Where Is Smart Money Going In This Market?

Plus: McDonald's Plays Chicken With Flagging Beef Revenues

Author

Cheddar's Big Business This Week
September 24, 2026

BROUGHT TO YOU THIS WEEK BY:

The world is changing quickly, and asset managers are typing to stay ahead of the changes. Insurance and risk advisory giant Marsh has just released its annual survey of the institutions that manage pensions, endowments and other big pools of money around the world, and where they put their money. The survey polled firms that hold about $5 trillion under management. BBTW columnist Peter Green spoke with Julius Bendikas, Marsh's U.S. head of economics and dynamic asset allocation, for some insight into what asset managers are worried about, where they're moving their money, and what it means for your retirement savings.

What's the big takeaway from the survey?

The biggest near term risk or worry is inflation. That is the bottom line. People are worried about inflation. The reason people are worried about inflation primarily is because of the energy shock. And the energy shock is coming because of geopolitics. And that has informed very significantly where their asset allocation intentions are. Or to put it in layman’s terms, where they think they need to put their money for the next year. And where they put the money is in everything that is linked to inflation.

Give us an example.

People are deploying the marginal cash that they have right now to infrastructure, which has the power to price linked to inflation. Think about tolls. This is a very simple example, but tolls increase with inflation every year. So it's very sensitive to the inflation rate. And investors really chase that because they worry about inflation. It’s not just bridges and roads. It’s private infrastructure, like the AI buildout.

What about bonds?

Some bonds are, as you know, let's say U.S. Treasuries, they're nominal bonds. Some bonds are inflation-linked or what we call real bonds. Real bonds have sensitivity to inflation a bit more than nominal bonds. So people are moving from one to another because they fear inflation. And if inflation surprises, then nominals will be underperforming the real bonds.

Is that shift why interest rates on government debt have been rising?

The reason yields moved up in general is not because of this investor flow, but just because economies have been much more resilient. Oil has been going up a lot. There's concerns around fiscal policy.

Inflation is the short-term worry. What about the long term?

Over the short term, everyone's speaking about inflation. Fair enough. But over the long term, the biggest theme, and it's the third in the short term too, the biggest theme is AI.

There's trillions of dollars being spent on AI. And the natural question everyone is raising for good reason is, are we going to get return on that? Is the capital going to get wasted? Is the capital going to be productively used? Is that going to trigger productivity gains?

Will AI trigger productivity gains?

We're confident that in the short term, it's very strong momentum because a lot of the revenue is already booked in because of the huge backlog of compute. Over the long term, we're also very certain that AI is going to be a hit because of the long-term productivity impact. But the journey from the short term to the long term might be a bit volatile because inevitably, there's going to be some losers and winners. Inevitably, there's going to be some sort of friction and some capital being wasted. So I think that's the punchline: Long-term, confidence that it's going to work. Short-term, optimism that it's still very much a strong momentum. Medium-term is concerns around the path.

There are also growing worries about data security. Are investors taking that seriously?

A lot of the companies, a lot of the asset owners, are quite bullish on incorporating AI. More than 50% are incorporating AI, but only a small percentage is saying that we're building controls around it. So AI first, governance second, is one of the themes that we've observed in the survey, and that could come to bite as we journey through the many years ahead.

Will today's AI winners stay on top?

If you look at the market leadership in equities, decade by decade, it's never the same. In the 1980s, it was all Japanese companies, all the Japanese banks. So who knows what companies over the next 10 years are going to be dominant. Maybe a sustainable farming company is going to be the one. You don't know that.

As far as the AI specifically, it's clear that the market sentiment has moved on from anything AI I want to build up, to I want to build up the winners. It's clear that smaller companies are beginning to catch up. And if AI does indeed begin to deliver the productivity gains, the smaller businesses can benefit. And the access point to that tech is not that expensive. All of this is telling me that it's an okay time to own equities. It's an okay time to be glass half full. Just don't concentrate your risk too much by being a hero and, say, shorting Nvidia or something like that.

The survey shows investors holding a lot of cash. Are they running scared?

I wouldn't summarize that as investors are dumping risk and moving into cash. I would say cash-like assets are becoming more popular and alternative assets like hedge funds are finding their vibe again because of what they can offer.

Why hedge funds?

Hedge funds have the luxury of long and short. Hedge funds have the luxury of running unique risks in a portfolio that are not correlated or are not driven by the same things that equities and bonds are. So in simple terms, access to unique risks and unique strategies is why hedge funds deserve a spot in a well-diversified portfolio.

Private equity firms are struggling to sell the companies they own. Are investors losing faith?

Almost everyone in the survey owns private markets, so there's still general optimism around owning [PE]. There's obviously concerns, and in the survey, there's concerns on liquidity, concerns on cash flow. But it's not a dynamic where people lose faith in private markets. I think these concerns are generally overblown.

