The market is pricing in a future that hasn't arrived yet. Alibaba's stock drops 10% on a $10.2B AI share sale, SoftBank is raising a record ¥1 trillion for the same reason, and Goldman finds only six stocks both hedge funds and mutual funds agree on, led by SpaceX at 93x earnings.
US-Canada trade talks collapsed, and the loonie dropped 0.45% against the dollar by Monday morning. Washington's 50% tariffs hit $20 billion of Canadian imports, and Mark Carney vowed "dollar for dollar" retaliation from September 1. The goods are just 0.6% of Canadian GDP, yet Capital Economics warns a collapse in exports could still push Canada's weak growth back toward zero. The stakes are lopsided.
Prediction-market firm Kalshi filed with the CFTC to launch a "US500" perpetual, a futures-style contract with no expiry, tethered to the MerQube U.S. Large Cap Index. It's the company's latest push beyond cryptocurrencies and metals, edging onto turf owned by CME and CBOE, which have pushed back. With perps logging over $90 trillion in global volume in 2025, the expansion is more than symbolic.
Goldman Sachs' sweep of 13-F filings covering $10 trillion of stock positions found only six names both short-horizon hedge funds and long-horizon mutual funds are overweight. SpaceX is the standout, trading at 93 times next year's estimated earnings, a price no conventional value shop would touch. When fast traders and buy-and-hold managers herd into the same six stocks, the market is already pricing in a lot of future growth.
Alibaba priced an HK$80 billion ($10.2 billion) placement of 710 million new shares at an 8.4% discount to Friday's close, and Hong Kong investors knocked the stock down 10%. Proceeds go entirely into AI infrastructure, the very spending that crushed June-quarter profit by 75% and pushed capex up 75%. Dilution today, AI dominance tomorrow: Alibaba is betting the full-stack cloud and model push outruns the near-term pain.
Shein's long-frustrated float is finally landing in Hong Kong, but at a valuation near $27 billion, roughly 70% below the near-$100 billion it once commanded. The US and Europe scrapped tariff exemptions on cheap imports, undercutting the low-cost model and stalling growth. Now it's raising up to $1.8 billion to fund AI and logistics, and investors are asking if that's enough.
Eli Lilly agreed to buy AtaiBeckley for as much as $3.8 billion, its biggest foray into psychedelics yet. The prize is BPL-055, an intranasal 5-MeO-DMT formulation that eased treatment-resistant depression after a single in-clinic dose, with effects persisting for months. It already carries FDA Breakthrough Therapy Designation and is entering Phase 3. For a pharma built on GLP-1s, this is a signal that mental health is the next blockbuster bet.
Xpeng spun out its humanoid-robot business with China's largest single-round private raise in embodied AI: over $900 million at a $6.3 billion post-money valuation. IDG Capital led, with Tencent and Alibaba in as strategic backers. The cash funds mass production of the IRON humanoid, set to begin by year-end with commercial sales from 2027.
SoftBank is planning a ¥1 trillion ($6.3 billion) retail bond sale, the biggest ever by a Japanese company. The seven-year paper, offered at a 4.3%-4.9% coupon, will refinance ¥400 billion of maturing bonds and fund Masayoshi Son's OpenAI commitments and physical-AI bets. Even after the raise, the conglomerate still faces a $20 billion-plus shortfall, a hint at offshore debt to come.
You’re caught up.
That was all 8 stories in the 24 August issue.