Tootfinder

US volunteer fire departments are scrambling to find software amid shrinking options and higher costs, as companies backed by private equity dominate the market (Mike Baker/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/14/us/fire-department-software-priva…

Rural Fire Departments Squeezed By Software Prices As Investors Profit
Rural departments have long relied on cheap software solutions to keep their operations running. But fire chiefs report sharp price increases as investors have entered the market.

Good NYT piece (gift link). Tl;dr: Financial whiz kids want to get their hands on mainstream retirement & insurance money so it can be plowed into unregulated private-debt markets and crypto. What could go wrong? https://www.

The Rules of Investing Are Being Loosened. Could It Lead to the Next 1929?
A group of financiers is trying to convince the public to invest heavily in private equity and crypto — a risky gambit with some real 1920s vibes.

Cork (Ireland), will host the 12th International Conference on Degrowth for Ecological Sustainability and Social Equity in 2027 with satellite gatherings in Covilha (Portugal) and Cluj-Napoca (Romania).
Cork 2027 | degrowth.info
https://degrowth.info/en/conference/cork-2027

Cork 2027
Coming in August 2027 the 12th Conference will take place in Ireland, with satellite gatherings in Covilha (Portugal) and Cluj-Napoca (Romania). With a thematic focus on "policy, practice and culture" the event aims to help accelerate the decolonial momentum of the just transition, celebrating diverse, pluriversal voices from around the world and turning a critical eye on the extractivist policies.

Sentiment Feedback in Equity Markets: Asymmetries, Retail Heterogeneity, and Structural Calibration
Lucas Marques Sneller
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11970 https://

Sentiment Feedback in Equity Markets: Asymmetries, Retail Heterogeneity, and Structural Calibration
We study how sentiment shocks propagate through equity returns and investor clientele using four independent proxies with sign-aligned kappa-rho parameters. A structural calibration links a one standard deviation innovation in sentiment to a pricing impact of 1.06 basis points with persistence parameter rho = 0.940, yielding a half-life of 11.2 months. The impulse response peaks around the 12-month horizon, indicating slow-moving amplification. Cross-sectionally, a simple D10-D1 portfolio earns…

Sources: OneTrust, which sells privacy and compliance software and was last valued at $4.5B in 2023, is exploring a sale, possibly to private equity buyers (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/onetrus…

OneTrust, Privacy Startup Last Valued at $4.5 Billion, Discusses Private Equity Sale
OneTrust, a nine-year-old startup that benefited from a wave of European and U.S. laws regulating how companies collect and share website data, is exploring a sale—possibly to private equity buyers, according to people familiar with the discussions. The Atlanta-based startup, which sells privacy ...

Equity Premium Prediction: Taking into Account the Role of Long, even Asymmetric, Swings in Stock Market Behavior
Kuok Sin Un, Marcel Ausloos
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10483 ht…

Equity Premium Prediction: Taking into Account the Role of Long, even Asymmetric, Swings in Stock Market Behavior
Through a novel approach, this paper shows that substantial change in stock market behavior has a statistically and economically significant impact on equity risk premium predictability both on in-sample and out-of-sample cases. In line with Auer's ''Bullish ratio'', a ''Bullish index'' is introduced to measure the changes in stock market behavior, which we describe through a ''fluctuation detrending moving average analysis'' (FDMAA) for returns. We consider 28 indicators. We find that a ''posi…

Podcast | Hoe private equity publieke instellingen opkoopt met steun van jouw bank https://www.ftm.nl/artikelen/podcast-hoe…

Podcast | Hoe private equity publieke instellingen opkoopt met steun van jouw bank
Er is meer geld dan ooit, maar de meeste mensen merken daar weinig van. In deze podcast voert Thomas Bollen verdiepende gesprekken over de relatie tussen de macht van het grote geld en de problemen van nu. Vandaag: hoe banken private equity van geld voorzien voor het opkopen van mkb-bedrijven en onze zorginstellingen.

The main factors in student satisfaction with a campus environment: A mixed approach vs. a quantitative approach
Mohammed Eddaou
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10571 https://…

The main factors in student satisfaction with a campus environment: A mixed approach vs. a quantitative approach
University dropout rates in Morocco continue to increase, with approximately 49 percent of students leaving university before graduating, despite the successive reforms and measures taken to achieve Morocco's 2015_2030 strategic vision in the higher education sector : For a university of equity, quality and promotion, which raises questions about the state of knowledge on social inclusion at the university, capable of informing decision-making and the achievement of this strategic vision. While…

RedBird Capital drops its £500M bid for the Telegraph Media Group, after intense pressure from the Telegraph newsroom and allies over the group's links to China (Mark Sweney/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2025/nov/14/redbird-ca…

Filing: Berkshire Hathaway discloses a $4.3B stake in Alphabet in Q3, a surprising move given Warren Buffett's reluctance toward high-growth, tech-driven stocks (Yun Li/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/14/warren-buffetts-berkshir…

Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway reveals new position in Alphabet
Berkshire disclosed a $4.3 billion stake in Alphabet at the end of the third quarter, making the Google parent the conglomerate's 10th largest equity holding.

