Inside the Biggest Banking Stories You Need to Know This Week (Anthropic, Diageo, Private Credit)

Hello and welcome back to The Market Maker. And this week we are covering the stories you need to know from the last 7 days, a week in which GameStop's audacious bid for eBay was rejected. We found out that Sam Altman has over $2 billion of personal investments in companies which have contracts with OpenAI, and we spare a thought for the friend of the pod, Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, whose pay packet fell 27% last year. To a measly $36 million. But on the docket today, Anthropic, yes, we can't, can't escape the wave that is Anthropic at the moment. They've agreed a $30 billion funding round at a $900 billion valuation. That's just a few months after their previous funding round that valued the company at $350 billion. Then a question I often ponder, to myself, why is no one drinking anymore? Is that actually the case? We're going to take a deep dive into Diageo and figure out whether their Buzzball canned cocktail can turn their fortunes around. Are you a Buzzball drinker, Stephen? Fancy a Buzzball every now and again?

You have to wait until halfway through the episode to find out.

Spoiler. And finally, we're going to end up talking about the mood music around private credit. So before I begin, a quick shout out to all of the incredible students that I met in Milan on Thursday at Bocconi University. You all did an incredible job. And Stephen, many of them who took the M&A track listened to your wise words on a weekly basis, and they wanted me to pass on their thanks to you. And then also we've had a whole flood of submissions for the researcher role that we put out in our last episode. But because of the travel, I just haven't had a chance to go through them all, but I will. So hopefully I can get in contact with one of you next week. But Stephen, let's get into it. Let's talk about Anthropic and yeah, how do you go from $350 billion to $900 billion in like, what was it, 3 or 4 months? That's insane.

Yeah, absolutely. Look, I'm going to try and cover the Anthropic story relatively quickly because I just want to get onto Buzzballs. We're recording this on a Friday afternoon and it just seems right to be talking about Buzzballs, not Anthropic. But anyway, so this headline came out again, back end of last week. Anthropic agrees a $30 billion funding round at a $900 billion valuation. Now with my corporate finance M&A hat on, this defies all logic. You know, when we talk about M&A, we talk about valuation. We're pretty sober, pretty spreadsheet-oriented people that try to understand the fundamentals of the company, try to really get a grip on their cash flow, how this company's going to generate cash flow going forward. We discount that cash flow to give a valuation parameter that looks sensible and looks like something that we could either invest in or take to our clients that are looking at buying a company. But when it comes to companies like Anthropic, which in a, whether you call it a bubble or not, but in a roaring bull market for artificial intelligence, this is like the head of the bulls. This is the one stamping over you in the running of the bulls over in Spain, right? It's number one. Therefore all of these good M&A principles go out the window and we get into this fear of missing out. We get into the animal spirits that, and I'm sure on your podcast with Piers, you speak about a little bit more. We get into the world of vibes and we get into the world of momentum as well. So everyone is trying to pile into Anthropic in the anticipation that they are going to IPO at some point during 2026. And obviously, you know, this is a great headline. You know, it's an interesting or exciting headline going from a $350 billion valuation to a $900 billion valuation in 3 or 4 months. And by the way, this valuation and this funding round, this wasn't Anthropic going out to investors. This was investors literally banging down the door of Anthropic's offices saying, we want to give you money. Name your value. Name the value of the company. Right.

I was going to ask you that question when I saw your notes was, have you not done the process badly if you need to do it again so quickly? But I guess you've answered my question there. So it's just demand, pure demand.

