• Bonds: 10-year Treasury yields briefly hit a 24-year high as the bond selloff deepened stateside. Things aren’t any better across the pond: UK 30-year yields hit their highest level since 1998, while France is quickly becoming the canary in the bond-market coalmine.
• Stocks: All three indexes dipped into the red today on bond market fears before recovering by day’s end.
• Commodities: Oil prices pushed up sharply as the US sent a third aircraft-carrier strike team and additional Marine Corps ships to the Middle East, while reports said President Trump may renew strikes on Iran after the midterms.

M&A

Morning Brew Inc, Photos: Adobe Stock, Grindr

You probably know Grindr—the place to find a date, fling, or midnight hookup. But the company behind the LGBTQ+ dating app wants to be more than a matchmaker.

Grindr is expanding beyond dating into healthcare after it agreed to acquire PurposeMed, the parent of HIV-prevention telehealth provider Freddie, for $250 million. Freddie will join Grindr’s existing Woodwork telehealth service under the broader Grindr Health umbrella.

Grindr will pay $190 million in cash and $60 million in stock, with another $70 million potentially coming Freddie’s way if it hits certain performance targets in 2027.

A surprisingly good match

On paper, healthcare and dating apps might look like an odd match, which may help explain why shares fell 8.28% today. In practice, there are some—much as it pains us to say it—very real synergies.

Freddie is focused largely on PrEP, a medication that can reduce the risk of getting HIV by as much as 99%, and its platform has served more than 55,000 patients across the US and Canada.

Grindr, meanwhile, has nearly 16 million monthly users—and a direct line to many of the customers Freddie is trying to reach. Grindr estimates that about 2.2 million Americans could benefit from PrEP, but only about 650,000 currently use it.

Freddie expects more than $80 million in revenue and $10 million in adjusted EBITDA this year, and Grindr projects that annual revenue from the deal could reach $240 million.

Playing the long game

Healthcare may seem like an unusual side quest for a dating app, but branching out could help it stay ahead as competition for users intensifies.

In addition to the new revenue stream Freddie offers, the company is also testing Edge, a premium tier that has been priced as high as $80 a week and is expected to be the company’s biggest revenue growth driver in 2027. Dating giant Match Group, Grindr’s closest competitor and the owner of Tinder and Hinge, gets roughly 98% of its revenue from premium tools.

If Edge takes off, it can add another growth engine to an already strong business: Grindr’s second-quarter revenue jumped 33% to $138 million, while average paying users climbed 16% to 1.4 million. Meanwhile, Match’s paid user base fell 6% over the same period.

Following the announcement, Citizens reiterated its Market Outperform rating and $21 price target, pointing to potential revenue synergies between Freddie and Grindr. Morgan Stanley is also bullish on the stock, with an Overweight rating and $20 price target, though its latest note predates the deal.

Compared to Match, Grindr is still the smaller name—but it’s giving investors more reasons to swipe right. For an app built around short-term connections, this stock may be worth sticking around for.—SY

      

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Stocks

🟢 What’s up

• Enerflex jumped 11.70% on a contract to build generators for a North American data center developer.
• Rocket Lab zoomed 1.12% after securing its largest commercial launch contract ever.
• Fair Isaac gained 11.69% following its worst quarter on record as shares rebounded from the recent selloff.
• Synopsys climbed 12.78% after announcing separate chip deals with OpenAI and Amazon.
• IBM rose 2.56% as strong results from Accenture fueled optimism about demand for consulting services (more on that later).
• Mattel surged 18.80% on reports that Authentic Brands is considering a takeover offer valuing the toymaker at $6 billion or more.

🔴 What’s down

• Foghorn Therapeutics sank 18.21% after ending a drug development partnership with Eli Lilly and announcing plans to cut roughly 40% of its workforce.
• Paramount Skydance fell 9.58% after a judge approved the company’s antitrust settlement, clearing another hurdle for its $81 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery.
• Nektar Therapeutics dropped 22.39% despite reporting promising long-term trial results for its experimental hair-loss treatment.
• Madison Square Garden Sports fell 1.51% after approving plans to spin off the New York Rangers from the New York Knicks.
• McCormick slipped 4.87% as a sharp drop in quarterly profit overshadowed stronger-than-expected sales.
• Corteva declined 83.81% after formally spinning off its seed and genetics business, leaving the company focused solely on crop protection.

