US stocks rallied on reports that US and Iran were nearing an agreement to end the war

India's Nifty Smallcap 250 index gained 2% to enter a bull-market from Iran war lows

US gas prices are now 50% higher than before the Iran war

Dollar fell 0.6% to the lowest since the Iran war

Apollo swung to a Q1 loss but posted 30% growth in fee-related earnings as AUM topped $1T for the first-time ever following a Europe acquisition; the firm will offer daily valuations for its investment grade private credit (WSJ)

Walt Disney beat Q1 earnings and revenue estimates on strength in its streaming and theme park units under new CEO Josh D'Amaro (CNBC)

Warner Bros. Discovery posted a huge $2.9B loss in Q1, with $2.8B tied to the termination fee that Paramount paid to Netflix this year (CNBC)

Uber missed Q1 earnings and revenue estimates due to a revaluing of equity investments but issued strong bookings guidance on resilient consumer spending despite macro volatility (CNBC)

Kraft Heinz beat Q1 earnings and revenue estimates on rising sales as its turnaround takes hold ahead of plans to split into two (WSJ) 

Snap missed Q1 estimates and gave cautious sales guidance as it struggles with headwinds from large North American advertisers; the firm will cut 16% of jobs and end its deal with Perplexity (CNBC)

CVS issued a Q1 beat-and-raise on strength in all three business units, especially insurance, amid progress in its turnaround plan (CNBC)

What we're watching this week:   

Full calendar here

Gonna have my intern running Claude like a hedge fund prop research desk to get me an information edge on this

Trade event contracts on Polymarket, the world's largest prediction market

JPMorgan offered a $1M settlement before 'sex slave' lawsuit went viral (WSJ)

Manhattan DA referred Rana for mental treatment after probe into 'sex slave' claims found nothing (NYP)

US and Iran are close to a deal to end the war (CNBC)

US fuel exports hit a record high (FT)

Private sector jobs rose by 109k in April (CNBC)

Wall Street readies data center IPOs as AI-linked debuts surge (BBG)

Europe M&A volume is at the highest since 2007 (BBG)

European bond market had its busiest day ever (BBG)

Global debt hit a record $353T (RT)

Apollo CEO says retail fund mark-ups 'make no sense' (FT)

Samsung hit a $1T valuation (CNBC)

Musk tried to recruit Sam Altman for AI at Tesla before falling out (FT)

Anthropic signed a computing deal with SpaceX (BBG)

Jeff Bezos shakes up Blue Origin stock incentives ahead of SpaceX IPO (FT)

US charged 30 people in a massive insider trading scheme (BBG)

Saudi's PIF opened a second office in China (BBG)

Saudi VCs press ahead with fundraising despite Iran turmoil (BBG)

Lutnick says he doesn't remember why he took family to Epstein island (BBG)

Musk's SpaceX plans to invest $120B in Musk's Terafab AI chip project 

Blue Owl-owned data center operator Stack Infrastructure is considering a $30B sale of its Asia operations

Aussie toll road operator Atlas Arteria rejected a $5.3B takeover bid from its biggest shareholder IFM Investors

Electronic instruments maker AMETEK agreed to buy a portfolio of instrumentation businesses from CD&R-backed advanced manufacturing firm Indicor for $5B cash

Nordic Infrastructure and Polhem Infra are exploring a $4.7B sale of renewable energy supplier Solor Bioenergi

Sony Music is set to acquire Recognition Music Group, a music rights manager with 45k+ songs including Justin Bieber and Neil Young, from Blackstone for $3.5B-$4B

German pharma giant Bayer agreed to buy eye-medicines maker Perfuse Therapeutics in a $2.45B deal

New Serbian company  KFT Senator Treasury offered to acquire the 56.1% in oil firm NIS from Russia's Gazprom Neft and Gazprom for $2.4B 

Western Midstream Partners will ‌acquire privately held Brazos Delaware II in a $1.6B cash-and-stock deal

Brookfield and Oaktree-backed music publisher Primary Wave Music recently acquired indie music publisher Kobalt from Francisco Partners for over $1.5B

