TheChek News Flow

The actionable edge is the asymmetry around catalysts. High-retail names carry a valuation premium and a fragility discount: they overshoot on the way up but punish misses harder — argues for owning these into beats only with conviction, and for the short book / put structures being disproportionately effective on the miss side. Retail's documented chase behavior (buying rebounds, not dips) means retail flow is a poor contrarian bottom signal in 2025–26 but a decent momentum confirmer. Short-interest crowding plus rising retail share is the classic squeeze setup — size shorts in high-retail, high-SI names accordingly and respect borrow. Net: treat elevated retail share as a position-sizing and volatility input, not just a sentiment curiosity — it's a measurable factor in post-earnings drift and realized vol.

Ticker	Name	Sector	Mkt cap ($bn)	YTD ret	Retail % vol	'27 sales gth	NTM EV/Sales
AAL	American Airlines	Industrials	8	-17%	27%	4%	0.6x
NU	Nu Holdings	Financials	73	-21%	21%	21%	4.1x
SOFI	SoFi Technologies	Financials	25	-39%	20%	22%	4.0x
TSLA	Tesla	Cons Disc	1,473	-4%	18%	15%	13.9x
APLD	Applied Digital	Info Tech	9	+79%	18%	109%	20.6x
SNDK	Sandisk	Info Tech	135	+512%	17%	41%	5.9x
HIMS	Hims & Hers Health	Health Care	7	-23%	17%	20%	2.0x
INTC	Intel	Info Tech	330	+227%	16%	11%	10.6x
PLTR	Palantir	Info Tech	349	-23%	16%	44%	38.6x
MU	Micron	Info Tech	506	+169%	16%	33%	5.7x
AMD	Advanced Micro Devices	Info Tech	448	+109%	16%	52%	12.5x
RKLB	Rocket Lab	Industrials	52	+69%	15%	39%	67.8x
F	Ford Motor	Cons Disc	51	-6%	15%	-1%	0.9x
NVDA	NVIDIA	Info Tech	4,910	+18%	15%	34%	13.3x
HOOD	Robinhood Markets	Financials	82	-31%	15%	23%	15.6x
PFE	Pfizer	Health Care	157	+7%	14%	-4%	3.3x
ASTS	AST SpaceMobile	Comm Services	24	0%	13%	344%	57.2x
SMCI	Super Micro Computer	Info Tech	17	+12%	13%	22%	0.6x
MSTR	Strategy Inc	Info Tech	59	+21%	13%	2%	152.0x
COIN	Coinbase Global	Financials	56	-8%	13%	24%	7.8x
AAOI	Applied Optoelectronics	Info Tech	12	+440%	12%	169%	8.4x
APP	AppLovin	Info Tech	166	-27%	12%	30%	18.4x
BE	Bloom Energy	Industrials	62	+223%	12%	70%	19.6x
WDC	Western Digital	Info Tech	127	+184%	11%	31%	11.1x
ORCL	Oracle	Info Tech	511	-4%	11%	41%	7.7x

Another year, another massive influx of capital for Anduril: The funding round that was rumored to be in process in March has officially closed. Anduril has raised a $5 billion Series H round at a $61 billion valuation, led by returning investors Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, the company announced Wednesday.

This is more than double the valuation it landed just under a year ago, when it raised $2.5 billion at a $30.5 billion valuation led by Founders Fund. (Founder’s Fund invested a $1 billion check, the largest check it has ever written, it told TechCrunch at the time.)

This latest raise comes after the nine-year-old defense tech company doubled revenue in 2025 to $2.2 billion, CEO Brian Schimpf wrote in the blog post announcing the raise.

Interestingly, as much as Anduril is the clear-cut winner among VC investors, the Department of Defense is already giving signs that it won’t lock itself into any one rising-star startup.

Shield AI, another U.S. drone company, recently had its software selected by the Air Force to work with Anduril’s “Fury” autonomous fighter jet, rather than granting the whole hardware and software contract to either one of them.

