Advertisement

Dividend Income ETFs Have Exploded ~100x In Seven Years. 

Ritholtz is Open for Business in the DMV

One of my favorite regions of the country is the DC - Maryland - Virginia area aka the DMV. I spent a lot of time there while in college at the University of Maryland and I fell in love with the people, the places and Old Bay seasoning on everything. So with that in mind, I am very excited to let you know that we have now opened up shop in Maryland with our first financial advisor hire in the area.

Ian Cully came to us the same way all of our top advisors have - first, as a fan of the message and the investing philosophy via our blogs and podcasts. Once he got a chance to spend some time with the team out at Future Proof, it became obvious that we were a great fit. Ian’s got an incredibly bright future ahead as our man in DC so to speak (Annapolis, but you know what I mean).

If you’d like to meet Ian and a whole roster of the Ritholtz all stars in person, we’re doing a live event in Washington D.C. on Tuesday, November 18th. My partner Barry Ritholtz will be on stage before a live audience taping a brand new episode of his Bloomberg Radio show and podcast, Masters In Business. You can get an invite to that or schedule an appointment to meet with us about your own portfolio and financial plan that week by going here. Some of our most talented Certified Financial Planners will be there to sit down with you.

If you’re an advisor reading this and you’re wondering why you aren’t representing Ritholtz in your own local area, I don’t know the answer to that question either. What on earth are you sitting around waiting for? Talk to us. If you make the cut, we will literally change your life.

Cramer on The Compound!

This week I had the chance to interview someone who has taught millions of investors around the world how the markets work and how to think about stocks. He’s someone who has been so inspiring to me I can’t even put it into words.

Jim Cramer basically invented the financial internet having founded TheStreet.com in the mid 1990’s. But the written word on a screen was never going to be enough to contain him, which meant a series of eight books would come along as well as a daily TV show (okay, two daily TV shows, but who’s counting?). Jim has spent the last twenty years interviewing the most important CEOs, from Tim Cook to Jensen Huang, Marc Benioff to George Kurtz, taking everyday investors behind the scenes of their stockholdings. It’s been an incredible run and we wanted to celebrate it with him.

A week ago Friday we hosted 120 of our biggest fans for a live recording of The Compound and Friends starring Jim Cramer. The video and audio went up on Monday night and the feedback has been amazing. Jim stuck around and signed a hundred books while posing for photos with every single person who came out that night. It was so cool to watch how generous and genuinely interested he was to meet the fans. He’s a true icon and a man of the people. If you haven’t seen the episode yet, it’s right here or listen on the podcast app of your choice:

Tech Earnings Week

One thing was clear by the end of this week - the AI Capex Boom is not only not decelerating, it’s actually ramping up into 2026. This kept stocks hovering near all-time highs. With the exception of Meta, all the hyperscalers rallied hard after reporting. Alphabet was the standout report and even Amazon finally showed us why it’s still the biggest cloud provider in the land. Apple said the coming quarter would be the biggest in its history and left no doubt that the new iPhone 17 is a smash hit. Apple’s market cap hit $4 trillion this week while Nvidia’s hit $5 trillion. We live in epic times. The semiconductor stocks reacted to everyone’s increased capex guidance by adding $1 trillion in new market cap over a period of five days! We’ve never seen anything like this.

One of the things you hear people casually say about the size of the technology giants that dominate the S&P 500 these days is that their market caps, in the trillions, represent a big concentration problem relative to the rest of the stock market. The thing is, this concentration makes a lot more sense when you consider their revenues. Why wouldn’t they dwarf the rest of the public companies in their index representation when they’re putting up the numbers they are?

Chart Kid Matt made this to illustrate the enormity of the top line growth these firms are still putting up. The blue bars represent the quarterly revenue announced this week at Meta, Microsoft and Alphabet. The gray bars are the revenues they each did one year ago in the same quarter. In hindsight, we now know that investors were acting rationally when taking up the valuations of these stocks over the last year.

Last thing on this - we’re not just talking about sales growth. We’re talking about profitable sales growth. Incredibly profitable sales growth for the most part. Microsoft’s operating income was up 24% year over year to $38 billion on $77 billion in revenue. This is, to put it mildly, an extraordinary business, the likes of which no investor in the history of the stock market has ever seen. I’d relay the numbers on Apple, Alphabet, Nvidia, Meta, etc but it would be redundant. Superlative market caps have been built on stupendous business success. It’s not an accident that these names sit head and shoulders above the market caps of the rest of the S&P index.

Stephanie Roth on Set for TCAF

Stephanie Roth of Wolfe Research joined us on the podcast to discuss the AI bull market as well as break down what the Federal Reserve actually said after cutting rates for a second time this past Wednesday.

Watch and listen below!

That’s it from me, have an amazing weekend.

Oh wait, one more thing -

My research associates Sean Russo and Chart Kid Matt came through with an epic Halloween costume this week. Sean as Downtown Josh Brown and Matt as Michael Batnick 🙂 Matt even nailed the point.

My chief compliance officer Patricia gave us all a jump-scare walking in with an FBI costume. Producer Nicole slayed as Beanie Baby Giraffe. Happy Halloween, guys. Talk soon - Josh