10 Value Stocks To Buy For 2026

Welcome back everyone, today on the Joseph Carlson Show. Every single year, towards the end of the year, Barron's and the analysts behind this publication, they publish what they believe are the 10 best stocks to pick for the following year. In this case, they picked 10 stocks for 2026, with Amazon leading the pack. Now not only do they pick these stocks, but they give a thesis for them. They explain why they think they're such good buys today and why they think they'll do so well next year. And so far, they've done a pretty good job. Last year, their picks outperformed the S&P 500. So they have a decent track record, and I thought it would be time to look through these 10 stock picks, to look through the list of them, and give you my reaction of whether or not I agree or disagree with their picks, and if I disagree, which companies I would choose instead. So in this episode, we're going to be breaking down all 10 of these picks, going through them, giving analysis and reaction. Now, of course, we have a lot of other news to get to as well. We have news that Disney's made a deal with OpenAI to license most of their iconic characters to make AI content with. Is it a good idea for Disney to allow OpenAI to make AI slop? We'll be discussing that. We also have news that Zillow stock, the company where you can look up your friend's home price, is down 10% today because of news from Google. What is Google doing that's causing Zillow stock to drop? We'll be discussing that. And then we also get to the fail of the week, which in this case, we have to highlight Elizabeth Warren. We just heard today that iRobot, the maker of Roomba, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The company is completely destroyed. And this is a company that was a success story just a few years ago. They were being acquired by Amazon for $1.7 billion until the deal was dropped because of regulation. One of the biggest promoters of that regulation, one of the biggest advocates of blocking that deal was Elizabeth Warren. And now that that's been blocked, we have one fewer American companies competing with Chinese competitors. So we're going to be looking over a quick history of Elizabeth Warren. Her continual opposition of any merger and acquisition and how this can be value destructive to U.S. companies while aiding competitors. So we have a ton to get to in this episode, a lot to go over. Let's go ahead and get started. Now, just a reminder before we jump in that Qualtrim.com, the stock analysis platform that I used, we've had thousands of people signing up for it. We've had such a good reaction. You can try it out right now with a free trial. You just hit get started, select a monthly plan, which comes with a seven day free trial. And that allows you to try out the entire platform. Qualtrim is simple to use, but feature rich. It has 30 years of financial history and visual format. You have a DCF calculator, you have earnings call transcript summaries, you have a dynamically updated earnings calendar, as well as a portfolio analysis tool. All of that is included with the membership. You can try it out now easily, risk free at Qualtrim.com. Now let's go ahead and jump in. We start off today with the Barron's top 10 picks. Now we have here the full list of them. Let's go ahead and go through them. They highlight on the onset here that last year was a good year for Barron's. They outperformed the S&P 500. And if we look over some of the companies that they picked, the big returns came from like three different, maybe four different companies. So four out of 10 did remarkably well. And then we have a couple that did medium well, and then some that didn't do well at all. So that's typically how a portfolio goes. Nobody has every stock in their portfolio going up. Most people are lucky to have just a third of their portfolio or half of it going up. And that's just how stock returns happen. Now in this case with Barron's, the one at the top of the pack was Alibaba. I think Alibaba is a fine company, but there's so many things that are uncontrolled that it's a tough one. The other companies that they had do really well are two of them that are in my portfolio. We have Google up 67% so far this year. So Google has been remarkably good. And if you bought Google during the lows, you did even better. This is since the beginning of the year, but remember Google dipped a lot since the beginning of the year and then it came back. So this is one where you could have had 100% returns. Google is about double where it was mid-year. Then you have ASML, another one that dipped below $700. And this one's up 58% year to date. So Google and ASML are both companies in my portfolio. If we look at the combined portfolio, I have Google as one of my top positions. It's the second to largest holding with $85,000 in gains. This doesn't include dividends. So this is all just capital appreciation. It is a $183,000 position. Then we have ASML. This one's further down the list, a $95,000 position, $31,000, $32,000 in the green. This one has been a great company to hold. It's been one of the biggest winners in a short amount of time. So both of those have been fantastic. Those are ones that I share with the Barron's picks. Then we have Berkshire Hathaway. That one didn't do well. Citibank went up 59%, so great pick by them. Evers Group went down 10%, so not a good pick. We have Louis Vuitton. That one's up 11%. Moderna, that one's down 32%. That's their worst pick. That's what you get a lot of the time with pharmaceuticals. They're just more risky than other companies, more volatile. We have SLB, which was flat. And then we have Uber. Another positive pickup, 37%. Now let's go ahead and get into their picks for this year. At the top of the list is Amazon, which should be no surprise. Amazon probably tops the list for many investors. But I still want to hear why Barron picked this one. Let's go ahead and just take a look at their thesis. They say that Metaplatform's stock surged in 2023, Nvidia soared in 2024. This year belonged to Alphabet. So Alphabet is the winner of 2025. Great, great winner. Now it's Amazon's turn. It's their turn in the MAC 7 in 2026. Amazon, at around $232, has gained just 6% this year and trades for about 29 times projected 2026 earnings. It's pretty crazy that Amazon trades at a discount to Walmart, but Walmart is, I guess, closer to people. It's in grocery more. Amazon's a bit more volatile in all of their AI business. But you'd think that Amazon has more growth ahead of it than Walmart. So their thesis on this, they start by outlining what is going wrong with the investment. Right now, here's the problems with the investments. Investors are concerned about the $125 billion of capital spending this year. So big problem with Amazon is they're just spending so much money. It seems like they never make any profits. They only spend money. The next thing is they slow down in the industry-leading Amazon Web Services. AWS is slowing down a little bit, but this is where I have a different view from them. If we look at AWS over time, we can look at it here. We get the revenue by segment from Qualtrim. We can subtract out everything else, cross it all out. AWS actually accelerated growth year over year from the previous year. So it's actually re-accelerating it in the past quarter, and I expect that to continue. Now, it's true. They say Amazon is spending, but it's getting results. It has a 40% plus share of U.S. e-commerce. While third-quarter AWS revenue growth of 20% was its fastest in 11 quarters, its lucrative ad platform is generating $75 billion in revenue, and it has a portfolio of promising newer businesses like Pharmaceuticals, Satellite Services with Amazon at Leo. That's their Project Kuiper. We have Alexa Plus, and we have Zoox, its robo-taxi service. Now, Zoox is actually doing driverless rides today. It's completing them. They're doing them all around Vegas. So they don't have the official numbers there. That's why we don't have the chart in Qualtrim. But as soon as they start updating us with the official numbers, that's going to be tracked in Qualtrim as a KPI on Amazon. We have here the Evercore ISI analyst, Mark Mahaney, one of my favorite analysts. I really like his thought process. I agree with Mark Mahaney on a lot of things. He has a $335 price target on Amazon and calls it his number one large-cap internet long. So Mark Mahaney is at $335 on Amazon. Right now it's trading at $220. So he believes it's a full $100 undervalued. He has made similar and correct calls on Uber a year ago and on Alphabet in the spring when both were out of favor. Overall, I agree with Barron's top pick is Amazon, but I would note that I agree with it for different reasons than what they outline. For example, in their write-up here, they basically outline AWS, which is good. I agree with that, the online RoboTaxi, and then Zoox, Alexa, and Project Kuiper or Leo. All of those are great, but I think what it's missing here is the margin expansion potential for Amazon. That is the biggest thing that will cause a stock to go up. When you have a company like Amazon that's doing the type of revenue they are, you don't need revenue growth. Like it's nice to have, but you don't need revenue growth. What you need is some revenue growth with costs staying flat, with employee counts staying flat, with robots doing a greater proportion of the work at Amazon, because that means that margins go up. If operating margins continue to go up for Amazon, that will be the biggest thing that leads to profitability, that leads to operating leverage, that causes those enormous spikes in free cash flow, far beyond what analysts predict. My biggest distinction by far with what they outline here is I really think the robotics and automation and efficiency is the biggest story overall. And having that enabled by AI, I think is the big story here. Now let's go ahead and move on to number two. In this case, we have Bristol Myers Squibb. These ones are always a bit more of a gamble. I don't own any pharmaceutical companies because of the nature of the business, but let's go ahead and take a look at their thesis here. They say that the stock is now down around $51. It's one of the worst performers in a group that has rallied off of mid-year lows. Shares are off 9% of 2025 after a series of drug pipeline disappointments. So that's part of the risk you get with the pharmaceutical industry. If you look into that industry, it takes so much work to get a drug to market, to actually get it through clinical trials and every side effect that gets recorded. If one bad thing happens to one person that's on the drug, it gets completely squashed. Like there's so many challenges getting an actual drug to market. It's really incredible. And even when you do, there's always the chance that it can be recalled or there can be mass lawsuits. Bristol Myers Squibb is a strong pass for me. It's not a company that I'd buy, especially based on this thesis. I don't buy companies simply because they're cheap and I don't think that's something you should do. If you start accumulating a portfolio of simply cheap companies, you're gonna end up with a lot of junk over time and a lot of theses that don't work out. There needs to be stronger evidence of why the company is gonna perform exceptionally well next year. Stronger growth engines ahead. With companies like Bristol Myers Squibb's, I'd rather replace that one with one like Meta. A higher quality company that has immense underlying earnings power, an executive that's driven to build the company in the future, and one where they can kind of flip a switch and stop doing some investments to make more money. It's also one that has traded off to some degree. So with Barron's second pick here, I would replace it from Bristol Myers Squibb's with Meta. Now let's go ahead and take a look at their third pick here. They have Comcast. What's going on with Comcast? Let's take a look at this one. We can bring it up here on Qualtrim. And the stock price has been, it's been crushed this year. It's down 25%, okay. Past five years, it's down 45%. Look at that. Comcast has just been crushed over the past five years. Now what has the company done? Well, we see that the revenue is really a problem. In the past 10 years, they've grown their revenue barely. It's grown about two to 3% per year on average. In the past couple of years, past two years, it's been flat. It's also a company like any of these cable companies that laid the railways for cable. It's one that carries an enormous amount of debt. Look at that debt. $9 billion of cash, $93 billion worth of debt. These are major red flags. Now I don't mind if my companies have debt. There's, it's just some of them do, but not $90 billion of net debt. That is incredible. So right now, my initial reaction looking at Qualtrim is I see some major red flags, but I'll go ahead and go through their thesis again. They outline it trades at six times earnings. So super cheap yet again. They say that shares are down almost 30%. They're trading at $27 below where they traded a decade ago. But Comcast Cable and Broadband Business, the largest in the country, has been shrinking slowly. Next year's earnings are expected to fall 3%. So you have a company where the earnings are going down. Comcast lost out on the bidding war for Warner Brothers Discovery, but could still separate its valuable media, entertainment, and parks businesses, which could create $30 billion of value, or $8 per share, argues Wolf Research, Peter Cepino. This is another one I don't like at all. I completely disagree with Barron's. This would never make it into my top 10 pick. Not only do you have a business that's struggling, but they note here that their central business, which is broadband, is in decline. Consumers will say that they've tapped out on pricing as well. They've priced broadband as high as they possibly can. They have new competitors like Google Fiber, which are undercutting them in price with a better service. On top of that, the rest of the thesis here is basically to slash and dash the company, to break it up and spin it off. So you have a thesis that is, again, very unpredictable. When I'm looking at investing in companies, you can sometimes win out on these. If you have a gambling spirit and you just wanna go into different companies and hope it turns out okay, these type of bets can play off. But I'd rather look at a highly predictable earnings growth company that's trading at a discount. And I don't see that here. I see a company that's in secular decline that the thesis is, well, maybe if we split up the parts, it's worth more. And that's not a thesis I can get behind. In number four, we have ExxonMobil. This is one that even though I don't own any oil companies, they're driven in large part by commodity prices. I do like this one a bit more. Just at the start of it, I like the idea of this one more. You have ExxonMobil seeing 13% plus compound annual growth in earnings throughout 2030. So strong, low double-digit earnings growth. And they mentioned that the long-term oil and gas supply picture looks positive. Global demand is still rising despite growth in renewable energy. So you might look at Exxon and say, well, that's of the past. Oil is of the past, but not really. While we're transitioning to solar, there's so many things that have to be made, manufactured, and ran by oil during that transition. And that transition will take 20, 40 years. So there's a long lifetime of earnings growth for this company ahead. The CEO, Darren Woods, is positioning the company to operate profitably for decades to come. I think this one's a safer, more predictable play. I think oil is gonna be around for a while. There's other companies that I think are a bit better, but I do like this one. Now, number five, we have Fairfax Financial Holdings. Sounds like this is gonna be a bank. Fairfax Financial may be the closest thing to a mini Berkshire Hathaway. All right, I like the pitch so far, a mini Berkshire. And it may be better at this price point. The Toronto-based property and casualty insurer has strong insurance operations, an excellent investment record, and a phenomenal long-term performance under founder-chairman Prem Watsa, 75 years old. They mention his age here. Not sure why that's applicable, but we'll continue on. The company targets 15% annual growth in book value against what's probably high single-digit growth at Berkshire. So again, they're doing the comparisons here. It's growing its book value, which is what Berkshire focused on. It's growing that book value at roughly double the pace of Berkshire Hathaway. It has a market value of around 40 billion against Berkshire's 1.1 trillion, which makes it a lot easier to grow. This is like investing in Berkshire in 1993, says investor Charlie Frischer. It has an excellent portfolio of Indian investments, as well as controlled stakes in Bangalore Airport. So they're all over the place. This is truly like a Berkshire Hathaway. They're investing in all these value investments all over the place. Fairfax has even partnered with David Sokol, who once was viewed as a successor to Warren Buffett. Sokol runs the container ship business in which Fairfax owns a 43% stake. The stock trades mainly in Canada and has thinly