John Stepek

It's been a problem.

And so the market has turned into, over the last couple of decades, something from which investors extract money from companies being bought out by private equity.

You take your cash and you run from dividend payments, from buybacks, huge rise in buybacks across all markets, particularly in the U.S., right?

And you can argue, and lots of people do, and it's hard to quantify, but that shrinkage of supply has been one of the drivers behind the bull market for the last many years, right?

You take out supply, demand stays the same or goes up and up and up with auto-enrollment and 401ks.

What do you expect?

You expect a bull market.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, it's entirely logical.

It's just that nobody thinks about it because it's so abstract.

Yeah.

But actually, you know, it's like if suddenly there were like half the number of apples at your supermarket, the price would go up.

Yeah, apples would be more expensive.

Yeah, and it's not because the apples are any better, there's just fewer of them.

Okay, and so...

Look at what's happening now.

We talked about this last week a bit, but we've got these huge IPOs.

SpaceX, I'll find out very soon how many shares I have been allocated in SpaceX.

SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, and these are huge.

We're into hundreds of billions with these guys.