The Big Board

The full data behind Fintech Friday. Every story and number we tracked this week, in the same order as the email. Levels as of Friday morning, October 23, 2026. Closes will differ slightly.

The five stories we'd call first.

A new startup called Warhound came out of stealth Thursday with $200 million to clone and gene-edit military working dogs. TechCrunch puts the valuation at $1.2 billion. No puppies have been born yet, and there are no customers. Investors include the CIA's venture arm, In-Q-Tel, plus Sequoia and ARK.

How it works: Warhound stores cells from top military and police dogs, edits out genes tied to problems like bad hips and some cancers, and clones the edited dogs into puppies. Colossal, the "dire wolf" company, owns a stake and licenses its cloning tech. Luckey co-conceived it but holds no equity. Anduril makes the dogs' vests and gear. The company says over 80% of US military dogs come from Europe and fewer than half pass training. The first puppies are due in early 2027.

Luckey's pitch: "Man's best friend deserves man's best tech."

McDonald's says the McRib returns as early as Oct 27. Crypto traders swear bitcoin rallies every time it does. We checked all 15 returns since 2010. Bitcoin was up six months later 10 times. Sounds great, until you learn bitcoin is up over any six-month stretch about that often anyway (66% of the time).

The sandwich adds nothing. Bitcoin sits at about $81,500, roughly 35% below its peak.

Bitcoin daily closes from Yahoo Finance and Blockchain.com. 2015 to 2018 returns dated to the first of the month. Our math.

Apple's first folding iPhone, the Duo, went on sale today. New US orders won't ship until late January. Bloomberg Intelligence thinks it could bring in $28 billion next fiscal year. On launch day, Apple briefly passed Nvidia as the world's most valuable company, at about $5.12 trillion.

Closed, it's a phone with a 5.4-inch screen. Open, it's a 7.6-inch mini tablet on a titanium hinge. Prices run from $1,999 for 256GB to $3,199 for 2TB. Apple called pre-order demand "nothing short of extraordinary." Reviewers liked the hinge, which survived a 32,000-fold test, but flagged the weight: 254 grams, against 201 for Samsung's Galaxy Z Fold 8.

Polymarket fired its chief marketing officer, Matthew Modabber, after an internal probe, the NY Post reported. Days earlier, Bloomberg reported investors had made founder Shayne Coplan repay company money spent on private jets and rent last year, and now want him to hire a COO. Coplan stays CEO.

The stakes: Polymarket is raising about $1 billion at a ~$21 billion value. Kalshi took about 58% of US weekend volume to Polymarket's 10%, and has talked at $40 billion. And the Pentagon banned staff from using inside information to bet on military operations, after a soldier was accused of making $400,000+ on Polymarket using classified details.

Researchers using AI found two critical holes in PHP, the code behind about 70% of websites. Cloudflare saw tens of thousands of attack attempts in the first 45 minutes, and millions since. France, Denmark, Finland and the Netherlands pulled government sites offline. Microsoft's Satya Nadella: "I've not seen anything like this in a long, long time."

The full list:

No government agency has called it a record. CISA's list of actively exploited bugs added 6 this week, about average. It's a pile-up of disclosures, many for attacks that started earlier.

Rates fell, and stocks did too.

On Thursday, chip stocks crashed and money ran to safety. The 10-year Treasury fell from 5.13% to 4.96% in one day, its first close under 5% since Sept 23.

The 10-year sets the price of most loans. 30-year mortgage rates dipped to 7.32%, down from 7.40%. A year ago they were 6.19%.

Meanwhile, hedge funds made about 5 short bets for every 1 purchase this month, per Goldman Sachs. Their bets against stocks are bigger than at almost any time in five years.

The Fed meets Wednesday. Markets put about 90% odds on no change.

Bad news for AI was good news for borrowers.

🇺🇸 At home

🌐 Abroad

Sources: Fed, Treasury, Freddie Mac, University of Michigan, Trading Economics.

The biggest check was a buyout: private equity firm EQT is taking Qiagen private for about $12.1 billion. Qiagen makes the lab tools and tests behind most DNA work.

