Should You Still Trust US Stocks? + Leaving Corporate America in Your 20s

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When you finally find your thing, you want the whole world to know about that thing.

So you use a thing called Kemba to make it an even bigger than better thing. Whether you want to create flyers to that thing, make presentations for that thing or design merch for that thing. You can do anything. So people can see your thing, feel your thing, love your thing.

The next thing you know, it's a thing. Kemba, the thing that makes anything a thing. Welcome to Office Hours with PropG. This is the part of the show where we answer questions about business, big tech, entrepreneurship. And whatever else is on your mind.

Anyways, or anyway, excuse me, anyway. That's right.

“Chelsea Hamler gave me shit for saying anyways all the time.”

So anyway. If you'd like to submit a question for next time, instead of voice recording to Office Hours with PropGmd.com, again, that's Office Hours with PropGmd.com or post your questions on the Scott Galois subreddit. And we just might feature it in our next episode.

I don't go to the subreddit if they sometimes say, "Mean things about me and it hurts my feelings." It hurts my feelings.

Anyways, our first question comes from John from the UK, John says, "Dear Scott, love

the podcast. Thanks John." My question is on the investment time horizon. I've heard your recent comments on investing in U.S. equities versus international equities and the relative returns 2026 year to date for each.

If we're looking at a time horizon, decades, in my case, two plus decades, does that change your view? For such a long time horizon, do you still recommend low-cost index funds if so, U.S. focus or other thanks? Okay, so the question does a 20-year plus time horizon change the case for U.S.

focus versus globally diverse by low-cost index funds. If you look at the past few decades, what you see is that leadership is cyclical, not permanent. And that is the U.S. dominated markets or global markets for the past 15 years. But international equities led for much of the 70s, 80s, and again through the 2000s.

So it is cyclical from 2010 to 2024, U.S. equities performed in 12 of the 15 calendar years, the longest such streak, and recorded history. But since 1975, the average of performance cycle has just been eight years. After we went, we had basically a 15 or a 17-year winning streak, which was twice as long as most winning streaks in terms of regions.

The current U.S. cycle has already run, as we said, about 15 years as of late 2025. If you were to bet exclusively on the U.S. over the next 20 years, you're effectively betting on that the longest cycle in history just keeps going. There's been, and that doesn't typically happen. There's been a recent reversal in 2025 international equities.

It's gained 31 percent in dollar terms outperforming U.S. stocks by about 15 percentage points, the biggest margin since 1993.

So here's what the forecasters are saying.

Vanguard projects U.S. stocks returning to support a 5% annually over the next 5 to 10 years. Almost entirely driven by stretched large cap tech valuations, and Vanguard's model gives a 70% probability that international stocks outperform U.S. over the next decade. Quality projects U.S. equities returning 3.2 percent over the next 20 years, roughly a third of the real returns delivered since 2005.

In terms of valuation, or how I like to just look at stuff, over half of the international sector trades at, or below their 20-year median forward PE, so they're still a relatively dismalue, and every single U.S. sector trades above it. Japan looked unstoppable in the 80s before entering multiple decades of underperformance,

is no guarantee of future performance, as I say.

So what's the answer? In my view, if you have a 20-year plus horizon, the key is to be diversified. You don't need to find the needle in the haystack just by the whole haystack. I would buy U.S. equities, but I would also diversify costs. Asset classes, not only equities, but bonds, and I would also diversify geographically.

Now, with a 20-year time horizon and being beyond, quite frankly, you can be a little bit more aggressive, so if you're going to invest in a European fund, a Vanguard European

“and it might be European growth, I think you could probably, if you were looking at,”

fixed income, look at some more exotic stuff, like distressed equity or a PE fund, I think you can be a little bit more risk aggressive. If you, it sounds like you're a young man. If you're my age, you want to start to scale down your risk and really diversify. In your age, you can be a little bit more concentrated, but I would still go across different

asset classes and different regions. But be a little bit more aggressive in terms of the type of fund, and you can endure volatility. You can invest in funds that invest in private markets, and you could even perhaps invest in some things that aren't as liquid, because you want to play to your strengths. Time horizon, so you can withstand volatility.

