Three Companies Are Taking Over The World | Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street

Boom, people, welcome back. In this video, I want to talk about why this is so important right now. Now, yes, as you go through this program, we're going to dive through the Funnel Launch Formula and all the cool stuff that involves building your funnel, launching your funnel, that hopefully will change your life, your kids' lives, the people around you's lives, and the community. But also, I think what we're doing can actually go impact the world at a massive level. I'll tell you exactly why. So if you look down at my screen here, why is it so important right now. As you may know, there are 3 companies that are currently taking over the world: Vanguard, State Street, and BlackRock. Combined, they manage over $22 trillion. These are larger than most countries, these firms. It's estimated by Boston University said here, by 2030, they would have over 40% of shareholder vote on the S&P 500. If you actually look on this next slide, the largest shareholders of all these companies, I'll zoom in for you, You can see like Apple here, the largest shareholder is Vanguard. Second is BlackRock. You can go down the list of Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, Tesla. I mean, look at the 2 largest shareholders are Vanguard and BlackRock, and State Street is a third. What this allows them to do is push certain agendas and things on companies and CEOs. If you ever wonder, like a couple years ago, ESG became very popular, and all of a sudden like everybody became— it was on ESG. And I was like, how did they do that? How did they get like all the Fortune 500 companies all at once to agree that ESG was important? That's a pretty big feat. You go, oh, well, Vanguard and BlackRock were pushing ESG very hard, and they're the largest shareholders in pretty much every Fortune 500 company. And so when your largest shareholder calls you up and says, hey, Bridger, you need to push an ESG agenda into your businesses, your companies, etc., you're probably going to push that agenda or else BlackRock, your largest or second largest shareholder, is going to sell their position which you don't want. That's your— I mean that would tank your stock. So what happens is all these companies started being on ESG. Now just recently, BlackRock and Larry Fink have come out and said ESG actually wasn't that good of an idea because of the S, the social things. It's hard to determine what's correct for a society. Usually half of the people don't agree with you and so it ends up being very political and they've actually come back for this, but I think it's interesting just how much power only a few individuals have. Additionally, I'll go on. So if some of you guys are like, oh, this is for the stock market, it doesn't affect me, I'm doing real estate or I'm doing whatever. Yes, it does affect you. So right here, residential real estate is being rolled together. In 2021, 1 in 7 homes were purchased by big Wall Street firms. 1 in 7. 2022, it was 1 in 5. We're waiting. There's some data that's not out yet. But for 2023, we think it's around 25% to 35% of single-family homes. Let's call it a third purchased by Wall Street being rolled together by these super big firms that are buying up everything. I'll continue on. These are industries that have already been consolidated or consolidating right now. TV and news networks, food and food production, accounting firms. If you never like, you know why there's like 3 or 4 big accounting firms? Because they bought everybody else up. They rolled that together. Ones that are starting to consolidate right now, car washes. People are buying up car wash businesses. Amazon stores. Dentists. They're starting to become— it's fractured right now, but these big groups are coming and buying up dental practices and pooling them together. Food franchises. Chiropractic. Real estate. Social media accounts. I'm not sure if you're aware, there's big groups that are buying social media accounts right now. They still leave the accounts as is, but they own the backend of the accounts. For example, I don't know if you guys know Blackstone owns Cocomelon. Like Cocomelon is one of the largest kids shows on earth right now. Did you guys know it's controlled by Blackstone? A lot of people don't realize the end buyers of these things. Another one, I'll go through this quick, but media. This is media giants right here. You have Comcast, News Corp, Sony. I mean, look at all the brands they own underneath these giant, huge news conglomerates. These are the big 6. Actually, 2 of these merged. Disney and 21st Century Fox actually came together a couple years ago to be big 5. Sometimes you think that you're, you know, I don't like ESPN, I'm gonna go watch somewhere else. They're usually owned by the same people that control pretty much everything we see. These are food brands that are all owned by these. You think you're shopping at a lot of different things, you're really shopping from really just a couple different brands that are rolled together. This is for car companies. I'll zoom in on this, but this is a lot of, 14 car companies own pretty much every brand on earth. If you zoom to the top here, FCA owns Chrysler, Jeep, Dodge, Ram. They own Fiat, Maserati, Alfa Romeo, and Lancia. Chrysler is the same company that makes Maserati and Alfa Romeo. A lot of people don't realize this. Down below, like Volkswagen, they own