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I would like to uh just go over two items that I would like particularly new entrants to the stock market to uh ponder just a bit before they try and do 30 or 40 trades a day in order to to profit from what looks like an a very uh easy game. So, I would like to uh go to slide L1. And these I on March 31st I ran off a list of the 20 largest companies in the world by stock market value.
And those names, good many of which will be familiar to you, but they were led by Apple at slightly over 2 trillion. And uh [snorts] it went down to the number 20th was worth 330-odd billion. But, those are the 20 largest companies in the world by market value on March 31st. Now, if I had a little I was hoping I could get a little uh quiz machine so I could have a reader weigh in on this answer and we could flash up a little later, but but proved technically impossible for But, what I would like you to do is look at that list and and starts off with Apple and So, Saudi Aramco is a pretty kind of a specialized country as as company.
I don't know whether it's 95% owned by the government or what, but but it's it's essentially a country that's for sale there in terms of that business. I But, the the top um of the top six companies, five of them are American. So, when you hear people say that America hasn't [clears throat] the you know, it's got all it's not working very well or something of the sort.
You know, in the whole world uh of the six top companies in value, five of them are in the United States. And if you think about it, you know, we talked a little about this last year, but in 1790, we had 1/2 of 1% of the world's population. Uh a little less, we had 4 million people. 3.9 million people.
600,000 of them were slaves. Ireland had more people than the United States had. Russia had five times as many people as the US. Ukraine had twice as many people as the United States. Uh so here we were, but what what did we have? We had a map for the future, an aspirational map, that uh somehow now only 200 Well, after the Constitution, 200 32 years uh later leaves us with five of the top six companies in the world.
You know, it's not an accident. And it's not because we were way smarter, the way stronger, you know, I mean, we had good soil. We had good soil. Decent climate. But so some of those other countries I named uh and uh the system has worked unbelievably well. Just imagine thinking of five of the top six companies in the world ending up with a country that started with a half of 1% of the population just a few hundred years ago.
But what I would like you to do is look at that list for a minute or two, if you want to, and and then make an estimate. Make your own guess. How many of those companies are going to be on the list 30 years from now? Here they are, these powerhouses. And how many would you guess are going to be on the list?
Well, you know, it's not going to be all 20. It may not even be all 20 today or tomorrow. [sighs] Uh uh This was March 31st. Uh but what would you guess? And think about that yourself. Would you put down five, eight, or whatever it would be. I would now invite you to look at slide two or L2, which goes back a little more than 30 years, and look at the top 20 from 1989.
And if you look at the top 20 from 1989, there's two things that we should grab your interest. At least two. None of the 20 from 30 years ago are on the present list. None. Zero. There were then six US companies on the list, and their names are familiar to you. We have General Electric, we have Exxon, we have IBM Corp.
These are They're still around. Merck is down there at number None made it to the list 30 years later. Zero. And I would guess that very few of you, when I asked you to play the quiz a little a few um minutes ago, would have put down zero. And I don't think it will be zero. But it is a reminder of what extraordinary things can happen.
Things that seem obvious to you. Uh uh Japan had this wonderful bull market for a very long time. So, you had a number of Japanese companies on the list. Uh today there there are none. Uh and uh the United States had the six. Now we have 13. Uh but they aren't the same six. Uh I would invite you to think about one other thing as you look at this list.
1989 was not the dark ages. I mean, we weren't just discovering capitalism or anything else. And people thought they knew a lot about the stock market, and the efficient market theory was in, and they were all It was not a It was not a backward time. And if you look the top company at that time had a market value of 100 billion, 104 billion.
So, the largest company in the world uh title in just shade over 30 years has gone from 100 billion to to 2 trillion. At the bottom, the number 20 has gone from 34 billion to something a little over 10 times that. Well, that tells you something about what's happened with equality, which is a hot subject in in in this country.
It tells you a little bit about inflation, but this was not a highly inflationary period as a whole. But, it tells you that capitalism has worked incredibly well, especially for the capitalists. And uh uh it's an it's a pretty astounding number. Do you think you think it could be repeated now that that the 30 years from now that you could take two trillion for Apple, multiply any company, and come up with 30 times that for the leader?
You know, it it seems impossible, and maybe it is impossible, but I just we were just as sure of ourselves as investors and Wall Street was in 1989 as we are today, but the world can change in very, very dramatic ways, and I'll just give you one other example you might ponder. This is When you start feeling too sure of yourself, the one thing it shows, incidentally, is that that uh it's a great argument for for index funds is that uh you know, it the main thing to do is to be aboard the ship.
Now, a ship. You know, they were all going to a a better promised land. You just had to know which one was the one they necessarily get on, but but you couldn't help but do well if you just had a diversified group of equities. Uh you US equities would be my my but uh to hold over a um 30-year period.
But, if you thought you knew a lot about which ones to pick or the person that you had hiring you were paying a lot of money to had all these ideas and uh uh they could tell you their best ideas in 1989 did not necessarily do that well, although overall equities were absolutely uh the place to be.
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