Salesforce is buying Braze for $5.66 billion, and Braze stock jumped 51%. LSEG is buying Octus, a credit-data firm, for about $3.5 billion.

The biggest raise went to chips: Tenstorrent, an Nvidia rival run by Jim Keller, raised $1.5 billion.

Most of the week's big venture checks went to AI you can touch: chips, robots, pilotless planes and factory software. Warhound's war dogs fit right in.

The money left the chatbot and went to the robot.

🇺🇸 US venture (12)

🌍 International venture (8)

🤝 Acquisitions (12)

🔔 IPOs (4)

📰 Reported, not confirmed

Brent, the global oil price, jumped 4% Thursday to $113.17, its highest close since May, after drone strikes on Saudi oil sites. It hit about $116 Friday morning. WTI, the US price, is back above $100.

At the pump, it's a different story. Gas slipped 3.5¢ to $4.29 a gallon, and diesel held at $6.31. Both are still way up from a year ago: gas by $1.22, diesel by $2.68.

And Ryanair's CEO says fares could rise up to 20% next year as its fuel hedges run out. He calls it the biggest increase in European history.

Oil hit a five-month high. Your gas bill hasn't caught up yet.

🌐 The price sheet

⚡ Power for AI

🌏 The East

The average new-car payment just hit a record $787 a month, so lenders are stretching loans to 7 years to make the bill look smaller. One in four new car loans now runs that long, and Americans owe $1.71 trillion on cars, more than on credit cards.

That means millions of people will still be paying for cars that are already breaking down, and 6.64% of subprime borrowers are 60+ days late. When the loan outlives the car, the next default is already on the calendar.

About that viral post: the "1 in 5 behind on a loan" is real, but it comes from the Fed's survey of families: 19.6% fell behind on some kind of loan last year, up from 12.2% in 2022. The "crash" call came from a Reuters Breakingviews opinion column, not a news report.

Stretching to 7 years saves $87 a month and costs $1,798 more in interest. Our math, using Edmunds' average loan.

Barclays is cutting about 5,000 jobs and American Express about 4,000, and both are leaning on AI to run with fewer people. At the same time, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, Bank of America and Citi are blocking or limiting the AI agents customers send into their own accounts.

Banks want AI doing their work, not yours, because they can't vet the bots customers bring. Whoever decides who pays when an AI agent moves money will own the next era of banking.

The numbers behind it: Barclays already has AI reading 120,000 client emails a day, and half its developers will use Claude Code by year-end. Its CEO: "AI is the icing on the cake, not the cake." Amex took a $336 million charge for its cuts. AI was the top reason US employers gave for layoffs this year: 120,136 cuts through September, more than double all of 2025. Yet weekly jobless claims are at a 3-month low of 194,000. Few people are being fired, and few are being hired.

Bitcoin finished the week flat at about $81,500, roughly 35% below its peak, as funds bought about $1.07 billion Monday through Wednesday and then sold $636 million Thursday. Meanwhile the OCC, which oversees national banks, finalized the first federal rulebook for stablecoins, starting Jan 18, 2027.

That means the digital dollar now has bank-style rules, but holders still can't earn interest, and "rewards" from partners will be judged case by case. The price went nowhere. The plumbing got built.

🪙 All five coins

Source: CoinGecko, Friday morning.

The week in crypto

Saw this online. Three bets on a nervous market.

Goldman's prime desk says hedge funds made about 5 short bets for every 1 purchase this month, and flagged a possible short squeeze. If good news hits, they all have to buy back at once.

Bill Ackman, who lost over $400 million on Netflix in 2022, told CNBC he now expects returns "well into the 20s" percent a year from the stock. Netflix just hit a 52-week low.

Berkshire hit a record under Greg Abel after he cut the portfolio from 42 stocks to 29, selling Visa, Mastercard and UnitedHealth.

How we read it: the crowd is short, Ackman is buying what it hates, and Abel is keeping only his best ideas. When everyone leans one way this hard, the squeeze is usually the story. Not advice.

Everything else worth knowing from Oct 16 to Oct 23, grouped by topic.

Markets

Deals and money

AI and tech

People and drama

Culture and consumer