The Case for Equal Weight S&P 500 ETFs
episodePreviously titled “Why Billionaires Are Investing in Pro Sports + The Case for Equal Weight ETFs” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 3, 2026
Transcript
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Investing is simple, but don't confuse that with thinking it's easy. A stock is not just a ticker. At the end of the day, you have to remember that it's a business.
Just my reminder to people who own cyclicals, don't be surprised when there's a cycle.
If there's uncertainty in the markets, there's going to be some great opportunities for investors.
This has to be one of the biggest quarters I've seen from this company in quite some time.
Welcome back to the Canadian Investor Podcast. I'm Simon Belanger. I'm back with Dan Kent. We have a fun episode here. So first, we'll be going over sports teams and whether these are good investments or not. And obviously, this is on the heels of Rogers Communication announcing that they would be buying the remaining stake of maple leaf sports and entertainment so mls mlsc that it did not own from kilmer sports which is owned by larry tannenbaum and then you'll be going over the equal weight s&p 500 and whether it's a viable strategy or not and i think you'll be comparing that to the s&p 500 the the regular index
Yeah, I have a bunch of kind of data and just commentary on this because it is one of the more popular strategies this year. The equal weight funds are seeing a ton of inflows and it's kind of a, I guess you could say like a defensive hedge against the concentration. So a lot of people have started to ask me like, is this a viable strategy or not? So I did some digging on historical returns. I'll go over kind of why you would do this, why you wouldn't do this, things like that. But yeah, it should be a pretty good episode.
Yeah, so let's get started here. And I do have some charts that I worked on that should be fun for the sports team valuation. So I decided to look at the four major leagues in North America. And like I mentioned with the purchase from Rogers, purchasing the remaining stakes in MLLC, they'll actually own quite a few of the teams in Toronto, almost all of them, not quite all of them. Yeah, they don't own the women's team. Those are still owned by Kilmer Sports and were not part of the MLSC. But what's really interesting is, like I mentioned on the Thursday news and earnings episode, the deal represent a 39% increase in valuation. In less than two years since Rogers agreed to buy BCE's stake in MLSC, during the same time frame, the S&P 500 had total returns of 36%.
So it actually outperformed the S&P 500 a little bit. And with the purchase, Rogers will own the Blue Jays, the Maple Leafs, the Raptors. Toronto FC, the Argonauts, and the Toronto Marlies, along with a few other lesser-known sports franchises. I think they own like an eSport one, if I remember correctly. And what's crazy is when you start looking here at Rodgers, is that they have a market cap of 26 billion and an enterprise value of 76 billion so that gap between the two is just essentially liabilities that rogers has and we've talked about it before evie would be if you bought the company so you kind of you take the market cap and you just add in the debt so if you bought the company you'd have to essentially take on the debt so you'd pay 76 billion
And what's really interesting is that the purchase price of MLSC implies a valuation of around $17 billion Canadian dollars. And the Blue Jays are valued at around $3.54 billion Canadian dollars because they weren't part of MLSC. So you're getting close to like... 21 billion roughly in sports franchises when the company has a market cap of 26 billion. Granted, you know, there's all the debt that goes with it. And obviously there is a communication business with that. But I just thought it was interesting to bring that context because now more and more, if you're buying Rogers, it's kind of an outlier in terms of telecoms in Canada where you get this massive sport. Sport franchise asset.
Yeah, kind of like a well, I guess you wouldn't call it a media situation, but I guess it does because there's a lot of brand power.
There's a lot of yeah.
And I remember if you dig way back into the podcast vault when BC sold this to Rogers.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:01–4:50
2
What was Rogers’ deal to buy the rest of Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment and why does it matter?
4:50–16:10
3
How much of Rogers’ market value is tied to its sports assets like the Maple Leafs and Blue Jays?
16:10–37:32
4
How have NHL franchise valuations changed since 2012 and which Canadian teams grew the most?
37:32–48:52
Speakers
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