You absolutely want to do low cost funds, and you could probably get into some alternatives whether it's private equity or funds raising money for venture capital or a low fee, because you can absorb some of the risks that older people can absorb. But again, what's the key, diversification? If you're just an SPY, you're not that diversified, because 40% of your investment is just

“in 10 companies, which dominate the indices right now, and you also want to be diversified”

geographically, and then you want to pick good funds, very low cost, and quite frankly, not look at them for a long time, because not only is it an investment of capital, a financial capital, it's an investment of your time, and so you want to find good funds that you feel good about, and then not have to invest your time looking at your phone or wondering what's going on.

You also may want to take 10%, 20% of it, and have some fun and pick stocks, individual stocks that you think might outperform. It's fun. You'll learn a lot. You track them.

And occasionally, you get lucky. Thanks for the question. Number two, comes from Thomas who emailed us.

Hi, Scott, first of all, I wanted to thank you for the great work that you do.

Thank you, Thomas. You and I have similar backgrounds. I was also raised by a single mom, and I too found my way into investment banking. I'm currently in my mid 20s and working municipal bonds, and all this has been financially rewarding.

I'm sick of working in corporate America. I have an uncle who has sold a couple of businesses to private equity firms, and we've tossed around the idea of starting a business, but I don't have many skills outside of what you learn on the job and I.B. I can grind, can do detailed financial analysts, and can put together and deliver a great

investor presentation. He's getting older, and I know that I would kick myself if I didn't take the opportunity to learn from him as an operator. My question is, if you were my edge today, what industry would you try to break into, if

“you have the time and willingness to work 80 plus hours per week?”

Okay, so first off, don't tell yourself short, you and I have very similar backgrounds.

I was in municipal finance of the fixed income department and Morgan Stanley, so we're doing the same thing. And you learned attention to detail, rigor, analytics, by virtue of the fact, you're out in investment bank, which are very selective. It means you have really strong skills, and you would probably make a very good entrepreneur

and a good operator. What field you go into? Preferently is opportunistic. What fields do you have contacts in? What fields is your uncle interested in or already in?

So if I said, yeah, in a vacuum, I would go into the intersection between AI and healthcare. But I don't know if you have the interest in healthcare or skills around AI or the ability to raise capital, which a business like that probably requires, or if your uncle is in the curtain hanging business and already has a business with six fans and you're going to take it over and apply, put your shoulder down and grow that business.

There is a big opportunity in the following, and that is if you have a little bit of capital going and buying a business, baby rumors, we're saying just an enormous wave of retirements of baby rumors, many of whom own small business, right, landscaping business, auto repair business, a company that installs appliances, all of these little businesses everywhere. And generally speaking, a lot of these companies, a lot of these people because of a lower

birth rates, don't have many kids to take over the business where the kids don't want to take over the business, right? Because what dad does is lame, or they just don't have anyone to take over the business. So you can show up a lot of times, and buy a nice little small business at and get seller financing.

In other words, I own, let's just go with the curtain company, the curtain hanging company, I just spent a bunch of money hanging curtains, and it was worth it. I love curtains.

I just go bonkers with a good curtain. I absolutely love them. I think they're so elegant.

“I think they're so sublime, I think they say a lot about me, right?”

Anyway, love curtains. So this guy, I spent a lot of money on this guy. And he was complaining that he didn't have, there's kids aren't interested in this business, and I think he makes a very good living. And if you approach someone and say, all right, I want to buy your business, I need one

year for you to stick around to train me, and then I'm going to give you some cash up front, but I'm going to give you royalty or a tail for the next three, five, ten years of x percent of the top line, such that you have a retirement.

So you basically buy the business and they finance it, if you will.

There's a ton of opportunity and small businesses. So having said that, maybe your uncle's already in a certain business, maybe you have a vision for something, but this is opportunistic, meet with your uncle on a regular basis, try and find something, and then start it, and see what happens. And if it's not working after two or three years, don't beat yourself up, go into the next

thing because, you know, small business is hard, but also as a former investment banker and fixed income, I found a lot of my skills and training. It was more about an approach to work, and hence into detail, and the willingness to work really hard and get along with others that makes for a good entrepreneur. So you have outstanding skills to be an entrepreneur, that's the luck to you.

