TheChek News Flow

Silver surges above $60 for first time on global supply squeeze

Google will launch its first AI glasses in 2026, according to a company blog post.

At Google’s I/O event in May, the company announced partnerships with Gentle Monster and Warby Parker to create consumer wearables based on Android XR, the operating system that powers Samsung’s Galaxy XR headset.

But you can’t wear a bulky headset while out in the real world, which makes smart glasses appealing as a less obtrusive smart wearable.

“For AI and XR to be truly helpful, the hardware needs to fit seamlessly into your life and match your personal style,” Google writes. “We want to give you the freedom to choose the right balance of weight, style and immersion for your needs.”

Google is working on various types of AI-powered glasses — one model is designed for screen-free assistance, using built-in speakers, microphones, and cameras to allow the user to communicate with Gemini and take photos. The other model has an in-lens display — which is only visible to the person wearing the glasses — that can show turn-by-turn directions or closed captioning.

Google also shared a preview of the wired XR glasses from Xreal called Project Aura. This model situates itself between a bulky headset and an unobtrusive pair of glasses. Beyond just an in-lens display, the Project Aura glasses can function as an extended workplace or entertainment device, allowing the user to use Google’s suite of products or stream video as they would in a more advanced headset.

While Meta has gotten off to an early lead in smart glasses development, Google now joins Apple and Snap among the companies expected to challenge Meta with their own hardware next year.

Meta’s smart glasses have caught on in part thanks to its partnership with Ray-Ban, and it sells these products in retail stores. Google’s partnership with Warby Parker seems like it will follow a similar strategy, committing $75 million thus far to support the eyewear company’s product development and commercialization costs. If Warby Parker meets certain milestones, Google will commit an additional $75 million and take an equity stake in the brand.

Commodities trader Trafigura says burst of new supply coming online will collide with reduced demand growth

The oil market faces a “super glut” next year as a burst of new supply collides with weakness in the global economy, one of the world’s biggest commodity traders has warned.

Saad Rahim, chief economist of Trafigura, said on Tuesday that new drilling projects and slowing demand growth were likely to weigh further on already depressed crude prices next year.

“Whether it’s a glut, or a super glut, it’s hard to get away from that,” Rahim said in remarks alongside the company’s annual results.

Brent crude has fallen 16 per cent this year, on track for its worst year since 2020. Prices are expected to be further damped by major projects coming online next year, including in Brazil and Guyana.

Demand from China, the world’s biggest oil importer, is expected to grow more slowly next year due to its huge fleet of electric vehicles, which have sharply reduced petrol demand. Low prices this year have prompted China to buy more crude to fill its strategic stockpile.

“China needs to keep buying at this rate, for that super glut to not show up even earlier,” Rahim added.

The US government has also been trying to keep oil prices low, and President Donald Trump has pledged to “drill, baby, drill” in a push to increase American production.

Trafigura reported net profits of $2.7bn during the fiscal year that ended in September, down slightly from $2.8bn the previous year — and representing a five-year low after years of bumper profits linked to Russia’s full invasion of Ukraine.

Its non-ferrous metals trading division reported a record year, due in part to the profits made by shipping copper into the US amid the disruptions caused by whipsawing tariff rules, according to people familiar with the matter.

Trafigura chief executive Richard Holtum said “significant headline-driven volatility” had been a major driver for markets this year and that the trend would continue in 2026.

“Trading conditions were not easy last year and our trading team put on a really credible performance across all divisions,” said Holtum.

However, the small drop in profits, combined with rising payouts to Trafigura’s employee-shareholders, meant group equity fell slightly, to $16.2bn, from $16.3bn the previous year — marking the first time this figure has shrunk since 2018.

Payouts to Trafigura’s employees rose to $2.9bn, up from $2bn during the prior year. The company, whose top management is based in Geneva, pays out “dividends” to its employee-shareholders, including by buying back the shares of departing employees over time.

The large number of departures among senior Trafigura staff over the past two years has put pressure on the dividend programme, prompting the board to slow the pace of share repurchases.

Ben Luckock, head of oil trading at Trafigura, said in October that he expected oil prices could fall below $60 a barrel before rallying. “I suspect we’ll go into the $50s at some point across Christmas and the new year,” he said at the time.

Firms like Apollo find it hard to shake narratives formed by legacy private equity and distressed debt operations

After a difficult 2025, private credit bosses are expressing frustration at losing the narrative over their companies. In September, a top executive at Blue Owl Capital wondered why the shares of the company had fallen by 25 per cent for the year, telling an industry conference: “It just makes no sense to me . . . what am I missing?” 

