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Happy Monday. A Cooper Flagg card set a new record, mortgage rates are climbing quickly, Cathie Wood has a new tokenized venture fund, and another AI startup saw a rapid valuation gain. Let’s dive in!
🎫 Register: For our next investor briefing featuring a discussion with Super Bowl champion Marques Colston about investing into sports.
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📈 WEEKLY MARKETS
🏀 COOPER FLAGG CARD
The highly anticipated auction of NBA Rookie of the Year Cooper Flagg’s 1 of 1 signed rookie debut patch card shattered the record for any modern NBA card when it sold for $8.04 million last week. It is the third highest sale for a basketball card ever and the highest ever for a card featuring a single player. Notable other sales at the Fanatics Collect auction included $2.88 million for Dylan Harper’s rookie debut patch card and $2.34 million for Kon Knueppel’s. Harper and Knueppel were also highly regarded rookies last season.
➨ TAKEAWAY: Flagg’s card was thought to have an outside chance of breaking the previous record of $5.1 million, but it blew the mark away, and with 83 bids and a late-night bidding war it is clear there were numerous interested parties. The sales for Harper and Knueppel’s cards may have been even more notable, as Flagg is more of a known commodity, having been the #1 overall pick and hyped nationwide since high school. That their cards topped $2 million each is remarkable given the scores of established NBA superstars whose debut cards have not come close to that number. It could also been an indication of the frothiness of the market, with big money chasing prospects and the hype of the manufactured scarcity of the rookie debut patch cards.
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📺 UPCOMING EVENT
Emerging opportunities in sports investing are opening up new ways to create value across different assets and markets. Join Vincent’s Eric Cantor with The Champion Fund’s Marques Colston and Nick Edwards to explore how investors identify these opportunities and the catalysts that drive value creation. They will dig deep into Champion Fund’s investment in Premier League soccer club Ipswich Town to break down how promotion, scarcity and league economics can drive significant valuation growth, while exploring similar opportunities across the entire sports ecosystem.
September 30 at 11 AM ET
📰 NOTABLE NEWS
🏡 Mortgage rates skyrocketing: In the wake of rising Treasury yields and the Fed’s interest rate hike, the Freddie Mac 30-year fixed mortgage rate topped 7% for the first time in nearly two years and is up more than 50 basis points since July. That measure may be understating it, as the slightly more current Mortgage News Daily’s average 30-year rate is nearing 7.5% and is up 75 basis points in the last month.
🪙 Cathie Wood’s tokenized fund: The prominent investor and our past investor briefing guest is launching a tokenized venture fund with exposure to Anthropic, OpenAI, and others. The ARK Venture Fund ($ARKVX) will trade 24/7 on the Ethereum blockchain using infrastructure provided by Securitize.
🤖 TypeSafe fundraise: The AI startup just emerged from stealth earlier this month with a $40 million seed round at a $200 million valuation, and is now reportedly in talks to raise $1 billion at a $10 billion valuation. This incredible 50x jump in less than two weeks is due to rapid adoption of TypeSafe’s Jev model, which is reportedly significantly faster and cheaper than general purpose LLMs.
🏢 Retail demand growing: U.S. retail leasing and store openings are accelerating, with positive net absorption and net store openings in Q2 and a turnaround from Q2 2025. This increase in demand comes as construction completions hit a record low in the quarter, which points to likely rent growth in the short-term.
🚀 Space investment doubles: Private investment into space startups in the first half of the year has already more than doubled the total from all of last year, which itself set a new annual record. Check out last month’s investor briefing on the space sector for more background.
🎨 Christie’s creates pop culture division: In the wake of its success selling parts of Jim Irsay’s massive memorabilia collection, the auction house is launching a dedicated pop culture division dedicated to sports, historical, and entertainment memorabilia.
📆 LOOKING FORWARD
This week: The fall art auction season kicks off in Hong Kong - Sotheby’s major evening sale is today, while Christie’s is tomorrow; wearables company Oura is expected to go public.
Tuesday: S&P Case-Shiller home price index and FHFA house price index released; Consumer confidence index released; The Major League Baseball playoffs begin.
Wednesday: Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) and Core PCE indices, the Fed’s preferred inflation metrics, released; ADP private employment report released.
Friday: U.S. jobs report released.
