Schroders agrees to Takeover by TIAA's asset manager Nuveen for £9.9bn

Nuveen LLC, an American asset manager (led by CEO William Huffman, a former CEO of Northern Trust Global Investments for 17 years), which manages assets on behalf of TIAA, the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America (led by Thasunda Brown Duckett), which has a century long focus on retirement security, has agreed to buy Schroders (led by Group Chief Executive Richard Oldfield) for almost ten billion GBP (1GBP=1.37USD, around the same level it was five years ago).

Wealth and Etrading Stocks Now Hit by AI Fears

AI advice and AI advice driven execution is a wake-up call to wealth managers charging high fees. 

In the US, Charles Schwab (NYSE:SCHW) fell by 8% as news of AI platform Altruist's new product, that unleashes AI-powered tax planning within its Hazel platform caused a stir amongst investors. 

In the UK, IG Index dropped 3%, CMC Markets dropped 3.5% and AJ Bell dropped 6.27%.

Energy Exchange ElectronX Now Offers Hourly Hedging on ERCOT

ElectronX ("Precision Trading for Power Volatility") has announced a new product suite for US regulated power contracts.

They are providing hourly "bounded" futures and binary options on the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) markets, where the "bounding" refers to predefined floor and ceiling prices, limiting gains and losses (contract sizes are for 1MWh for specific hubs and specific hours).

The capping of payoff means there is no need for daily variation margin for the exchange to manage risk. 

These contracts enable smarter (potentially AI-oriented) management of intraday volatility as reported by The AI Journal.

Anthropic Announcement Wipes Value Off Data Stocks

Data stocks took a beating with news of new functionality released in Claude Cowork for legal research. 

Claude is the invention of Anthropic, the AI company founded in 2021 by ex Open AI employees, including San Francisco-born Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei.

Big investors in Anthropic include Amazon, who invested $4bn in 2023, later doubling this in 2024. Anthropic uses AWS for cloud provision.

On Wednesday 4 February, Gartner stock dropped over 20%, as did IP-management software firm Clarivate. NIQ Global Intelligence, formerly Nielsen IQ, that provides consumer insights, also dropped almost 20%.

Gartner's cousin, Forrester, dropped 12%, potentially as its business decline was already priced in. FactSet dropped 10%.

S&P Global dropped 11.2%. That is despite historical investments in AI, including Kensho in 2018. Kensho specialized in NLP and machine learning for financial data.  Some of S&P's current work involves interfacing with LLMs - a product win for S&P but a not a financial one - that cash goes to AI companies.

LSEG dropped 9.72%. Around 60% of their revenue can be said to be data-driven revenue, coming from the Data and Analytics segment. The rest comes largely from trading services.

$6.4bn Take-Private of OneStream by Hg to Accelerate AI Growth

Orbex in Talks to Sell its business to The Exploration Company

The Exploration Company (backed by investors such as EQT and Red River West) is reputedly in talks to acquire Orbex, a Scotland-based rocket launch startup (which builds rockets powered by BioLPG instead of kerosene).

Netflix updates bid to all-cash offer for Warner Bros

Netflix has offered an all cash for Warner Bros.

The aim is to push off  repeat bids from Paramount Skydance (PSKY, backed by Larry Ellison, whose son David founded Skydance, and produced Top Gun -Maverick) which have been repeatedly rebuffed.

The deal would include Warner Bros film and TV studios, HBO and HBO Max, content library and streaming operations. 

However, Warner Brothers (currently Warner Bros Discovery) would lose the Discovery brand (which includes CNN, Discovery Channel and Food Network, making it one of the largest linear TV operators in the world). Discovery would be taken public mid 2026.

Warner Bros has stuck with Netflix's bid and questioned Skydance's financing.

Netflix stock is up, Paramount down.