💥23andMeh💥
Stem Inc., Nikola Corporation, SolarEdge Technologies Inc., Accuride + More
Are things feeling just a wee bit wonkier these days or is it just us?
This week the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell nearly 3%, down ~1300 points. The S&P 500 Index dropped nearly 1.7%, down slightly over 100 points, and the Nasdaq Composite fell roughly 2.2%, down 430 points. It was a market bloodbath but the biggest market bloodbath of all is the price of eggs at the supermarket (if you can even find them). C’mon, President Trump, you’ve been in office for 30 days already, what gives?!? 😜
Look this is not a political statement, it’s a fact: sky high policy uncertainty has the tendency to destabilize things — especially when that policy, 😉 tariffs, is largely viewed as inflationary.
Indeed, earlier this week Walmart Inc. ($WMT) reported blockbuster earnings and nevertheless freaked people the f*ck out with a very conservative go-forward tariff-oriented outlook. The stock fell nearly 10% on the week (but remains up over 5% YTD). If you think WMT doesn’t matter, well … check it ⬇️:
Shhhh … don’t tell anyone but … uh … these readings were measured before WMT chimed in, 😬. Whatever, don’t take our word for it. After all, we don’t have more money than G-d and own a baseball team:
Again, this isn’t a political commentary. It’s a *licks lips* rates-may-continue-to-be-“higher for longer”-and-sh*t-may-be-about-to-go-down-in-a-way-that’s-good-for-the-RX-community kind of commentary.*
And you know whose appetite is really growing? Distressed investors. Earlier this month Oaktree Capital Management (“Oaktree”) closed its Oaktree Opportunities Fund XII with $16b in commits (including co-investment and affiliated vehicles, which inflates the figure, but still). They’re telling people that opportunity is a’knockin’ and people are biting.
Oaktree has company. On Friday, February 21, 2025, we learned that Strategic Value Partners is out to market in an effort to raise its largest distressed fund ever at $6.5b, 30% larger than its previous fund. Per middlemarket.com:
"The Greenwich, Conn.-based firm’s latest fundraising target was disclosed during a recent meeting of the New Jersey State Investment Council, which committed $100 million."$100mm. Niiiice! Do you think that’s enough to cover the purchase price of Hooters? There are, after all, five locations in New Jersey that appear to be up for grabs (no pun intended). Or will that money be deployed in “deal away” LME transactions? After all, we hear Friday’s Wharton conference featured “8 straight hours of LME talk,” lol.
Anyway, here’s another one that’s ripe for the taking if there’s an interested buyer out there with billions to deploy …
*We’re being optimistic for once but maybe we’re kidding ourselves. There’s still very likely to be a predominance of LME deals and glorified liquidations in ‘25.
⏩One to Watch: 23andMe Holding Co. ($ME)⏩
By now, y’all have probably heard of 23andMe Holding Co. ($ME) (the “company”) or, if not, one of its competitors: AncestryDNA, FamilyTreeDNA, Living DNA, and MyHeritage to name a few. In the off-chance not, this vintage-2006 company is a self-proclaimed “leading human genetics company with a mission to help people access, understand, and benefit from the human genome.” But at a high level, it and its competitors all do the same thing: you pay one of them a hundred or so bucks for a test kit, swab some saliva into a tube, plunk it in the mail, and pace around for a few weeks waiting for your results. When those arrive, they’re in the form of (i) pretty charts and graphs breaking down your lineage and detailing the (statistically, not so) exotic locales from which your ancestors hailed and (ii) a list of the diseases you’re likely to develop in your lifetime and — if you’re lucky enough — die from.
For a lot of us, it all ends up mostly being a waste because the family hasn’t been keeping any juicy secrets, whether relationships or heart health. But every so often, the company gets to deliver the news that the local butcher was delivering more meat to grandma than showed up on grandpa’s weekly receipts. Here’s one witty redditor’s 23andMe tale:
