You Can Learn IPO Discipline By Studying America’s First Bubble

June 22, 2026 | Season 8 | Episode 19

We connect the SpaceX IPO frenzy to 200+ years of US market history, from the first bank offerings to the moment the NYSE is born after America’s first crash and bailout. We also break down what actually moves newly public stocks, then zoom out to the Fed, inflation, and where stability can still be found. 

• SpaceX’s record-setting IPO and what the early price surge signals 
• Why IPO history matters for modern investing decisions 
• The 1792 scrip bubble, William Duer’s scheme, and the first US bailout 
• How the Buttonwood Agreement leads to the New York Stock Exchange 
• Float versus shares outstanding and why supply drives price 
• Options activity, call-heavy flow, and how hedging can push prices 
• ETFs and index inclusion as forced buyers in the market 
• Staggered lockups and why unlock dates can pressure a stock 
• Fed policy expectations under Chair Warsh and why communication changes volatility 
• Dividend Kings, dividend growth, and what long-lived payout records do and do not guarantee 
• The bullish case for General Motors driven by free cash flow and buybacks 

** For informational and educational purposes only, not intended as investment advice. Views and opinions are subject to change without notice. 

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Transcript

Market Open And Weekend Headlines

Alan Eppers 0:00

And now introducing Mr. Keith Lanton .

Keith Lanton 0:03

Good morning. Today is Monday, June 22nd. Also, , we had Juneteenth on Friday. Financial market closed in celebration of that holiday. We've got the summer solstice over the weekend. happy summer. Summer officially begins. A lot of sunlight here in the Northeast. And of course, , hope everyone is enjoying the action in North America for the World Cup. So a busy weekend here as we approach the end of the second quarter. we have news out of the Middle East with ongoing discussions between the United States and Iran taking place in Switzerland. They have the concerns over the weekend with respect to activity between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon creating concerns the fragile would not hold. At the moment, it seems that the two sides are talking, and today was the first day since March 9th, that there was not any strong hostility in Lebanon, so the hope is that we'll continue, and that President Trump and Islamic Revolutionary Guard in Iran will continue to focus on getting the open with respect to that precious known as oil, which has been dropping significantly. Price of oil down below four dollars a barrel here in most places east, as optimism. Also, we had at the end of the previous week coming into last week, we had the SpaceX IPO, largest IPO ever to take place. SpaceX stock subsequently rising last week in Tuesday and then falling off on Wednesday and Thursday, but still significantly above IPO 35, also significantly above the price that it opened for trading at 150.

SpaceX IPO Sets A New Record

Keith Lanton 1:54

And we're gonna talk a lot about initial public offerings, the history of initial public offerings in the United States in light of the SpaceX IPO and the vast wealth that's potentially being created as a result of this IPO, and we can get some sense how initial public offerings started, what their history is, and again by learning about the history, perhaps we can learn more about what we should be doing in terms of our investing and thinking about the exuberance and the excitement and whether or not different situations are worthy of that exuberance and excitement, and which ones may not be, and how we should be reacting, because very often the greatest mistakes that we make when we're doing our financial planning is the emotional component and getting carried away with excitement, it's it's inevitable. It's one of the reasons why it's often helpful to have someone else that you can bounce things off of before you jump in. Perhaps at the very least it will just refrain you, just thinking about making uncle or having that conversation. Perhaps that in of itself might at least make you think again and perhaps change your mind or perhaps reinforce your thinking. There's not a ramp going about the. So Baron's talked about the SpaceX IPO and talking about how this was the culmination of a long trail of big IPOs that started taking place right after our country was founded. The SpaceX IPO raised $75 billion that shattered records in terms of the most amount of money ever raised in an initial public offering. It turned Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, into the world's first trillionaire, at least at the moment, based on market capitalization, and opened fresh debates over corporate valuations and governance. It's not the first time an IPO has shaken things up. In fact, IPOs have been shaping markets and U.S. history since the Bank of North America made its debut in 1783. Moving forward through history in the 19th century, we had many offerings of railroad companies and railroad company stocks that were marked by booms and busts and frenzies. Arguably, the first significant IPO of a company that was taken public in at least what we view today as current iteration of Wall Street arguably could be the IPO of a company that interestingly no longer exists, but in 1906 was revolutionary, and that is Sears Roebuck. In 1906, Sears Roebuck signaled the rise of retail. Think of how revolutionary Sears Roebuck was coming out with a catalog where you can take a look from the comfort of your home in 1906, different items that you could purchase and that you could place an order and receive it in the mail to your house. A little bit like the Amazon of today. But Sears Roebuck took that concept throughout the United States and it was truly revolutionary. But another example of a great idea, great company, a company that was at its peak and pinnacle, but yet wasn't able to outcompete the new upstarts like Walmart and Amazon. But one company that has been able to continue to thrive and survive is the company that took public Sears and Roebuck in 1906, and it actually took them public with their very first initial public offering, and that company was Goldman Sachs. Another company that came public about 50 a little longer than that, but about 50 years later, was a company called Ford Motor Company. Ford Motor Company was the first company that came public, and the founder or owner was able to retain control, something that Elon Musk has shown how to do here with this SpaceX IPO, as he is still the voting shareholder on over 80% of the shares. So the Ford Motor Company doing that when they took their company public as well. In the history of IPOs, thinking back to what maybe the first Silicon Valley IPO, that was Hewlett Packard back in 1957. And then if you move forward to some of the biggest IPOs ever, they look small in comparison today to the SpaceX IPO, but if you go back to 2000, the peak of the dot-com market, we had another revolutionary technology called cell phones or wireless companies, and we had AT ⁇ T wireless being spun out and created in 2000, and they had an IPO of $10.6 billion, first company to crack that $10 billion number. Just a few years later, that record was shattered when Facebook came public in 2012 and raised $16 billion. And in 2014, the Chinese company Alibaba came out and raised north of $20 billion.