Audi, Seat, Bugatti, Bentley, Porsche, Volkswagen, Lamborghini. So like, if you're like, I don't, you know, I don't like my Porsche, I'm gonna go buy an Audi, or I'm gonna buy a Bentley, like you're buying from the same company. They're actually all controlled by just a handful of people. A lot of us, people like us, don't realize this consolidation that's happening. That's why we call ourselves like the Wall Street Rebels. I believe the Wall Street Rebels is such an important thing that we are doing. The fact that you're here watching this, consuming this content around funds, is massive. For the world at large. Now, our goal is to help you go out and launch a fund, scale it, and even if you don't launch a fund, worst-case scenario, you don't launch a fund, at least you'll know how funds are run and how they work, and maybe your business one day is gonna be bought by a fund, and you'll understand the bigger game at play. This is why it's not just important for me and you to understand this, it is important for your cousin and for your sister-in-law and whoever else to understand the game at large right now. We have seen the last decade what we call the rise of the retail investors. This chart kind of shows it here. March of 2010, we had about 10% of retail investors for— this is the share of U.S. equities trading volume. In COVID, that peaked around 24% of all equities trading was just retail people like me and you. Isn't that kind of cool? Wall Street hedge funds started to talk about and trade. They're like, man, these retail traders, are really pushing and moving markets. And we gotta actually pay attention to them. They're actually a big factor and they were moving and shifting different markets. A great example is Disney and Target. This is a time window here. This is July to September of 2023. You saw massive, massive sell-downs on these 2 brands because of retail investors, people like me and you. Disney and Target both had political things that they had put in. Disney had a bunch of stuff they were putting in their movies. Bunch of political agendas and I have a kid. I don't know about you guys but I just don't want politics in my kids' movies. I don't care if you're right or left or pro-Trump or pro-Biden or pro whoever the person is, pro-guns, anti-guns. I just don't want it in my kids' movies. I just want to go to a kids' movie and just have fun and enjoy that and Disney recently has put in a lot of political items into their movies and what has happened and not just movies but their theme parks and everything else, the consumer has come out and said, we don't like this. They have lost $209 billion in market share. That's a 56% drop in their market cap. During that same period, you see the top there, the Dow was only pretty much flat, down 0.9%. So it's not like the market fell, it's that they fell 56%. Target during this time period had put out, I think it was like satanic clothing in their clothing lines and other stuff. Promoting Satan and a bunch of moms and other people said, we don't like Target. Target lost $120 billion in market cap, 65%, okay? This is the rise of the Wall Street rebels and again, I'm gonna say this again, I don't care your political agenda. I just don't, I think what's cool is us the people can actually rise up and if we have a strong voice, if we understand funds, this game, we can actually move and push markets. Which is kinda cool. Instead of just having 3 big firms at the top dictate to us, the peasants, what they want, okay? That's why I believe we need more people to launch funds. We need more people like me and you to democratize Wall Street. 'Cause, you know, yes, we can protest or we can write letters to our congresspeople, which is all fine, but in my opinion, it's been a little lackluster the last few years. There hasn't been that much, you know, protests and writing. There's just a protest every single day. However, if we use the power of a fund, if we beat them at their own game, we can democratize Wall Street. And I'm okay with funds. I like funds. I actually love funds. I promote funds. I run 2 funds. I just don't like 3 funds running the whole world. I'm okay with 10,000 differently independently ran funds that have a competitive market because I believe in capitalism, that competition drives the best product for consumers and drives prices down and makes an efficient economy. I'm all for that. I'm just not for 3 companies running the whole world. So hopefully, you understand what I'm getting to and that's why I believe what you're doing right now watching this program, this course, all this stuff is crucial and not just crucial for you but you need to also teach your kids, your grandparents, whoever. You need to teach and share what is actually going on, what's happening behind the scenes in high finance, how are they incentivized, how do they run and actually how can we build things that can disrupt or decentralize and decouple with Wall Street. This is massive. That's why I call ourselves the Wall Street Rebel. So kudos to you for showing up here, spending time, getting a pen and paper out. This is very important what we're talking about. So buckle up, come to the events, be with us, be in the community groups talking and sharing with people. It's massive because what we're building is huge for the retail investors, for people like me and you to go out and take back what we've given up. So with that, we'll head on to the next videos. You guys are awesome. We'll see you in there. Thank you.