Hi! No cap: The people of Switzerland voted against a proposed 10-million-person upper limit on the nation’s population, notching a 55% majority in yesterday’s referendum. Today we’re exploring:

It’s still the “you gotta spend money to make money” stock market

A major theme of this year is that American companies are once again becoming major sellers of stocks.

For years, companies did the exact opposite: buying back trillions of dollars’ worth of shares, a practice that juiced earnings and was seen as a safe option for management teams that had run out of other ideas. Just look at Google, which is wiping out more than two years’ worth of buybacks with an $85 billion offering, while Meta reportedly mulls an equity raise of its own.

Now, the mantra is that investing in AI — particularly as suppliers to the arms race — is a source of future returns that’s also key to sustaining growth. In short, capex is king, and buybacks are admitting that you don’t have enough investment opportunities allowing you to benefit from the AI boom. Indeed, a Goldman Sachs basket of companies with elevated capex relative to peers is besting stocks with the strongest buyback yields by some 30% — the most ever.

This spending is leading to some insane divergences in profit measures, like net income and free cash flow (which takes capex into account), for companies like Oracle.

Of course, the rest of the AI complex doesn’t care whether the cash spent on the next data center was raised via debt or equity: more funding for the AI build-out is more funding for the AI build-out. If we took capex to a bazillion dollars, that spending would still be accretive for aggregate earnings in the first year (assuming all the recipients of the capex binge were public stocks). Yes, eventually the depreciation on those assets starts to be felt and we’d normalize lower, but in the short term, it’s a boon to the stock market’s bottom line.

This is why Oracle’s chart is just a more extreme version of the wider market: free cash flow used to be about 90% of aggregate net income, and now it’s hovering around 75%, per estimates compiled by Bloomberg.

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Lionsgate persists with decade-long effort to make a Monopoly movie

Lionsgate — no doubt buoyed by the success of “Michael,” the biggest film in the studio’s history and now the highest-grossing music biopic of all time — is pressing on with its mission to get a Monopoly movie off the ground, reportedly enlisting two different writing teams to work on separate versions of the film.

GO directly to movie jail

The latest move to bring on two writing partnerships, one of which penned “Dumb Money,” while the other wrote “A Minecraft Movie,” shows that Lionsgate thinks that the idea of a Monopoly movie still has legs, even over 10 years after the studio first started the project with the screenwriter behind “The Truman Show” in 2015.

On paper, a movie based on America's most played board game, despite being a century on from its initial inception, could be a 2026 cinematic slam dunk — likely kid-friendly and based on beloved IP.

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