A Quick History Of Mega IPOs

Keith Lanton 6:50

So SpaceX now owns that record, $75 billion capital raise, but it could be fleeting. We have OpenAI and Anthropic planning their own AI-powered mega IPOs. But if we want to go back in in history and take a look at one of the earliest IPOs in the United States, we'd have to go back to the early 1790s, and we could go back to a period here where we were issuing a shiny new baby that was being led by a guy who's now famous on Broadway named Alexander Hamilton, and he was bringing public a company called the Bank of the United States. And if you think the modern crypto volatility or meme stock short squeezes a wild, well, you gotta go back to the story in 1792. This is the story of the very first financial crash. It included a rogue speculator, and how this panic gave birth. So the first IPO or the first mega IPO, there were previous bank IPOs, but the first mega IPO here in the United States gave birth, actually, to what we now call as the New York Stock Exchange. So in 1791, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton created the first bank in the United States to handle the country's war debt. And to fund it, they launched an initial public offering. Now they didn't sell traditional shares, they sold something called scripts, which were down payments or options to buy bank stock later. So you ponied up $25. This is again in 1791, 92, and then you owed the rest in installments. So think of it as a capital call, kind of like you see in the private equity world today. So you put down $25 and then you have capital calls for $275 later. But that script, that $25, gave you the right to buy that stock later. So what happened next? some would say was total madness. Within hours of opening, the script sold out. Kind of sounds a little bit like what we saw here in 2026 with SpaceX, and within weeks, the price of that script for $25. Now, the price of the script, not the price of the script plus the capital call, but the price of the script skyrocketed from $25 to $300. People were quitting their day jobs to trade scripts in the streets of New York. Some would say it was America's very first financial bubble. Alright, so it's 1792. Scripts are trading like wild on the streets of New York, and we have a man entering the scene here. His name is William Dewar. Dewar was a smooth talking speculator. In fact, he was a former treasury official who worked under Alexander Hamilton at the bank of the treasury, and with the benefit of history, even back then some would say he was a smooth-talking potential and also subsequently actual con man. Dewar saw the hype and hatched a scheme to corner the market on the bank stock. So what he did is he borrowed massive amounts of money from banks, wealthy elites, and even ordinary people who were buying up these scripts, promising them huge returns. And he used that borrowed cash to buy up every piece of bank stock he could find to drive the price higher and higher. But Hamilton saw the bubble growing and he decided to cool things down. And what the treasury started to do is tighten credit, and by tightening credit they raised interest rates. By raising interest rates, they made it more difficult for Dewar to finance his scheme, and suddenly he was unable to keep buying more and more of these scripts, and the easy money vanished, and about month or two later, Dewar's house of cards collapsed. He ran out of cash and the ability to keep this frenzy going, and he defaulted on his loans. In fact, he was thrown into debtor's prison because he owed money to everyone, and the fact that he owed people money caused people to panic. And there was absolute chaos. Investors who were wealthy on a Monday were bankrupted by Wednesday. Riots broke out outside of the prison where Doer was being held, angry mobs were demanding their money back. So Hamilton stepped in with the federal funds and he bailed out the markets, making this not only the first crash in the history of the United States of America, but also its first bailout. So