traded US shares now around $1,750. This feels a little bit more like Brookfield, where you have investment managers that take the money of shareholders, they invest it in all these different undervalued assets, as well as they run an underlying business that generates cashflow. It feels very much like they describe here a mini Berkshire. But overall, I like this one. I'd have no problem with it. I think it may actually do really well in 2026. Now we get to number six here. We have Flutter Entertainment. Flutter Entertainment is the global leader in online sports betting, but its stock at around $215 is down by a third since August peak amid concerns that Kalshi and PolyMarket will undermine FanDuel, Flutter's most valuable asset. So this company is the owner of FanDuel, which you've heard about everywhere. Sports gambling is so big now. It's taken off, it's everywhere. And it's not just sports betting, it's betting everywhere. People are calling it prediction markets. That's another term for gambling, and now you can gamble on almost anything. Most Wall Street analysts think prediction markets don't threaten the business model of FanDuel. The top US site with over 40% market share, FanDuel could capitalize on the trend with a 50 to 50 prediction market joint venture with financial exchange leader CME Group that rolls out by year end. You have analysts saying that the sell-off is overdone. He views it as a best-in-class operator. He has a price target of 330 on Flutter shares, noting that the current valuation is well below historical levels. Now I'm of the view where I don't believe, or at least I don't see any convincing evidence that sports betting and prediction markets are all that different at all. In practicality, prediction markets are just a way of betting on everything, and sports betting is just one subset or it's within the scope of a prediction market. So when I look at this, I do see the prediction markets being a competitive threat to sports betting. And although they may have some moat against it, they may have some intricate technological advantage or different things that they can do, I would be concerned as an investor that you have so many other non-gambling but gambling opportunities moving into this field. I think it's gonna become incredibly saturated. This is one that I'd personally avoid. Their number seven pick for 2026 is Madison Square Garden. All right, we're going to an event center here. Sports investing is hotter than ever with record prices being paid for professional teams, not so for Madison Square Garden Sports, the owner of the New York Knicks and the New York Rangers. The combined value of the Knicks and Rangers is probably over $13 billion. The NBA's Los Angeles Lakers were sold in 2025 at a valuation of 10 billion, and the Knicks are probably worth at least that. The Rangers' estimated value is more than $3 billion. MSG Sports, whose shares trade around $225, is valued at 5.4 billion. The stock is up 30% over the past five years. Basically, these teams are undervalued. They're intrinsically undervalued, but the problem is the container in which that value is kept. Right now, the container is in Madison Square Garden, where you can't ever sell it. Like, you have the money in that company. If the company's never gonna sell those teams or realize the value of the teams they have, you're never gonna be able to extract that value out of it. They say that this is controlled by his family. His attitude is bad corporate governance, but John Boyer, president of Boyer Value Global, says it could spin off one of the teams into a separate company, or sell a partial stake in one or both of the teams to private investors and use the proceeds to repurchase stock. A tax law change in 2027 will penalize owners of public sport teams, which could pressure the company to consider a sale. This is a really, I believe, risky investment thesis. You have these great undervalued teams trapped in Madison Square Garden stock, and the only way to realize the value, Barron's argues, is if the family is pressured into selling the teams. Well, if it's true that the family doesn't wanna sell, I don't think some tax law is gonna change that. Like, it might, but what if the family doesn't care? What if they like owning the teams more than selling? What if they just wanna keep them? They're already super rich. They're probably not looking for money tomorrow. So again, I believe this is a very unpredictable way of investing. Trying to invest based off of what a family will or won't do is highly unpredictable. It's something I wouldn't get behind. I wouldn't buy Madison Square Garden based off of this thesis. I actually think it's one of the weaker theses that they share. I'd rather buy a company like Uber or one like MasterCard. And they even highlight here with number eight, one company that I think is a much better pick, which is Visa. Now, let's go ahead and look at why they're picking Visa. Maybe they have a reason they pick it over MasterCard. I'd be very interested in that. They say that stable coins buy now, pay later, and pushback on fees, concerns about these issues, and more have made Visa stock a laggard in 2025, gaining just 5%. And that is true. All of these problems, all these questions are the things that you get asked when you bring up these stocks. So when I bought MasterCard, I got so many questions about stable coins. I got so many questions about buy now, pay later firms, pushback on fees, concerns about these issues, especially regulatory concerns, and another thing, another one they don't mention here is Europe building their own debit transaction system, South America building their own debit transaction system. All of those things cause concern for Visa and MasterCard. They say, but no matter