🎙️ Rich Get Richer

📈 Folks, for the first time since 1964, the S&P 500 has now risen 17 of the past 19 weeks, and it’s not just mega-cap tech leading the way.

Breadth expansion — more stocks participating in the move higher — has come from all over. Every sector is now about its 50-day moving average. Meanwhile, Nvidia is getting close to surpassing Apple as the world’s second-most valuable company.

All of this comes 15 years to the week (March 9, 2009) since the stock market bottomed following the great financial crisis. Since then, the S&P 5oo has risen over 10x, a 16.7% annualized return. Heck, even if you had entered the market in October 2007, before the crisis, you’d still be up 357% — 9.7% annualized.

— Matthew & Shawn

Here’s today’s rundown:

Today, we'll discuss the biggest stories in markets:

• Family office boom creates new Wall Street gold rush

• Why more women are working globally

This, and more, in just 5 minutes to read.

Chart of the Day

In The News

🌟 Family Office Boom Creates New “Gold Rush” On Wall Street

Being wealthy comes with many perks. One of them is the chance to have a devoted investment team managing your money.

And the number of wealthy families employing these “family offices” to oversee their assets is booming, tripling since 2019.

• There are now over 4,500 family offices worldwide catering to 2,600 billionaires and those with tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in investable assets.

Big money: Managing roughly $6 trillion or more, these private investment arms of rich families command tremendous resources, and Wall Street has caught a whiff of the opportunity.

• As CNBC reports, the surge in family offices has set off “a new race among private equity firms, hedge funds, and venture capital firms to attract their investments.”

Why it matters:

Private equity giants like Blackstone, KKR, and Carlyle have built teams and financial product lines devoted to family offices.

• While private equity firms, hedge funds, and venture capitalists have traditionally focused on “institutional investors” from pensions, endowments, etc., the family office space has grown enough to attract their attention, opening the door to more private market investment opportunities.

At Blackstone, its exclusive Private Capital Group is fast-growing, catering to family offices and the wealthiest, most sophisticated individual investors. The group’s head told CNBC, “We view this as a substantial growing opportunity for Blackstone.”

Of course, it’s a great time to target the rich, with surging asset prices creating many more of them.

• Record highs in the stock market, gold, and bitcoin, paired with wealth created in real estate globally in a bounce-back from 2008, have made it a great fifteen years to have money to invest.
  

• In 2021 alone, America gained over 2.5 million new millionaires, bringing the world total to over 62.5 million. But being a millionaire is chump change; the top 1% wield over 45% of global wealth.
  

• In the U.S., the top 10% of wealthiest households had an average wealth of $6.5 million, or about 66.6% of total household wealth.

Read more

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💼 The Share of Women in the Workforce Continues to Rise

It’s International Women’s Day, a time for women worldwide to advocate for rights and liberties. It’s also a day of celebration, as women have made enormous strides. One such area is the workforce.

The share of women in the workforce globally is far above pre-pandemic levels, which is good for the economy, families, and women. 

• According to Moody's, labor force participation rates—people who are working or looking for work—among working-age women have soared in the U.S., the E.U, Japan, Australia, and most large Asian and Latin American countries.
  

• Rates for men haven’t risen at the same clip, even as a tight labor market and near-record unemployment have defined the market in recent years. 

Two primary factors are driving the change:

• Rising costs have pushed more families to generate more income
  

• Remote work has enabled more women to juggle both caregiving responsibilities and a remote or hybrid job

The other side of the story: Rising child care costs—up 32% in the past four years, outpacing inflation—could drive women out of the workforce. 

Why it matters:

Friday’s latest jobs report showed U.S. employers posted another healthy month of hiring in February, adding 275,000 jobs and representing more economic resilience despite (relatively) high interest rates. 

• Meanwhile, the unemployment rate rose two-tenths of a point to 3.9%, the highest level in two years. But it’s still very low by historical standards. A key reason for the strength is the growing participation of women, who have particularly benefited from the rise of remote work.

As McKinsey said in a recent report, “For women, hybrid or remote work is about a lot more than flexibility. When women work remotely, they face fewer microaggressions and have higher levels of psychological safety.”

Read more

More Headlines

🚀 Bitcoin’s price breaks $70,000

🗣️ Takeaways from the State of the Union

🛒 Costco misses quarterly revenue expectations despite online growth

💼 U.S. adds 275,000 jobs in February, unemployment rate rises to 3.9%

✈️ TSA’s new experiment: Self-service security checks

🚨 Russian hackers breached key Microsoft systems

💼 Reddit launches new tools for businesses ahead of IPO

Quick Poll

Yesterday, we asked: I’m [blank] concerned about a crisis in regional banks…

—Results were even. Among the “very” concerned, one reader wrote: “With today’s rampant use of social media, it is easier than ever to create panic in the market even when it may not be as dire as predicted. Community and regional banks play an important role in this country’s financial system.”

—As for “not” concerned, a reader stated, “I believe the Fed will come to the rescue again, just like last time, and all will be well.”

—Another stated, “There are things in my control and things that are not. This is something out of my control. And I don’t worry about those.”

See you next time!

That's it for today on We Study Markets!

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