agitating for Johnson to name his successor. When it became apparent that Ted would hand control to his son, Ned, Tsai resolved to leave. In October 1965, he sold his FMR shares back to the company for $2.2 million and began preparations to launch his own firm.

Tsai’s new fund was a success. Targeting a raise of $25 million, he pulled in nearly ten times that despite charging a fat upfront fee of 8.5%. Press clippings glowed. Tsai “radiates total cool,” Newsweek reported. After two years, his firm attracted attention from suitors and in August 1968, he sold to CNA Financial for a consideration of $30 million.

Sixty years on, Fidelity remains a family firm. Ned became president in 1972 and chairman and CEO in 1977. In 2014, his daughter Abigail took over, today overseeing a firm with 80,000 employees and $7 trillion under management.

It’s notable that so many large asset managers have stayed in private hands. Two of the top three firms in the world are privately owned; another is not far behind. Abigail and her family own 49% of Fidelity with employees and former employees holding the rest. Vanguard ($12 trillion in assets under management) is mutually owned by its customers. And Capital Group ($3.3 trillion) – older than either of them – is owned by a select group of senior employee partners.

Over the next few months, each of these firms will be asked to participate in some of the largest IPOs in history yet none have been through the process themselves. (Vanguard won’t be asked, but it will participate). They hew to distinct ownership structures that cut against the securities they trade in.

To see how each arrived at its structure – and what that means for how they operate today – read on.

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I haven’t had a chance to visit Citadel’s new global headquarters in Miami, and it’s a while since I visited the firm’s offices in New York, but I’m told that on his elevator doors, CEO Ken Griffin has emblazoned a slogan informing all who enter that his is the “#1 Most Profitable Hedge Fund Manager of All Time.”

The message celebrates Citadel’s position atop LCH Investments’ rolling scoreboard of hedge fund gains. Since founding the firm in 1990, Griffin has delivered net gains to investors of $90.4 billion after fees – over $10 billion more than any of his closest peers. His flagship fund has generated positive returns in more than 80% of the months it has been going, and has grown at a rate of 19.2% a year, again after fees. With $68 billion under management, Citadel isn’t the largest hedge fund manager out there but it is adept at managing cycles and the changes they bring.

Recently, Griffin has been speaking about AI. The finance industry has a long tradition of deploying technology to achieve edge, and Citadel has been at the forefront. It launched a quantitative strategies group in 2012 and employs around 270 PhDs from fields including computer engineering and statistics. Currently, around one in three employees at the firm is a software engineer.1

Yet while the firm was quick to embrace earlier machine learning advances to support its portfolio managers, its approach to generative AI was more tempered. Griffin instructed his team to abandon 195 of the 200 projects they had been working on and a year ago remarked that AI hadn’t been game-changing. As recently as January, he remained unimpressed:

“I was with one of my colleagues who runs our commodities business, and he handed me a report that we generated with an AI engine. Doesn’t matter what the topic was, the first few sentences – wow, that’s really insightful. And then you go down below that and it’s all garbage.”

At a session at Stanford this month, though, he changed his tune.

“In the last few months, there has been a step change in the productivity of the AI toolkit. It is profoundly more powerful than it was just nine months ago.

And for us at Citadel, that has allowed us to unleash a much broader array of use cases for AI. And it has been really interesting to watch, to be blunt, work that we would usually do with people with Masters and PhDs in finance over the course of weeks or months being done by AI agents over the course of hours or days.

… I have to tell you, I went home one Friday actually fairly depressed by this because you could just see how this was going to have such a dramatic impact on society. When you witness it in your own four walls, when you see work that used to be man years of work being done in days or weeks, it’s like, wow, like that’s the first time I’ve seen real impact in our four walls.”

Griffin’s experience reflects a prediction made by Anthropic, the AI lab most focused on finance. In a report on the labor market, it ranks investment analysts as the seventh most exposed profession to AI displacement, up there with data entry keyers and customer service representatives. For a firm built around people – “a culture where talent can thrive,” as Citadel’s website proclaims, and “a team where every mind counts” – this can be jarring.2

To find out how Griffin has built one of the most disciplined talent operations in finance – and whether AI changes the calculus – read on.