Yeah. And it's a really interesting one. And again, anyone that wants to get involved in the world of venture capital and startups, there's some, there's some good lessons to be learned here. So on the one, on the one side, make hay when the sun is shining, right? You know, if there are people banging down your door to fund you at whatever valuation you think is appropriate, you take it. Money is fantastic. You know, the more money you've got in this AI arms race, to a greater or lesser extent, the better. So that's what Anthropic's done. It's been opportunistic and it said, look, We'll take the $30 billion at this remarkable valuation. However, from a VC perspective or from a startup perspective, it's really, it sounds really cool raising money at a blockbuster valuation, right? You know, $900 billion is ridiculous, but if you're a slightly smaller, less breakaway company, getting that valuation that you can tell people, ooh, we just got our seed round valued at $50 million or our Series A valued at $200 million. It sounds cool. The bigger number, the better, the less dilution, the more money you can raise. But that sets a floor for the next round. Right? So if you're raising at $200 million valuation, your next round better be higher than that. Otherwise, the air starts to come out of the tires of your story. You know, you want to go from 50 to 100 to 200 to 500. Pleasing investors that come on board at every single round. You don't want what they call in the business a down round. So yes, it's great to have this big headline number, but in the case of Anthropic, we are talking about an IPO later on this year. And we all know, having looked at plenty of IPOs over the last few years, WeWork being one, not that this is a WeWork story, But there are public markets investors and IPO investors are a little bit more sober maybe than the bulls of the private markets that are just trying to chuck cash at this thing. So a $900 billion valuation, you know, we were talking about an IPO at $600 billion only a few weeks ago. So we've suddenly raised the floor of this IPO and you're going to get investors, public markets investors that were really excited and comfortable at an Anthropic IPO at $500 or $600 billion. Are they going to swallow $900? Well, probably more than $900 because that's the new floor. So this is where the story starts to go, hmm, sounds great, but there could be some problems further on down the road.

Are there any actual tangible metrics that we do know of? That could explain some of the rationale? I know there's been lots of developments on Mythos, but Claude Code and things like that. Is there any other data points that we have that would justify some of this?

Yeah, absolutely. So the big headline that everyone's going bonkers about in the tech world or in the startup world is that Anthropic's annualized revenues are expected to crossed $45 billion month ending April, a fivefold increase from the $9 billion at the end of last year. And you think to yourself, wow, $9 billion of revenue up to $45 billion in just 4 months. Like, how is that possible for a company to scale up that quickly? But the devil, as it often is, is in the detail. Note that this is ARR, annualized recurring revenue, a lovely startup term that basically says, all right, we're going to take one month of previous revenue and we are going to extrapolate that forward. So this $45 billion, actually what they're doing is they're saying this is Anthropic's revenue for the last 28 days. Then we're going to multiply it by 13. To get to their annualized run rate revenue, right? So their actual revenue in April was $3.46 billion or $3.5 billion, right? Not $45 billion for the year. And their revenue in December wasn't $9 billion, it was $700 million, right? So we just gotta get our, we gotta understand what these numbers actually mean. They haven't cashed $45 billion worth of revenue checks in the last 12 months. They're expecting based on the amazing performance in April that their run rate is going to be $45 billion if we're sitting here this time next year having a chat about Anthropic's last 12 months. So it's a nuance that we need to get our head around because otherwise we're thinking, how the heck have you gone from $9 to $45 in pure dollar revenue terms?

And then what about a word on the investors in themselves? Because I know I've read about a couple of names that I had never heard of before. I'm sure they're huge, but what's the spread and variety of those primary investors?

Yeah, so the leads on this deal, some companies, some VC and growth equity firms that you might never have heard of. So Dragonair, San Francisco-based growth-oriented investment firm with over $40 billion of AUM. They've been involved with Anthropic since I think quite the early days. Green Oaks, another San Francisco-based VC firm. You'll get the kind of picture very quickly. Makes concentrated bets. I was reading from their website. Obviously the world of VC tends to be more spray and pray, make a load of investments, see which ones, you know, survival of the fittest. Concentrated bets. Investments like Wizz, Deliveroo, Robinhood, Scale AI, about $20 billion of AUM. Then you've got the OGs, Sequoia Capital, $56 billion of assets under management. They invested in companies, small companies like Apple. I don't know if you heard of it. It's not a bad— they also invested in Cisco, which I think again was pretty cool at at some point. And then the fourth one is a company called Altimeter Capital. It's actually a hedge fund and it's based in Boston. So if you're a hedge fund, you go to the East Coast. If you're a VC fund, you go to the West Coast. And it invests in private companies, but it also invests a lot in publicly traded companies. Nvidia is its biggest holding. And I love, if ever I get cool enough to have a website, You know, these guys got $20 billion of assets under management to have a website that just has their name and an investor login and their address in Boston and in Silicon Valley. There's nothing else there. It just shows that, you know, we don't need to, we don't need to, we don't need to do any marketing. We don't need to do any flashy website. Let's just put our name and that's it.