Marc Rowan, the head of Apollo and the sector’s most influential thought leader, decided in November it was time to blame the media. At a periodic investor meeting held by Apollo’s insurance affiliate Athene, he offered a slide entitled “Does Anybody Know What They Are Talking About?”

The page showed a series of recent headlines (including one from the FT) which he said demonstrated a misunderstanding of the nuances among the differing products and business models within private credit.

Rowan’s remarks were similar to what he has offered at earnings calls and investor conferences for the last several years: assurances that his firm Apollo is not overexposed to the risky and opportunistic leveraged buyout finance side of private credit. Rather, as he has long reiterated, Apollo’s focus in the credit business was 99.6 per cent focused on high-grade debt, offering “safe yield”, in its own language, that matched well with its retirement annuities business run by Athene, itself conservatively capitalised.

On the surface, Rowan is probably correct. Much of Apollo’s lending is highly structured and complex but typically secured with a senior lien against hard collateral. As for the balance sheet, Athene’s credit ratings sit just below AAA. 

However, what is also true for Apollo and several other big private credit managers is that their heritage is in racy private equity and the sometimes vicious world of distressed debt brawls. And those stereotypes will not be so easy to shake just as these firms want to manage trillions of Main Street dollars and position themselves as the heirs to bank-like lending. Trust, record and reputation matter in a complex business which regulators, the public and journalists are still struggling to grasp.  

“We are becoming a bank. It truly sucks,” one longtime Apollo credit investing executive recently told me. This person worried about the loss of efficiency from what he said were new layers of bureaucracy and politics that come from being a large, diversified financial institution.  

Apollo now discloses a figure similar to the “net interest margin” measure of banks that shows the difference between the pay on its deposits and earn on loans. The firm reports a “spread-related earnings” figure which shows that its investments earn just over 1 per cent above what it pays out to annuity policyholders. The Apollo executive also pointed out that, like at a bank, overhead costs suddenly mattered more.

A heavy balance-sheet business with thin spread margins is not necessarily bad when the underlying market opportunity is measured in the trillions of dollars and there is the chance to earn leveraged returns that compound year after year, which Apollo and Athene aspire to do like a modern Berkshire Hathaway.

However, the firm remains in the harder-edged businesses of private equity and distressed debt. Apollo, for example, is in a messy legal fight at Patrick Drahi’s overleveraged Altice USA where the firm is a major creditor. Apollo had also taken a short position in the term loan of the now scandal-torn auto parts maker First Brands, which another Apollo executive said made it trickier for the firm to be seen as an ally to companies. Another person close to Apollo said, however, such short trades were one-off and merely the result of the firm’s intensive research process.

In 1990, Apollo itself was born of an insurance investment calamity. It scavenged on the oversized junk bond portfolio that had soured at the Executive Life Insurance Company, a west coast life insurer. The legal fallout from the distressed purchase of the ELIC junk bond portfolio helped to bring down French bank Credit Lyonnais and at one point California’s attorney-general sued four Apollo executives for being part of an illegal transaction, but the case was dismissed and no enforcement action against Apollo resulted.

That was a long time ago. But after years of aggressive manoeuvring in current private equity and distressed debt operations, Apollo and its brethren should expect wariness when they now want to present themselves as a friendly face in the boardroom.

After tension around profit-sharing and culture, the fund tries a new leadership model

Following a streak of disappointing performance, tension over profit-sharing and complaints about a negative culture, Sequoia’s $9 billion hedge fund is trying a new approach to leadership: “No kings.”

The firm has installed a group of four leaders in an attempt to make the hedge fund’s operation look similar to that of its more famous relative, Sequoia Capital, the giant venture-capital firm, according to people familiar with the fund. It is an unusual move for the hedge fund world, where co-portfolio manager relationships have been known to blow up and clients tend to like a single boss.

Sequoia Capital Global Equities is a large hedge-fund investor in tech and has long been seen as a way for clients to get some access to Sequoia’s private investments. It is a growth investor with bets on both public and private tech companies. Its private portfolio has included Stripe, TikTok parent ByteDance, SpaceX, Chinese food-delivery giant Meituan, Chime Financial CHYM -0.83%decrease; red down pointing triangle and failed crypto firm FTX.

The hedge fund reports to a board that includes partners of Sequoia Capital, which recently shook up its own leadership. Alfred Lin and Pat Grady, who Sequoia named as stewards in November, are reviewing the hedge fund’s operations, said a person familiar with the firm.

The changes at the top of the hedge fund started in February when its longtime head, Jeff Wang, stepped down. Some of his team had complained to Sequoia leaders that he wasn’t sharing enough of the fund’s profits and that he had created a negative culture, some people familiar with Sequoia said. Wang, who had run the fund for about a decade, had shouted and cursed at members of his team and made at least one analyst cry, the people said.