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Social media remains a relatively new frontier in investor relations. Barclays is also looking to hire an IR manager and its job spec makes no mention of social media. The successful candidate there is expected to prepare and review presentations, cultivate shareholder relationships and manage events “to effectively communicate the company’s story to investors.”

Payments company Fiserv is another firm looking to hire. Tasks include collecting investor feedback, gathering information on competitors’ earnings, managing the quarterly earnings reporting process, maintaining a record of publicly disclosed information, and representing the company on investor calls. Unlike their counterpart at SpaceX, Fiserv’s investor relations officer won’t be required to “monitor social platforms, retail investor forums, and market commentary to track sentiment, engagement trends, and emerging narratives.” Scrolling is not part of the day job at Fiserv.

Of course, SpaceX is a different kind of company. For a start, it owns its own social media platform, X, where many of its prospective shareholders congregate. CEO Elon Musk already showcased his disdain for traditional investor relations processes back in 2018 when he cut analysts off his Tesla earnings call for asking boring, bonehead questions. “These questions are so dry. They’re killing me,” he said. Instead, he went to YouTube and invited questions from Gali, a 25-year-old fanboy who couldn’t believe his luck (“I’m still basically in complete shock right now,” he told viewers afterwards).

These days, Tesla uses Robinhood-owned Say Technologies to canvass questions from individual investors. On its most recent call, 4,900 participants submitted 86 questions through the platform; nine were answered. That left time for only five Wall Street analysts to ask questions.

When I was a regular attendee on earnings calls, they were heavily choreographed affairs. No investor relations manager wanted to run the risk of inviting Buddy Fox from Geneva Roth Holding Corporation onto their call, or Bruce Wayne from Wayne Enterprises. But the rise of retail participation has changed the landscape. The share of US households that own stocks has surged this decade to nearly 60%. Broadridge, a company that offers investor communications services, helps administer around 1.5 billion shareholder positions, up 15% on last year. For the first time, Americans hold more wealth in stocks than in their homes. Retail trading activity now accounts for roughly 20% of total US equity trading volumes.

The shift comes at the same time as passive becomes more dominant. We talked last week about the demand for SpaceX shares from index funds – a group that the company’s new investor relations manager won’t have to court. Invesco’s exchange-traded fund QQQ alone will be obliged to buy an estimated $2.7 billion of stock whether the role is filled or not. With such a large share of the market impervious to their charms, investor relations officers can focus their attention elsewhere – on retail investors and, increasingly, on audiences inside the company. To understand where the role is headed – and how it got there – read on.

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The Nasdaq-100 index tracking stock launched in March 1999. It was an immediate hit. Listed under the ticker QQQ on Nasdaq’s sister venue, the American Stock Exchange, it accumulated $12 billion in assets in its first year. By the time it transferred to Nasdaq five years later, trading volumes had increased from 6.9 million shares per day to 100.3 million – and a million investors held it.1

As it grew, Nasdaq risked turning into an asset manager. An algorithm ran its investment process, but marketing required specialist resource. “So we looked around for a good partner,” says Jacobs, “and PowerShares was merging into Invesco, and when we talked to the team at Invesco they said we have 400 salespeople. Nasdaq had three. It was easy math to figure out that we would be able to broaden the distribution.”

In partnership with Invesco, the fund continued to flourish. It charged investors 0.20% of net assets and ploughed much of that into marketing. As part of its deal with fundholders, any revenues left over after paying expenses such as licensing and trustee fees had to be used exclusively for marketing. With Nasdaq taking a licensing fee of around 0.08% of net assets and Bank of New York Mellon a trustee fee of around 0.04%, that left a lot to spend on ads. “I’ve been watching college basketball and have seen 10+ QQQ commercials. I don’t remember ever seeing this many specific investment advertisements, other than the crypto craze a few years ago,” posted one Reddit user.

