Publications
Weekly market notes and longer-form research from CS Holding. We publish what we read, watch and conclude — on Italian SMEs, the global search-fund community, and the macro context that shapes our investment decisions.
Weekly Focus
Our weekly recap of the four conversations we are paying attention to: search-fund & ETA, Italian M&A in the lower middle market, AI for SMEs, and the AI frontier. Published every Friday.
Weekly Focus · August 28, 2026
The week the cost of money stopped being a hypothesis. At his first Jackson Hole as Fed Chair, Kevin Warsh said inflation is still too high and opened the door to hikes, with PCE at 3.7% over twelve months. In Italy two unrelated issuers priced at exactly 9% within four days, while Confapi found two SMEs in three struggling to reach bank credit. Toyota showed the one lever that does not depend on rates, running more than fifty agents in production and cutting machine diagnostics from five hours to three minutes. And the deal that closed in Milan used Italian senior debt and kept the founder in.
Read the noteWeekly Focus · August 21, 2026
The week the premium went to adjacency rather than to size. Madison Air paid 14.6x EBITDA for German family manufacturer ebm-papst, a multiple that falls to ten on synergies alone, because data-centre cooling changed the market it addresses. Stripe put more than USD 7 billion into OpenRouter, worth USD 1.3 billion in May, buying the layer between the models rather than a model. MPS fired a EUR 34 billion all-paper offer at Banco BPM and Banca Generali on 20 August, when nobody was watching. And two searchers who bought into the same franchise in the same year ended up worlds apart on one adjacent deal.
Read the noteWeekly Focus · August 14, 2026
The week capital found a new form of collateral. Nvidia signed six of the largest alternative asset managers to mobilise more than USD 500 billion for AI data centres with GPUs pledged as security, backstopping up to a quarter of residual value off its own balance sheet. Lovable doubled to USD 13.3 billion in seven months and turned custom internal software into an afternoon’s work. In Italy, Osservatorio PEM counted 318 deals year to date, up 36%, with add-ons at 55% of all buyouts. And a searcher paid three times earnings for a business that was worth two by closing.
Read the noteWeekly Focus · August 7, 2026
The week scale got punished and Italy showed up. AstraZeneca lost nine percent for merely exploring a USD 400 billion merger, its worst day since 2020. Underneath, the Italian tape refused to take August off: sixteen private equity transactions in the first week, Nextalia closing a EUR 1.1 billion fund in five months, and a search fund buying two Milan facility management businesses together after a twenty-three month hunt. Meanwhile the AI Act became enforceable, with penalties scaled down for smaller companies.
Read the noteWeekly Focus · July 31, 2026
The week the cost of capital turned openly hostile and buyers signed anyway. Three Federal Reserve members dissented in favour of raising, and the thirty-year Treasury hit its highest level since 2007. Conceria Pasubio printed EUR 400 million at a 9.5% fixed coupon — the real ceiling on what anyone can pay. Only 18.7% of Italian firms use AI regularly against two thirds of American small businesses. And Yale put a number on the searcher’s own career: below a thirty percent acquisition rate, a salaried job pays better.
Read the noteWeekly Focus · July 24, 2026
A thin week for deals and a loud one for the gap between promise and delivery. The same USD 110 billion merger was frozen in California and cleared in Brussels inside forty-eight hours. Ninety percent of enterprises say AI reshaped their workflows; eighteen percent can find it in revenue. Italian private equity guided itself down twenty-eight percent while sliding into the sub-thirty-million band. And searchers who underwrote twenty-five percent returns are landing at twelve, for reasons that surface only after signing.
Read the noteWeekly Focus · July 17, 2026
The week the numbers landed. Stanford closed its 2026 study at 4.75x aggregate return and 33.9% IRR across 850 search funds. Equinox took 65% of a Bergamo plastics recycler with around EUR 30 million of revenue and EBITDA above EUR 6 million — the founder keeping 35% and the industrial wheel. Caylent turned a 2,600-hour migration into 220. And beneath all of it, Hormuz traffic collapsed from roughly 130 vessels a day to six in two days, a reminder that the inputs we model can move faster than the models.