The Biden administration may have shot the serif,
switching from Times New Roman font on the grounds that serif-less fonts such as Calibri are more accessible to readers with disabilities.
That’s all over now.
The State Department Action Request reads:
“To restore decorum and professionalism to the Department’s written work products
and abolish yet another wasteful DEIA [Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility] program,
the Department is return…

Marco Rubio Has Spoken! Please Remove All of Your Woke Fonts.
Marco Rubio has spoken—get out of here, Calibri!

I am no financial expert, but recent "AI" business news has sounded like blatant fraud. A & B barter B's illiquid equity for A's hardware, make up numbers for it, suddenly they are both more valuable because A books revenue & B gets a market value based on the made up numbers. So maybe they can sell more. Or borrow on it.
Then C "licenses" raw models to D, who pays in equity and tuned AI services D, establishing a price floor for all of D's real…

Lighthouse Tech awarded CHF 1.2M from Innosuisse, and launches Equity Crowdfunding round to scale growth https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2025/12/02/3197664/0/e…

Lighthouse Tech awarded CHF 1.2M from Innosuisse, and launches Equity Crowdfunding round to scale growth
Lighthouse Tech awarded CHF 1.2M from Innosuisse, and launches crowdfunding round to scale growth....

Profitmaschine Pflegeheime
Senevita gehört Tertianum. Tertianum gehört Capvis AG. Die Private-Equity-Firma Capvis in Baar macht mit der #Altenpflege Geld.
#Pflege #Kapital

Tertianum übernimmt Senevita
Elefantenhochzeit bei Langzeitpflege und Alterswohnen: Die beiden grössten Anbieter in der Schweiz schliessen sich zusammen. Damit entsteht ein Milliardenkonzern mit rund 11'000 Angestellten.

Crosslisted article(s) found for q-fin.TR. https://arxiv.org/list/q-fin.TR/new
[1/1]:
- Equity Premium Prediction: Taking into Account the Role of Long, even Asymmetric, Swings in Stock...
Kuok Sin Un, Marcel Ausloos

Sources: DMGT has locked down funding for its £500M acquisition of the Telegraph, in a funding package expected to comprise equity and debt (Daniel Thomas/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/beff1427-c291-496b-8823-457f01e293f8

Buyout von Electronic Arts: Saudi-Arabien stemmt über 90 Prozent
EA wird von einem Private-Equity-Konsortium gekauft, zu dem drei Firmen gehören. Nun werden die neuen Kräfteverhältnisse bekannt – sie sind wohl sehr einseitig.

London-based Dexory, which builds autonomous warehouse robots, raised a $165M Series C in equity and debt, after raising a $80M Series B in 2024 (Kai Nicol-Schwarz/Sifted)
https://sifted.eu/articles/ai-robotics-startup-dexory-raises-165m/

Goldman Sachs agrees to acquire multi-stage investment firm Industry Ventures, which has $7B AUM, for $665M in cash and equity plus $300M tied to performance (Saeed Azhar/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/go…

Trump commutes 7-year prison sentence of former private equity CEO David Gentile (Rebecca Shabad/NBC News)
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-commutes-7-year-prison-sentence-former-private-equity-ceo-david-rcna246744
http://www.memeorandum.com/251201/p52#a251201p52

How Private Equity Made Piracy Great Again
#culture #media

Yankees even series with Red Sox; Dodgers move onto NLDS; Big Ten eyeing $2 billion private equity deal

https://www.cbssports.com/mlb/news/yankees

Sources: OpenAI told staff it was ending the six-month "vesting cliff" that required new employees to work for at least six months before their equity vests (Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tec…

In Canada, @gandersocial.bsky.social’s equity crowdfund is really resonating.
It turns out that people want Canadian owned and run social media.
Very excited to see!
https://gandersocial.ca/blog/just-giver-why-were-inviting-canadians…

