Capitalhq

18/10/2026

AI either ends badly or completely reshapes how work gets done over the next five years. There is no middle outcome worth planning for.

That is Sean Scallan (Kings Gate Capital Partners) at Yield & Growth Sydney 2026, on where the structural opportunities actually sit right now.

Three observations worth sitting with.

The traditional pathway is being quietly dismantled. Andreessen Horowitz has just launched Silicon Valley Academy, a $42 million two-year unaccredited college alternative charging Harvard-level fees without issuing a degree. It is a market signal, not a marketing stunt. The Harvard-to-KPMG pathway is no longer the only credible answer for high-performing young people.

The next generation of billion-dollar firms will not look like the last one. The structural shift is away from thousands-strong corporates and toward AI-leveraged boutiques with one, two, or a handful of partners. We have already seen the first few of these emerge. The pattern will accelerate.

The practical implication is specific. The investors and operators who thrive over the next five years are the ones who can pivot faster than the industries they sit inside. That is a different skill from the one that produced success in the last cycle.

The nature of work is changing. The nature of capital allocation has to change with it.

16/10/2026

A tax change designed to influence selling has made a lot of investors decide not to sell at all.

Adam Switzer, CEO and co-founder of BetterX, described the behaviour on our yield panel at Capital 2026. Investors hold an asset with a large embedded gain. Crystallising it now means paying away a meaningful share of that gain. So instead of selling, they collateralise the position and use the borrowed capital to fund the next strategy.

The asset stays. The exposure stays. The capital gets deployed anyway.

What makes this worth paying attention to is not the mechanism, which is as old as margin lending. It is how cheap and fast it has become in digital asset rails, where collateralising a holding is a few clicks rather than a credit process. He described investors looping assets they already own into new yield positions, often with an inflation hedge in mind, because sitting in cash is its own quiet loss.

It also says something about the May budget. Capital gains settings changed the cost of exiting a position. They did not change anyone’s desire to redeploy. So the behaviour moved sideways into borrowing rather than stopping.

The honest caveat is that this swaps one risk for another. A collateralised position introduces liquidation risk that an unencumbered holding simply does not have, and that risk arrives fastest in exactly the volatile assets where this is easiest to do.

Policy rarely removes an incentive. It reroutes it, and the new route carries risks the old one did not.

15/10/2026

Three AI-era companies are about to collectively surpass 45 years of US tech IPO history.

Steve Torso at Yield & Growth 2026 Sydney on where the next decade of productivity actually comes from.

The historical reference he uses is one every Australian will recognise. Newspaper classifieds were the cash cow of every media company before the internet. Then Carsales, SEEK, and realestate.com.au emerged to match the classifieds model, then rapidly outgrew it. The value that moved into those three companies dwarfed what the media companies lost.

The current scale is on a different order.

SpaceX listed in June 2026 at a $2 trillion valuation. Anthropic filed its public S-1 today, targeting a similar range for its November Nasdaq listing. OpenAI has filed its own S-1, with reports pointing to a $1.2 trillion valuation ahead of a 2027 listing.

Combined valuation of the three: approximately $5.2 trillion.

Combined first-day market cap of all 3,365 US tech IPOs between 1980 and 2025: $4.1 trillion.

Three companies. Four and a half decades. One chart.

That is the size of what is coming down the pipe. The IPOs themselves are not the story. They are a guide to what happens to productivity over the next ten years.

14/10/2026

How will top founders, fund managers, and advisors raise capital in 2027?

Join Steve Torso live on Thursday, Oct 22 at 5:00 PM to master the shift from transactional pitches to always-on AI investor engagement.

Reserve your spot here: https://buff.ly/ql9iNoj

13/10/2026

“I’m stuck. I can’t get my money out. I never really understood what was going on.”

That is the moment Jonathan Weinstock, Founder of FarmCap, says is reshaping how Australian investors engage with private credit right now.

The specific shift is investor behaviour. People are starting to look under the hood for the first time. Not after a redemption request is denied. Before one is made.

Three questions are driving the look.

What am I actually invested in. The underlying loans, the asset backing them, the sector exposure.

Who is the investment manager. Their track record, their incentives, their skin in the game.