the worry, Visa has dodged those challenges and continues to generate some of the most consistent double-digit earning growth among mega cap companies. It has even become a leader in stable coins, a dollar-backed cryptocurrency that some feared would disrupt it. And this is typically what you see happening. The very things that you believe will disrupt the companies actually end up enabling them. Now, I think this is a great thesis. I agree with it. Overall, I think that Visa is a fantastic buy. I prefer MasterCard a little bit because MasterCard actually has less exposure to debit, which is one of the things that's under pressure. Credit is more resilient than debit because it has those really tricky reward points. Debit doesn't have that quite as much. So a lot of competitors are kind of eating away at debit more than they are credit. MasterCard is bigger into credit. MasterCard is also pushing more into value-added services, which I think is a really good thing for them to do. So overall, I love the Visa pick. My only critique here is I slightly like MasterCard more. In number nine, we get SL Green Realty. The New York City office market is improving, but you wouldn't know it from the looks of the shares of SL Green Realty, New York's biggest commercial landlord in Manhattan. The company's stock is around $44. It's down 35% in 2025 and trades at near 52-week lows. So this company has been completely crushed, right? Office space, commercial space in New York City is getting crushed because work from home. Everybody can work from home now, or at least most jobs you can. The depressed stock price reflects weaker-than-expected guidance in 2026, made recently, as well as ample leverage, but also the impact of Democratic Socialist Zoran Mondani, New York's incoming mayor, who isn't exactly business-friendly. The CEO has said the situation is, quote, absurd, and said the company is priced at no more than the value of the land underneath its buildings. So investors are so scared about Zoran. They're so scared about work from home that they're just abandoning this company. It's not even priced like the land that it's on, which if that's true, that's crazy, and that would be absurd. This one, I think, is a tough one. I wouldn't be buying New York real estate, especially if it's only 30, 40% dislocated. Things can get a lot worse, and as much as the CEO says it's absurd, if the trends continue, if New York real estate, it really becomes less valuable because there's more business-unfriendly policy, there's more work from home, there's more all of these different factors working against it, then that could make the company a long-term secular decliner, which no matter how much value you try to get, if the company's fundamentals are in decline, it's not likely to go up quickly. Now, finally, number 10, we get to Walt Disney. This is one that I'm actually interested in. I haven't looked at Disney in a while, but I like Disney. I was invested in it for a time. It was actually one of my losers. I decided to swap out Disney for Netflix, which was a good choice in the end, but I lost money on Disney stock, and it's one that I've always really liked the company. The stock is trading just at 16 times earning. They say that it's too cheap given the valuable intellectual property and durable demand. So 16 times earnings, their price target is 133. What's more, Disney has a similar total earnings as Netflix, but only half the market value. With Netflix potentially becoming more of a traditional media company if it buys Warner, why buy Netflix at double the valuation to Disney? Now, why is Netflix valued at double the price of Disney? Netflix is growing around five times the speed of Disney. So when one company is growing 3% revenue, the other is growing 16%, of course the one that's growing 16% is gonna be valued higher. And Netflix also has a more consistent path of operating margin increases. So Netflix has a faster-growing, more profitable, streamlined business, and that's the reason that it's valued at greater capacity. There's also the fact that Disney's more reliant on parks and experiences, which are not subscription businesses, and Netflix is basically all subscription as of today. So they highlight that Disney's much cheaper than Netflix. That is just on a multiple, but if you look at the other factors, I think Disney's more in line with Netflix given the fundamentals of the company. But I do agree with this pick. I actually think that Disney's a decent buy here. If I look over the next five years, I think this company could have an attractive return. And that concludes the 10 picks from Barron's. If you're looking at companies that aren't in the AI realm, if you're looking at companies that aren't into that heavy CapEx realm, they have nothing to do with Gemini or OpenAI, then this is a decent list to look at. Now let's go ahead and move on to some news. Now, first of all, we get to the story that Disney is licensing some of its iconic IP to none other than OpenAI and Sam Altman. And this has caused a bit of a stir. If we look at the actual news release, we have Bob Iger going on to CNBC with Sam Altman, and this is enough to cause some shivers of different content creators, different talent at Disney, seeing that you have the CEO of the company working directly with the guy that makes the application, that looks at all the content, combines it all, and allows users to make different various forms of that content. So right off the bat, this looks concerning. Let's go ahead and just take a look at why they're doing this deal. Why is Disney agreeing to work with OpenAI? Well, this is a great opportunity for the company to enable consumers to engage with our characters on what is probably the most modern of technology media platforms