The 1792 Panic And First Bailout

Alan Eppers 11:10

the question then becomes how did this chaos lead to the New York stock exchange? Well, before the crash, stocks were trading like the Wild West. So people were buying and selling shares in auction houses, street corners, kind of like trading baseball cards or trading trading pieces of artwork. Strict trades were taking place in noisy coffee houses. There was no regulation, there was no standardization, and this led to massive fraud, especially after what William Dewar did. In fact, nobody trusted anybody at this point, so it really was chaotic. So the top merchants and brokers in New York, the folks who knew one another, who viewed themselves as the reputable adults in the room, they realized that if they didn't fix the reputation of the American financial markets, well, the American financial experiment would die in its infancy. So on May 17th, in 1792, just weeks after the panic subsided, twenty-four of these brokers gathered outside on Wall Street under the shade of a Buttonwood tree, that famed Buttonwood tree, we'll talk a little bit more about that tree, and they signed a simple two-sentence document called the Buttonwood Agreement. They agreed to two revolutionary rules. Number one, they would only trade with each other to keep the scammers out, and number two, they would charge a fixed commission rate, which held until the 1970s, not the exact rate, but the fixed commissions held, one quarter of one percent in order to keep the competition fair. This way, no one broker could undercut another broker. A few decades later that con that group officially renamed themselves the New York Stock and Exchange Board. Today we call it the NYSE or the New York Stock Exchange. So let's back up to that sycamore tree. Remember that's where these folks met back in 1792 under this buttonwood tree, which was in fact a sycamore tree. So why did they call it a buttonwood tree? And why do we view it as the buttonwood agreement when in fact they sat under or stood under a sycamore tree? Well, it's because sycamore wood is incredibly tough, dense, and resisting, resistant to splitting. And since this wood didn't crack easily under pressure, it happened to be the perfect material for making a button. And this is in the day when buttons were made of wood. So back then when a tailor or craftsman needed to slice up small, durable wooden discs to fasten a coat, well, they headed to a sycamore tree, which got the nickname that has stuck with them and now stuck in financial history called a buttonwood tree. Now, standing under a buttonwood tree, as the exchange grew and more and more people were standing under this tree, which is currently at the location of the intersection of Wall Street and Pearl Street. In fact, today there is a hotel there called the Wall Street Hotel. It's at 88 Wall Street. The original address of where that tree originally stood was 68 Wall Street, which no longer exists because buildings were consolidated, so there no longer is a 6'8 Wall Street, but there is an 88 Wall Street at that corner, and there is a plaque at that corner to honor where that tree once stood. And at that exact same location is also where they moved indoors. These folks built a coffee house that the founders created, and the name of this coffee house was the Tontyne Coffee House, which is where the founders of the New York Stock Exchange moved indoors to into the Tontine Coffee House. Why is it called the Tanteen Coffee House? Because a Tanteen was a widely popular, high-stakes, 18th century financial structure that was created by a Italian banker. And the way that tanteens worked, and they used to be very popular, no longer popular, is they were a collective invert investment pool that worked as a reverse life insurance policy. So how did Tanteens work? How did these 24 members create this coffee house, which became a significant building? Well, the way a tanteen works here, in this case, these folks, they pull their money together to buy property, which became this coffee house to fund this project. And every year the property made money, the profits are paid out as dividends to all of the shareholders. The twist is when a shareholder dies, the shares don't go to their kids. It is divided among the surviving members. So the surviving members get more shares, get more dividends. As more people died, the payouts for the survivors get bigger and bigger. So the survivors think of it as almost a life insurance policy. In reverse, the survivors are getting more and more income because they are alive and they are getting greater and greater ownership. And the person who lives the longest is the ultimate winner because they become the ultimate owner. The Tantyne Coffee House was a massive, chaotic four-story brick powerhouse, sat at the northwest corner of Wall Street and Water Street. Back then, Water Street was literally right next to the East River Dock, since then some of the land has been filled in if you go downtown into New York City, so it's a little further from the water today than it was then. And the brokers who signed the Buttonwood Agreement, what they wound up doing in this coffee house from its its construction until it no longer served as the home of the New York Stock Exchange, what they did was they took over the upper floors to trade stocks and government bonds. Down below, in what became known as the newsroom, ship captains fresh off of the boats would walk straight into the Tonteen to register their cargo, which included coffee, sugar, and enslaved people. So that trade going on on the first floor, and on the second floor is the business of the New York stock exchange as it ultimately became. Also in the pub, you also had raucous activity and auctioneering taking place. So this was a a very active and and rowdy place. By 1817, stockbrokers had outgrown the chaotic, rowdy coffeehouse atmosphere. They wanted a more formal, quiet space, so they packed up and moved up Wall Street and officially rebranded in the New York Stock and Exchange Board. They moved to their current location, which we now know of as the New York Stock Exchange in 1865. The building that you can view and visit or at least visit from the outside today, that was built in the early 20th century, 1902 to 1903. So you can see long history of initial public offerings here in this country, and we can see the first one led to the stock exchange that the current offering of SpaceX, which we can see we've made lots of progress, went a lot more smoothly than the first initial public offering back all the way in the late 1790s.