Finance people: If I have a list of mutual fund symbol names and percentages of each, is there an easy API or data source I can use to calculate what my actual underlying equity exposure is?
The specific goal is figuring out how much of my 401k is actually in companies that are propped up by the AI bubble.
I can look at a single ticker symbol and see at least its top n hodlings easily enough but what if I want to know across ten different index funds I own different amounts of, h…

Bari Weiss
– a staunch Zionist and a fierce opponent of supposed wokeness and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives
– famously left the New York Times opinion section,
claiming she had been bullied by her colleagues for her beliefs.
She started a Substack newsletter and eventually founded the wildly successful website Free Press.
Her rise has been meteoric. She “has ascended the mountain of journalism on a slingshot”, Jessica Testa of the New York T…

Fox Entertainment takes an equity stake in Holywater, which primarily uses AI to create vertical microdramas on platforms such as My Drama and My Muse (Tony Maglio/The Hollywood Reporter)
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business

Fox Entertainment Takes Equity Stake in AI-Microdramas Company Holywater
"Development deals with top Hollywood talent will be unveiled soon,” the companies say.

Dutch government has let all messages within the judicial system run via Solvinity, a company now about to be sold by a UK-based private equity firm to US-based Kyndryl. Which brings the data within reach of the Trump regime.

Niet alleen DigiD: ook geheime info rechtspraak en Justitie in geding bij overname IT-bedrijf
Er is onrust ontstaan over de aangekondigde overname van IT-dienstverlener Solvinity – leverancier van DigiD – door een Amerikaans bedrijf. Door de systemen van Solvinity lopen uiterst gevoelige data van onder meer het ministerie van Justitie en Veiligheid, het Openbaar Ministerie en de rechtspraak. Die dreigen binnen het bereik van de Amerikaanse regering te komen.

Chancellor of the Exchequer Reeves with not one but 2 imperial flags and the lectern slogan, "Strong Foundations | Secure Future", neither of which can be claimed in any sense, either as the present reality or as the result of whatever 'tough choices' she will trail.
The only tough choices that matter are to reduce material and energy usage coupled with a massive redistribution of wealth to secure a 'strong foundation' of security and equity, in terms of ecolog…

Psalm 58 is about the maga-klan... Here it is (slightly shorted to meet my Mastodon site's posting length limits.)
...
Do you rulers indeed speak justly? Do you judge people with equity?
No, in your heart you devise injustice, and your hands mete out violence on the earth.
...
Break the teeth in their mouths, O God;
Lord, tear out the fangs of those lions!
Let them vanish like water that flows away; when they draw the bow, let their arrows fall s…

Bible Gateway passage: Psalm 58 - New International Version
Psalm 58 - For the director of music. To the tune of “Do Not Destroy.” Of David. A miktam. Do you rulers indeed speak justly? Do you judge people with equity? No, in your heart you devise injustice, and your hands mete out violence on the earth. Even from birth the wicked go astray; from the womb they are wayward, spreading lies. Their venom is like the venom of a snake, like that of a cobra that has stopped its ears, that will not heed the tune of the charmer, however skillful the enchante…

"As Joy-Ann Reid put it in an Instagram video: “Dear retailers who’ve decided you don’t like diversity, equity, and inclusion, or you really love ICE and you have no problem with them busting into your establishments to drag people away: Here’s the thing. We ain’t buying it. I mean, for real, for real, we ain’t buyin’ it.”
She explained: “We’re gonna spend our money with businesses who actually respect our dollars, respect our communities, and respect our diversity, equity, and inclusion. We are going to buy from people who respect immigrants, who respect immigrants’ rights, and respect freedom and liberty. We are going to buy from establishments that respect our right to vote and our right to live in a free society. And if you ain’t that, we ain’t buying it.”
“Let’s show them our power,” she told listeners. “Let’s show them what we can do together.”"
https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/november-25-2025

A new thing to boycott, if you aren't already: https://apnews.com/article/ea-electronic-arts-video-game-silver-lake-pif-d17dc7dd3412a990d2c0a6758aaa6900?utm_source=copy&utm_medium=share

EA to be acquired for $52.5 billion in largest buyout ever of a public company taken private
Electronic Arts, the maker of video games like “Madden NFL,” “Battlefield,” and “The Sims,” is being acquired by an investor group including Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund in the largest private equity-funded buyout in history. The investors, who also include a firm managed by Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, and the private equity firm Silver Lake Partners, valued the deal $55 billion. EA stockholders will receive $210 per share. The deal far exceeds th…

The monthly Digital Library Federation Committee on #equity and #inclusion mtg is a welcoming space to discuss supporting #libraries,

Fair Minimum Labeling: Efficient Temporal Network Activations for Reachability and Equity
Lutz Oettershagen, Othon Michail
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03899 https://

