UK spread-better IG could move to the US

UK spread-better IG, which joined the FTSE100 recently, has launched a strategic review of its domicile.

Brent at $104, WTI at $97.55

Front month Brent (May 2026, K26) is at $104 a barrel, with the rest of the curve in backwardation (June 2026, J26, at 99.58).  Nymex WTI (April 2026, J26) is at 97.55 and is also in backwardation.

While 76K contracts traded on the most liquid WTI futures (second from front-month) no liquidity was seen on the corresponding options contracts.

Google Acquires Wiz for $32bn

Google has acquired Wiz, a cloud security company founded in 2020 that works across multiple cloud environments led by Assaf Rappaport (who previously founded Adallom, a cloud access security broker sold to Microsoft for around $320m). 

Wiz frames itself as "A new operating model for AI-era security".

Google was advised by Bank of America and Freshfields.  Wiz was advised by a slew of investment banks, including Barclays, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs.

Bank of America has expanded its technology banking team, including hiring Jason Rowe of Goldman Sachs and others from JP Morgan and Centerview Partners (Gary Kirkham).

McKinsey's AI System Hacked by Startup Codewall

Red-team security startup Codewall has an AI agent which hacked McKinsey's internal AI platform (called Lilli, rolled out in July 2023)  gaining full read-write access to their chatbot in under two hours.  The technique used was SQL injection.

Agentic Commerce Gets Lift from Santander and MasterCard PoC

Santander and Mastercard have completed an agentic payment, billed as Europe's first agentic commerce transaction within a regulated banking environment. It was conducted using Mastercard Agent Pay.

Agentic commerce is an emerging ecommerce category.

The grand vision is to allow purchases to be conducted using Mastercard's payment rails within conversational interfaces.

Oil Prices up 12.5% from Previous Day on Iran Conflict

Brent crude is currently trading at $104.47 a barrel and WTI at $99.6 putting the Brent-TI spread almost $5 premium Brent over WTI in face of the Iran conflict.

Murban crude (trading on ICE Futures Abu Dhabi , or IFAD) is even higher at $113 a barrel. 

ICE's plans to launch IFAD were disclosed in November 2019 with ICE partnering with ADNOC (Abu Dhabi National Oil Company) and nine large energy traders, including BP, Shell, PetroChina and GS Caltex.

Axel Springer's Leap to buy Telegraph Media Group

European media firm Axel Springer is buying TMG (Telegraph Media Group), owner of Telegraph brands including the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph, for £575m (beating a previous attempt by DMGT to acquire TMG for £500m). Matias Dopfner committed to "preserve the distinctive character and legacy" of his latest acquisition. Part of the strategy will be to expand the Telegraph's reach to the US. This is Axel's largest acquisition since 2021 when it acquired Politico for roughly $1bn.

Private Credit in Check as Blackstone Faces Withdrawals

Blackstone, the New York based investment behemoth, faced surging withdrawals in Q1 2026 from BCRED, its flagship $82bn fund. 

Clients pulled $3.7bn though new commitments came in at $2bn, leaving net withdrawals at $1.7bn (a 2% net reduction).

BCRED is the largest fund of its kind that doesn't trade on the market. This is the first quarter it has faced withdrawals. 

Wall Street was also jittery Friday from the collapse of UK mortgage lender Market Financial Solutions Ltd. (MFS)This builds on concerns arising since the collapse of First Brands. Jefferies stock has been hit this year due to exposure to both businesses.

Private credit is a $2tr industry which has grown rapidly over the past decade. Questions over valuation and transparency have hit recently, culminating in impact to BCRED.

AI "fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company" - Dorsey

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey's technology firm Block (formerly known as Square) is cutting almost half of its workforce in the wake of AI (reducing its headcount by almost 4,000).

Stock price surged by 20%-24% in wake of the announcement, reflecting confidence in the restructuring.

Sidebar - Square is now part of Block's portfolio of products, which include Cash App, Clear Pay and Tidal - the latter which portrays as a premium music streaming service competing with Spotify.

Dorsey predicts more change to companies is on the way - and added "I think most companies are late" (to to the realisation of AI's impact).

Some pundits have accused Dorsey of "AI washing" - using AI as a cover for managerial failures including over-hiring - citing the restructuring of Twitter by Musk as a case in point. Others have pointed to "crypto winter" with Bitcoin losing a quarter of its value since the start of the year.

Block's investor relations website can be found here.  Its stock price history can be found here.

