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Becker Business
15 Stories We Are Following This Week 9-15-25
00:05:33
In this episode, Scott Becker reviews 15 key business and market stories, including year-to-date stock performance, AI-driven market gains, challenges for private equity and venture capital funds, and more.
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This is Scott Becker with the Becker Business Podcast and the Becker Private Equity podcast. These are 15 of the stories that were following this week and today, and thank you for listening. First, the markets point slowly up today and are up substantially year to date. When you are a conservative investor, there's sort of this love hate relationship and a bit of FOMO when the markets keep rising and you're a relatively cautious investor thrilled to see the markets going up. Second, the S&P 500 is now up 12% or so year to date. The NASDAQ is up 14.34% year to date. Commentators are starting to say that some of the market gains from Fed rate cuts are already fully built into the S and P and Nasdaq, so there might not be that much more room to run, but we'll see. Also, OpenAI board chair Brett Taylor says that we're in a bit of an AI bubble, which is some concern of course, for where we're at on the market as a whole, because so much of the big wins are driven by AI and the big tech companies. Third, the five biggest market cap companies. You know, and again, like we like we say in figure in the roof. I wish I were a rich man or I wish I had Nvidia. But here are the biggest five market cap companies. Nvidia is up 32% year to date. Microsoft's up 21% year to date, Apple's down 6.5% year to date. Google is up 26.75% year to date and Amazon's up 4% year to date. And again, these are numbers before today's market closes. Nvidia, Microsoft and Google are all winning. China is after Nvidia on the antitrust front. Currently that's one of the pieces of news today. Fourth, the five largest companies by revenue are as follows. And again, Walmart and Berkshire keep on improving. United is having a tough year. Walmart's up 14 and a half percent year to date, Amazon's up 4% year to date. UnitedHealth Group down 30% year to date, Berkshire Hathaway 9% year to date and Apple down six and a half percent year to date. Those are the five largest companies by revenues. Fifth, four of the best performing stocks last week. These are Open door technologies up 37%. Warner Brothers discovery up 55%. Macy's up 30%. You know, still a hard store to love. Macy's and SanDisk up 24.61%. Sixth, the five largest PE fund firms and PE funds are having a very, very rough time manufacturing the exit they want, but at the same time doing fine. Rate cuts should help the PE business. Like the first of the big five. Blackstone's up 5% year to date. Apollo is down 16.43%. KKR is down 3%. The Carlyle Group which is outperforming everybody is up 32%. And TPG is down 2.27 year to date. Again Carlisle outperforming everybody. Seventh, the five largest VC funds, the Venture capital funds. Again my experience is getting to invest in these as an individual investor is a little bit harder than getting into Harvard Law School or top medical school, but it is what it is. This the big five Here are Tiger Global Management, Sequoia Capital, it's recent Horowitz, New Enterprise associates and lightspeed. Eighth, a quick stat, 90% of startups fail within five years. The most common reasons cited are cash flow, market product fit and operational challenges. Third, worse than failing before five years and a lot of us have been there is staying in business a lot longer than that through self fund funding. I've made that error before. Some friends have made those better before. That's a different part of this. Tenth, there's about 5, 6 million businesses started of the year in the United States. So that that's a generally a rough number. 11th over the last year and this is interesting when you look at S P vs VC vs PE. The S&P 500 over the last year or so has outperformed VC and PE over the mid and long term. And longer term VC and PE generally outperform the S&P 500. And over the much longer term they start to over perform by bigger numbers with VC having the biggest returns but the most risk. But this adds too much in question and we'll see if it continues. Twelfth, there's a wide range of outcomes for different PE and VC funds. All PE and VC funds are not created equal. There's a big big dispersion out there amongst them. 13th, the federal deficit is expected for this year to come in right between 1.9 to $2 trillion. No improvement from prior years. We'll see if that gets any better. 14th, the unemployment rate stands at approximately 4.3% and is poised to go up, just like my handicap index in Guelph is going up finally. 15th, the family Amex is on pace for a rational month. Slightly better control over spending than the US but not as good a control as we'd like to see. Thank you for listening to the Becker Business Podcast and the Becker Private Equity Podcast. Thank you very, very much.