Author: Stacking Trades

The headline numbers from investment crowdfunding’s best year in half a decade tell one story. The platform-level data underneath them tells a different one. Regulation Crowdfunding raised $378 million in 2025 and Regulation A+ surged 124% to $546 million, bringing the combined market to just under $925 million — the strongest annual performance since the 2021 peak. But the top-line growth obscures a structural shift that sophisticated investors evaluating crowdfunding as a deal source need to understand: the platforms hosting these offerings have spent the past two years diverging sharply in strategy, revenue model, and the type of investor they…

The target date has been on the calendar since early March. When U.S. Customs and Border Protection told the Court of International Trade it needed roughly 45 days from March 6 to build a functional refund system, the math put a go-live window around mid-to-late April. CBP’s most recent court filings have confirmed late April 2026 as the target for Phase 1 of the Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries system, known as CAPE. For the roughly 330,000 importers that paid duties under the now-invalidated International Emergency Economic Powers Act regime, that launch date is not an administrative milestone. It…

For weeks, Terafab read like a Musk announcement in search of an execution plan. The March 21 unveiling was characteristically ambitious: Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI would construct the largest semiconductor facility ever built in Austin, Texas, targeting one terawatt of annual compute output, combining logic, memory, and packaging under one roof, and breaking from the global foundry supply chain that every other AI hardware company still depends on. It was a compelling vision with one conspicuous gap. None of the three companies announcing it had ever built a chip fab. That gap closed on April 7, when Intel announced it…

Venture capital firm Eclipse disclosed a $1.3 billion fundraise this week in filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, making it the firm’s largest fund to date. The capital is split across two vehicles: $720 million for early-stage startups and $591 million for later-stage deals. The target sectors are AI infrastructure, manufacturing, and defense — not another frontier language model.The timing matters. Eclipse is closing its fund in the immediate wake of a quarter in which $300 billion flowed into global startups, with 65 cents of every venture dollar going to four companies: OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Waymo. That concentration is historically extreme. And…

Most earnings calls handle tariffs the same way: acknowledge the headwind, cite mitigation, decline to put a firm number on it. That language has been useful for investor relations departments navigating genuine uncertainty, but it has also obscured something that sophisticated investors can now actually measure. A handful of companies have been unusually specific — and the differences between how they are accounting for tariff exposure are not just interesting as disclosure strategy. They are a window into margin trajectories, pricing power, and supply chain positioning that will separate winners from laggards in the back half of 2026. The legal…

For roughly two years, the central question in enterprise technology investing was whether AI would actually generate revenue, or whether it would remain a perpetual R&D story — impressive in demos, invisible in earnings. That question now has a clear answer. The harder question, the one that explains a $285 billion software sector selloff in early February and a Salesforce stock that fell 5% after the company reported the fastest quarterly revenue growth in two years, is what that revenue is actually worth.The revenue is not speculative. Salesforce reported that its Agentforce platform had reached $800 million in annual recurring…

Bank earnings season opens in six days. Goldman Sachs reports before the bell on April 13. JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo follow the morning after. Morgan Stanley and Bank of America arrive in the days after that. For most of the market, these releases will be read as a quarterly economic checkup. For investors tracking the capital markets cycle — particularly anyone with exposure to private equity, deal-dependent sectors, or the IPO pipeline — they carry a more specific signal: whether the M&A fee recovery that Wall Street has been predicting since late 2024 has actually arrived in the…

The last time Cerebras Systems tried to go public, it withdrew its registration statement in October 2025 — days after closing a funding round — citing an unresolved national security review of a minority investment from Abu Dhabi-based technology firm G42. The optics were not ideal. The company’s first prospectus had revealed that a single foreign customer represented roughly 87% of its revenue through the first half of 2024, and federal regulators wanted to understand what that relationship meant for sensitive American compute infrastructure.That chapter is closed. G42 has since been removed from Cerebras’s primary shareholder structure to satisfy U.S. regulators, and…

On April 1, 2026, SpaceX submitted its confidential draft registration to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, setting in motion what could be the largest initial public offering in stock market history. Bloomberg reported the filing first. CNBC, Reuters, and the Wall Street Journal confirmed it within hours. The company is targeting a June listing. The valuation cited by multiple outlets is $1.75 trillion, with a capital raise that could reach $75 billion — more than double the $29 billion Saudi Aramco raised in 2019, which currently holds the record.None of that is the story. The story is what investors don’t have…

On January 28, Microsoft reported a quarter that most companies would celebrate. Revenue of $81.3 billion, up 17% year-over-year. Non-GAAP earnings per share of $4.14 against a consensus of $3.97. Microsoft Cloud crossing $50 billion in a single quarter for the first time. Commercial remaining performance obligations — essentially contracted future revenue — more than doubled year-over-year to $625 billion, buoyed in part by large Azure and OpenAI commitments.The stock fell nearly 10% the next day, erasing roughly $350 billion in market capitalization in what became Microsoft’s worst single-session drop since the early pandemic months of 2020. The contradiction tells you everything…

The headlines out of the private credit industry this quarter have been stark. Blackstone allowed investors to pull a record 7.9% of assets from its flagship $82 billion private credit fund — well above the standard 5% quarterly cap — after fielding roughly $3.8 billion in withdrawal requests. Blue Owl had it worse. Its technology-focused business development company saw redemption requests hit 15% of net asset value; a separate fund was gated entirely, with Blue Owl replacing quarterly tender offers with rateable return-of-capital distributions.The industry response has been swift and, at times, defensive. Blue Owl argued it was “accelerating the return of capital,”…

X-energy, Inc. filed its S-1 registration statement with the SEC on March 20, 2026, setting up what could be the first pure-play advanced nuclear company to reach the public markets in a generation. The company intends to list on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker “XE,” with J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Jefferies, and Moelis & Company acting as lead bookrunners. Renaissance Capital estimates the raise at approximately $300 million, though the number of shares and price range have not yet been determined. The timing is not coincidental. Every major technology company with a balance sheet is currently trying to…