Still, Anduril is hardly hurting by sharing. In the past few weeks, it has announced a number of contracts, expanding outside the U.S., too.

In May it announced it was part of a contract with others to develop a space-based “golden dome” defensive system — a missile defense shield designed to protect the continental U.S. — for America. Anduril also announced a contract win from the Dutch Ministry of Defence and a U.S. Army contract for battle manager software, using its Lattice platform to analyze data from joint missile defense systems.

"When we founded Anduril in 2017, defense was not a category that attracted significant venture investment. That has changed meaningfully over the last several years," Schimpf wrote in the post.

It has. To offer just a few recent examples: In March, Shield AI raised $1.5 billion in Series G funding at a $12.7 billion valuation. Last month, Hermeus, maker of hypersonic unmanned fighter jets, raised $350 million at a $1 billion+ valuation, led by Khosla Ventures. And European defense tech darling Helsing is reportedly close to raising a new $1.2 billion round at about an $18 billion valuation, led by Dragoneer and earlier Helsing investor Lightspeed.

Anduril has now raised more than $11 billion from investors altogether.

The new circular trade in private credit

Private capital groups have a new opportunity to buy significant risk transfers tied to credit funds

A growing chorus of private capital executives insist there’s nothing to worry about in private credit. 

Fears stemming from a few high-profile defaults in the loan marketplace are overblown and overhyped by the media, according to luminaries such as Apollo’s Marc Rowan and Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman.

DD is excited to point out that they now have a new way to express their confidence in their own cooking: buy significant risk transfers tied to the very credit funds they are sanguine about, from banks seeking to trim their exposure.

Japan’s largest bank, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, is in talks with investors to offload its exposure to about $2bn of loans it extended to listed private credit funds, people familiar with the matter told the FT.

Specifically, MUFG has pitched a $200mn risk-transfer product that would protect the bank against losses if private credit funds failed to repay their debt.

The product, called an SRT, is underpinned by about $2bn of credit lines for business development companies.

For the bank’s part, offloading the risk offers it capital relief to free up more capacity for lending and dividend payouts.

“Bankers are under pressure to tell their bosses that they got their private credit exposure down because investors will ask in upcoming earnings calls,” one person familiar with the matter told the FT.

Private capital already has investments in SRTs tied to private equity capital call lines and other corporate credit. In recent weeks banks have sounded out investors about a variant of an SRT to offload risks tied to data centre debt.

The sceptical view is that the arrangement will just create a circular risk, given that the most likely buyers are firms that have massive private credit operations. It also underscores the growing interconnections between the banking system and the giants of private capital.

Indeed, Blackstone, Apollo and Ares are among those that banks have pitched on private credit SRTs, according to people familiar with the matter.

If firms with private credit operations do load up on these products, any adverse loss could hit them in multiple ways.

Blackstone faced this criticism in 2024 as it loaded up on SRTs underpinned by short-term loans used by private equity funds. “They are providing protection on themselves,” one large SRT investor told the FT at the time.

It will also be interesting to see how MUFG decides to deploy the cash freed up by the arrangement. Perhaps to make further loans to private credit funds?

The Fast and the ‘Fraudulent’

How many Ferraris does the owner of a niche property lending firm need?

In the case of Paresh Raja, the flamboyant founder of collapsed mortgage firm Market Financial Solutions, the answer was allegedly six . . . along with three Aston Martins, two Mercedes and three Rolls-Royces.

The fleet of luxury cars is among the trophy assets that MFS’s administrators claim in a new lawsuit that Raja purchased after “plundering” his company “to fund a lavish lifestyle”. 

MFS borrowed £2.6bn from lenders before its spectacular implosion, prompting heavy losses for banks such as Barclays and private credit firms including Apollo’s Atlas unit. MFS’s administrators allege that at least £1.3bn of this borrowed money has been misappropriated.

A spokesperson for Raja told the FT that he “strongly denies the allegations” and “has consistently maintained there was no fraud or dishonesty”.

Before its collapse, MFS was one of the UK’s largest providers of bridging loans — short-term mortgages taken out by borrowers who struggle to obtain traditional bank finance.