QQQ now sits on $456 billion of net assets, making it the fifth largest exchange-traded fund in the market. In the past five years, it has spent $749 million on marketing. Invesco recently succeeded in amending its agreement with fundholders to capture more of the revenue for itself. As part of the revised agreement, the fund’s charge falls slightly to 0.18%, but Invesco captures more of what remains – committing to a marketing budget of $60-100 million and retaining a revenue stream of around 0.04% of net assets.23

For Nasdaq, it has been a profitable endeavor. QQQ was its first exchange-traded fund – and remains its largest – but its index now sits inside multiple products listed all over the world. In the past 12 months, it earned $854 million in licensing fees, of which around a third are from QQQ. Licensing overtook cash equities trading as a source of earnings some time ago; now, for the first time, it has overtaken data and listings too. In the company’s core business of capital access and market services (excluding the newish financial technology businesses we discussed in Nasdaq’s Pivot) index licensing makes up a quarter of revenue – and the opportunity is still expanding. Nasdaq recently gave BlackRock and State Street permission to launch funds on the same pricing terms as QQQ, adding their distribution networks to Invesco’s.4

“A new chapter of growth and expansion for the Nasdaq-100,” said CEO Adena Friedman on her recent earnings call.

The ascendancy of indexing is part of a broader trend as passive gains an increasing stranglehold over markets. Passive now accounts for 39% of total assets among the world’s largest 500 asset managers and over a third of US equity market trading. Add in active assets that use the Nasdaq-100 and other indices as a benchmark for performance and their influence grows.

Now that influence is reshaping listings. Nasdaq talks often about flywheel effects – executives mentioned the idea 22 times at their investor day earlier this year. Listings were always meant to be the engine. But listings have stalled. Now Nasdaq is trying to run the flywheel in reverse – using the index to restart the listings engine. To see how, read on.

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When it changed hands last year, the pub’s former proprietor bemoaned what a difficult business it is to run: “Pub and bar ownership isn’t for the faint hearted,” he said – it “requires energy and focus.” It’s something his patrons might say about their own business. The difference is that while the hospitality industry faces challenges (as I know well – I’ve described my own experiences of owning a pub here before) the arbitrage industry is on a roll: a “golden age,” the Financial Times characterized it this week.

The concept is simple enough. “Arbitrage is when you can do a set of different trades that cancel each other out and make a free profit at the end,” one likely former customer writes in his book, The Trading Game. He was looking at foreign exchange, but the breadth of such trades is currently huge:1

• Disrupted by the crisis in Iran, the spread between oil prices in different parts of the world has rarely been wider. Last month, a barrel of crude oil could be picked up for $78 in Kansas; in Sri Lanka, it cost $286.

• The so-called “basis trade” where traders sell Treasury futures and buy underlying Treasury bonds continues to attract record flows, estimated at over $1 trillion. It profits when the basis between the two instruments converges, often at the futures’ expiry. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) calculates that after a period of low profitability from 2020-23, returns rose to nearly 2% on numerous occasions in late 2024 and 2025. With leverage, that becomes meaningful.

• Fixed income markets provide a venue for other arbitrage trades, too, including the swap spread trade which exploits the difference between the fixed rate of an interest rate swap and the yield of a government bond. Including the basis trade, The IMF estimates that traders have around $2.3 trillion of fixed income arbitrage exposure on their books right now. So far it’s been a good risk-adjusted trade – since September 2022, the Bloomberg Fixed Income Arbitrage Hedge Fund Index is up 32%.

• The growth of private markets creates new opportunities. We’ve discussed the wave of redemptions that has hit private credit funds over the past few months. Some of that is being recycled into publicly traded funds that trade at steep discounts to net asset value.

For those putting on or facilitating these trades, it’s a profitable time. Jane Street, whose legacy business lies in exploiting price differences between the market value of exchange-traded funds and their underlying holdings, earned a record $39.6 billion of trading revenue last year – more than any of the traditional Wall Street brokers. Glencore announced this week that first quarter profits put its trading unit on track to exceed the top end of its long-term guidance for the full year. And as a measure of how hedge funds are sizing the opportunity, their borrowing sits at a record high of $7.42 trillion, up a third over the prior year.

Arbitrage is a broad term and it’s often misused. If you want to sound clever in finance circles, simply describe your latest trade as an “arb”. To dig into what arbitrage really is, and how the opportunity is playing out, read on.

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In the world of finance that Net Interest caters to though, Cook may be remembered for something else: his role in reshaping payments. When Apple shipped the iPhone 6 in 2014 with a near-field communication (NFC) chip embedded inside, it was, in the words of Capital One CEO Rich Fairbank, “a game changer in terms of security.” The chip allowed iPhone users to make contactless payments by holding their phone near a terminal. Crucially, it never transmitted actual card numbers – instead generating a one-time code for each transaction. Combined with fingerprint or face authentication, it was significantly harder to defraud than a physical card.

