Good Morning! Nvidia absolutely crushed earnings with a threefold increase in sales. The stock hit the $1,000 threshold and the company announced a 10-1 stock split. Meanwhile, Vivek Ramaswamy acquired an activist stake in Buzzfeed, sending the battered stock soaring 20%. Investment firm Oaktree took over Inter Milan after the club’s owner missed a payment. Private equity firms are getting ready to invest in college sports, and DocuSign wants to stay public after private equity takeover speculation. Plus why we’re reluctant to connect with old friends, and tips for making a career move.

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Citi’s $100M Typo

Citi just got hit with a $78 million fine for a fat finger mistake that accidentally dumped $189 billion worth of stocks onto the market.

On May 2, 2022, an experienced London trader working from home mistakenly entered 58 million into the quantity field instead of the notional value, creating a $444 billion basket instead of the intended $58 million.

Despite hundreds of warnings from Citi's systems, the trader overrode them, leading to a five-minute flash crash across European markets., which at one point wiped $325 billion off European stocks.

The error resulted in $1.4 billion worth of equities being sold and a $48 million trading loss for Citi. The bank managed to block most of the erroneous $444 billion order, but $189 billion still made it onto the markets.

The trader was reportedly working without a tool typically used for such transactions and had to manually build the basket of stocks, leading to the input error.

The miscommunication within Citi's trading desks exacerbated the situation, as alerts were not properly escalated, resulting in the delay of canceling the order.

Takeaway: Fat fingers come in many shapes and sizes, but in terms of impact, this one takes the top prize for crashing the entire stock market with a $325 billion sell-off. Citi didn’t dispute the findings that were highly critical of the bank’s internal controls. This latest mishap follows a previous fat finger error in 2021 when Citi accidentally sent $900 million to hedge funds. Here are our top 5 fat finger errors, and we'll let our intern know to add this one to the top of the list

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_HEADLINES

Top Reads

• Nvidia beats Wall Street estimates, announces 10-1 stock split (YF)

• Vivek Ramaswamy acquired an activist stake in Buzzfeed (CNBC)

• Blackstone will give stock to acquired company workers (Axios)

• Amazon plans to give Alexa an overhaul, monthly subscription (CNBC)

• Private equity firms getting ready to invest in college sports (YF)

• Investment firm Oaktree took over Inter Milan after owner missed payment (Axios)

• How crypto became a political football (YF)

• DocuSign wants to stay public after private equity takeover speculation (CNBC)

• S&P 500 companies are boosting profits by stripping more items from earnings (YF)

• It’s not your imagination - pickleball courts are everywhere (CNBC)

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Markets Rundown

Stocks closed lower in the leadup to $NVDA earnings, as investors weigh high-rates for longer concerns.

Movers & Shakers

• (+) Buzzfeed ($BZFD) +20% after Vivek Ramaswamy announced an activist stake.

• (+) Moderna ($MRNA) +14% continuing an 8-day rally after the company reported earnings.

• (–) Lululemon ($LULU) -7% because the company’s chief product officer will leave.

Private Dealmaking

• Biogen bought H-Bio for $1.8 billion

• Saltchuk Resources bought Overseas Shipholding Group for $950 million 

• AltruBio, an immunological diseases biotech, raised $225 million

• H, an AI foundation model, raised $220 million

• Farcaster, a social media protocol, raised $150 million 

• Circtec, a tire recycling developer, raised $81 million

For more PE, VC & M&A deals, subscribe to our Buysiders newsletter.

_{BOOK OF THE DAY}

Means Of Control

For the past five years—ever since a chance encounter at a dinner party—journalist Byron Tau has been piecing together a secret story: how the whole of the internet and every digital device in the world became a mechanism of intelligence, surveillance, and monitoring.

Of course, our modern world is awash in surveillance. Most of us are dimly aware of this: Ever get the sense that an ad is “following” you around the internet? But the true potential of our phones, computers, homes, credit cards, and even the tires underneath our cars to reveal our habits and behavior would astonish most citizens. All of this surveillance has produced an extraordinary amount of valuable data about every one of us. That data is for sale—and the biggest customer is the U.S. government.

In the years after 9/11, the U.S. government, working with scores of anonymous companies, many scattered across bland Northern Virginia suburbs, built a foreign and domestic surveillance apparatus of breathtaking scope—one that can peer into the lives of nearly everyone on the planet.

This cottage industry of data brokers and government bureaucrats has one directive—“get everything you can”—and the result is a surreal world in which defense contractors have marketing subsidiaries and marketing companies have defense contractor subsidiaries. And the public knows virtually nothing about it.

Sobering and revelatory, Means of Control is the defining story of our dangerous grand bargain—ubiquitous cheap technology, but at what price?

“A revealing . . . startling . . . timely . . . fascinating, sometimes terrifying examination of the decline of privacy in the digital age.”

_{DAILY VISUAL}

Same-Store Retail Sales Still Strong

Redbook research: Same-store, retail sales

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Human Reasoning

Research conducted at Stanford in 1975 and subsequent studies by cognitive scientists shed light on the complexities of human reasoning, revealing that it's more about social interaction than logical problem-solving.

Concepts like confirmation bias, where we tend to favor information that aligns with our beliefs, and the illusion of understanding, where we overestimate our knowledge, illustrate how our minds operate.

We often lean on the expertise of others without fully realizing it, leading to misunderstandings, particularly in areas like politics. Understanding these cognitive tendencies can empower us to engage in more productive conversations and make wiser collective decisions.

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Short Squeez Picks

• How to speak up and stand out with confidence

• Why slowing down is essential for your growth 

• 5 ways to regain your spark and make a career move

• Why we’re reluctant to reconnect with old friends

• 7 rules for emotional health

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Memes of the Day