The FT took a closer look at this very British form of property lending, discovering that US private credit money has turbocharged the high-octane niche.

Take Duncan Kreeger. Having started out working at his father’s mortgage brokerage as a teenager, the 42-year-old has since co-founded two bridging lenders. He candidly states on his personal website that “around 50 per cent of the businesses he has been involved in have failed”.

US private credit firms have proved willing lenders to Kreeger’s firm, TAB, which has not been accused of any wrongdoing, but has previously racked up losses on non-performing loans.

In an interview with the FT, Kreeger clarified that his failed businesses primarily comprised ventures from his youth, such as trying to sell alloy wheels online and opening a poker club in North London.

“Lending money is the oldest business in history,” he said. “Bar one maybe.”

Tech groups score win on clean energy rules for gas-powered data centres

Corporate climate watchdog drops stricter proposal on net zero claims after heavy lobbying

Tech groups including Meta and Amazon will be able to claim gas-fuelled data centres are fully covered by their clean energy investments, after heavy pressure by lobby groups on top corporate climate watchdogs.

The Science Based Targets initiative has decided to drop proposed rules that would have made it harder for a data centre group, running mostly on fossil fuels, to claim its energy needs were entirely met by renewable power to reach its climate goals, four people familiar with the decision told the FT.

Companies argued that the proposal was too onerous and could backfire by discouraging clean energy investments, the people said, despite research showing that such a policy could slash emissions.

The information war over how to account for greenhouse gases has seen Big Tech pour money into the lobbying of regulators and watchdogs, as well as into academic research.

Amazon, Meta and Microsoft all have said they “match” 100 per cent of their fossil fuel energy use with clean energy investments, even as the rising energy demands of AI push them to double down on gas power.

These tech companies use certificates to offset their emissions on an annual basis.

The certificates typically represent investments in the generation of energy by solar and wind or hydropower — even if it is produced at another place in the world or at another point in time.

But SBTi proposed that when large energy users offset their use of coal or gas, they should increasingly buy renewable energy certificates that represent energy produced at roughly the same time as the energy consumed.

A technical decision-making body at SBTi last week approved a standard, due to be published in coming weeks, that would instead make this optional.

SBTi has previously told the FT that it “has strict governance and safeguards in place to ensure no disproportionate influence from any one individual, stakeholder or group of stakeholders”.

The move by standards bodies to tighten rules on net zero emissions claims is also being pursued by the Greenhouse Gas Protocol (GHG Protocol), a voluntary carbon accounting oversight body, and by the European Union.

In response, the large energy users have stepped up their lobbying of the EU and global voluntary standard-setting bodies.

Last month, a lobbying effort representing companies with $4.7tn in annual revenue — including Amazon, Apple, General Motors, Salesforce, Schneider Electric — was launched called ‘May not Shall’. It argued that hourly and location-matching energy rules should be optional.

Technical experts responsible for developing new carbon accounting rules at SBTi and the GHG Protocol were sent emails, seen by the FT, inviting them to examine the lobby group’s proposals.

Meta has been involved in a separate but similar lobby group called the Emissions First Partnership. The company has also funded a number of academic papers arguing in favour of looser restrictions.

On the other side of the debate, rival Google has a stated preference for hourly matching of energy use with renewable power generation.

A recent paper in The Electricity Journal, found that an hourly clean-energy accounting system could cut CO₂ emissions dozens of times faster than the present system.

The authors were researchers at the Electric Power Research Institute, a non-profit group with board members who are representatives of JPMorgan Chase and US and global utility companies.

Academics at Princeton University’s Low-Carbon Technology Consortium also backed this view in a 2023 paper, arguing that emissions would be minimised by accounting for electricity consumption on an hourly basis. The university consortium has been supported by companies including Google.

Certificates should represent clean energy that is new and was produced locally, they said.

The GHG Protocol said its “governance and standard-setting processes are specifically designed to safeguard independence”, and to stop individual companies or donors shaping standards.

Meta and Amazon did not provide a comment.