Hello! Donald Trump has won another Republican primary, taking 54% of the vote in New Hampshire, 11 points ahead of rival Nikki Haley, who will continue her campaign into South Carolina. That's it for politics, today we explore:
The Magnificent 7
America’s flagship stock market index, the S&P 500, closed at another record high yesterday, as a stream of solid earnings reports — including Netflix (see more below) — drove the index to a fresh high.
Gone are the stock acronyms of FANG, MANTAMAN, or FAATMAN, and in is a new moniker for companies driving the market: The Magnificent 7 — Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia, Meta, and Tesla. Not for decades has the US stock market been so top-heavy, with 28% of the index concentrated in just these 7 names. Indeed, the two biggest components are so large that buying $100 of an S&P 500 fund now means you’ve effectively bought ~$7 in Apple stock and ~$7 in Microsoft, with the other ~$86 split among the remaining stocks in the index.
Big tech’s relentless rise has seen these companies gain $5.66 trillion in market cap since the start of last year. That’s equivalent to adding the value of 33 Walt Disney companies... in just over a year.
Raw power
Netflix is teaming up with WWE as it furthers its foray into live streaming, signing a punchy $5 billion deal to become the exclusive home of the weekly flagship Raw show from January 2025. The 10-year agreement is the biggest live sports entertainment deal in Netflix history and brings WWE properties like SmackDown and Wrestlemania under the platform’s umbrella for streaming outside the US.
Shares in TKO Group — the entertainment giant formed after the merger of WWE and UFC last September — jumped almost 20% on the news yesterday morning. Netflix’s stock is also soaring, up 12% at the time of writing, although that’s likely more to do with the company reporting 13 million new subscribers, way ahead of the expected 8-9 million additional watchers.
WWE works
For TKO-owned WWE, the deal is a milestone in the monetization of its flagship show, with media deals adding over $1 billion in sales last year — some 80% of the business’s record $1.3 billion revenue, largely thanks to its current streaming deal with Peacock and record viewership across many of its pay-per-view premium live events.
For Netflix it's one — very expensive — step toward achieving its ambition of becoming the “must-have home-entertainment” subscription service: adding one of the longest-running weekly episodic shows in history to its portfolio.
Minor jobs
America’s next generation of workers has already started punching in. New data from the Labor Department reveals that US teenagers today are increasingly picking up part-time jobs, with 37% of 16-19 year-olds either being employed or seeking employment last year — the highest proportion since 2009.
Following more than 4 decades of decline in teen employment, current high-schoolers appear to have shifted cultural norms by seeking out after-school and summer jobs since the pandemic. Despite the employment-to-population ratio for this demographic sinking to a historic low of 20.1% in April 2020, the figure has steadily grown in the intervening months, up to 32.6% at the end of 2023.
School of life
While the labor force participation rate of 16-19 year-olds had been in steep decline from the turn of the millennium until the early 2010s, Gen Z has of late become a powerhouse in the world of work. By filling entry-level positions in a wealth of new hospitality and retail job vacancies, the teen unemployment rate recently dropped to a 70-year low.
Interestingly, Atlanta Fed data cited by the Washington Post also shows that young workers are seeing the most dramatic relative pay rises of any age group in the US: in December, the average wage growth for 16-24 year-olds (9.8%) was more than double the rise for workers aged 55+ (4.2%).
• Moody’s Analytics found 21 million “red flags” when assessing shell companies last year, including a 942-year-old director and 22,000 businesses supposedly working out of the pyramids in Egypt.
• Yelp’s top US restaurant for 2024 is a vegetarian Mexican joint in Arizona — read the full list of 100 here.
• Stainless steal: a California woman was arrested on suspicion of stealing 65 Stanley cups worth almost $2,500.
• Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is leading the charge for Oscar nominations this year, garnering 13 nods from the Academy, beating out Poor Things (11) and Killers of the Flower Moon (10).
• A handy timeline of the key events in the run up to the 2024 election.
• Visualizing the major tech layoffs so far this year.