It's the Patrick Bateman business card. It's the Braille business card in the modern-day form, I think.

It is. It is. It's a very nice font as well. So yeah, maybe they've got the message.

All right, cool. Well, I'd love to actually, first opportunity for you in the community to give us your thoughts. Why don't you let us know what you think the valuation of Anthropic will be by the end of 2026? So where do you think it's going to be in a basically 6 months' time? Let us know in the comments. All right. Second story then. Um, going to look at Diageo, which I guess most people would've heard of, but they're probably going to recognise more some of the drinks I'm sure you're about to cover. So why are we talking about drinks and Diageo, Stephen?

Yeah, so I wanted to do a bit of a section on drinks and on alcohol and on the big alcohol drinks companies, including Diageo. And then maybe introduce a little bit of strategy into the game and introduce this concept called the ready-to-drink category. And then we're going to talk about buzzballs. Why not? So let's do a little bit on Diageo first. So Diageo, I've just, again, as a visual person, I put a little image of some of their brands. They, I mean, some of their brands include Smirnoff, Baileys, Gordon's, Johnnie Walker, Guinness. So some pretty big— Casamigos, sorry. Some pretty big names. But as we know from lots of headlines, and we can't just blame Gen Z for this, I think it's a very kind of stale thing to do, but people seem to be drinking less. And I just put a little chart of their key brands and their key categories. And pretty much all of them has had a year-on-year decline in terms of sales. So Scotch, tequila, vodka, rum, liqueur, liqueurs, gin, Chinese white spirits, US whiskey, all down, right? So these companies are really, really struggling. And we'll get on and talk a little bit about maybe why that is, but Diageo, you know, 9.4% decline in sales in North America year over year. Spirit sales down 40% in China, in part due to a ban on alcohol at official state events, which is quite funny. It slashed its dividend. Its revenue in 2023 was $28 billion. Its revenue in 2025, $28 billion. So it's gone a whole heap of nowhere, but it's become less profitable. So this is really problematic. And this is such a famous, storied, well-known company with all these unbelievable brands. And you think to yourself, the power of brand, the power of intangible assets. And then you think, well, let's have a look at Diageo. So I'm just going to give you a very little quiz. So is there a question?

It's gotta be a question on Guinness in here. Surely Guinness has gone up. Everyone drinks Guinness, it seems these days. Do you have any stats on Guinness at all, or?

Yeah, I tell you what, so I'm going to, yeah, let me just zoom in on my little, so you're absolutely right. So Johnny Walker down, Smirnoff down, Baileys down, Casamigos, which we'll talk about in a second, down 16%. Guinness. Up 14%. Oh, okay. So you're absolutely right.

Only 14. I would've thought more than that.

And I don't know whether that includes Guinness Zero as well, because Guinness Zero has been an absolute breakout. Yeah. Certainly amongst my kind of millennial circles. Maybe not, maybe not elsewhere, but there you go. 14%. All right. Little quiz for you before I talk about Casamigos and then we get onto Buzzballs. Over the last 5 years, share price. So what percentage rise or fall do you think Diageo has had over the last 5 years?

Well, you were just explaining it. You said it's basically gone nowhere and now it's making less money. So I'm assuming it's down quite a lot. And all of those numbers you were just putting out were like a 40 to 60% range. So I'll pick the middle of that, 50, 50%.