today. And it not only gives consumers, users, an opportunity to do so, but it also is significant because in this deal, OpenAI is both respecting and valuing our creativity, both our characters, but also those that have created those characters. So it gives us an opportunity really to play a part in what is really a breathtaking, breathtaking growth in essentially AI and new forms of media and entertainment. Now, Bob Iger is sure to say that this protects and it even rewards our talent. This isn't something where we're selling out our talent, we're protecting them and rewarding them. Now let's go ahead and take a look at how Sam Altman describes this deal. We hear so much from users about how much they love Disney's characters. Disney, I think, is the greatest storytelling company in the world, bar none. And people really wanna connect with Disney characters and express creativity in new ways. And we are confident from everything we've heard from our users that they're gonna respond very well to being able to do this. And I hope that it'll unleash a sort of a whole new way that people use this technology and a new model for the companies making the technology and rights holders to sort of responsibly figure out how to get this done together. Can you expand on that? What do you mean when you say unleash a new wave, Sam? One thing we found again and again is that we have underestimated the amount of latent creativity in the world. That if you lower the effort, skill, time required to create new things, people very quickly are able to bring ideas to life and make new kinds of entertainment, art, code, all sorts of things with this new tool of AI. And if we can enable people to do that and give them more flexibility with these 200 Disney characters, I don't know exactly what we're gonna see, but I think people will come up with amazing kinds of ideas. So now they're officially in partnership together. Now, a lot of people have looked at this and said, how could Disney ever do this, right? They have such a good brand. Why would they align with open AI and have users be able to generate what is essentially AI slop, right? Disney AI slop. They're gonna go in and create really dumb things using different prompts with Disney characters. So why would Disney allow that to happen? When I look at the deal, I think I have a different perspective on this or at least a different take than what I think most people or at least what I'm seeing here, which is I think it's a good thing for Disney. First of all, there's no company in the world that protects their IP more than Disney. There's no one that has a bigger team of lawyers. There's no one that scavenges the internet to look for any infringements on their IP. Disney is ruthlessly protective of their intellectual property like no one else, no other company in the world. Like you can name any other company, Apple, Coca-Cola. No, Disney is more protective. They care more about their IP than any other company. So even when looking at this deal with them doing a partnership with Sam Altman, they have intensely looked over this and made sure that it benefits them, that in the long run, it's gonna be something that Disney makes a lot of money on while they still retain control over their intellectual property. I also believe that Disney is making the calculation here that they know their Disney characters are gonna be used in AI. Like it's just inevitable. There's gonna be so many different backdoor ways of doing it, different options of doing it. So they're also looking at it from the perspective as they may as well make a lot of money from it. Disney can stand the chance of having another highly profitable way of making money. Essentially, it's kind of like if Disney licensed some of their content to Netflix, right? They put it on a different platform. They're basically doing the same thing, but now it's a bit more interactive. And of course, there's gonna be AI slop, but there's gonna be AI slop anyway. So when I look at it from the lens of Disney, I actually think that this is likely a good thing for them. They're going to protect their IP. They're gonna have ways that they can profit from this and reward the creators. And this could become a very valuable revenue stream for Disney in the same way that an artist licensed their music and you can chop up the music and use different slices of it. I believe it's gonna be very similar to that where they're using these characters. Open AI is gonna have a license to be able to have users come in and use the characters and generate different things. And Disney will get paid for each of those instances. And Disney can control what you can generate and what you can't generate. So overall, I view this more positively for Disney than I think a lot of people would. Now, another piece of news that I saw, I noticed that Zillow Group, this stock is down 11% on the day. The reason that Zillow stock is dropping is because of Google. Zillow stock tanks after report that Google is testing sales listings. So sale listings. We have here from Seeking Alpha that Zillow stock is down 11% in the late morning trading on Monday. Following a report that Google appears to be testing home sales listings directly in the search results. The search engine giant appears to be testing the sale listings in a limited number of markets and only on mobile. So some people noticed, hey, you're finding like home listings on Google now, directly on Google. So we know what Zillow does, right? You can go to zillow.com, you can plug in your address and look at your neighbor's home values. Sometimes it will have photos of their home, like the inside of it, if they've ever listed it before. So it's one of those things where you can kind of have fun, like looking around the neighborhood