Disney's Social Initiatives are BACKFIRING...

Disney peak to bottom is down 56%. $209 billion they've lost in market cap. Boom, people. Welcome back to the show. Today, I want to talk about something that is moving in the world right now that I think is a major threat to society. Frankly, when we started Fund Launch, I was like, yeah, it's cool to launch funds. And now it's kind of gone from I want or it's cool to launch a fund to we need to launch more funds. We actually need more people like me and you that can figure out this game and decentralize and decouple Wall Street. Let me throw a few facts at you right now. So Vanguard, State Street, and BlackRock, they control pretty much the entire earth. And let me— you might say, Bridger, that's a little hyperbole. But let me actually walk you through. So right here, this is actually from the New York Times. BlackRock manages nearly $10 trillion. Vanguard has $8 trillion. State Street has $4 trillion. Their combined $22 trillion in managed assets is the equivalent of more than half of the combined value of all shares for all companies in the S&P 500, about $38 trillion. They are more than half of the S&P 500 of assets controlled. Now Vanguard, BlackRock, State Street, how those work, they launch ETFs and a lot of your and my 401s or whatever buy into their shares. And what happens is they then go buy as a SPDR fund, they go buy positions in all these big Fortune 500 companies. But what happens is they hold such a big position that companies like Disney, Companies like Bud Light, companies like Target that are told from their board or largest shareholders, we are trying to push an ESG initiative. Now, before I dive into this, it could be whatever initiative. That's the scary part. It doesn't matter. Right now, you may agree with the initiative. You also might disagree and it could flip-flop in a year or 2. And so, for example, I mean, Bud Light, they pushed Dylan Mulvaney and they have not apologized since. The CEO said, we've pushed this. Our customers have hated it. It's killed our sales, but our largest shareholders were telling us to push this because they need to fill whatever their initiative is they have. Target has pretty much done the same thing, has not apologized, which is kind of crazy. So April till, let's call it yesterday, Dow Jones up 8.9%. Okay? So the market in general is up 8.5%, which is pretty good, you know, for just a few months. Bud Light during that same time period, down 12.3%. Okay? Target down 15%. 13.9%. And then I'll throw in Disney there as well. Disney down 8.1% during only a few months, which is pretty significant spread. So that's a miss of, for Bud Light, of about 22%. If they stayed on par with the Dow Jones, it's about a 22% spread from the Dow to them. Target, that's a 25.5%, 26% spread. Now you might say, well, that's whatever, it'll bounce back. But look at this trend. Now, if you back up a little bit from peak to low, Disney, which has been pushing, I think, political agendas into their movies. I have a kid and we, we've actually stopped seeing a lot of Disney movies. Why? Because I don't want to take my kid to a Disney movie that has a political agenda. I don't care if it's pro-guns. I don't care if it's anti-guns. I don't care if it's pro-LGBTQ or anti or pro-abortion, anti-abortion. I don't even care what the agenda is. And by the way, it could— whatever your political party is, just imagine the opposite being put into a kids movie. Okay? Regardless, I don't even care if I'm pro that political agenda. I don't want it in my kids movies. I don't want my kids. I just want to go to a kids movie and just have fun and just watch cartoons do crazy funny things. That's why you go to a kids movie. Okay? Why are we slipping in all these little things about whatever a political agenda people are pushing? What's cool is we are seeing this rise of the consumer, of retail investors. From peak to bottom, Disney, Disney, the conglomerate that owns like the entire world. Disney peak to bottom is down 56%. $209 billion they've lost in market cap. Today, they're worth about, I think it's $130 billion. $135, $150 billion, somewhere in that range. $209 billion loss. Target peak to bottom has lost 65%. They're more than half as big. Lost $120 billion in market cap. Our largest shareholders are telling us to do this. If we don't push a certain agenda, our largest shareholders are going to sell 13% or 15% or 12% of our stock overnight. They're just going to sell and it'll tank our stock. And so we're stuck between a rock and a hard place where we are pissing off our customers. But also if we don't do this, we're going to immediately lose our larger shareholders and maybe customers we can always win back, but this larger shareholder we won't. And anyways, these at least CEOs have decided to err in the favor of the larger shareholder, which is either BlackRock, Vanguard, or State Street that wants to push a certain agenda in their brand or company or line. Now what's cool though is this rise of what I call the retail investor. And Wall Street's been talking about this a lot. So COVID really put this out. During COVID if you guys remember the GameStop or the AMC whole trend, if you guys, if you didn't follow that, go, there's a great documentary on Netflix that actually documents the whole GameStop thing. Citadel Securities had taken out a naked short on the market. I think, uh, it was like 1.5 times all the shares, which is an illegal— in my— well, in the SEC's terms, it's illegal naked short, but they never prosecuted. I don't know. They were shorting synthetic shares, shares that were just made up. That's how big of a short position