Fair Minimum Labeling: Efficient Temporal Network Activations for Reachability and Equity
Balancing resource efficiency and fairness is critical in networked systems that support modern learning applications. We introduce the Fair Minimum Labeling (FML) problem: the task of designing a minimum-cost temporal edge activation plan that ensures each group of nodes in a network has sufficient access to a designated target set, according to specified coverage requirements. FML captures key trade-offs in systems where edge activations incur resource costs and equitable access is essential,…

Electronic Arts vor Buyout: Sind die goldenen EA-Jahre jetzt plötzlich vorbei?
EA wird von Private Equity gekauft. Schlimm! Fans der liebenswürdigen US-Spieleschmiede müssen sich auf so einige Veränderungen gefasst machen. Eine Glosse.

Source: OpenEvidence, which offers an AI chatbot for doctors, is raising $250M at a $12B valuation, up from $6B in Oct., and has $150M in annualized ad revenue (Stephanie Palazzolo/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/ch

‘ChatGPT for Doctors’ Startup Doubles Valuation to $12 Billion as Revenue Surges
OpenEvidence, which operates a ChatGPT-like product for doctors to find health information from medical journals and other trusted sources, is raising $250 million in equity financing that will value the three-year-old startup at $12 billion after the investment, doubling its last private ...

Oh no, some private equity firms seem doomed to fail. Let me try not to celebrate

If true, this explains why the #Browns took #ShedeurSanders for $4.6M:
▫️$15M (6%) of $250M in Shedeur merch equity & tax classification as a business revenue not personal income
▫️Sponsorships like Nike worth $5M-$10M & Beats by Dre, Gatorade, etc. worth $6.5M
▫️Owner…

The groundbreaking clause in Shedeur Sanders’ rookie deal that’s rewriting the rules
Cleveland Browns rookie quarterback Shedeur Sanders has included a groundbreaking clause in his contract that could set a new standard in the NFL.

Apple removes ICE tracking apps after pressure by Trump administration (Kanishka Singh/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/society-equity/apple-removes-ice-tracking-apps-after-pressure-by-trump-administration-2025-10-03/
http://www.memeorandum.com/251003/p50#a251003p50

LLM-Based Multi-Task Bangla Hate Speech Detection: Type, Severity, and Target
Md Arid Hasan, Firoj Alam, Md Fahad Hossain, Usman Naseem, Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01995

LLM-Based Multi-Task Bangla Hate Speech Detection: Type, Severity, and Target
Online social media platforms are central to everyday communication and information seeking. While these platforms serve positive purposes, they also provide fertile ground for the spread of hate speech, offensive language, and bullying content targeting individuals, organizations, and communities. Such content undermines safety, participation, and equity online. Reliable detection systems are therefore needed, especially for low-resource languages where moderation tools are limited. In Bangla,…

Equity Market Price Changes Are Predictable: A Natural Science Approach
Qingyuan Han
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01542 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.01542

Equity Market Price Changes Are Predictable: A Natural Science Approach
Equity markets have long been regarded as unpredictable, with intraday price movements treated as stochastic noise. This study challenges that view by introducing the Extended Samuelson Model (ESM), a natural science-based framework that captures the dynamic, causal processes underlying market behavior. ESM identifies peaks, troughs, and turning points across multiple timescales and demonstrates temporal compatibility: finer timeframes contain all signals of broader ones while offering sharper …

I guess the Internet Archive is now a for-Proffitt...
https://mastodon.archive.org/@internetarchive/115611174274779543

internetarchive (@internetarchive@mastodon.archive.org)
Attached: 1 image The Internet Archive welcomes Merrilee Proffitt as director of Democracy’s Library, US! With decades in digital libraries & open knowledge, she’ll expand free, online access to government research, supporting transparency, equity, and democratic engagement. Learn more at our blog ⤵️ https://blog.archive.org/2025/11/18/meet-merrilee-proffitt-director-of-democracys-library-us/ @internetarchive

Adrian Newey to be team principal (!) at Aston Martin
https://www.astonmartinf1.com/en-GB/news/announcement/aston-martin-aramco-announces-changes-to-leadership-structure

Tel Aviv-based Sweet Security, which helps spot abnormal cloud infrastructure behavior, raised $75M led by Evolution Equity, taking its total funding to $120M (Marissa Newman/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Sources: Paramount Skydance is in talks with private equity firms including Apollo Global Management to join its potential $60B bid for Warner Bros. Discovery (Charles Gasparino/New York Post)
https://nypost.com/2025/10/08/media/pa

Exclusive | Paramount Skydance talking to Apollo, buyout firms to join possible $60B Warner Bros. Discovery bid: sources
“These companies bring a lot to the table since they own stakes in Hollywood properties and have a lot of money,” said one source.