or looking at different places and looking at the homes. It has a little bit of that voyeuristic aspect to it. Well, now apparently, Google's wanting to get directly in that business. Or instead of going to Zillow, you can find the same information directly on Google. There's a lot of potential implications here, from the incumbent portals to exclusive listings to AI and international. But for now, it's all speculation. The test seems to be partnered with Come Home and House Canary. He added that the property results aren't supplied or sponsored by listing agents or brokers. Shares in Rocket Companies, which owns a Redfin, fell 4.6%. The online brokerage, Compass, dropped 3.8%. World Holdings, Expedia, dropped 6.1%. House, H-O-U-S, shares slipped 3%. Armax dropped 4.5%. And Google stock is basically flat. So here you have Google, reportedly just testing one feature for one market, which is real estate. And a whole slew of companies, like the entire industry in this whole category, all the stocks are getting crushed. They're all going down 3%, 6%, 10%. And this is the power of Google. Google becomes such a big risk for companies almost immediately because they already have so much demand. They already have such customer trust. There's so many people that go to them every single day that if they start surfacing information right on their search page that your business does, it can become a big competitive threat. There's always the arguments of whether or not Google's gonna work with you or it'll be better over time. But Google's gonna do ultimately what's in their own best interest. If that means directing traffic to their search engine, making it more powerful, making it better, then that is going to affect these companies. So it's just one more example of an instance where Google does one little thing and it just crushes other companies. We're gonna be seeing this a lot more over the next five years. And it's why Google, in part, remains one of my top picks. It's my second to largest holding behind MasterCard. And I keep it there because I believe Google's just such a powerful company. They can do so many things with their already huge platform that will continue to drive earnings growth long into the future. Now, moving on, we get to the fail of the week, which in this case is Elizabeth Warren. We just have news that one good company, one American company, just filed for bankruptcy after being out-competed by Chinese rivals. The company's called iRobot. It was a maker of Roomba. Now, it's normal for businesses to come and go. It's normal for businesses to become big and fail over time. That is capitalism. Capitalism is fiercely competitive. And the story of a business like iRobot failing is nothing unique. But where this story takes a turn is the unjustified failing of iRobot. It's a failing that should have never happened in the first place because iRobot is a company that should be owned by Amazon. Amazon, at one point, just a few years ago, tried buying iRobot. They wanted to pay $1.7 billion for the company. This is the free exchange in the market. A big company that's successful sees a smaller company with a product that would enhance the bigger company's offering, and they do an acquisition. In the acquisition, both parties benefit. The party that's getting acquired benefits because they're trying to make a company successful. They built a product and prototype. They have all the technology and infrastructure already put together. They have the know-how, but they may not have the long-term capital to be able to compete with other bigger rivals. So being acquired, in many cases, makes sense, and it rewards all the people that worked to create this company. So iRobot and their leadership and their employees were excited about being acquired by Amazon. Amazon was excited to have their own foot in the robot game. Amazon wasn't making robots themselves. They weren't manufacturing them. They had no big market share of robot vacuums at all, so they were looking to acquire. A mutually beneficial acquisition. But this acquisition, like so many others, was met with immediate pushback. Immediate pushback from many different parties, from the SEC, from many European regulators, and then from one person that seems to always push back. One person that, no matter what is being acquired or who's doing the acquiring, is always in opposition. And one person that was louder and more vocal in their pushback than anyone else, which is Elizabeth Warren. Here we have a news report. This is from three years ago when the acquisition was proposed, noting the immediate pushback. Good afternoon, Shauna. That's right. Senator Elizabeth Warren and a handful of House Democrats sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission today calling on the agency to oppose Amazon's acquisition of iRobot on concerns that it could squelch competition and hurt consumers' privacy. Senator Warren writing, quote, I have serious concerns about the Amazon iRobot deal. Dominant companies like Amazon should not be allowed to just buy their way out of competing. The FTC should oppose this proposed merger to protect competition, lower consumer prices, and rein in Amazon's well-documented anti-competitive activities. Now, of course, Elizabeth Warren got exactly what she wanted. Amazon, the big bad company, was blocked from buying iRobot and enhancing the features and backing it with its financial strength. iRobot was never able to be acquired by Amazon. The owners of iRobot, the creators of it, the employees were never rewarded with that $1.8 billion paycheck. And instead they were left in a financially desperate position competing with larger Chinese competitors. Now we fast forward three years and the Roomba maker iRobot files for bankruptcy