Cook’s initial motivation was to monopolise what people keep in their pants:

“We’re about making the user’s life better, making the experience better. We saw all the mobile payment stuff that had been done and none of it was making anybody’s life better. It was more about creating a business model for someone else to make money. We started with the user and we said, what do they really want? Well, nobody wants to carry a wallet. You don’t want another thing that you have to remember to put in your pants when you walk out the door. You don’t want another thing to lose. You don’t really want this card with exposed numbers on it that has a huge security risk on it. And so we fixed the security issue. Our system is much more secure than the traditional credit card system is.”

“We kept the thing that people liked, which is they do love their card. And we said, ‘We don’t want any of this data. So we’re not doing what other companies are doing. We don’t want to know what you’re buying. We don’t want to know where you’re buying it. We don’t want to collect all this stuff on Charlie [Rose, his interviewer]. I don’t want to know where you’re spending your nights.’ And so we firewall all the stuff — we don’t keep it, it’s not on our servers. And so we kept what’s great and fixed what wasn’t.”

Today, Apple Pay is used by 785 million people worldwide. It is accepted at over 90% of US retailers where it has a market share of 14.2% in online payments and 5.6% in in-store purchases. Cook said on his latest earnings call that last year alone, it eliminated $1 billion in fraud.

Having nurtured its growth, Cook has used Apple Pay as a springboard into other financial products. In 2019, he launched Apple Card, announcing that by “bringing together our hardware, software and services, we’re going to do…so much more, changing the entire credit card experience.” He also launched a peer-to-peer digital transfer service, a point-of-sale capability directly in the iPhone, a savings product, and he has flirted with Buy Now Pay Later. He has reined in his fintech ambitions over the past couple of years, but his successor may have other ideas.

To explore Apple’s footprint in fintech more fully, and the competitive advantage it has versus pure-plays like PayPal, read on.

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So what are they seeing?

First, on the consumer. Last week, the University of Michigan reported its lowest-ever reading on its consumer sentiment survey. The university has been conducting this survey for 74 years and April’s reading came in below anything registered during the global financial crisis, peak Covid or the period of stagflation in the 1980s. While inflation has fallen from its highs, price levels remain high and many respondents cite this as a reason for poor personal finances. Higher gas prices don’t help.

But what consumers say and how they behave are different. “I don’t know that we can square for you the headline surveys on consumer confidence or small business confidence, which are all not great, how we square that with what we actually see,” said Bill Demchak, CEO of PNC Financial Services Group. “When you look through spending patterns, growth in savings, activity levels, loan growth, like everything we see day-to-day in our business is almost at complete odds with the surveys you see on confidence.”

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Named Bistro – short for Broad Index Secured Trust Offering – the structure bundled 307 credits from JPMorgan’s balance sheet, spanning corporate loans, bonds, and municipal debt. A special purpose vehicle would insure the portfolio’s risk, funded by selling notes to outside investors. If all went well, investors would earn a steady stream of fees paid for by the bank to compensate them for assuming the risk. If things went badly and defaults occurred, investors would be on the hook. Because defaults were expected to be low – Moody’s estimated 0.82% per year – the vehicle didn’t need to raise so much money. On a portfolio size of $9.7 billion, capital of only $700 million was deemed necessary – enough to cover losses in all but the most dire of scenarios.

JPMorgan gave investors a choice. They could sit first in line to take losses in the event of defaults via $237 million of high yielding Ba2 notes, or they could opt for $460 million of safer, though lower-yielding, AAA notes which would only take losses once the Ba2 tranche had been exhausted. The special purpose vehicle invested the proceeds in US Treasuries, guaranteeing the money would be there if called upon. Only if it was used up would JPMorgan need to take a hit on the so-called super-senior risk it retained.1

Within a matter of days, investors snapped up all the notes. JPMorgan didn’t hang about. In early 1998, it conducted a second transaction and soon began marketing the service to others. Regulators gave the fledgling market a boost by agreeing to lower capital requirements on the super-senior slice. Against the standard 8% capital requirement for corporate loans, regulators allowed exposures supported by a Bistro structure to be backed by only 1.6% of capital. Now, not only could banks use the structure to fine-tune credit exposures, they could free up capital as well. In less than a year, JPMorgan printed five deals, transferring credit risk on $29 billion of exposure by selling $2.7 billion of securities.