What are the actual risks. Not the marketed risks. The real ones. Duration mismatch, concentration, construction completion risk, borrower quality.

Those three questions should always have been asked. For a decade of easy conditions they often weren’t. The shift is not that the questions are new. It is that investors are finally asking them before they commit, not after they get stuck.

13/10/2026

Can cash generate returns while markets are volatile?

When markets shift and interest rates stay higher for longer, how do you approach income without relying on financial leverage?

In this interview, Haydn F. and Zac Brabin, co-founders of Fairway Capital Management, explain how they use covered calls and cash-covered puts to generate option premiums, manage risk and navigate changing market conditions.

In this interview, discover:

🔹 How their options strategy works across different market conditions

🔹 Why holding up to 85% cash can be an active part of their approach

🔹 How they generated option premiums over 12 consecutive months

🔹 The trade-offs between income generation and upside potential

🔹 How they position for higher-for-longer interest rates

If you're interested in investment strategies, portfolio construction and managing downside risk, this conversation is worth watching.

▶️ Watch the full interview on the Wholesale Investor YouTube channel.

Subscribe to Wholesale Investor for more insights from fund managers, investors and capital markets experts.

How do you generate consistent income every single month during rat...

13/10/2026

The pitch that arrives with its own urgency attached is the one worth slowing down for.

James Pound, Head of Capital Investments at Luxivana, was asked on our yield panel at Yield & Growth 2026 what his red flags are. His answer was not a metric. It was a tone of voice. Strike while the iron is hot. It is only available because of where the economy is right now. We are going to make heaps of money.

In his experience, those are typically wrong.

What makes the observation useful is where he says the failures actually originate. It is rarely the market that breaks a deal. It is the valuation set at the inception of the loan, carried forward on an assumption that was generous at the time and became load-bearing later. By the time the headline appears, the problem is eighteen months old.

Urgency is how that gets past diligence. A compressed timeline is not a feature of a good opportunity. It is a request that you skip the part where you check the numbers, and it is usually the sponsor’s problem being transferred to you.

His filter is unglamorous and it works. Traditional credit practices applied before the money moves, honest pricing, and timely reporting afterwards. On that last point he was blunt. If there is no timely reporting, it is probably not a product that makes sense.

Good operators keep finding good deals in every market. That is precisely why nobody credible needs you to decide this week.

12/10/2026

Are investors overlooking the biggest risks in the stock market?

Stock prices tell one story. The underlying financial health of a company can tell another.

In this interview, Kien Trinh, Head of Research at Stock Doctor (powered by Prime Financial), reveals how actuarial modelling can help investors assess downside risk, identify financially weak market giants and spot overlooked small-cap opportunities.

In this video:
✅ Why market prices may not reflect underlying risks
✅ How AI disruption could create new investment opportunities
✅ Why large companies aren’t always the safest bets
✅ Where to look for undervalued small-cap stocks

Watch the full interview on YouTube.

Subscribe to Wholesale Investor for more conversations with investment leaders, fund managers and market experts.

Is the stock market ignoring major economic red flags? Kien Trinh, ...

07/10/2026

The person you just wrote off as a peer is the second largest category of investor in our data.

Founders who also invest. Advisors and intermediaries who back companies on personal account. This market was built by exactly those people.

The path is familiar. Build, exit, rest, get bored, join boards, get frustrated, start deploying. Nobody updates their LinkedIn headline to say investor while they are still building.

You are at an event dividing the room into founders and investors. Investors are not doing that.

Job titles are a poor filter for capital.

07/10/2026

A founder sold his company to an ASX listed buyer six months after someone told him to stop talking.

Here is what happened.

Steve Torso had been interviewing the founder for CapitalHQ. The question was simple. Tell me what you do. The founder spent the next fifteen minutes on technology, acronyms, and detail only an industry insider could follow.

Steve's intervention. "I'm being polite to you. Most people would have checked out."

The problem was not the business. The business was obviously valuable, which is why it attracted an acquirer six months later. The problem was the translation gap. What founders want to communicate about what they are building, versus what investors can actually process in the first few minutes.

Most founders solve the business before they solve the explanation. The ones who close rounds solve both.

Reduce the thing to a single sentence a non-specialist can understand. That sentence is what the market responds to.