Stock of the day

More bots, more billable hours

Morning Brew Inc, Photo: HJBC/Adobe Stock

Maybe investors worried about AI killing the consulting industry should’ve consulted the experts first.

Accenture reported better-than-expected fourth quarter results: Consulting revenue hit $9.28 billion, topping Wall Street’s expectations, while total bookings rose 4% to $22.2 billion. The consulting giant forecast 3% to 6% revenue growth for the coming year, thanks in no small part to record-breaking bookings last quarter: 141 clients with contracts worth $100 million or more.

Shares jumped 15.78% for the stock’s best day of trading ever—but even after today’s rally, the stock is still down around 20.78% in 2026.

AI creates work, too

Accenture has spent much of this year fighting a pretty uncomfortable narrative that AI can write code, analyze data, and automate corporate grunt work, removing the need for companies to pay armies of consultants. But instead of replacing consulting altogether, it turns out that AI is creating a new category of work.

Companies still need help choosing models, cleaning up data, connecting AI to decades-old systems, training employees, and figuring out where agents can actually save money. CEO Julie Sweet said much of Accenture’s growth is coming from helping clients build the data foundations and AI stack that they need in order to use the technology at scale, while more customers are starting advanced AI projects for the first time. Accenture is also expanding AI work with major clients like FedEx and BP.

Investors treated the report as a broader read-through for the entire IT services industry. Cognizant, IBM, Infosys, and Wipro all moved higher today as fears of an AI-driven collapse in consulting demand eased.

AI is making consultants more efficient, and it is also giving them more work to do. For now, the opportunity looks bigger than the disruption investors were pricing in. —HC

INVESTING

Morning Brew Inc.

Investors keep lining up at the roulette wheel—and markets want them to take a spin.

It’s the age of casinofication: Investors now have access to prediction markets, 24-hour trading, AI-powered portfolios, perpetual futures, and more—all of which allows them to trade more frequently and with less friction than ever before.

Now, two new developments threaten to make markets look even more like a casino.

Neon capital

The SEC just made it easier for retail investors to access private markets, approving plans that expand how individuals can qualify as accredited investors—and letting them enter what was once an exclusive club, with opportunities for aggressive growth inside.

SEC chairman Paul Atkins framed it as democratization: With the growth of private markets, gaining access to “one of the great engines of American enterprise” should “not be reserved for the wealthiest or for those deemed to be the most sophisticated,” he said in a statement.

But accessing private markets introduces everyday investors to complex options that can be hard to assess. Some private investments can also restrict investor redemptions, locking traders in and preventing them from easily withdrawing their money—even if the investment is tanking.

In short: The rewards go up, but so do the risks.

Robinhood after hours

The SEC’s decision comes a day after Robinhood announced new features that reduce trading friction—and invite more casino-lite habits.

Robinhood is expanding trading hours, allowing customers to trade certain US equities 24/7 and on weekends. Plus, it’s rolling out new features like advanced AI-powered trading tools. More than 150,000 customers have already opened agentic AI trading accounts so far—which can translate to more frequent betting rather than measured investing decisions.

A new class of customers has grown accustomed to low fees and easy access, and now they want to trade across more markets and more hours. The name of the game now is speed and automation—and with regulators opening the door to riskier types of investments, the market is looking more and more like Vegas every day.—GR

      

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News

• Anthropic is reportedly targeting an IPO before Thanksgiving, narrowing the timeline for a listing that has been in the works since it confidentially filed in June.
• Citi raised its base-case bitcoin price target from $82,000 to $113,000, citing stronger market activity, the macro environment, and renewed ETF inflows.
• The Treasury is automatically opening Trump Accounts for more than 60 million additional children under 18, expanding the investment program beyond families that actively signed up.
• Charles Schwab plans to roll out an AI assistant next month that can answer customers’ investing questions and complete certain account tasks.
• The world’s largest thoroughbred auction pulled in a record $536.7 million this year, as tax incentives and stock-market gains helped support demand for racehorses.
• Alphabet sent Google AI chips into orbit aboard a SpaceX rocket as part of Project Suncatcher, its effort to test AI computing infrastructure in space.
• Meta has classified some of its AI data centers as experimental facilities to claim federal research tax credits, reducing its 2025 tax bill by $3.9 billion.
• Tencent reportedly signed a five-year, roughly $7 billion deal to lease access to about 100,000 advanced AI chips from Oracle.

Calendar

No major earnings are on the books, but all the better to focus on a big release—we’ll have the September jobs report to watch.

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