Monthly Archive: October 2020

In the late 1990s, Tyler Maroney worked as a reporter for Fortune. But a chance encounter with an employee of Kroll, the large corporate detective agency, set him off on a new career as a private investigator. After working for Kroll, he went on to found his own investigations agency, Quest Research and Investigations (QRI), based in New York.

Now, Maroney has written The Modern Detective (Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House), in which he reflects on a two-decade career as a PI, detailing his pursuit of corporate fraudsters, missions to conduct due diligence for blockbuster mergers and acquisitions, and even how he helped free an innocent man from prison.

Maroney seeks to demystify the job of private investigators and debunk myths ingrained from television and pulp fiction. He argues that the modern detective is a vital cog in corporate life and can be a force for … Read More

This is the web version of the Bull Sheet, Fortune’s no-BS daily newsletter on the markets. Sign up to receive it in your inbox here.

Happy Friday, Bull Sheeters. Big Tech’s big four—Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Alphabet’s Google—reported on Thursday a combined $38 billion in profits, and yet Nasdaq futures are bombing this morning on the murky outlooks they provided.

Meanwhile, COVID cases hit fresh records across much of Europe and the U.S. in the past 24 hours. It’s entirely possible that Americans will see numbers topping 100,000 cases per day shortly after Election Day.

Let’s check in on the action.

Markets update

Asia

• The major Asia indexes are solidly in the red in afternoon trading with Japan’s Nikkei down 1.5%.
• Demand for Ant Group shares is feverish on the eve of its record-breaking IPO, forcing its underwriters to boost the fund-raising effort to a whopping $37

For weeks, warnings that elevated tech-stock valuations could cause a violent selloff bubbled beneath the surface. On Wednesday, they looked prescient.

U.S. stocks tumbled the most since June with rising virus cases threatening the economic recovery. More than $2 trillion has been wiped from the value of American equities this week and Wall Street’s fear gauge spiked to the highest in four months.

Big tech companies from Apple to Amazon led the rout, their shares having gotten so expensive relative to expected earnings that further price gains became hard to justify. Software giant SAP SE set off alarms on future profit when it warned revenue would suffer well into 2021. A day later, U.S. tech darlings exacerbated market volatility for the second time in two months after a summer of gains that outpaced the broader market’s advance by 10 times.

“There’s uncertainty around the coronavirus surrounding the impact of another … Read More