Author: Stacking Trades
Discord confidentially filed for an IPO on January 6, 2026. Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase were mandated as lead underwriters. A March debut was the stated target. It is now May 21 — nearly five months later — and there is no public S-1 on file, no roadshow date, and no pricing window. SpaceX dropped its long-awaited public prospectus on May 20. Discord has said nothing. The silence is the story. A Window That Opened, Then Moved When Discord filed confidentially in January, the setup looked favorable. The IPO market had come off its best year since 2021, with tech…
For most of its existence, the private company secondary market has operated on a simple principle: the people who know the most trade the most, and everyone else waits. A founding engineer sells shares through a bank-sponsored tender. A late-stage growth fund takes a stake at a negotiated price. The information that moved those transactions never left the room. On Tuesday, Polymarket and Nasdaq Private Market announced an exclusive partnership designed to change that dynamic — or at least route around it. The deal is straightforward in structure. a new category of contracts tied to private company milestones — valuation thresholds, IPO…
The number that matters most from the Cerebras IPO is not $185 — the price at which shares were sold — nor $350, where they opened, nor $311.07, where they closed on May 14. The number that matters is 86. That is the percentage of 2025 revenue that came from two entities in the United Arab Emirates. Everything else about this offering flows from that fact. Cerebras Systems raised $5.55 billion on Nasdaq on May 14, pricing 30 million Class A shares at $185 each — more than double the original marketed range of $115 to $125 — after an…
The SpaceX IPO is being covered as a milestone. It is also a stress test — for private market valuations, for passive index fund mechanics, and for the pre-IPO vehicle ecosystem that has spent four years building toward this moment. The milestone is the easy part. The stress test is what sophisticated investors need to be thinking about before the S-1 drops. SpaceX filed its confidential draft registration statement with the SEC on April 1, 2026. The public prospectus is expected in the May 20 to 22 window based on SEC timing rules and the reported June 8 roadshow start, with pricing…
Three months ago, Anthropic closed a $30 billion funding round at a $380 billion post-money valuation and described it as the second-largest private tech financing in history. That round has since been lapped — by Anthropic itself. The company is now in early talks to raise at least another $30 billion, this time at a pre-money valuation exceeding $900 billion. Dragoneer, Greenoaks, Sequoia Capital, and Altimeter Capital have agreed to co-lead the round, with each expected to invest $2 billion or more, per The Information. The round is expected to close by the end of May. No term sheet has been…
The numbers were supposed to confirm a structural shift. Instead, they confirmed a competition problem. Investment crowdfunding posted its worst quarter in two years to start 2026, with Reg CF capital falling 29% year over year and Reg A dropping 45%, according to Kingscrowd’s Q1 2026 update. In raw terms, Reg CF raised $72.4 million in Q1 2026, down from $101.9 million in the same period a year earlier. The Reg A decline was sharper — a category that had been on a multiyear run powered by a handful of large, consumer-facing campaigns suddenly lost nearly half its quarterly volume. Both…
The four companies that now spend more on artificial intelligence infrastructure than most nations spend on defense all reported first-quarter results on the same evening this week, handing investors a rare side-by-side test of a thesis that has driven equity markets for two years: that the hyperscaler capex binge will pay off in durable cloud revenue growth. Three of them passed. One of them passed and still fell 8%. The divergence tells you more about where we are in this cycle than the top-line numbers do. What the Numbers Actually Said Microsoft’s fiscal third quarter came in at $82.9 billion…
Apple’s fiscal second quarter ends tonight the way Apple itself rarely does: in the middle of three simultaneous transitions that Wall Street has no clean template for pricing. The company’s earnings call Thursday afternoon at 5 p.m. Eastern is the first since Tim Cook announced on April 21 that he will hand the chief executive role to John Ternus on September 1. It is also the first quarter in which the full cost of Apple’s tariff exposure, the full pressure of the global memory crunch, and the full implications of the January Google Gemini deal are expected to show up…
In March 2026, Replit raised $400 million at $9 billion — triple what the company was worth six months earlier. Its annual recurring revenue at the time of the raise was $240 million. That is a roughly 37x revenue multiple, priced into a company that did not exist in its current form two years ago and whose core product — letting anyone build a functioning app by describing what they want in plain English — was not commercially viable three years ago. The number that made investors move was not the valuation. It was the trajectory. Replit’s ARR stood at…
The U.S. House of Representatives passed the Incentivizing New Ventures and Economic Strength Through Capital Formation Act — the INVEST Act — on December 11, 2025, by a vote of 302 to 123. The margin was bipartisan: all Republicans present voted for it, and 87 Democrats crossed the aisle. The bill then moved to the Senate, where it was referred to the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee. As of mid-April 2026, no Senate action has been taken. That gap between passage and enactment is where private market investors need to focus. The INVEST Act is not one bill —…
On March 17, 2026, StartEngine Crowdfunding, Inc. entered into an Agreement and Plan of Reorganization with Vinovest, Inc., a West Hollywood-based platform for fine wine and whisky investment. The deal closed the same day, with StartEngine issuing 8,750,000 shares to Vinovest stakeholders — including a 1,750,000-share holdback for potential indemnification claims — in a transaction structured as a full merger, with Vinovest becoming a wholly-owned subsidiary. The formal announcement landed on March 23. Financial terms beyond the share consideration were not disclosed. On its face, a crowdfunding platform buying a wine investment app is an odd headline. Looked at differently,…
The number that stopped investors cold was not a loss or a miss. It was a capex forecast. When Amazon reported fourth-quarter earnings on February 6, CEO Andy Jassy committed to spending $200 billion in capital expenditures across Amazon in 2026 — more than the company generated in operating cash flow in 2025. Within days, Alphabet had disclosed plans for $175 billion to $185 billion in its own 2026 capex spend. Meta had already told investors it would invest between $115 billion and $135 billion. Microsoft is tracking toward $120 billion or more. Oracle has guided to $50 billion, a…