Alternative Investing Report - July 31, 2025

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*as of 7/30; Sources: S&P, BTC, FTSE, DJRE, CL50

For the fifth straight meeting, the Federal Reserve elected to keep interest rates unchanged, but for the first time since 1993 two Fed governors voted no on the decision. There is some disagreement on whether inflation is under control and how good the jobs market is, but Fed Chair Jerome Powell said that he is confident the economy is strong enough to keep rates the same for now. The markets had widely expected there to be no change, but with some doubt about whether September will bring a rate cut led to the public markets falling slightly on the day.

➨ TAKEAWAY: The rare dissent from the two governors, and the ongoing criticism from President Trump is putting pressure on the Fed to cut rates sooner rather than later. The CME FedWatch tool puts the chances of a September rate cut at 43%, down from above 60% before today’s meeting. It does still expect there to be one or two cuts by the end of the year, though that is a far cry from the four that were expected in 2025 at the beginning of the year.

Vincent co-founder Slava Rubin was a guest on Milk Road’s podcast talking crypto and pre-IPO investing. He and host Jay Hamilton covered the latest news on Bitcoin and Ethereum, as well as Slava’s picks for the next $1 trillion pre-IPO companies.

The publicly traded company Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) which has essentially become a Bitcoin treasury company, raised $2.5 billion for a preferred stock issue in the biggest IPO so far this year — enabling it to buy 21,021 Bitcoin. The company now holds around 3% of all Bitcoin that will ever be mined. Quite a few formerly failing public companies are turning to this playbook of late, and becoming crypto holding companies using debt and equity sales to finance the purchase of coins and tokens. Shares of CEA industries, a Canadian vape company, skyrocketed 800% when it announced plans to be a Binance coin (BNB) treasury company. A number of companies are doing the same for Ethereum, Solana, Tron, among others.

➨ TAKEAWAY: The idea behind these treasury companies is that they can act as proxies for the token, so people and entities that cannot legally hold crypto or don’t want to hold crypto can just buy shares in the treasury company. This has worked for Strategy, but in the long-term, as crypto become more accessible the demand for these companies is unlikely to last, particularly as many of them trade at a premium to the underlying assets. For now, this trend has boosted demand in crypto, but there are concerns that it is artificially propping up the market and could leave it more exposed to a bear market, as these companies are not designed to withstand any kind of downturn.

🏡 Pending home sales tick down: Even as inventory increased, pending home sales fell 0.8% in June and are now down 2.8% year-over-year. The one region where pending sales are up was the Northeast, which also has shown the strongest home price growth.

🏡 Starter homes in demand: While the greater housing market is slowing down, starter home (defined as those in a market’s 5th-35th percentile) sales grew 3.9% in June, and the average price rose 3.1% year-over-year to $260,000.

💵 Retail PE fund: Capital Group and KKR are seeking SEC approval for a fund for retail investors that will combine publicly traded stocks with private equity investments, which could comprise up to 40% of the fund’s assets. The fund will be open to all with a $1,000 minimum investment.

🤖 Fireworks AI fundraise: The cloud-based AI startup is reportedly in talks to raise funds at a $4 billion valuation, an exponential increase over its $552 million valuation last year.

🏢 Delinquent CRE loans: Approximately $23 billion of delinquent commercial mortgage loans that are tied to commercial mortgage-backed securities are approaching their maturity dates with borrowers that are unable or unwilling to make payments. Depending on how this bottleneck resolves, it could have a significant effect on the CRE market.

🎨 Artlogic and ArtCloud merge: The two art-tech companies agreed to join forces and together will support more than 6,000 galleries, artists, and collectors with more than 15 million pieces of artwork, which could bring more transparency to the global art market.

A recurring concern around AI is its use by students to write essays and do homework assignments, which have become hard to prevent and even harder to police. One college professor shared tips to sniff out when a piece of writing has been created by AI, which is useful not just for teachers, but for anyone wading through the internet, which is filled with AI-generated content these days. There are clear stylistic traits that AI models share, such as the use of em-dashes (—) and certain vocabulary, as well as uniform sentence and paragraph length. There are also obvious tells, like leftover prompts in the writing, hallucinated citations or other made-up information. For now, with enough practice, a reader can tell the difference between human and AI-written content, but with how models are advancing, that might quickly change.