Welcome to Seeking Alpha's Wall Street Lunch, our afternoon update on today's market action, news, and analysis.

Good afternoon. Today is Monday, March 16th, and I'm your host, Kim Khan. Our top story so far,

wealthy investors sought to pull more than $10 billion from some of the largest private credit funds in the first quarter,

forcing managers to limit redemptions and threatening one of all streets' fastest growing businesses.

The FT reports that funds run by Blackstone, Black Rock, Cliffwater, Morgan Stanley, and Monroe Capital

agreed to honor roughly 70% of the $10.1 billion in redemption requests received so far. More withdrawals are expected

in the coming weeks as Ares, Apollo, Blue Owl, Oak Tree, and Goldman Sachs tally their figures. Retail

credit funds balloon from $34 billion at the end of 2021 to $22 billion by the end of last year,

according to Goldman Sachs. That growth is now reversed, and Goldman expects the sector could shrink by $45 to $70 billion over the next two years. Morningstar analyst Jack Shannon put it bluntly, they will chase performance, they will leave the moment they sense danger. C.T. Fitzpatrick, of Vulcan-valued-valued partners, told the F.T., the air has come out of the balloon. From flood of inflows to gates on

the exits, private credit is hearing an echo it hasn't heard before. Among active stocks,

dollar tree as choppy, after better than expected quarterly results were offset by cautious

guidance, the discount retailer sees adjusted EPS of 145 to 160 on revenue of $4.9 to $5 billion. The midpoints, 152 and $4.95 billion, came in slightly below

consensus estimates of $156 and $4.97 billion. Comparable sales are expected to rise 3 to 4%.

Alibaba is preparing to launch an enterprise-focused at Gen Take AI service as soon as this week.

Bloomberg reports the tool will help companies deploy task-performing assistance as interest

in AI agents accelerates across China. And Nebius is surging after meta-platforms committed to

spend up to $27 billion over five years for access to advanced AI infrastructure.

Under the agreement, Nebius will provide $12 billion

of dedicated capacity across multiple locations, powered by one of the first large-scale

deployments of NVIDIA's Vera Rubin platform. In other news of note, a record 331 S&P 500 companies

cited AI on earnings calls between December 15th and March 11th, according to FACCET.

That's 68% of all calls during the period.

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