Happy Thursday. The Yankees sold a stake to private equity, Charles Schwab is aiming for private markets, a Batmobile is up for auction, and Series A rounds are getting bigger. Let's dive in!
🎫 Register: For our next investor briefing featuring a discussion with Super Bowl champion Marques Colston about investing into sports.
This issue is brought to you by The Champion Fund - structured access to the sports economy.
📈 DAILY MARKETS
⚾ YANKEES STAKE SALE
Details are emerging surrounding private equity firm Apollo Sports Capital’s investment into the New York Yankees, a deal that values the franchise at more than $12 billion, by far the highest ever for an MLB team. The $2.6 billion investment contains both a debt and an equity component, with the latter reportedly comprising a 16% stake in the team. The deal comes after MLB owners voted to raise the private-equity ownership limit from 15% to 20% over the summer.
➨ TAKEAWAY: Franchise values are exploding across leagues, with record-sales of the Los Angeles Lakers in the NBA and the Seattle Seahawks in the NFL in the last two months. Institutional investors have been pouring into sports as quickly as the leagues are letting them. To learn more about sports investing, check out what we wrote about the space last week, and register for our investor briefing next week on investing in the sports ecosystem beyond the major leagues.
Partner
The Sports Asset Class, Structured for Your Portfolio
The Champion Fund is an SEC-registered interval fund providing structured access to a managed portfolio across five verticals of the global sports economy.
Sports is now an institutional asset class — recurring revenue, structural scarcity, limited correlation to public markets — with deal flow once reserved for insiders now open at a low minimum.
📺 UPCOMING EVENT
Emerging opportunities in sports investing are opening up new ways to create value across different assets and markets. Join Vincent’s Eric Cantor and the Champion Fund’s Marques Colston and Nick Edwards to explore how investors identify these opportunities and the catalysts that drive value creation. They will dig deep into Champion Fund’s investment in Premier League soccer club Ipswich Town to break down how promotion, scarcity and league economics can drive significant valuation growth, while exploring similar opportunities across the entire sports ecosystem.
September 30 at 11 AM ET
📰 NOTABLE NEWS
💵 Schwab targeting private markets: Brokerage giant Charles Schwab is planning to use its $660 million acquisition of pre-IPO trading platform Forge Global to bring Pre-IPO stock trading to its massive investor base. The company is planning to form its own semiliquid private funds for those worth $1 million or more, as the entire industry broadens retail access to private markets.
🦇 Batmobile for sale: The actual Batmobile from 1992’s “Batman Returns” is being auctioned off in November at Julien’s Auctions with a pre-sale estimate of $7 million, which would make it the most expensive movie car in history.
🚀 Jumbo Series A rounds: So far in 2026, startups globally have raised 114 Series A rounds of $100 million or more, on track to set a record for the most in a year. More than 70% of those rounds have gone to AI-related startups, with all of the top 10 biggest Series A rounds going to AI, semiconductor or robotics companies.
🏡 High end rents growing faster: Single-family rental homes priced 125% above the regional median saw their rents increase by 2.6% annually, while lower-priced single-family homes rose just 0.6% in the same time period.
🪙 Binance invests in Circle: The world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange is investing $100 million into the USDC stablecoin issuer as part of a five-year partnership and promotion deal.
🤖 Snorkel AI triples valuation: The AI data and training startup raised a $350 million round at a $3.5 billion valuation, nearly triple its valuation from early last year. Its annual revenue run rate hit $375 million and is up 18x over the past twelve months.
🤖 AI CORNER
In a harrowing and dystopian story, a Tennessee grandmother was arrested for bank robbery in North Dakota and detained for six months, losing her house, car, job, and her dog. The big flaw in the North Dakota police’s case? She had never even been to North Dakota, and was flagged on social media by an AI facial recognition tool. Somehow, despite the woman not resembling the suspect in any way, the North Dakota detectives still arrested her. She is now suing for $10 million, and one would hope that this would set a precedent against wantonly using AI tools in this manner. AI has had a bad run of press recently, but this story should serve as a reminder that one of biggest dangers of AI is the incompetent humans using the technology.