Ellison backed Paramount in Pole Position for $111bn Takeover for Warner Bros

Warner Bros was put up for sale last year. 

In light of Paramount's new bid, Netflix has dropped out of the bidding race citing the transaction was a "nice to have" not a "must have" at all costs. 

Rob Bonta, California Attorney General (the State's "top legal boss"), warned the transaction was "not a done deal".

HSBC targeting cost savings of £1.5bn in 2026 and increasing bonuses by 10%

The cost saving drive is being led by CEO Georges Elhedery who stepped into the job in 2024. These savings may be achieved 6 months ahead of schedule.  

£2.9bn of bonuses were paid to staff in 2025, with the CEO taking home £11.4m in total compensation.  

HSBC's pay committee said it intends to give the CEO the maximum long-term incentive award at 600% of salary for 2026-2028. 

However profits were down 7% year-on-year for 2025, suggesting a focus on costs rather than revenues.

Anthropic's Series G Raises $30bn led by GIC and Coatue

The raise values Anthropic at $380bn post money (accounting for the fresh capital). Co-leaders of the round were DE Shaw Ventures, Dragoneer, Founders Fund, ICONIQ and MGX. But many other funds put up money too. Money will go into frontier research, product development and infrastructure expansion.

Qualcomm Investing in Indian Startups

Technology pioneer Qualcomm has announced it will invest up to $150m though Qualcomm Ventures to support India based startups focused on AI in areas like robotics, automotive, IoT and mobile.

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.

NatWest Acquires Evelyn Partners

The acquisition increases NatWest's exposure to a high growth, capital light segment (private banking and wealth management).

Evelyn Partners has a 180 year history and oversees £69bn in Assets under Management and Administration ("AUMA"), with an AUMA CAGR greater than 7%. This is a massive addition to NatWest.

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.

Suedzucker performance improves despite weak sugar prices

Suedzucker, Europe's largest sugar producer (it produces beet sugar which is table sugar or sucrose, extracted from the sugar beet plant), reported 3Q earnings improvement, driven by its non-sugar businesses such as biofuels, starch and fresh fruit (protecting itself against a weak EU sugar market).

Suedzucker warned that the EU sugar market is likely to remain depressed and hence forecasts a fall in operating profit from the previous year.

80% of world sugar production comes from sugarcane (grown in tropical and subtropical regions) and 20% comes from sugar beet (grown in temperate climates like EU, Russia, UK, US). 

Sugar beet is very important for Europe's sugar supply.

Worldwide sugar production is roughly 181 million tons (2024/25).

Loss-making Costa Coffee Calls off Sale from Coca Cola

Coca-Cola has called off plans to sell Costa Coffee to private equity after low valuations manifested from wannabe bidders.  

Coca-Cola was said to be selling Costa for £2bn, a discount from the £3.9bn it paid for the business from Whitbread, its previous owner.  Bidders included TDR Capital (which owns ASDA) and Bain Capital (which owns Gail's - which it bought for £200m - and Pizza Express).

Costa has faced competition from cheaper rivals like Greggs, and brands like Blank Street and Black Sheep Coffee.

James Quincey, CEO of Coca-Cola, admitted the Costa transaction had not delivered. Henrique Braun (California-born COO) will come in as new CEO from March 2026.

BitGo Eyes up IPO

BitGo, based in Palo Alto and founded in 2013, is targeting a valuation of $1.96 billion for its upcoming IPO on the NYSE. 

GS and Citi are lead underwriters. 

BitGo bills itself as "The Digital Asset Infrastructure Company" with a reputed $104bn of assets on the platform. They provide a number of services, including digital wallets and prime services (the latter services promise best execution with low capital commitment).

There is investor appetite for IPOs however a crypto selloff last October has risen the bar for crypto firms.

Accenture to Acquire Faculty, Gets AI Talent Boost

Accenture is acquiring Faculty, a UK-based AI services company, for over $1bn.  

Faculty emphasises safe and ethical AI systems build with customer collaboration, and profiles a number of clients on its website including the UK's National Health Service.

CEO of Faculty, Marc Warner, will become CTO of Accenture. 

Accenture will acquire 400 AI native professionals, including data scientists and AI engineers.

Bulgaria Becomes 21st Country in Eurozone

Bulgaria became the 21st country to embrace the Euro on 1 Jan 2026. The lev and euro will remain in use throughout January but change will be given in Euros only.