Navigating Equity and Reflexive Practices in Gigwork Design: A Journey Mapping Experience
Alicia E. Boyd, Danielle Cummings, Angie Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16808 https:/…

Navigating Equity and Reflexive Practices in Gigwork Design: A Journey Mapping Experience
How do we create ethical and equitable experiences on global platforms? How might UX designers and developers incorporate reflexive practices--a continuous self-evaluation of one's assumptions and biases--to mitigate assumptions and workers' experience? This tutorial will explore ways to build equitable user experiences using gig work platforms as a target use case. With the rise of gig work platforms, the informal digital economy has altered how algorithmic systems manage occasional workers; i…

The New Quant: A Survey of Large Language Models in Financial Prediction and Trading
Weilong Fu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05533 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510…

The New Quant: A Survey of Large Language Models in Financial Prediction and Trading
Large language models are reshaping quantitative investing by turning unstructured financial information into evidence-grounded signals and executable decisions. This survey synthesizes research with a focus on equity return prediction and trading, consolidating insights from domain surveys and more than fifty primary studies. We propose a task-centered taxonomy that spans sentiment and event extraction, numerical and economic reasoning, multimodal understanding, retrieval-augmented generation,…

(LinkedIn) #Paradromics: "A #BCI capable of capturing and delivering rich neural signals could stream visual information directly to the cortex, bypassing external displays and generating experiences indistinguishable from the physical world."

#bci #technology #biotech #augmentedreality #virtualreality #arvr #braincomputerinterfaces | Paradromics
Our daily mission is to restore independence for those living with severe motor impairment. But as our CEO Matt Angle and CSO Reema Khan (Green Sands Equity) discuss at the OPEN Silicon Valley Annual Forum, the long-term potential of high data rate BCIs extends even further.   A #BCI capable of capturing and delivering rich neural signals could stream visual information directly to the cortex, bypassing external displays and generating experiences indistinguishable from the physical world.   …

Germany just committed €3 billion to help lower-income families afford electric vehicles. This is a game-changer for EV accessibility—making clean transportation a reality for people who've been priced out of the electric transition. It's not just about climate goals anymore; it's about equity.

Germany agrees €3 billion support scheme to make EVs affordable for lower income groups
German government has agreed to spend three billion euros ($A5.3 billion) on a new scheme to support electric mobility adoption among low- and middle-income groups.

#Minnesota raised #AntiWoke Warrior and former #FauxNews pundit #PeteHegseth has used his

Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros. Following the Separation of Discovery Global for a Total Enterprise Value of $82.7 Billion (Equity Value of $72.0 Billion) (About Netflix)
https://about.netflix.com/en/news/netflix-to-acquire-warner-bros
http://www.memeorandum.com/251205/p57#a251205p57

Approximately Optimal Toll Design for Efficiency and Equity in Arc-Based Traffic Assignment Models
Chih-Yuan Chiu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.20355 https://…

Approximately Optimal Toll Design for Efficiency and Equity in Arc-Based Traffic Assignment Models
Congestion pricing policies have emerged as promising traffic management tools to alleviate traffic congestion caused by travelers' selfish routing behaviors. The core principle behind deploying tolls is to impose monetary costs on frequently overcrowded routes, to incentivize self-interested travelers to select less easily congested routes. Recent literature has focused on toll design based on arc-based traffic assignment models (TAMs), which characterize commuters as traveling through a traff…

Why donate to SEEC PAC?
The Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition Political Action Committee
exists to support SEEC members in Congress and candidates who fight for clean energy, climate change solutions, environmental justice, and protection of our nation’s clean air, water, wildlife, and natural environment.
https://seecpac.org/<…

Home – Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition Political Action Committee
Join the movement Elect environmental champions to Congress. SEEC PAC Members of Congress Congressman Connolly has always prioritized the environment in his public service, and as the Chair Emeritus of SEEC, he understands the importance of environmental justice to social equity and the success of future generations. Rep. Gerry ConnollyVA-11 Congressman Jared Huffman represents the […]

Sources: the US is working on a settlement that could see ZTE pay $1B over alleged foreign bribery from 2018 and earlier; a deal would require China's approval (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/soc

Greenleaf Book Group and Amplify Publishing Group have been acquired by Civica Media, a new publishing company formed by private equity firm BlackBern Partners (Jim Milliot/Publishers Weekly)
http://www.publishersweekly.…

Private Equity Firm Acquires Two Leading Hybrid Publishers
Greenleaf Book Group and Amplify Publishing Group, two of the country’s oldest and best-known hybrid publishing companies, have been acquired by Civica Media, a new publisher formed by private equity firm BlackBern Partners.