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So why not you? Try Odo for free at Odo.com/propg. Welcome back, question number three comes from The Pie is a lie on Reddit. Hi, Scott. I've been following you since your book The Four, which I found to be an incredibly

insightful take on the success of Big Tech in our world. Thanks by the way, wrote that 10 years ago. My question is 10 years later, how do you think your analogies and predictions have held

Is there anything you would update given today's reality?

Hmm, so when I first started writing the book in 2015, it was basically a love letter.

“I mean, people don't remember, in 2015, we were trying to figure out if it was going to be”

Jeff Bezos or Sheryl Samburg that we're going to be president. By the way, Sheryl Samburg was supposedly going to be the VP for Secretary Clinton and or the Treasury Secretary or Bloomberg's VP and her Treasury Secretary and people were trying to get trapped Bezos to run for president and boys the warm turn. And my book was basically a love letter.

I made a lot of money investing these companies that was fascinated by them. By the time I got to chapter 3 and 4 and did a lot of research and talked with a lot of people in the industry, it turned into a cautionary tale. And that is how that's something is wrong here. And I'm not going to be humble here.

The book was preaching. I said, don't be fooled in this as again, 10 years ago. There's something wrong in Mudville that there's meta, does not have our best interest at heart.

Amazon is using predatory pricing to basically put other small retailers out of business,

consolidate the market.

“Their fulfillment costs went from 16% of the purchase to about, you know, some like 40.”

So the play is consolidate the market and then increase increase fees on your third party retailers. So the core idea of the four was that the biggest tech companies who won because essentially they won because they tapped into basic instincts. And that was Google was knowledge and answers. When you pray, what are you doing?

You're sending a query into the cosmos hoping that some divine entity with greater processing power than you will hear your prayer and then spit back an answer you can trust. That's Google. You're most personal items, you're most serious queries. You type into Google.

Now maybe into clutter or chat to VT. And you trusted more than your boss, mentor, girlfriend. You take your most serious questions to this new God and that's our brain. Facebook or meta was the heart. We want connections.

We want to be loved. We want affirmation. We don't want to be shamed. Apple was the genitals and that is status. If you have an iPhone, it's basically the most elegant kind of, I don't know, non-obvious

or subtle way of saying, I am wealthy. I am creative. You should have sex with me. Only a billion iPhone contract holders and those are the billion wealthiest people on the planet.

If you don't have an iPhone, you're kind of sending a signal to the world that things haven't worked out the way you'd hoped if you will and that you're a gene, the branch of your gene pool should come to an end. And then finally, Amazon is the stomach and that is my dog. No matter what time it is, we'll just pretty much eat until we take the food away because

dogs grew up with the experience on the savanna that there was never enough food.

So they want to just go and we have consumption mindset where we have an inability to let or our instincts have been cut up to institutional production. So we gore John, fatty foods on gambling, on porn. You know, these are things we can on feeling good on alcohol. We can't, when they're put in front of us, no one is telling us, wait, you don't need

to eat everything on your plate because guess what, you're going to have cheap calories in the morning. That's where it kind of would jail if you wanted to, and why they're so transformative in my mind, it's going to be bigger than AI. It essentially is scaffolding on our instincts that brings our instincts up to date.

But Amazon adopted the strategy of Walmart, of Dell, and of China, and that is the ultimate business strategy is more for less. And they were able to attract such cheap capital because business is such a visionary and such a great communicator, that they were able to basically give you a dollar worth of goods for 90 cents for good 10, 15 years in the consolidated market that's slowly

but surely start raising prices, but their scale, their operational excellence, just gives you a dollar worth of stuff for less than anybody else or almost less than everybody else, usually. And that is, that taps directly into our consumptive instinct, full stop. So these companies, I thought, if you want to build a trillion dollar market cap company,

“I think the first question you got to answer is, what instinct is this calling on?”