Buttonwood Agreement And NYSE Origins

Keith Lanton 18:18

So let's talk a little bit about this SpaceX IPO. It shares having impressive action out of the gate. Barron's saying that while the shares are hot, a upcoming looming event could derail them. SpaceX fans may think that SpaceX is poised to change the world. Barron saying though a big reason the stock shot up to a peak north of $225, up about 67% from its initial offering price, is due to good old-fashioned supply and demand. As employees and early investors are permitted to sell shares in the coming months, SpaceX stock could come back to Earth, as has happened in other hot IPOs in the past. SpaceX stock though has been on fire since its first trading day on June 12th, as investors look for CEO Must to repeat or even exceed his success running electrical vehicle maker Tesla. SpaceX shares rose for three straight days. They closed at 20180 last week on Tuesday, but have slipped back to 185 as of Friday. 639 million shares are available for trading, but that is a fraction of the 13 billion shares that SpaceX has outstanding. Much of those 639 million shares have been snapped up by long-term shareholders, and that tight supply of stock, even though it's 639 million shares. If the folks owning those shares don't intend to sell them, well then there's only a limited amount of supply for those who want to buy them, and that therefore pushes up the price. And then on top of that, on Tuesday, the day that SpaceX at least temporarily peaked in price, was the day that options trading began on SpaceX. So that was last week on Tuesday, that was June 16th. Those options in SpaceX were the most actively traded options of the day, despite their relatively number small number of shares available to trade. And in fact, call options, which give the holders the right to buy at a fixed price in the future, were more popular than puts. So when folks are buying lots of calls, well, that puts upward pressure on prices because if I'm selling you the calls, one of the ways that I would hedge myself is some of the underlying stock. So if there's lots of demand for calls, that means there's lots of demand to buy stock. If there's more demand for calls than puts, well, there's more people positioning themselves to need to buy stock than sell stock. So we get the result that on Tuesday we saw an additional upward pressure on the price of SpaceX. At the same time, we started to see the creation of ETFs like the Direxion SpaceX Bull two times ETF that started trading on the exchanges that was designed to give investors twice the return of SpaceX stock in daily trading. That also forced more shares to be bought. And then investors also keeping their eyes on July 6th, which is when SpaceX will enter the Nasdaq 100, which will force even more buying by index funds. Initial buying might amount to seven to ten billion dollars, so that is a good chunk of the 86 billion that SpaceX raised in its IPO. So we can see lots of demand, not so much supply. But this supply being a lot less than demand, Farron's saying maybe temporary. So be careful, be mindful. Many traditional IPOs include a provision preventing insiders and early investors from selling stock for 180 days. SpaceX isn't doing exactly that, but what it is doing is it's doing a staggered lockup. So as of right now, most folks who bought the stock privately cannot sell it. Number of shares cannot increase. So then the question becomes when? So after the first quarterly earnings report, probably happening sometime late in July or early August, 20% of the outstanding stock will come off of lockup. And it's possible that it could be as high as 30% coming off lockup at that time. But there is a provision SpaceX stock needs to be consistently above 175 for even more stock to be available to trade, about 10% more based on that stock price provision of 175. Then 7% of the stock comes off of lockup on August 20th, as well as September 9th, October 9th, and October 24th. And another 28% comes off after the second quarter report. The final amount is unlocked on December 8th after 180 days. So after 180 days, you can see the supply of SpaceX stock go from currently 639 million shares to multiple billions of shares. Hard to say because again, Elon Musk is a big holder, has the right to sell, but what he does, of course, we don't know. But potentially there's multiple billions, 10 billion, 11 billion shares potentially could be available to trade as opposed to 639 million today, obviously changing the supply-demand economics significantly. Lockup endings have significant impacts. Shares of electrical vehicle startup Rivian fell 21% when its stock IPO unlocked after 180 days. More recently, Reddit used a performance-based lockup similar to SpaceX here, where the stock's got to stay above a certain price after the first earnings. Still, its shares dropped roughly $10 a share back in August of 24 from 62 to 52. So for SpaceX, staggering the lockup makes sense, but still more supply is more supply. Going forward, what you really want to focus on key for long-term investors is not to get so much caught up in the trading dynamics and the short-term supply-demand equation. No stock goes up in a straight line. In the long run, what's gonna matter is earnings and earnings growth expectations will ultimately be what determines the price of not just SpaceX, but the of of any company over