How Private Equity Oversees the Ethics of Drug Research (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/04/health/drug-trials-ethics-ozempic.html
http://www.memeorandum.com/251004/p70#a251004p70

Samba TV raised up to $60M in venture debt to scale through acquisitions and new AI-powered measurement tools; Samba previously raised $69M in equity funding (Kerry Flynn/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/12/08/samba-tv-measurement-venture-debt

Exclusive: Samba TV raises up to $60M venture debt
The firm plans to boost AI-powered media measurement and pursue acquisitions.

Donald Trump has set free a private equity executive
who had served less than two weeks of a seven-year sentence
for his role in what prosecutors described as a $1.6 billion scheme
that defrauded thousands of victims.
David Gentile, 59, a onetime resident of Nassau County, N.Y.,
had reported to prison on Nov. 14, and was released on Wednesday, according to Bureau of Prisons records and a White House official who was not authorized to discuss the matter.
Mr…

Trump Frees Fraudster Just Days Into Seven-Year Prison Sentence
David Gentile had been found guilty for his role in what prosecutors described as a $1.6 billion scheme that defrauded thousands of investors.

Energy Equity, Infrastructure and Demographic Analysis with XAI Methods
Sarahana Shrestha, Aparna S. Varde, Pankaj Lal
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16279 https://

Energy Equity, Infrastructure and Demographic Analysis with XAI Methods
This study deploys methods in explainable artificial intelligence (XAI), e.g. decision trees and Pearson's correlation coefficient (PCC), to investigate electricity usage in multiple locales. It addresses the vital issue of energy burden, i.e. total amount spent on energy divided by median household income. Socio-demographic data is analyzed with energy features, especially using decision trees and PCC, providing explainable predictors on factors affecting energy burden. Based on the results of…

Sources: xAI nears a deal to raise $20B in equity and debt, tied to the Nvidia GPUs that xAI plans to use in Colossus 2; Nvidia is investing as much as $2B (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-07/musk-s-…

Billie Eilish Calls Out Billionaires While Accepting Award: 'Give Your Money Away, Shorties' https://apple.news/AJZGwWdM5R9CSGm7Y_dwbLQ
11.5 million for food equity, climate justice, carbon reduction, and combating climate change. Thank you, Billie 💗💗💗

Billie Eilish Calls Out Billionaires While Accepting Award: 'Give Your Money Away, Shorties' — Complex
Mark Zuckerberg was reportedly in the room during Eilish's acceptance speech for the WSJ Magazine’s Music Innovator Award.

Do Mutual Funds Make Active and Skilled Liquidity Choices in Portfolio Management? Evidence from India
Pankaj K Agarwal, H K Pradhan, Konark Saxena
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02741

Do Mutual Funds Make Active and Skilled Liquidity Choices in Portfolio Management? Evidence from India
This study examines active liquidity management by Indian open-ended equity mutual funds. We find that fund managers respond to inflows by increasing cash holdings, which are later used to purchase less-liquid stocks at favourable valuations. Funds with less liquid portfolios tend to maintain larger cash reserves to manage flows. Funds that make active liquidity choices yield statistically and economically significant gross and net returns. The performance differences between funds with varying…

Snap announces a deal to distribute Perplexity's search engine to Snapchat users; Perplexity will pay Snap $400M through a combination of cash and equity (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-05/snap-…

Education software company EdSights, which uses SMS texting and AI to reach students and identify those at risk of dropping out, raised $80M from JMI Equity (Chris Metinko/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/pro/enterprise-software-deals/…

Exclusive: EdSights raises $80M from JMI Equity
The company is growing revenue 70% year to year.

