Dear Reader,
This is Dylan Jovine with Behind the Markets.
Happy Tuesday. Today is Tuesday, June 23rd.
I picked up an interesting piece in the Financial Times this morning that I wanted to share with you.
Bain Capital — one of the world's leading deal advisors — has set up a team of programmers doing something called vibe coding.
They're using AI to recreate the business models of publicly traded companies.
Hundreds of prototypes.
The goal is simple: figure out how easy it is to replicate what these companies do, and how much of a real competitive advantage they actually have.
What they're finding is what we've been finding too.
A lot of companies out there are at serious risk of AI wiping their businesses away entirely. It's unbelievable when you really look at it.
This tracks with something else worth paying attention to.
Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, came out recently and said publicly that you can't have a situation where two or three companies capture all of the economic value from every other company on Earth. The population won't support it.
And now you have Microsoft and Google — fierce competitors — essentially joining forces to push back on that outcome. Competition makes for strange bedfellows, every single time.
The Report You Should Read
I've spent real time looking at this myself, and we put together a report for Behind the Markets members that I think is genuinely important. I went through the market company by company and asked: who is most at risk, and who has the most durable moat?
Some of the names I flagged as most at risk: Accenture, Adobe, Interpublic, Invesco, Franklin Resources. Companies where AI doesn't just threaten market share — it threatens the entire reason they exist.
On the other side, I ranked the strongest competitive moats in the S&P 500. High, medium, and low. The companies where AI is a tool, not a threat. I urge you to read it.
Alan Greenspan - The Maestro
Before I let you go — Alan Greenspan passed away yesterday at 100 years old.
He was the first Fed chairman I really understood. They called him The Maestro, and the name fit. I heard him speak in New York once, and someone asked about the collapse of the Soviet Union. He dismissed it almost casually. "They collapsed because of oil prices." Like it was the most obvious thing in the world.
I was in my twenties, and that one sentence opened a door for me that never closed. Here was a man who understood that oil prices could bring down an empire.
That geopolitics, military strength, national wealth, and energy were all the same conversation.
That insight very much shaped the way I look at the world today.
Reagan understood this too. He was deliberate about flooding the oil market to bankrupt the Soviet Union. Shrewd operator. And if you look at what's happening right now — the working group at the Eisenhower Building focused on energy dominance, the moves on Venezuela and Iran, the pressure on Saudi Arabia — Trump is running the same playbook.
Keeping the dollar as the world's reserve currency. Maintaining our comparative advantage. It's all connected.
Little things teach you big things, if you're paying attention. Greenspan taught me that.
Have a great day. I'll see you tomorrow.
“The Buck Stops Here,”
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Written by Dylan Jovine