SpaceX Trading Hype And Supply Crunch

Keith Lanton 24:22

long term. So, what's going on this morning? Well, as of right now, we've got a fairly quiet start to the day as we get back to work here after the three-day weekend. We are looking at Dow futures up about 46 points, SP futures pretty flat down one point, and NASDAQs are up about 90 points. Markets digesting the negotiations with Iran. We have the two sides signed the 60-day memorandum of understanding last week that , as we said, pushed oil prices lower, helped the major stock market averages recover from a post-Federal Open Market Committee sell-off, which took place on Wednesday. We'll talk a little bit about that. So federal open market committee left rates unchanged, but new Fed chair Warsh and the Fed striking a hawkish tone, meaning that they are talking about being aggressive in terms of fighting inflation, which means the possibly keeping rates higher for longer. So that bumped up the market's expectations and timeline of a rate hike. In other words, markets previously thinking perhaps there'd be one rate hike at the end of the year, now thinking there may be, in fact, two rate hikes or rates starting as the third quarter of of this year. All of that remains to be seen, but nevertheless, expectations shifting, so that causing some concerns in the equity markets that interest rates may stay elevated for longer. We will get inflation readings coming more fully into focus later this week on Thursday. We get the release of the May personal income and spending report, which includes the PCE price index. This is the Fed's preferred inflation gauge, so this will be carefully parsed and looked at. Today, economic news on the lighter side. We do have today that AP V symbol ABB and Apoge Therapeutics, APGE, entering into a definitive agreement under which AP V will acquire Apo G. So a lot of A's there for $135.11 a share in cash. So APGE or Apogee up almost 50% this morning on that announcement. Google this morning, or Alphabet as it's also known, down about 2%. A top AI researcher is leaving Alphabet to join Anthropic. Oil continuing to drop this morning, it's down 75 cents, now 85 cents a barrel to about 75.75. Other commodities mixed gold down about $20 an ounce, silver up about $0.00 an ounce. Some news here with respect to Iran. Cutter issuing a statement saying that encouraging progress has been made, including the creation of a mechanism for future for further technical talks, saying a high-level committee has agreed upon a roadmap towards reaching a final deal within 60 days. They said a communication line was formed to avoid incidents and miscommunication with the aim of safe passage for commercial for commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz. On CBS News, Lindsey Graham said he spent hours with President Trump, and he expects if the Iran deal fought fails, the U.S. will take the Strait of Hormuz over by force and charge fees to ships that go through. UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer says he will resign as Labour Party leader. Andy Burnham will likely become the next Prime Minister of the UK. Today marks approximately ten years since the UK exited the European Union, and since then they have gone through seven prime ministers, so the jury is certainly still out on the Brexit at the UK. News in South America that Abelardo de la Espria wins the presidential election in Colombia. He is the more conservative candidate. He was endorsed by President Trump. He has called for closer ties with the United States, and he has apparently won the election against the more moderate or liberal candidate. The existing prime minister or president Petro was unable to seek re-election due to term limits. So his hand-picked candidate not successful in the vote in Colombia. It was a very close election. This week, the Senate and the House will vote on a housing affordability bill that will increase housing supply. This bill puts limitations on large institutional investors in the single-family housing market and is expected to pass both chambers of Congress as well. This week we get earnings tomorrow from FedEx, and the markets will be very closely looking at earnings on Wednesday from Micron Technology Symbol MU, one of the poster childs for chip and technology stocks in the AI age. Micron shares having surged 750% in the past 12 weeks due to a shortage of memory trip chips. Street is expecting earnings at $20.45 a share up just a quarter and revenues of $35 billion. Alright, let's shift gears, talk about a few different articles in Barons.

Lockups, Index Buying, Long-Term Basics

Keith Lanton 29:33

first up, let's talk about the new Fed chair Warsh. He is taking a different tact in how he leads the Fed from previous Fed chair Jerome Powell at his post-policy meeting press conference. The new chair was while he was exciting, he was also surprising. He was shorter than usual. Investors always concerned with change, but some optimistic that this change would be change for the better. Warsh's commentary, a lack thereof, also made for something else. It was a wake-up call for financial markets, signaling that the Fed would no longer spoon feed investors information on which they had come to depend. Now that may sound disruptive and may lead to more market volatility in the short term, but Barron suggesting that this will prove a good thing for both the markets and the Fed longer term. Walsh saying that markets perform best when they react to incoming data, not when they are trying to game how the Fed will react to that data. Warsh intended a blizzard of changes ahead, but arguably maybe dispensing with the consideration of the market's reaction to the Fed's words may be the biggest change for the moment. Walsh was very clear about one thing. He said the Fed is committed to bringing inflation back down to its 2% target, which it hasn't hit in the past five years. You may remember Chairman Powell was a little bit less direct about that, suggesting or hinting without clearly stating that perhaps the Fed could live within two and a half to three percent. Here we have Fed Chair Walsh laying the gauntlet down saying two percent and being very firm about it, so setting a very clear guideline for the markets to focus