Good, good deduction. Down 55%. Diageo. So if you invested in Diageo 5 years ago, you'd be down 55%. Now, S&P 500. If you invested in the S&P 500 5 years ago, what would you get? What would you get for your money?

What do we normally get? Normally get about 9% a year or something like that. A little bit more because the AI froth on top. 75? Up to 75.

Up 7. Well, yeah, absolutely. 80% up. Okay. So in a market where you put your money in the S&P 500 and you get 80% over 5 years, Diageo's down 55%. Then my final one, harking back to last week's episode, Eli Lilly, last 5 years.

Ah, yeah. Well, I don't know this one, but we were talking the last time we were talking, they were going out on this merger spree, so they must be doing a good job. So I would assume that they're probably, oh, I suppose the weighted amount of tech though, dragging up to the 70, 80% you said of the S&P. So they're probably in and around that ballpark.

Eli Lilly is 413% up in the last 5 years.

Oh wow.

So I'll give you, I'll give you 2 out of 3 on that one.

Did you say 400?

413%. Yeah. Again, it's just the trail of missed investments is just quite remarkable, isn't it? So, and I, I bring Eli Lilly into the story because it's part of the explanation for the reason why people aren't drinking as much as they were. This rise in GLP-1s, I think JP Morgan came out with a stat that patients consume up to 75% less alcohol when they go on Ozempic or Mounjaro, right? So that's one of the explainers as to why people might not be drinking so much. Then there's this kind of Gen Z factor. I've got, I've got in my notes, they're 4 times more likely to want to meet people working out, like at a gym than in a bar. Now I don't have any sources for that. So, you know, maybe people can comment. Is that actually true?

I've got an anecdote.

I must have just heard it somewhere.

Source actually was when I was in Dublin doing a gig and I finished doing this workshop and then I was walking back to the hotel. It was about 10:30 PM in Dublin city center. You know, I had to walk past the back of Trinity College Dublin and it was 10:30 PM on a Friday and the gym was ramo. It was like Friday night at the bar, 4 man deep back in the day, but they were just waiting for the bench press. And then I went to the pub. After I got changed about 11:00 PM, it was just, I think I was the youngest person and it was just a couple of those old leather men sat at the bar drinking their Guinness. And I was like, wow. Yeah. I mean, I mean, I can't speak for all, but I was shocked to see everyone just pumping iron at like 10:30, 11:00 PM on a Friday night.

Yeah, it's, it is remarkable. And, and I would love to get the community to put some comments down. Is this true or are we just kind of crusty and we just don't know where you guys are going out and, you know, and having your drinks? Like, I just can't believe that you're 4 times more likely to want to meet new people in gyms and on, you know, runs than in a bar. You know, maybe I'm just old.

I think you're old.

But I mean, the other thing is about this, right? You know, we all say Gosh, Gen Z doesn't want to drink. It's too healthy. They're too healthy, et cetera. But drinking is expensive, right? And there was a good stat that said, I think in 2023, 68% of Gen Z said that they had drunk in the last month. By 2026, that had gone up to like 80%. And that, I reckon, is just because Gen Z's getting older and they've got a little bit more money and maybe want to buy a couple more drinks. So I doubt, you know, I think we can kind of maybe read too much into this.

Maybe another question then. Well, I don't know, another comment question for the audience. What's the most expensive pint of Guinness you've ever bought? Has anyone broken the £8 ceiling? I want to know. And where in the country was that? I mean, it's got, I guess it's got to be London somewhere, but have you, have we broken the £8 pint yet?

I went, I got one for £8.60 last week. So there you go. In London, at a place called Tempo in Queen's Park. It was very expensive. It wasn't even that nice.

So we're knocking £9 now, are we?

Oh yeah, we're hitting, we're going to be double digits very, very soon. And goodness, perfect segue. This is why we're going to talk about the ready-to-drink.

Category. Right. Sounds good.