“The overarching motivation for Bistro wasn’t to open up a new market or sell some funky product, but for JP Morgan to hedge its credit risk,” Bill Winters, former co-chief executive of JP Morgan’s investment bank, later recalled. “It was extremely effective in accomplishing that. It also had the effect of spawning a new industry.”

Over time, the spawned industry morphed. Bistros became known as synthetic collateralised debt obligations. Banks began dumping real estate assets including sub-prime mortgages into them while transparency eroded. Some accumulated huge super-senior positions on their books, blind to the risk building up. Others bought protection from monoline insurers that would prove largely worthless. By the time the financial crisis hit in 2007, outstanding volumes stood at $105 billion.

It took a while following the crisis for the market to recover but in 2017, after a wave of reforms, authorities in Europe published a paper clarifying how transactions would be treated from a regulatory perspective. Rebranded synthetic risk transfers or SRTs (or in the US, simply credit risk transfers) volumes have reaccelerated. Last year, banks issued $41 billion of SRTs, up from $29 billion the prior year and are on track to grow issuance by more than 20% again this year. JPMorgan has done some – in December 2023, it finalised a deal to buy $2 billion of insurance on a $22 billion portfolio – but other banks including Barclays and Santander have embraced the trend more actively.2

Alongside all the focus on private credit, SRTs are attracting scrutiny as a similarly opaque market, growing quickly. Over recent months, the European Central Bank, the Bank for International Settlements and the International Monetary Fund have all weighed in to warn that SRT-related risks could be building undetected.

This comes after the pioneer of the Bistro already sounded the alarm. Now chairman and CEO of PNC Financial Services Group, Bill Demchak ran the department that devised the structure within JPMorgan back in 1997. “I might have invented that product,” he told investors in 2024.

“In today’s world [it] is perhaps the cheapest way to create capital. But a complete arbitrage… If you’re actually executing and a professional takes the other side, you must presume that he’s charging you more for the risk you’re hedging than you would charge yourself internally or you never would have made the loan, you’d never be in the business. So this is a near-term band-aid to free up capital that you can double down and make the next mistake on.”

We’ve discussed emerging asset classes here before – private credit, infrastructure, litigation finance, GP stakes, supply chain finance, GPUs and more. Key to their durability is an equilibrium between supply-side factors and demand-side factors, with regulation often a pivotal catalyst.

To dig into those factors and explore how they shape the growth of SRTs – and the risks regulators fear are building inside them – read on.

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This week, I’m joined by Adam Shapiro, partner and co-founder of Klaros Group. Klaros is a specialist advisory firm that helps financial institutions navigate banking regulation from applying for a bank ch…

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An experienced investor, he’d done his due diligence. Among his calls was one to a senior executive of Visa. The company would never be able to maintain a competitive advantage, the exec told him. The big players would copy whatever it built. Encouraged by his own experience of the product – and his daughter’s – he ignored the advice and wrote a cheque in the company’s seed round, becoming a 3.3% shareholder.

Today, Revolut does much more than free currency exchange. Its product range spans savings, lending, investing and trading, business banking, eSIMs, travel booking and more. It has 70 million customers across 39 countries – up from around 150,000 at the time of that meeting, when it operated in the UK alone. Full-year results released this week show gross revenue of $6.0 billion and net income of $1.7 billion – numbers its founder and CEO Nik Storonsky reckons will grow by at least 50% this year. With a valuation of $75 billion, determined by a secondary share sale last November, Revolut is already worth more than many established banks.1

Not bad for an angel investment.

Ten years on, any scepticism shared by incumbents has vanished:

“We do observe Revolut very carefully,” said the CEO of BNP Paribas in Poland in December. “This is the most successful neo financial institution in history, and they will have their place in the landscape.”

“When you have strong, highly competitive new entrants in the market, you have to pay attention,” said the CEO of Société Générale on his third quarter earnings call.

