From the Desk of InvestorPlace: I don't forward many outside notes to my readers. But this one from my colleague Luke Lango stopped me cold. If you've been following the OpenAI IPO story — and most of our readers have — what Luke is about to share could completely change how you approach it. Please read this carefully before IPO day arrives.

Dear Reader,

It's no longer theoretical. It's officially in motion.

OpenAI – the inventors of ChatGPT – just filed the confidential paperwork to go public.

And it could be the largest IPO in American history.

We all knew it was coming. But here's what almost everyone is about to get wrong.

They'll rush to buy OpenAI the moment it hits the market.

And if history is any guide, most of them will regret it.

In nearly every blockbuster tech IPO of the last 15 years, the people who bought on day one underperformed.

While a small group of other folks made as much as 3,900% on a little known investment connected to the IPO.

I call it the Pre-IPO Backdoor.

In my view, it's one of the best moneymaking opportunities out there.

It rarely comes around. You only see it when a huge tech company goes public.

And it's about to open again, thanks to the OpenAI IPO.

There's only one catch. You need to get in before OpenAI actually goes public.

And now the filing is official.

For the full story - and a free ticker you can invest in TODAY - click here.

Sincerely,

Luke Lango
Senior Technology Analyst, InvestorPlace

P.S. There's every chance the OpenAI IPO will be the biggest in American history. And that means the Pre-IPO Backdoor opportunities could be the biggest ever too. You may never see another opportunity like this in your lifetime. For your free ticker, click here now.

BREAKING NEWS

💰 Stripe Wants To Buy PayPal. Should You Buy It First?

Over the last 5 years, PayPal has been destroyed, crashing over 80%. But today, that all might start to change. Stripe, a payments company you may not know, teamed up with a big investment firm and offered to buy PayPal for more than $53 billion. PayPal stock instantly jumped 20%.

Here’s what makes this juicy. Stripe is basically PayPal's biggest rival. It is the company that quietly handles payments behind the scenes for thousands of websites. So this is like your rival showing up at your door with a dump truck full of cash and offering to buy your whole house.

This couldn’t be coming at a better time for PayPal. Back in 2021, this company was worth about $360 billion. Today it is worth just over $41 billion. Growth slowed, Apple Pay and Google Pay ate its lunch, and the stock got crushed. Now the once-mighty king of online payments might get bought.

Here's the breakdown:

• 💰 The price is a fat premium. The offer is $60.50 a share, about 28% more than PayPal's price on Tuesday. When a buyer offers that much extra, they really want it.

• 🤐 PayPal has not answered. The offer is "unsolicited," meaning Stripe made the bid without PayPal asking for it or agreeing to negotiate first. Now all eyes are on PayPal's next move.

• 🕵️ Watch the gap. The stock jumped toward $55 before the bell, still short of the $60.50 offer. If it stays below that once trading opens, it means traders are quietly betting the deal might not close.

The Munch Take: Here is the thing to keep in mind before shareholders get too excited. A takeover offer is not a done deal, it’s a proposal. PayPal has yet to respond, so nobody knows whether it will accept, reject, or negotiate. Two payment rivals joining forces could also draw a hard look from regulators, and deals like this can take a year or more to sort out. Maybe it closes at $60.50, maybe PayPal holds out for more, maybe the whole thing quietly dies in six months. Nobody knows yet, including the people telling you they do. Watch how PayPal responds and watch whether the stock climbs toward that offer price, because that gap is the market telling you how confident it really is. In this business, "offered" and "closed" are two very different words.

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THE MARKET REEL

📝 The Study That Changes How You Think About Investing

A professor at Arizona State just finished a wild study. He looked at every single stock in America over the last 100 years. That’s 29,754 companies from 1926 all the way to 2025. What he found should change how you think about picking stocks.

The market created a mind-blowing $91 trillion in wealth over that century. Sounds amazing, right? Here is the punchline: almost none of the companies did it. Just 46 companies made up half of that entire $91 trillion. Forty-six, out of nearly thirty thousand.

Even wilder, most stocks are actually losers. Line up every stock ever and pick the one right in the middle. It lost money, about 6.9% over its whole life. And roughly 6 out of every 10 companies made their investors poorer, not richer. So how did the market grow so much? A tiny group of superstars did all the heavy lifting while most stocks quietly sank.

Here's what the data shows:

• 🍎 The winners are the names you know. Apple alone created $5.02 trillion, Nvidia $4.58 trillion, Microsoft $4.03 trillion. Just seven companies made 24% of all the wealth in 100 years.

• 📉 It’s getting more lopsided. Back in 2018, it took 89 companies to make half the wealth. Today it takes only 46. The winners' circle is shrinking fast.

• 🎲 Your odds are rough. Only about 28% of stocks beat the overall market. So if you throw a dart at the stock page, you’ll probably miss.

The Munch Take: This is the most important chart nobody shows you. Everyone talks about "finding the next Apple," but the math says you are hunting for one needle in a haystack of thirty thousand. Even the pros stink at it: last year 79% of professional fund managers failed to beat the plain old S&P 500. This is not a reason to avoid stocks. It is the single best argument for owning a big basket of them, so the 46 winners are automatically in your pocket. You do not have to find the needle if you just buy the whole haystack.

🍪 Munchy Memes