Alternative Investing Report - April 1, 2026

*as of 3/31; Sources: S&P, BTC, FTSE, DJRE, GOLD

The S&P Cotality Case-Shiller Index rose 0.2% in January, adjusted for the season, and is up 0.9% year-over-year, continuing the trend of decelerating annual home price growth. The best performing market was New York City with a 4.9% gain, and Tampa brought up the rear with a 2.5% decline. Meanwhile, the FHFA House Price Index for January showed a 0.1% monthly gain and a 1.6% annual one. The East North Central (Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio) region of the country showed the most growth at 4.4% annually, while the West South Central (Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana) region had the biggest decline at 0.8% annually.

➨ TAKEAWAY: Inflation is now outpacing home appreciation by a significant margin, meaning that real price growth is negative for much of the country. January was also when mortgage rates started to fall close to 6%, and with rates back up due in large part to the Iran war, future reports could show even slower price growth. Regionally, Florida is still struggling, with the bottom three markets and 12 of the bottom 20, while the Midwest and Northeast are still holding up better than the rest of the country.

In the latest episode of Smart Humans, Vincent’s Slava Rubin and Sacra's Jan-Erik Asplund discussed Perplexity, the $20 billion AI search startup, and its origins, growth trajectory, market positioning, revenue streams, and competitive landscape.

🤖 Biggest VC round ever: OpenAI raised an astonishing $122 billion at a $852 billion valuation, shattering its own record for the biggest venture capital round ever, which had been $40 billion. Its valuation has nearly tripled in the last year and has gone up by more than 5x in the past 18 months. The company reported generating $2 billion of monthly revenue and 900 million weekly active users, and many expect it to go public later this year.

📊 Consumer confidence ticks up: The Conference Board’s consumer confidence index rose from 91.0 to 91.8 in March, but the expectations index dropped from 72.6 to 70.9, indicating that consumers are pessimistic about the near future.

💵 Private credit secondaries: Distressed-debt funds, also known as “vulture” funds, are touting the recent private credit downturn as the best buying opportunity since 2008, and are stockpiling cash to take advantage.

🏢 Multifamily market stabilizing: Nearly 30% of metro areas have apartment occupancy rates of 95% or higher, as new supply diminishes and demand from renters continues to steadily grow.

🪙 FTX creditor payment: The defunct crypto exchange is paying out $2.2 billion to its creditors in its fourth round of payouts, which could impact the crypto market, albeit mildly. While the payouts are in USD and reflect the Bitcoin price from November 2022, when it was much lower in USD terms, some of the creditors could reinvest to restore some of their previous holdings.

⌚ Titanic pocket watch: An 18-carat gold Patek Phillippe pocket watch that belonged to John Jacob Astor IV, who wore it when he died in the sinking of the Titanic, will be auctioned off later this month.

Last week we talked about Worldcoin, the Sam Altman-founded crypto project that scans people’s eyeballs in exchange for tokens. Given the news of the OpenAI raise yesterday, Altman is not likely to be losing a lot of sleep over Worldcoin’s recent performance, but its token holders are. The crypto token’s price dropped 97% over the past two years and had the biggest decline of any major token two weeks ago. We warned that the specter of a major token unlock in July would likely only push prices down further, and once again, Worldcoin posted the biggest loss of the last week for any token in the top-60 by market cap. The foundation behind the project sold an additional $65 million worth of the coins this week, another bearish sign. The token hit an all-time low before rebounding slightly yesterday, but is still down 27.6% in the past month and 64.2% in the past year.