“Our competition is all back. Wells Fargo is back, Bank of America is back, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley. But we also have Citadel, fintech, Revolut, and that – so we are conscious of that,” said Jamie Dimon in May.

Even Visa has come around. Revolut recently partnered with Visa to launch a premium business card. “Titan for Revolut is a really cool win for us,” the company’s Chief Product and Strategy Officer said this month.

Since my peek inside the dashboard, I have been a happy Revolut user. I signed up immediately after leaving that meeting and – as the app still records – spent £6,438 on my travels through the remainder of that year. As an early user, I also got the opportunity to invest a small amount in the series A.

I’ve written about the company before – in Revolution in the Air in 2020 and Britain’s Newest Bank in 2024 – but, with results just released and a shiny new bank license in the bag, it warrants a fresh look. To dig into the numbers and explore what they say about Revolut’s competitive positioning, read on.

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But this was no gathering of four-star generals. The Leadenhall-based Joint War Committee is made up of senior underwriters in the marine insurance industry, whose job it is to determine regions of the world that present enhanced risk of peril. On March 1, they expanded their map of so-called ‘listed areas’ to incorporate large parts of the Gulf.

For shipowners and charterers, this had implications for insurance cover. All have policies in place to accommodate a range of risks – hull damage, cargo, crew, third-party liability. The unpredictability of war – and its tendency not to hew to standard actuarial trends – means war risk has long occupied a category of its own, but most seafarers have a policy to cover that, too.

When hostilities erupted, those policies came into focus. Commentators saw several leading insurers issue cancellation notices and concluded that war risk cover was being pulled entirely. They suggested that was a reason for the collapse in traffic through the Strait. Donald Trump promptly intervened, announcing that the United States Development Finance Corporation would step in “to provide political risk insurance and guarantees for the Financial Security of ALL Maritime Trade, especially Energy, traveling through the Gulf.”

The reality was more mundane. Reinsurers backing a specific layer of cover for charterers had got nervous and, exercising a contractual right, excluded Gulf claims at 72 hours’ notice. The insurers, their hands forced, duly notified clients. It wasn’t the first time – the same sequence had played out after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, and again when Houthi attacks escalated in the Red Sea in 2024. Each time, replacement cover was on the market before the old contracts expired. The Joint War Committee was blunt: “Despite some regrettably incorrect reporting about cancellation, hull war insurance cover remains in place and available in the London market.”

What did change was price. “I think we have had in the last week a 500% increase on war risk insurance,” shipping magnate Nikolas Tsakos told investors on his earnings call a few days into the war. “I think from what we used to do it at $0.15 per deadweight ton, we’re up to close to $1 now or $0.75 to a $1. So that’s a huge increase.”

And that was just the beginning. By mid-March, cover had leaped to around 5% of a vessel’s value – roughly five times even those early-war rates. Insuring a $100 million tanker through the Strait now costs in the region of $5 million.1

But when faced with the risk of a direct hit, crossing the Strait isn’t just a matter of insurance. “Our main concern is the safety of the crews,” the CEO of d’Amico International Shipping told investors on his call last week. “It’s not that of the vessel itself – because the vessel itself can be insured in normal circumstances.”

Through the beginning of this week, there have been 18 direct attacks on commercial vessels in the Gulf, plus another five which have suffered near misses or minor damage. This is not somewhere a prudent captain takes a laden tanker, however much Donald Trump inveigles him to “show some guts”. London’s moment of apparent influence over Hormuz traffic turned out to be a misreading. The key didn’t hang there after all.

The episode, though, is a useful entry point into a market that most people never think about until something flares up. I had flagged last week that I was going to write about marine insurance, and the response from readers persuaded me to weigh anchor. To explore how the market works – and what this crisis reveals about it – read on.

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This week, I’m joined by Kunal Kapoor, CEO of Morningstar. Kunal has spent his entire career at the firm, starting as a data analyst and working his way up to lead one of the key information providers in global finance. Morningstar began as the “system of record” for the mutual fund industry, known for its star ratings, but today it’s a much broader platform spanning credit ratings, indexing, private-market intelligence through PitchBook, and wealth technology.