So, so, you know, the headline that was interesting to me was Diageo's new CEO came in 6 months ago, ex-Tesco's, basically said, look, we're going to focus quite a lot of our strategy. This guy called Dave Lewis, who's called Drastic Dave when he was at Tesco for cutting prices. So part of Diageo's strategy is to go into this RTD, ready-to-drink category, right? And actually, their sales have gone through the roof in ready-to-drink because people are much more likely, or people are increasingly likely to, you know, stop off at your local supermarket and get a couple of tins of, I don't know, gin and tonics or tequila or whatever, you know, or margarita or whatever it might be. And this is where Diageo is starting to place a little bit of its faith. And that's why we want to talk about some buzzballs.

So I think you need to talk about what is a buzzball first before we go any further.

Yeah, absolutely. So buzzball, I'm going to actually, I'm going to, I'm going to bring one up right here. If anyone's watching YouTube.

Can't quite make out what flavor are we talking here?

So we've got, it's called a Tequila Rita. My brother gave me this for Christmas and I haven't yet drunk it, but I promise I will.

Put it in the centre, in front of your face, so we can all see it.

There you go.

There we go. Oh, that looks like a green hand grenade.

Yeah, it looks great, doesn't it? It looks great. I was actually speaking to a friend about buzz balls who used to work in shipping, and the first thing he said is, this is a nightmare from a logistics perspective. 'Cause if you think about, if you think about all of the tins, really easy to package them up into, you know, into nice little containers and put them in. But these, there's a load of wasted space around the edges, right?

That's part of the joy though.

It's absolutely bizarre. But anyway, so Buzzballs. So I want to give you a little bit of a background. So it was founded in 2009 by a woman called Muriel Kick. A 47-year-old teacher from Texas. She was about to get a divorce and she was terrified of being homeless. And she had this idea while she was doing a funded MBA for this cocktail in a jar. No one would fund her until one bank accepted the cows from her mom's ranch as collateral, which I love, only in America. Yeah. So anyway, so she built this brand up from the ground up. It got sold. It actually got sold to Diageo, got sold to a company called Sazerac, famous for Sazerac and Fireballs. And it has gone absolutely ballistic since. So off-licenses are limiting orders, limiting the amount of Buzzballs that you can buy at any one time. 46% month-on-month growth of Buzzball sales in the UK. And it's all part, and I wanted to get onto this, Ant, because I know how much you love the '90s. It's all part of this kind of retro '90s Alcopops. I read earlier on that they're actually, they're bringing back the Bacardi Breezer. Which got discontinued for 10 years. They're bringing it back. So how do you feel about that?

Yeah, you know, there's a, well, shout out to Henry in our office, who's the, the 21-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio from Titanic is the look, is the only way I can describe it. It's the center parting, the sort of floppy hair, the wide straight leg jeans. And yeah, I could see him with a Bacardi Breezer for sure.

Yeah, absolutely. A Bacardi Breezer, a Reef, a WKD. This takes me back to my university days, but this is a thing, you know, this is a thing that's happening. And again, it slightly speaks to, slightly speaks to the, you know, it's a little, it's cheaper than going to a pub, right? It's 3 or 4 quid to get one of these in your hands. It's sweeter and tastier than a, than maybe a more bitter alcoholic drink. So it's kind of maybe a little bit more of a gateway drink. I remember probably enjoying WKD more than I enjoyed, you know, a pint of bitter when I was 18 or 19 years old.

Yeah, true.

And it's getting, it's getting the younger generation. It feels like a drink that is designed not for us, but for that generation.

Yeah. Yeah. There's, there was, there was two other points to that. That I picked up. One was the packaging. I know we talked about it briefly and you showed it, the kind of shape of it, but the color, the toy-like shape. I mean, it goes crazy on TikTok and Instagram, as you can imagine. So that short-form video content, festival content, all that sort of stuff is perfect. And then how frictionless it is. No mixer prepared, no glassware. So it's just convenience factor as well. Yeah. And as you said, that modern pre-drink house party, not going out. And if you go to a house party, you're not exactly like getting out your, you know, your fancy crockware for like your mate. You just want to, yeah, take one of these little bombs and off you go. So fill your boots. Makes a lot of sense.