Carlyle and Diversified Energy will acquire $1.2B worth of O&G fields in Oklahoma from Camino Natural Resources in a deal financed through an ABS engineered by Carlyle

Grosvenor Group, the centuries-old property group of the billionaire Duke of Westminster, plans to sell its direct US real estate holdings valued at $1B

Real estate firm BGO bought Toronto office property 95 Wellington Street West from CRE firm Cadillac Fairview for $175M

London flexible office landlord Workspace is weighing a $170M sale of its most valuable asset Salisbury House to raise capital amid pressure from activist Saba

Samantha Holloway, the daughter of TPG's co-founder and owner of NHL's Seattle Kraken, hired banks to work on a bid for a new Seattle NBA team

UK oil firm Capricorn Energy extended the deadline for Saudi investment firm Cafani to make a takeover offer

French cheese company Bel Group acquired US-based snack maker Ingenuity Foods

Google DeepMind will take a minority stake in Eve Online, a popular role-playing game set in outer space

Chinese OpenAI-rival DeepSeek is in talks to raise a debut round at a $50B valuation led by China's state-backed China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund 

Astranis, a high-orbit satellite company, raised $455M in equity and debt financing including a $300M Series E co-led by Snowpoint Ventures and Franklin Templeton 

Corgi, an AI-native full-stack insurance platform for startups, raised a $160M Series B at a $1.3B valuation led by TCV

Enter, a Brazilian AI legal tech startup, raised a $100M Series B at a $1.2B valuation led by Founders Fund

XBOW, an autonomous offensive security company, raised a $35M Series C extension from Accenture Ventures, DNX Ventures, NVentures, and more

Subquadratic, an AI research company developing long-context LLM architectures, raised a $29M seed round from Javier Villamizar, Justin Mateen, and others

Ethos, a UK AI-driven career marketplace, raised a $22.75M Series A led by a16z 

Vori, an autonomous grocery store OS, raised a $22M Series B led by Cherryrock Capital

Scout Space, a space domain awareness sensors and software company, raised an $18M Series A led by Washington Harbour Partners

OpenTrade, a stablecoin yield infrastructure platform, raised a $17M strategic round led by Mercury Fund and Notion Capital

SageOx, a startup building shared context infrastructure for AI-native teams, raised a $15M seed round led by Canaan Partners

Dandelion Health, a clinical intelligence platform for life sciences, raised a $14M Series A led by Healthier Capital

Chinese heavy equipment manufacturer Sany Heavy Industry is considering raising $500M in a Hong Kong IPO of its EV truck unit Xingbida Network Technology 

Advanced analytics security company Power Analytics Global will merge with Drugs Made In America Acquisition in a $1B deal

Eli Lilly sold $9B of investment grade bonds to fund M&A

India's Sun Pharmaceutical Industries is considering raising $3B-$4B in offshore loans, selling euro-denominated bonds, and swapping debt to fund its $12B acquisition of US-based Organon 

Chinese appliance maker Midea raised $2.2B in an upsized convertible bond sale

Alaska Airlines launched a $500M debt offering as jet fuel prices surge

Banks led by JPMorgan will take a $500M paper loss on $5.3B of debt meant to back Silver Lake-owned software firm Qualtrics' acquisition of Press Ganey Forsta

Trucking giant Knight-Swift Transportation sold $1.3B of convertible senior notes as part of a restructuring

Primary Wave Music raised $2.2B for its fourth flagship music fund 

Two Blue Owl private credit funds cut dividends as borrowing costs rise

Morgan Stanley rolled out crypto trading on its E*TRADE platform

Coinbase will launch 24/7 gold and silver futures

Crypto's 'DeFi' sector gets hit by investor exodus after hacks

ICYMI: F2 just launched their biggest update yet with Institutional Knowledge. F2 is quietly emerging as the go-to platform for private market workflows and their latest update is tackling a decades-old challenge of turning deal history into reusable firm knowledge. It's worth checking out.

Josh Katzowitz published an interesting piece on why spending in retirement is such a psychological challenge.