I’ve written recently about how AI could reshape the financial data industry — potentially unbundling traditional terminals and shifting the competitive focus towards proprietary data and embedded workflows. That makes Kunal an especially interesting person to speak with. Morningstar sits right at the centre of those changes as a firm built on data, research and investor trust.

We cover a lot of ground in this conversation – from Morningstar’s ratings franchise and the push for transparency in private markets to the economics of financial data and what AI might mean for the future of market intelligence. So it’s a pleasure to have Kunal on the show.

We discuss:

• Morningstar’s evolution from mutual funds to financial data platform [02:12]

• Star ratings, Medalist ratings, and the continuing role of human analysts [07:05]

• How AI is changing financial information interfaces [10:18]

• The value in financial information: proprietary data, research and IP [11:06]

• Morningstar’s move into private markets and semi-liquid funds [18:30]

• Private company research and venture valuations [24:00]

• Competing with larger agencies in the ratings business [29:52]

• Morningstar’s push into indexing and the economics of the index business [35:26]

• Why Kunal rejects the idea that retail investors are “dumb money” — and what worries him instead [38:11]

• Crypto, risk-taking and what still matters most in financial data businesses [40:37]

Further Reading

We’ve discussed the rise of retail money in private credit before. By some accounts, vehicles set up to cater to wealthy individuals now make up 30% of the direct lending market. Many of those investors now want out. And as others watch redemption requests go in, they wonder if they shouldn’t ask for their money back too. According to data from Robert A Stanger & Co, redemption requests are running close to 8% this quarter, up from an average 1.3% in 2024.

It’s been three years since Silicon Valley Bank reminded us what a bank run can look like. One of the lessons from that episode is that historic assumptions about the stability of retail funding need updating for the social media age. WhatsApp groups, X/Twitter and the like give retail investors coordination mechanisms with far greater reach and immediacy than ever before. The old logic that a diversified base of small investors was inherently stable no longer holds when information – and panic – spreads instantly.

Private credit is structured differently to banks. Without the blanket of deposit insurance, managers employ other means to push out the duration of their funding. Typically, they impose redemption limits, conventionally 5% per quarter. The problem is that those limits are now being breached. Last week, BlackRock said that it had received requests to repurchase 9.3% of shares outstanding in its HPS Corporate Lending Fund (HLEND) – “exceeding the 5% framework for the first time since inception.” Blackstone announced that redemption requests totalled 7.9% of its Blackstone Private Credit Fund (BCRED). And this week, Cliffwater revealed that investors have asked to pull 14% out of its flagship private credit interval fund.1

Managers are responding to the wave of redemption requests in a variety of ways. Blackstone upsized its offer to 7% and joined with its employees to chip in the rest, declaring proudly that it is “fulfilling all repurchase requests this quarter, as we have done every quarter since inception.” BlackRock, by contrast, stuck to its guns, imposing a 5% limit while thanking investors “for the trust you place in us as your investment fiduciary.” Its decision was applauded by John Zito, co-President of peer firm Apollo Asset Management, who said that these “products are designed to protect redeeming and remaining investors by allowing vehicle liquidity to match natural asset liquidity.” Blue Owl tried a different approach. It sold a portfolio of loans in its Blue Owl Capital Corp II vehicle to fund a one-off 30% payout, telling investors to hold tight for the rest. Rather than stick with its quarterly tendering schedule, management will return capital as and when it can.

Over the next month, other funds will reveal the scale of their outflows. Goldman Sachs estimates that the industry could see $45 billion to $70 billion in net outflows over the next two years. Yet the fear of gates going up before investors can exit may itself accelerate the outflows. Managers reference record redemption requests, but it’s not clear how robustly they have modelled these at the industry level.

For some, recent events have the hallmarks of the Global Financial Crisis. On X/Twitter this week, Jeffrey Gundlach, founder of DoubleLine Capital, posted: “A Private Credit Fund of Funds in 2026 seems to rather closely resemble a CDO-squared in early 2007.”

Many of the echoes are certainly there. In June 2007, Bear Stearns suffered debilitating issues in two of its managed hedge funds; a few months later, Goldman Sachs had to stabilise one of its own. Questions around marks and hidden leverage circulate. Whatever parallels you want to draw, the important question is whether the current issues are systemic. To explore the question with me, read on.2

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