Yeah, absolutely. It is the perfect drink for the kind of, for the social media TikTok generation. So Man United, I think it was Man United midfielder Kobbie Mainoo celebrated his 21st birthday with a lavish party in Manchester where there were unlimited, there were people going around with kind of silver trays serving buzz balls. So that was absolutely brilliant and kind of canapés on the other side. So it really, yeah, it's definitely gone viral. And I think just to bring this back to the world of business.

Can I just say that guy, that football player is a genius. Genius. He's like gone viral and he's spent probably 1/50th of the amount of money he would've had to have done by buying expensive champagne if he was an old man like us.

There you go. Exactly. Well done, KB Mainy. So yeah, to bring this back to the world of business, this is obviously the RTD, the ready-to-drink. Everything else is slightly falling off a cliff. People aren't drinking as much wine as they used to. Spirit sales are down. You know, especially post-COVID where we all got into fancy cocktails. Drinking at pubs is extremely expensive, especially in this cost of living squeeze that everyone is under at the moment, especially in the UK. So it's understandable that you go down the RTD, the ready-to-drink route. But the danger, even the danger with something like Buzzballs, which has broken out, is that this stuff is so faddy, right? You know, and you mentioned TikTok, Instagram, the ball, all of that stuff. This is cool or unique or novel now. You know, the danger is for a company like Diageo, you go out and panic and buy a couple of competitors to Buzz Balls, you know, another trendy, interesting bottle, interesting color, whatever it might be. And either that flops or it has its moment in the sun, and then you're left with, then you're left with a brand that doesn't have any real enduring value. So it's going to be super interesting to see whether Buzzballs, which have broken out over the last few months in the UK, whether that's got enduring, whether you're going to get a load of loyal customers that are just desperate to come back and get their Friday night Buzzball.

Got to think that the BuzzBall revenue's got to go up in the coming months as we go into the summer, surely.

Well, they've got a World Cup special, a specially themed World Cup BuzzBall. And I know that you love your shopping in supermarkets. You must have seen the big 1.75-liter ones as well. It's almost the size of your head.

Hold on, hold on. Here we go. Hold on. No, I've not got one.

23 quid. It's not bad. You know, you can—

what was that, 2 liters?

Yeah, 1.75 liters. I think you'll probably have a pretty, pretty good night.

Yeah, that is, that is compared to a couple of pints. Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, that beats your £8.60 pale ale.

Correct.

All right, well, look. To wrap things up, we've got a third topic and it's one that we put out a video only a few weeks ago and it was trying to be a bit more of a long play informative one talking about private credit, just because everyone has been talking about it to no end and continues to do so. However, I know that you wanted to circle back to it just because the comment section was getting lit up a little bit and you wanted to just retouch on a few points. Where should we go?

Yeah, absolutely. I love, one of the things I love about this podcast is we can go from Anthropic to buzzballs to private credit all in 45 minutes. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. So my third headline is, well, it's what the heck is going on in private credit? And I think it's really instructive to take a kind of long view or take a kind of bird's eye view of headlines and just try to pick up, not to use this word again, but to pick up the vibes, right? And a lot of finance, because it's still a human-driven business, is momentum-based and vibes-based, as we discussed with Anthropic. And I was just kind of looking through, I get a few emails every day summarizing different news stories and having links to different articles from all these different news outlets. And I just kept seeing private credit come up again and again and again. So I'm going to give you 5 or 6 headlines, one every day of the last week. I'm not going to go into it in too much detail, but I just want to show that there's this kind of growing groundswell of momentum to the downside on private credit as an asset class. So on May 9th, Bloomberg comes out Banks win more deals as private credit shrinks. So headline basically, all right, private credit. There's loads of redemptions. Lots of people are taking their money outta private credit. Private credit is getting more expensive. Actually, banks that are slightly less regulated, especially in the US than they used to be, they're stepping back in and starting to lend instead of private credit funds, which is a bit of a reversal.