Read the noteWeekly Focus · July 10, 2026
Nobody won on price this week. EasyJet’s board folded to Castlelake at GBP 5 billion only at the fifth attempt; Alfagomma reached a EUR 1.2 billion sale to Danfoss only after a deadlock between two fifty-percent shareholders had forced it into liquidation. Advantage Solutions handed 70,000 hours a year back to frontline managers, cutting weekly forecast validation from ten hours to thirty minutes. And the searcher who actually closed had read 150 files to sign a single letter of intent. Value is made or destroyed in the structure, not the price.
Read the noteWeekly Focus · July 3, 2026
The AI frontier turned political this week: OpenAI rationed GPT-5.6 Sol to about 20 organizations after a US-government review, and Anthropic’s Fable 5 returned only after a 19-day export-control shutdown. Capital concentrated too — Praexidia sees ~800 Italian PE exits by 2030, two in three heading abroad, as Palladio’s PH Capital debuted with EUR 400M. Meanwhile Italy’s search funds reached 52 and Stanford’s 2026 study put aggregate returns at 4.75x, or 2.8x once you strip the outliers. The edge isn’t the model or the leverage, it’s the operating delta you install after you sign.
Read the noteWeekly Focus · June 26, 2026
Capital concentrated into businesses you can actually run: Bain took 51% of Everllence (ex-MAN Energy) from Volkswagen in a EUR 7.4B carve-out, and CVC bought Italy’s Irca from Advent after a EUR 370M-to-1.5B revenue build. POLIMI counted 37 active Italian search funds at a 94% search-success rate. Meanwhile OpenAI shipped GPT-5.6 Sol to just 20 government-approved companies — the first gated frontier rollout. The operator’s edge is now the operating delta you install, not the leverage or the model you wait for.
Read the noteWeekly Focus · June 19, 2026
Capital clustered at both ends in a single week. SpaceX bought Cursor (Anysphere) for $60B all-stock, the largest venture-backed deal ever, while at the base Cosulich’s Compagnia del Gusto added Cantine Romagnoli with six more deals in sight and Italy’s search funds reached 37, up 73% on 2024. In between, AI use in manufacturing quality jumped from 33% to 47% in a year. Leverage and liquidity are at all-time highs; the durable edge is the operational playbook you install after you sign.
Read the noteWeekly Focus · June 12, 2026
The Hormuz energy shock pushed the ECB to 2.25% and 2026 inflation to 3.0%. In the same days, Apple opened iOS to third-party models. In the deal market, Culti Milano left the exchange at roughly 9.7x EBITDA and France’s Renovatio search fund bought Odontys at 4.3x. For anyone buying SMEs, the arbitrage is shifting from cheap leverage to the operating delta you can install.
Read the noteWeekly Focus · June 5, 2026
Patient capital moved at the top of the stack — Berkshire put $6.8B on U.S. homebuilder Taylor Morrison in Greg Abel’s debut mega-deal. Hydra launched a take-private on Datalogic at EUR 5.82/share (+36%); Eterna Partners became the 10th Italian search fund since October 2024. And POLIMI’s 2026 data shows 39% of large Italian firms capture Gen AI productivity gains while 76% of SMEs sit out.
Read the noteWeekly Focus · May 29, 2026
Italy’s mid-market got denser at every layer of the cap stack in a single week. Etrus Capital closes EUR 500k of search-phase capital; Compagnia del Gusto buys Krumiri Rossi outright. AWS reports Italian SMEs at 38% AI adoption while POLIMI says 76% have no plan. And the ECB flags systemic risk as Brent reclaims $96.
Read the noteWeekly Focus · May 22, 2026
The week in numbers: SpaceX targets an $80 billion raise at a $1.7 trillion valuation. In the US, the SBA acquisition loan cap doubles from $5M to $10M. In Italy, WindeX closes OMEPS (~EUR 8M EBITDA) on bank debt plus mezzanine. And POLIMI’s observatory weighs in on AI adoption in Italian SMEs.
Read the noteNew issue every Friday. Older notes will be archived here as we accumulate the run.