What is it about kind of our primitive past that it makes it obvious what this company is doing? Also the book was more about a fear around a lack of regulatory frameworks in the idolatry of this companies because they were making so much money, was while papering over some very troubling signals even back then in terms of radicalization of young men, putting

smaller businesses out of business, tax avoidance, what Apple was doing with these double Dutch strategies and basically fooling government into thinking, no, no, no, don't regulate us where you're winners.

grow totally unfettered, right?

So regulation exempt from the same regulation that newspaper is subject to because it's going to quote, they were on niece in platforms 29 years ago, things have changed dramatically.

“And also, so in some, I think I wasn't harsh enough.”

I didn't, I kind of missed how incredibly damaging it was going to be to our youth, the weaponization of our elections or the weaponization of these platforms by bad actors. I think when we look back on this era, we're going to regret the coursing of our discourse, the consolidation of industries and income inequality. But I think that thing we're going to regret the most is, well, two things, one, how do

we let this happen to our kids? And two, the shaping, I don't think people really come to grips with how much we are subject to mind control or opinion control because of bots, sometimes sponsored by bad actors or

the loudest minority, if you will, that shape or shame are views and shape the narrative.

I'm subject to it. If I say something in a hundred bots or people weigh in and say, Scott, you're tone deaf, just like an old white guy to say, I'm less reticent to say it again. So we have, unfortunately, a series of unknowns and bots and the most extreme on either side, shaping our narrative, which is resulted in polarization and inability to get up.

This is the least productive Congress in history.

“It's some of that in confidence of our elected representatives, maybe, but I think most of”

it is our fault. And that is, we've all decided we hate each other and that the enemy is necumenical, or climate change, or Russians pouring over the border in Ukraine, that the enemy is the guy, the neighbor down the street was a political sign that we don't like. So I think things have gotten worse. I think that it was a cautionary tale and I think

we got more right than wrong and I wish I'd been a little bit. I wish I spent more time talking about the impact on kids and how it shapes our views on politics and I also wish I'd spent more time looking at the CCP and the GRUs impact. Anyways, I might, who knows, maybe I should do an update and call it the five or I guess it's the ten now.

And things have changed a little bit. Big tech's more dominant. AI is making the biggest company stronger, not weaker. Tech companies now look more like infrastructure than apps. Yeah, governments are starting to wake up and regulate them. It took us about, you think about externalities.

It usually takes 20 to 30 years for the public to weigh in. It took 30 years in tobacco, it took 20 years in opioids and it looks like it's going to take 20 years in social media, social media, social media, mobile and 2013. And I imagine by 23, we'll have pushed back what's interesting is Microsoft really held on and became much more important to the AI in cloud computing.

The new player on the stage, I would argue is in video and became one of the most powerful

companies in the world because AI depends on chips and compute. And also, I think people recognize that social media has kind of shifted from friend of folks, specifically from friend networks to algorithm driven platforms, including TikTok that do not have our best interests at heart and elevate content that is in sendy area or more conspiracy minded because it's more novel creates conflict, more ads for Nissan,

more shareholder value. The original book was more about consumer psychology and platform dominance today. The story isn't increasing about AI infrastructure and compute. Thanks for the question. That's all for this episode.

If you'd like to submit a question, please email a voice recording to office hours in proptumina.com. Again, that's office hours of proptumina.com. Poor. If you prefer to ask on Reddit, just post your question on the Sky Gallery subreddit.

And we might feature it in an upcoming episode. This episode was produced by 10% Ches and Laura Jenerer. Can we reak as our social producer, Brad Williams, as our editor, and Drew Burrows, as our technical director. Thank you for listening to the proptumina pop from proptumina media.

Support for the show comes from Odo. Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with it doesn't different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odo. It's the only business software you'll ever need.

It's an all-in-one fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more. In the best part, Odo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost.

“That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch.”

So why not you? Try Odo for free at odo.com. That's odo.com. Support for the show comes from Odo. Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with it doesn't different apps

Introducing Odo.

It's the only business software you'll ever need.

It's an all-in-one fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more. And the best part, Odo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost.

“That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch.”

So why not you?

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