Trump Administration in Talks to Take Equity Stakes in Quantum-Computing Firms (Amrith Ramkumar/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/business/entrepreneurship/trump-administration-in-talks-to-take-equity-stakes-in-quantum-computing-firms-60ee5143
http://www.memeorandum.com/251022/p172#a251022p172

The state department is proposing to suspend 38 universities including Harvard and Yale
from a federal research partnership program because they engage in diversity, equity and inclusion hiring practices,
according to an internal memo and spreadsheet obtained by the Guardian.
The memo, dated 17 November, recommends excluding institutions from
the Diplomacy Lab – a program that pairs university researchers with state department policy offices
– if they “openly en…

The University of Alabama suspends two student-run magazines, one focused on Black students and another on women's issues, citing federal anti-DEI guidance (Kim Chandler/Associated Press)
https://apnews.com/article/university-of-alabama-dei-tru…

University of Alabama closes student magazines for women, Black students
The University of Alabama has suspended the publication of two student-run magazines — one primarily focused on Black students and another on women’s issues — citing federal guidance against diversity, equity and inclusion programs on college campuses. A university official informed the editors of Nineteen Fifty-Six and Alice magazines on Monday of the decision. A spokeswoman for the university said in a statement that the university is committed to helping all students but “must also c…

Vista Equity-backed infrastructure software company LogicMonitor acquires Catchpoint, which monitors user experiences across the internet, for $250M in cash (Liana Baker/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-1…

Vista-Backed LogicMonitor Buys Monitoring Startup Catchpoint
Vista Equity Partners-backed infrastructure software company LogicMonitor is acquiring the startup Catchpoint for more than $250 million in cash.

Scorability, a college sports recruiting marketplace for athletes and coaches, raised $40M led by Bluestone Equity Partners, bringing its total funding to $51M (Jessica Golden/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/30/scorability…

Startup Scorability wants to revolutionize college sports recruiting as NIL takes off
Scorability now boasts 1.2 million athletes and 3,000 college sports program users.

Gerald Epstein, a leading expert on finance and financial crises,
warns that Trump’s executive order on retirement accounts
not only comes with high risks,
but the so-called alternative assets deliver, at best, average returns.
https://truthout.org…

What Trump’s Executive Order on 401(K)s Means for Workers Who Hope to Retire
More workers may lose their hard-won retirement savings now that Trump has pushed them toward crypto and private equity.

Snap announces a deal to distribute Perplexity's search engine to Snapchat users; Perplexity will pay Snap $400M through a combination of cash and equity (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-05/snap-…

The Trump administration agrees to inject up to $150M in xLight, which develops lasers for EUV machines and has Pat Gelsinger on its board, for an equity stake (Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/trump-administration-to…

Generative AI as a catalyst for democratic Innovation: Enhancing citizen engagement in participatory budgeting
Italo Alberto do Nascimento Sousa, Jorge Machado, Jose Carlos Vaz
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19497

Generative AI as a catalyst for democratic Innovation: Enhancing citizen engagement in participatory budgeting
This research examines the role of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) in enhancing citizen engagement in participatory budgeting. In response to challenges like declining civic participation and increased societal polarization, the study explores how online political participation can strengthen democracy and promote social equity. By integrating Generative AI into public consultation platforms, the research aims to improve citizen proposal formulation and foster effective dialogue between…

Some Bollywood stars sue YouTube, seeking the removal of AI videos infringing their IP, and want safeguards to stop other AI models from training on such videos (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/soc

Beacon Software, which buys niche software businesses and uses AI to transform them, raised a $250M Series B led by GC, Lightspeed, and D1 at a $1B valuation (Krystal Hu/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/technology/beacon-…

Rethinking Portfolio Risk: Forecasting Volatility Through Cointegrated Asset Dynamics
Gabriele Casto
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.23533 https://arxiv.org/pdf…

Rethinking Portfolio Risk: Forecasting Volatility Through Cointegrated Asset Dynamics
We introduce the Historical and Dynamic Volatility Ratios (HVR/DVR) and show that equity and index volatilities are cointegrated at intraday and daily horizons. This allows us to construct a VECM to forecast portfolio volatility by exploiting volatility cointegration. On S&P 500 data, HVR is generally stationary and cointegration with the index is frequent; the VECM implementation yields substantially lower mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) than covariance-based forecasts at short- to mediu…

Randy Villegas is an educator, activist, and proud son of immigrants. Born and raised in Kern, California, in a working-class family, Randy knows firsthand the challenges that many Central Valley families face.
His journey - from earning a PhD to teaching and organizing for change - has been rooted in one core belief: that government should work for everyone, not just the powerful few.
With deep ties to our community and a lifelong commitment to justice and equity, Randy is running…

In its Q3 earnings, Alphabet said the profit included "net gains on equity securities of $10.7B," in part from a private company, which sources say is Anthropic (Bloomberg)

Sources: Saudi Arabia's PIF is the largest contributor to the $36B in equity used to finance the EA deal; it will roll over its $5B EA stake into the new entity (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-29/s…

A White House official says the US will not hold a golden share or equity in TikTok US and the new board will not have a member selected by the US government (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-22/no-golden-…

Automattic files counterclaims against WP Engine's October 2024 lawsuit and alleges that WP Engine has been abusing the WordPress trademark (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/24/automa…

Automattic files counterclaims against WP Engine in WordPress lawsuit, alleging trademark misuse | TechCrunch
Automattic has filed counterclaims against WP Engine, alleging that the company — backed by private equity firm Silver Lake — misused WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks, misled users, and undermined the open source community.