Fed, Inflation Data, And Key News

Keith Lanton 31:18

on. Couple of other stories in Barron's one talking about an old American company known as General Motors. Barron's out very positive on General Motors stock, which closed just under 80 coming into this week, saying that General Motors is a cash compounding machine and to buy the stock. They say that General Motors has managed to pull off a surprising trick. Its market capitalization in 2021 was 100 billion. Today the market cap is 75 billion. That sounds lower, and it is. Yet the stock is up more than 40% over those past five years. The reason is because General Motors has been per repurchasing or buying back stocks, so there are less shares outstanding. General Motors has spent $30 billion, retiring $500 million shares since 2021. Since that period, General Motors has generated $53 billion in free cash flow, and that's despite COVID inflation tariffs and ever-changing electric vehicle prices. So GM, they say, deserves credit for being a stable business with strong management. If investors were to ever realize that, Barron's saying the shares could rise to $131 in a year from now, which would be a gain of 50%. If investors don't realize that, they still think that General Motors with their sherry purchases could support double-digit price gains. So little cherry on top or some emerging opportunities that could also boost General Motors valuation, is that on Tuesday, General Motors and Lockheed Martin announced a new collaboration aimed at boosting defense manufacturing productivity. So, manufacturing for defense, a new opportunity for General Motors, and automakers are also shifting unused electric vehicle capacity into utility scale backup power, capitalizing on AI data center building boom. To be sure there are risks, tariffs hit the sector in 2025, and the US-Mexico-Canada Trade Pack is up for review in July. Talking about some stocks that have a long history on the exchange here in the United States. Barons also talked about stocks with 50 years of dividend hikes. We're not talking 25 years, we're talking 50 years of dividend hikes. This elite group is known as the Dividend Kings. Group includes names like Procter Gamble, which has raised its dividend for 70 straight years, Coca-Cola 64 straight years, Johnson ⁇ Johnson 64 straight years, Colgate Palm Olive 63 straight, Pepsi 54, Walmart 53, Newcore 53. So for investors seeking dividend security and the higher prospects of higher payouts, Barron saying it's hard to beat the Kings. The average yield in the group is 2.7%, the average dividend payout just under 50%. These companies have delivered payouts through multiple recessions, market crashes, inflation cycles, so these companies have proven themselves to be very resilient. The Kings also include many utilities, including Con Edison here in New York, industrial companies like Dover and Emerson, as well as some smaller utilities, because to be in the Kings, you do not need to be in the S P 500. To be in the dividend aristocrats, which are companies that have been raising their dividends for 25 years, that group, if if you want to be in that group, you must be in the SP 500. So actually, American States Water, which is a California utility with the largest history of dividend hikes at 72 years, has a market capitalization of just 3 billion is in the Kings, but because it's not in the SP 500, it is not in the dividend aristocrat. Now, if you're looking at the Kings, you need to be mindful that they have returned 8.7% since 2014. That's an annual return, which sounds very healthy, but when you compare it to the SP 500, there the returns have been 14% through the end of 2005. , this is because this group does not include very many technology stocks because most technology stocks haven't been paying dividends or been public for the last 50 years. So this group is more defensive, says Brian Bollinger, president of Simply Safe Dividends. He also says they are 30% less volatile than the E500, and they have produced annual dividend increases of 5% in years. There are no are no exchange traded funds, at least at the moment, for the dividend kings. If you're looking for exposure, well, probably the best way to get exposure, although it is not the same index, is through the ProShares S P 500 dividend aristocrats ETF, which holds SP 500 stocks which have raised dividends for the Letty 5 years. The symbol for that is N-O-P-L, but again, that's the Aristocrats contains many of the keys, but it's not exclusive dividend keys.

Disclosures

Keith Lanton 36:09

That's everything I've got.

Alan Eppers 36:10

Thank you for listening to Mr. Keith Lanton. This podcast is available on most platforms, including Apple Podcasts and Spotify. For more information, please visit our website at www.heroldlantern.com.

Sophie Cohen 36:24

Opinions expressed herein are subject to change and not necessarily the opinion of the firm. Pest performance is no guarantee of future results. The information presented herein is for informational purposes only and is not intended to provide personal investment advice. It is important that you consider your tolerance for risk and investment goals when making investment decisions. Investing in securities does involve risk and the potential of losing money. The material does not constitute research, investment advice, or trade recommendations.