Hang about, so you The cockroaches come out and then the one who criticizes the cockroaches now starts offering cockroaches.

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Lending into cockroaches. I'm sure that JP Morgan's lending standards are extremely good. Maybe because I want a job there at some point in the future. So that was May 9th. May 11th on MarketWatch, wealthy investors scale back new private credit fund commitments. So again, we're talking companies like, or asset managers like Blue Owl. I think their commitments went from something like $500 million a month of fresh capital this time last year to about $25 million. So that's not great. Blue Owl's been the head of this kind of private credit backlash. May 12th, Reuters: Private credit slashes loan values As Borrowers' Stress Rises. So that's not a great headline and I'm going to finish on that. May 12th, Blue Owl Fundraising Capital Evaporates Over Private Credit Concerns. See previous article. May 13th, Private Credit Is Not a Cancer, Says Wall Street's Top Prosecutor. I mean, Wow.

Yeah. Why go there?

I mean, it's one of those things that if you've ever had media training, the last thing you want to do is use a word like cancer because that's going to be the thing. Even if it says private credit is not a cancer, well, everyone's going to be thinking, well, why do you have to say that? Are other people thinking that it is a cancer? What do we mean by cancer? What is it infecting? So it was, I just, it's a bit of a shocker. And then on the 14th of May, to finish this one off, HSBC pauses $4 billion of private credit investments. It was going to take some of its $3 trillion balance sheet and put it into private credit strategies within HSBC's asset management division. And it's actually just said, look, yeah, let's just hold off on that because we're not really sure about this asset class. Anymore. So, you know, as I said, it's vibes, but it's momentum every day. If you read more and more headlines and we are, you know, even if you're the most rational-minded investor, asset manager, asset allocator, you're seeing these headlines and you know, you're going to be thinking to yourself, maybe I should check on my private credit position, or maybe I shouldn't go in for that next new fund that's being launched.

So like you said at the top of the show then, do you think it's, there's not a great deal of new information here or developments. It's just that the herd is moving now and then therefore the behavioral winds are picking up some steam and that's problematic.

Yeah, I think a lot of this is news that we already know. I think the only one that was really, really new news, which is definitely the most instructive and consequential headline out of all of them. Is the headline about marking down loans, the loan book of private credit funds. So this was the Reuters article, private credit slashed loan values as borrower stresses rise. So this was a report put out by MSCI, basically said that private credit funds have marked down more than a tenth of their loans by at least 50%. Basically means that, you know, you lend a billion dollars, you actually only think that it's worth $500 million because the chance of default, the chance of getting that money back and getting the interest on that is very, very low. So these are like, if over a 10th of your portfolio is seriously distressed, which is what this is suggesting, you know, you are never going to be able to make returns on that portfolio. And remember, just to kind of conclude this piece, it's not like an equity fund. An equity fund, you might have a couple of dogs, but you might have other companies that have 2x, 3x. You could have had an Eli Lilly in there. You could have had an Anthropic in there. When it comes to a fixed income fund or a credit fund, the good performers can only provide so much. It's fixed income, right? You just get an interest or you just get a coupon. So every default is so much more damaging to a private credit fund than a write-down on an equity fund. So if you're saying that more than a tenth of loans have been written down by at least 50%, that for me is the one where my kind of alarm bells are starting to ring and starting to think, oof, I need to look into this a little bit more.

All right. Well, look, let us know what you think. And we'd love to hear that in, uh, in the comments section. But thanks as always, Stephen, for sharing your thoughts. We'll be back again for the other need-to-know deals and news of the week in the next episode. So take care, everyone. Thanks, Stephen.

Thanks, Anthony.