Transcript
A (0:00)
AI is incredible. It can teach you how to fry an egg and even write a poem pirate style, but it knows nothing about your work. Slackbot is different. It doesn't just know the facts. It knows your schedule. It can turn a brainstorm into a brief. And it doesn't need to be taught, because Slackbot isn't just another AI It's AI that knows your work as well as you do. Visit slack.com meetslackbot to learn more.
B (0:31)
Banks. They're the lifeblood of the economy, and each has a unique story to tell. We tear through this week's earnings from the Big six and try to keep your attention while doing it. K Pop Demon Hunters it ends with us. The Legend of Zelda Sony is going global with its hit movies. We explain how, and it turns out a century of market gains are due to very few stocks. We look at the stunning results of a study and what it might mean for modern investing. For Thursday, January 15, it's Brew Market Markets Daily, and I'm Ann Berry. More market details to come. But first we have a dense, packed show today, a big earnings roundup, a big acquisition. The markets are absorbing a ton of information right now and we do a lot of our own research, as you know, that you won't find anywhere else. So everyone, and particularly us, we're drinking from a fire hose, taking it all in. Well, in the thick of all this, we thought we start with a light palate cleanser to kick us off and put into longer perspective the daily rollercoaster that is the markets. The Wall Street Journal's Spencer Jacob just published a fascinating article citing Hendrik Bessembinder, a professor at Arizona State University who studied returns to every U.S. common stock traded on the New York and American stock exchanges and the NASDAQ from 1926 to through to 2023. What the professor found is somewhat astonishing. He found that just 86 out of thousands and thousands of these stocks have accounted for a whopping half of the stock market's gains in that time, and that all of its gains came from just the top 1,000 stocks. Now, bear in mind this data also comes in just before huge concentration in gains we've seen in tech in the past two years, giving birth to the reference that is the Mag 7. Now here's the nugget that really caught our eye. It wasn't great news, but it caught our eye. 96% of all the US public stocks in this history collectively returned the equivalent of one month treasury bill yields. I mean, there's nothing to say to that other than, ugh, when we think about all the work that goes into stock picking, all the energy that goes into following the roller coaster, a long period of time, that's what it boils into. But there are even more interesting nuggets in this Journal article. So as it goes on, it basically says here's to looking at Mark Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Jensen Huang, Michael Dell, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, because people are looking there for the hope of a different outcome. Now we've talked a lot on the show about IPOs in which founders and executives keep control of their companies even with public shareholders as the predominant owners. StubHub was a 2025 example in which post the IPO Eric Baker retained 90% voting control. And in the upcoming IPO IPO of equipment share, that's the construction equipment rental business, the founding Schlax brothers will hold Class B stock which will give them roughly 81% of the total voting power after the offering. Well, this is a somewhat controversial practice because you see a cases where founder voting power is outsized compared to their economic interest once they've taken money off the table through a public offering. Which raises questions of conflicts of interest and just fairness if other shareholders like you and me are taking disproportionate economic risks. Well, Jack Ablin, strategist at the money Manager Crescent has identified that founder led companies have beat the S P500 by 167 percentage points over the past five years. Now there's a big skew towards tech in there. Again cue the conversation around Mag7. But Berkshire Hathaway, Blackrock and Blackstone or the Bees are examples of long term founder led financials. So tech very much predominant. But again these are examples of financial services businesses with a similar profile. Now this isn't a universal strategy to go. We're not racing out to put our money to work behind founder run companies only because timing really does matter. Salesforce, for example, run by Mark Benioff, its co founder stock down 26% for the past year. But it is something to think about as we all work away trying to pick the winners. So one we thought that we would flag. I'll post a link to it on my X and Insta accounts later on today. Well, coming up, bank stocks largely soared in 2025. We're going to take a look at their recent earnings and break down what worked each of the big six. But first a word from our sponsor public. John, how serious are you about investing?