Sources: quantum computing companies including IonQ, Rigetti, and D-Wave are in talks to give the US Commerce Dept. equity in exchange for $10M each in funding (Amrith Ramkumar/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/business/entrepren…

Sources: xAI has raised $10B at a post-money valuation of $200B, weeks after reportedly raising $10B in debt and equity at a ~$150B valuation (CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/19/musks-xai-10-billion-at-200-billion-valuation.html

Elon Musk's xAI raising $10 billion at $200 billion valuation: sources
The fundraising comes weeks after Musk raised $10 billion in debt and equity at what was believed to be a roughly $150 billion valuation, according to Faber.

OpenAI says it has "completed our recapitalization", the OpenAI Foundation now has equity valued at ~$130B, and it continues to control the OpenAI for-profit (OpenAI)
https://openai.com/index/built-to-benefit-everyone/

EU member states agree a position on draft child protection legislation without forcing Big Tech to find and remove CSAM; states now negotiate with EU lawmakers (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/soc

Toronto-based Wealthsimple, an online investment management service, raised CA$750M co-led by Dragoneer and GIC at a post-money valuation of CA$10B (Josh Scott/BetaKit)
https://betakit.com/wealthsimple-hits-10-billion-valuation…

Wealthsimple hits $10-billion valuation in new round backed by Dragoneer, GIC, CPP Investments
Toronto-based FinTech firm Wealthsimple has announced that it has signed an equity round of up to $750 million CAD at a post-money valuation of $10 billion.

DeltaHedge: A Multi-Agent Framework for Portfolio Options Optimization
Feliks Ba\'nka (Warsaw University of Technology, Faculty of Electronics,Information Technology), Jaros{\l}aw A. Chudziak (Warsaw University of Technology)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12753

DeltaHedge: A Multi-Agent Framework for Portfolio Options Optimization
In volatile financial markets, balancing risk and return remains a significant challenge. Traditional approaches often focus solely on equity allocation, overlooking the strategic advantages of options trading for dynamic risk hedging. This work presents DeltaHedge, a multi-agent framework that integrates options trading with AI-driven portfolio management. By combining advanced reinforcement learning techniques with an ensembled options-based hedging strategy, DeltaHedge enhances risk-adjusted…

Automattic files counterclaims against WP Engine's October 2024 lawsuit and alleges that WP Engine has been abusing the WordPress trademark (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/24/automa…

Automattic files counterclaims against WP Engine in WordPress lawsuit, alleging trademark misuse | TechCrunch
Automattic has filed counterclaims against WP Engine, alleging that the company — backed by private equity firm Silver Lake — misused WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks, misled users, and undermined the open source community.

Israel-based Chargeflow, whose AI tech automates chargeback disputes for online merchants, raised a $25M Series A led by Viola Growth, and a $10M debt round (Meir Orbach/CTech)
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/bk00v9g9e11g

Chargeflow raises $35 million to fight the surge in transaction denials
Fintech startup secures equity and debt funding as e-commerce fraud grows to $100B a year. 

A White House official says the US will not hold a golden share or equity in TikTok US and the new board will not have a member selected by the US government (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-22/no-golden-…

General Atlantic purchases a $96M minority stake in Japanese HR software unicorn SmartHR, marking the PE firm's first growth equity investment in Japan (Lisa Du/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-…

Findem, an AI-powered talent acquisition startup, raised $51M in equity and debt, including a $36M Series C led by SLW, taking its total funding to $105M (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News)
https://news.crunchbase.com/ai/findem-funding-ai-powered-hiring-re…

Exclusive: Findem Lands $36M Series C To Supercharge AI-Powered Hiring 
Findem is just one of more than a dozen startups at the intersection of AI and recruitment globally that has raised venture capital in 2025.

Meta forms a JV with Blue Owl to fund the $27B, 2GW Hyperion data center in Louisiana, its largest ever private capital deal; Meta will retain a ~20% equity (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/technology/meta-forms-joint-ventu…

Galaxy Digital reports Q3 net income of $505M and total assets up 27% QoQ to $11.5B, including $1.9B in cash and stablecoins and $3.2B in equity (Blockworks)
https://blockworks.co/news/galaxy-posts-505m-profit