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Craps, Roulette and Sports Betting Debuts at Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Hollywood
Marcellus Osceola Jr., Holly Tiger, Mike Tyson, and Rick Ross place their first bet (John Parra/Getty Images)

The boom in sports gambling and prediction markets is creating “emerging credit risks,” per Bank of America

“For investors this convergence of entertainment and speculative finance signals heightened behavioral risk,” writes BofA.

If you’re worried that a society that indulges in speculative activities is indicative of cultural decline, Bank of America has nothing for you.

But if you’re concerned that the proliferation of sports betting and prediction markets is creating new economic risks, you’re singing from their hymnal.

“Easy access and gamified interfaces encourage frequent and impulsive wagers, which can lead to overextension of credit and rising loan defaults,” wrote a team of analysts led by Mihir Bhatia. “For investors this convergence of entertainment and speculative finance signals heightened behavioral risk that could pressure credit quality, increase delinquencies, and impact earnings for issuers and subprime lenders.”

Prediction markets are booming, with much of the growth in activity consisting of what are, in the plainest terms, wagers on sports.

BofA Polymarket growth

The analysts flag that both academic research and recent surveys suggest these activities tend to result in an increased incidence of financial hardship, with young men and lower-income consumers particularly vulnerable. Bread Financial, Upstart Holdings, and One Main Financial are lenders that face “emerging credit risks,” per BofA, as these outfits are more exposed to those segments of the market.

“Beyond individual behavior the nature of these trends could pressure credit quality across portfolios, challenging underwriting models and risk pricing,” they wrote. “Net-net, online betting markets introduce a new risk for lenders, one that they have not had to deal with historically and underwriting models may need to be adapted.”

BofA bettors living osts

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Iren Cipher Mining Data Center Crypto Miners

JPMorgan lifts Cipher Mining to “overweight,” hikes Iren price target

The crypto-miner-turned-AI-data-center trade is back on Monday.

markets

Broadcom soars as rave reviews for Gemini 3 boost appeal of its custom chips

When spectators saw Michael Jordan blossom as a basketball star, it made them want to buy Nike’s Air Jordans.

Mizuho reckons there’s a similar halo effect for Broadcom based on the rave reviews for Google’s latest GenAI model, which include this ringing endorsement from Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.

“Gemini 3 was trained and powered on Google homegrown TPU chips, which benefits partner AVGO,” wrote Daniel O’Regan, Mizuho’s managing director of equity trading.

Custom chips (ASICs) are Broadcom’s specialty, and as O’Regan noted, Google and Broadcom codesigned these building blocks for Gemini 3. Boosts to Google’s capex budget have tended to buoy shares of Broadcom, since it’s a big beneficiary of these outlays.

The early positive reception to Gemini 3 implies that: a) Google will want to continue this relationship (and need more chips for training and inference!), and b) other GenAI developers might be more willing to pursue the custom chip route for AI models and inference, perhaps eating into market share for Nvidia’s GPU-based solutions.

To this end, Broadcom announced a collaboration with OpenAI in mid-October to develop and deploy 10 gigawatts of custom AI accelerators.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has argued that GPU-centric data center solutions are superior because of how ubiquitous the firm’s CUDA software is in high-performance computing.

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Citi ups Oklo price target as company executes “on all fronts”

Citi analysts lifted their price target for aspiring nuclear power provider Oklo Monday, after meeting with management last week.

They cited progress on the company’s reactor licensing strategy, its new radioactive fuel supply business — part of an acquisition that closed in March — as well as Oklo’s ability to borrow at lower-than-expected costs recently.

Analysts led by Vikram Bagri, who have a “neutral/high risk” rating on the stock, lifted their price target to $95 a share from $68. (It’s currently trading around $90.) They wrote:

“The company is executing on all fronts with new supply contracts for long lead time items, a dual-track licensing approach, diversification through its radioisotope business, and the exploration of new avenues for fuel procurement. We lift our target price as we incorporate radioisotope business.”

In particular, they spotlighted Oklo’s strategy of pursuing licensing for its reactors on parallel tracks with both the Nuclear Regulatory Commission — the traditional decider on all things nuclear in the US — and the Department of Energy, which under the Trump administration has begun issuing faster authorizations for initial development of experimental reactors, without applicants having to wait for full commercial approval of reactor plans from the NRC, as was previously typical. We recently wrote about that approach here.

Oklo has no revenue and Wall Street analysts don’t expect it to have any significant sales until 2028, when they project it will still be seeing losses.

markets

Grindr falls after company ends engagement on take-private proposal

Grindr fell in premarket trading after it announced that a committee of board members decided to disengage with a take-private proposal by its majority shareholders due to “uncertainty as to the financing” for the deal.

In October, shareholders James Lu and Raymond Zage, who together already own more than 60% of the gay dating app, proposed to buy the remaining shares of the company and delist it from the New York Stock Exchange. They said they would use a $1 billion loan and $100 million in their own cash to fund the deal.

To date, the Special Committee has been unable to obtain satisfactory information about definitive financing,” Grindr said in a Monday morning press release.

Representatives for Lu and Zage did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Rumblings of the take-private deal led the stock to jump after shares slid starting this summer. While the two huge shareholders are hoping to buy out Grindr stock at $18 a share, a premium from current levels, it was above $20 as recently as July.

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