pursuing a manufacturer buyout. The manufacturer in this case of iRobots are, wouldn't you know, Chinese. So now the Chinese is actually owning the intellectual property of iRobot when the company was previously American. It was an American company designing these robots that was manufactured in China, but now China's going to own everything from the design to the manufacturing. The companies that are leading in this category today are the likes of Roborock, a fully Chinese company that's out-competed iRobot and now is winning this race in the robot vacuum category. Even the companies like Dyson can't keep up. So effectively the outcome of this blocked acquisition is that Amazon was robbed from an asset that they could have benefited from. Amazon could have infused iRobot with a lot of financial strength. They could have helped embolden the design team. They could have integrated it into some of their other products in their home category to make it more valuable. And today many of the employees at iRobot could still be working there instead of being fired as they seek bankruptcy. At the same time, Amazon could have competed against Chinese rivals like Roborock. They could have had a product that was actually competitive against them. But now Chinese companies own almost the entire market of the robot vacuum segment. So in essence, what the FTC did, what European regulators did, and what the most vocal advocate of blocking these acquisitions did was enable foreign competitors over their American counterparts. They hurt American businesses. They took money directly away from American employees that created these companies that should have been rewarded with the sale to Amazon. And you might say that this was just a one-off blunder, that Elizabeth Warren, you know, she made a mistake here, but this is just kind of like a one-off thing. It doesn't always happen. And that's just not the case. If you look at her history, Elizabeth Warren is almost invariably, inevitably against every single acquisition from one large company to a smaller one. Every single one. It doesn't even matter what the category is. Elizabeth Warren opposed JetBlue merging with Spirit Airlines over the same concern of anti-competitive behavior, which Spirit Airlines subsequently went into bankruptcy. Another two companies in the US trying to merge just to stay alive, and one of them goes bankrupt after the government blocks it. Elizabeth Warren vocally opposed the merger of Kroger and Albertsons, two retail chains trying to stay alive in the midst of competition from Costco, Amazon, and Walmart. And after those didn't go through, after it was blocked, her successful again, Albertsons is a mess. The sales are going down, they're closing locations. They've never been in a worse situation before. If they were able to combine, it would be lower prices for consumers as scale equates to lower prices, exactly what Costco does. But now that they are unable to combine, now that the government got their way, consumers have higher prices and fewer locations to shop from. If we look at some of the history again of the different acquisitions and mergers that she's opposed, it's so incredibly exhaustive. Again, it's almost every company that's ever wanted to combine. We can look at the Capital One and Discover, she's opposed, vocally opposed to it. JetBlue, Spirit Airlines, Frontier Airlines, Netflix and Warner Brothers Discovery, no surprise there. Warner Media and Discovery, Microsoft and Activision, she was opposed to that. She was opposed to Amazon buying iRobot, Amazon buying One Medical, Amazon buying MGM, Amazon buying Whole Foods. She was vocally opposed to all of those. Many of them went through, but she was opposed. We also have T-Mobile and US Cellular. We have T-Mobile and Sprint. We also have the CVS and Aetna, she was opposed against that. CVS and Oak Street Health. We have Amgen and Horizon Therapeutics. We have Endeavor and Opient in the pharmaceutical industry. We have Cardinal Health and GI Alliance. We have Cardinal Health and Integrated Oncology. We have Sanderfarm and Wayne Farms. Senator Warren was against those as well. We have ExxonMobil and Pioneer Natural Resources, two energy companies, she was opposed against that. We have Facebook and Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp. Elizabeth Warren is actually calling for retroactive unwinds of those companies. So since she wasn't opposed to it at the beginning, she's opposed to it now and wants them to be broken up. She also wants to break up Google and Waze. She wants to break up Google and DoubleClick. She wants to break up Google and Nest so you can't have your Nest home integrated with your Google system. And the list goes on and on and on. It doesn't matter what the company is. It doesn't matter if the market is really competitive or not competitive. In any case, with every acquisition of two large companies, there's one thing that's for certain. Elizabeth Warren will oppose it. She'll advocate strongly against it. She's made it so that she's like the boy who cries wolf. Maybe some of these acquisitions should be opposed. Maybe there is a sound reason why two companies combining would be an antitrust risk, but it doesn't matter to her. Every one of them is opposed. It doesn't matter what acquisition it is. There's no nuance. There's no rhyme or reason. There's no logic behind it. In her eyes, any two companies that are combining are anti-competitive. And you see that throughout her entire history. In many cases, giving someone the power in Senate to influence the government to go after all these companies can have devastating consequences. And that is why we highlight her today as the fail of the week. That's gonna be it for this time. Hope you enjoyed. See you in the next one.