they were on. The retail investors figured this out and said, let's do a short squeeze on Citadel. If we pump this stock up, they'll eventually have to cover their short and it will explode this market cap. So for about 6 to 8 months. These retail investors, that's why there was so much hype around AMC. If we plow and push this stock up, Citadel will need, they need to, a thing called covering your short. They'll need to cover their short, which is you have to buy back shares typically at a lower, you're hoping the stock goes down. So you're buying back shares at a lower price. You have to cover your short because you have to repay back those borrowed shares to take your short out. And so if you prop the stock up, what you do is it's called a short squeeze. It forces, so Citadel, for example, I don't know how, let's just use round numbers. I don't know how big their short position was, but let's just say, I don't know, a multi-billion-dollar short. They are paying every month premiums to hold that short open. So they're paying, I don't know, $10 million a month or $30 million or $100 million a month just to keep the option for to pay the rental fee to borrow those shares. But then what happened, just to wrap that story up, this huge short squeeze, AMC is buying order flow from Robinhood and is one of Robinhood's main investors. And so what happens is Robinhood one day Says, no more buying on AMC and GameStop. They stopped all buying though. You couldn't buy the stock. You could only sell. They literally disabled the button. And so what it did, it like artificially forced the stock to sell. And then over time, it came back down. And anyways, I don't know. We don't know exactly when Citadel exited their position, but they had a really good year last year. So it looks like Citadel ended up winning. The rise of retail investors though, let me pull up this chart. In 2010, about 10% of U.S. equity trading volume was retail investors, about 10%. During COVID So it got up 2014, it was about 14%. 2019, it was still around 14%. 2020, COVID hits, it jumped to 20%. Then it jumped even 2021, it jumped up to 24%, which is pretty significant. Now since then, it's come back down. It's floating right around 20%, which is massive though. All of a sudden, Wall Street is waking up to, wow, we have to appease. We have retail investors buying and selling shares, a decent amount of equities. And so we now need to cater to them. Now we can take that a step further is when we help people launch funds. It has the ability of people like me and you. The only way that we're going to be able to beat these Wall Street conglomerates that are gobbling up every single industry instead of having 3 mega funds, if we had 10,000 funds that were ran by me and you, all of a sudden you're back to a competitive market. We can bid against each other and we— it's not a monopoly. What I don't like is a monopoly, which is anti-capitalism, anti-America, in my opinion, to have monopolies. That can control from the state sector, and right now it's very sneaky way they've done this. It's kind of indirect control of what they've done through all these businesses. It's hard to say well, you know, it is a monopoly, but it's not a monopoly. They have big shareholder. They have a big you know big weight and pull on these companies because it's not, but it is. I think the way we need to beat it is by us decentralizing the capital that's all in these three big companies: Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street that are only getting bigger and bigger. Analyst published in Boston University Law Review estimated that the big three, so Vanguard, State Street, and BlackRock could control as much as 40% of shareholders. Votes in the S&P 500 within 2 decades. 40% of shareholder votes in the S&P 500 in the next few decades. That's pretty interesting. Now, you might say, well, that's just equities. It doesn't matter. Maybe I'm in real estate. No, it does matter because guess what? 1 in 7 homes last year were purchased by Wall Street. 1 in 7. Right here, this is from CNBC. Institutional investors may control 40% of U.S. single-family rental homes by 2030. 40%. That's pretty wild. By 2030, you will own nothing and you will be happy. That's pretty wild. You know, you will own nothing and you will be happy. They want to control all assets and you'll just rent and you'll be happy about it apparently. I don't know how happy I'll be about that, but this is happening in every single industry right now. It's already happened in the auto industry. It's already happened in food production. It's already happening in the accounting industry. There's the Big 4 accounting firms. There's the Big 5 TV networks. There's the Big 2 chicken manufacturers because they've gone out and bought everything else. Now, the whole reason for this conversation is we need more people like me and you to learn and launch funds. If we don't do this, the contrary, if we don't move on this in a decade or two, the whole world I think is going to be rolled up and consolidated into a couple of major companies, which is pretty scary. Now, right now, if you guys want to learn about funds, again, go to fundlaunch.com. We have a full free course on funds. Our whole goal is to help more people do this. So go to fundlaunch.com. You guys go check it out. Small plug for Fund Launch. It's amazing. And again, our goal is to help we the people, not just Bridger, Lincoln, like we, us, you need to learn this game. If you don't learn this game, your kids, your grandkids, may not have a chance in a competitive market, in my opinion. You guys are amazing. I'll see you in the next episode. Peace. Peace.