Welcome to Markets Desk, your midday read on the stories moving money and markets.
Leopold Aschenbrenner, the former OpenAI researcher who launched the AI-focused hedge fund Situational Awareness, watched a fund valued at forty-five billion dollars shed the vast majority of that value in a matter of days. It is a stark reminder that AI conviction and AI returns are two very different things.
Shifting to the research desk, a new National Bureau of Economic Research study tracking over one hundred twenty thousand Ivy League graduates across seven decades found that athletic team connections, particularly on football rosters, significantly outperform traditional career center pipelines when it comes to landing roles at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America. The teammate, it turns out, is worth more than the transcript.
And in a story with real geopolitical weight, Japan's destroyer JS Chokai conducted a live-fire test of Tomahawk cruise missiles for the first time, marking the culmination of years of US-Japan cooperation on long-range standoff weapons integration. For a country constitutionally constrained on defense for decades, this is a meaningful shift in posture across the Pacific.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
