Zaid Admani

They first bought a 5% stake back in 2021, and then just last September, they agreed to increase that stake to 20%.

SMFG's plan is to break into the top tier of global investment banks, and Jefferies is a pretty recognizable name.

Now, the timing here is pretty interesting because Jefferies stock has gotten crushed lately.

It's down 40% since September, largely because of concerns around its exposure to the collapsed auto parts company First Brands and questions about its underwriting standards.

So SMFG is ready to move in and take advantage of this depressed share price.

What's funny is that the report of their possible takeover is causing Jeffrey's stock price to shoot up as much as 10% this morning before giving back some of those gains.

Now, sticking with banks, let's talk about Apollo.

Shares of the finance giant are under pressure this morning after they capped investor withdrawals from one of their flagship private credit funds.

You know, we've been talking about the stress in the private credit space for weeks now, and this is just the latest example.

Investors in the Apollo Debt Solutions Fund, which is a $15 billion private credit fund, tried to pull out $1.6 billion this quarter.

That's 11% of the fund's net assets, but the fund has a 5% quarterly cap on redemptions.

So Apollo only honored just half of the withdrawal requests.

And look, this isn't just an Apollo problem.

A lot of other banks like Morgan Stanley, BlackRock, and several others have done similar things.

This is one of the risks that investors take when investing in these private credit funds.

They get access to higher returns, but the trade-off is less liquidity.

And that liquidity problem has a spotlight on it right now.

So we'll see how the private credit story plays out over the next few weeks and months.

Apollo stock is down around 4% this morning at the time of this recording and down nearly 25% for the year.

Let's wrap the show with a fun fact.