The survey also shows investors moving into emerging markets, meaning countries such as China, India and Brazil. Why?

Everyone wants to buy EM equities. In the survey, it's clear people are selling US, UK, buying EM and buying global. So people are concerned about the concentration, people are concerned about the overexposure to the AI theme, and people are buying EM, which is actually very AI-exposed.

But a lot of investors have actually ridden the ride of US equities, outperforming everyone else. So they were probably overweight, so they're just paring back a bit of that overweight. It's simply trimming back on the previous winners and deploying that into EM.

Finally, what should someone with a 401(k) or pension take from all this?

Ask yourself: Do you think your portfolio is sufficiently resilient to inflation shock? Is your portfolio sufficiently resilient to geopolitical shock? Is your portfolio sufficiently resilient to AI shock? These are the kind of questions to ask yourself. But the general view from the house here to an average investor is glass-half-full on growth, glass-half-full on inflation, again, glass-half-full on the Fed, and it's a reasonable time to own risk. But as you own that risk, make sure you shape your portfolio accordingly to those risks.

(This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and brevity).

—Peter S. Green

Big Businesses mentioned this week:

This week, big business!

The Usual Suspects

  • Paramount Supreme: The colossal game of Hollywood chicken over the merger of Paramount $PSKY ( ▲ 2.21% ) and Warner Brothers $WBD ( ▲ 0.26% ) ended this week with a meek squawk from California Attorney General Rob Bonta and the 11 other state AGs who joined him in a lawsuit they argued was needed to save America’s entertainment industry. Now, the merger won’t be blocked. Production by both studios is only guaranteed for five years. Layoffs are not banned. CNN and the cable channels won’t be spun off. And the mountain of debt used to finance the deal remains as interest rates climb ever higher. What happened? California Gov. Gavin Newsom and L.A. Mayor Karen Bass took seriously the threats by Paramount's chief, nepomogul David Ellison, to move the whole shebang to Nashville. A government report leaked to Politico said a pullout by Paramount would cost L.A. some 29,000 to 58,000 jobs and $10.6 to $21 billion in economic output every year. Was Ellison bluffing? Probably, but he won. So will the deal work? Paramount’s bid is backstopped by David’s father Larry, the Oracle $ORCL ( ▼ 3.47% ) founder and chair, who just scrapped a $7 billion sale of his own Oracle shares for fear of undermining a sorely needed round of financing at Oracle. If the combined Paramount can’t service its $80 billion in debt, the company could easily end up in the hands of the foreign investors who will own 49.5% of the merged company: The sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi. As longtime Hollywood watcher Sharon Waxman, who founded The Wrap news site, wrote in a New York Times op-ed: “There’s no sense of triumph or even defeat in Hollywood, merely numb exhaustion. Big changes are coming for the century-old entertainment industry, which until now was never seriously threatened…” 

  • Big Mac Attack—on Chicken: McDonald’s $MCD ( ▼ 0.55% ) may sell more beef burgers than anyone else in the world, but that’s a slowing market, and the chain now has its eye on chicken. The company told investors this week that annual fast-food chicken sales were $130 billion and growing 5% a year in the 10 largest markets, while beef sales hit just $50 billion, growing at only 3%. Rising inflation and a worsening economy is hitting Mickey D’s main customer base, of lower-income eaters, and GLP-1 weight loss drugs have cut appetites. Those are the combined likely causes of the 21% drop in the McDonald’s share price this year. “The industry growth algorithm is changing,” CEO Chris Kempczinski told shareholders. The only way to keep growing is to grab market share from others, he added. The company also said it will spend $8.5 billion over the next decade to help franchisees buy equipment and pay their rent. 

  • A better bet? Sure you can make money betting on sports, markets and global events with prediction markets, but a recent study showed that nearly all those winnings were collected by the smartest 3% of accounts. Now comes a chance for everyone to win. Prediction market Kalshi $KALSZZX ( ▲ 0.46% ) is weighing an IPO next year that could value it at $42 billion. In May, a $1 billion investment valued the company at $22 billion. Meanwhile, closely-held Kalshi is facing a Supreme Court challenge that would let individual U.S. states regulate it as a gambling concern. Right now the Commodities Futures Trading Commission regulates wagers on Kalshi as futures contracts.

  • Disney parks losing ground to the Magic Emirate: A Dubai theme park is outpacing Disney’s $DIS ( ▲ 2.03% ) Magic Kingdom in Orlando as the world’s most visited theme park, even though it’s only open in the desert’s dominion’s cooler months. Disney World in Orlando had an average 48,732 visitors a day in 2024, while Dubai’s Global Village drew an average 49,505 a day, according to data from the Themed Entertainment Association 

  • Boat Shoes: Cruise giant Royal Caribbean $RCL ( ▲ 3.77% ) says it’s agreed to buy half of closely-held Caribbean resort chain Sandals for $3 billion, in a bid to diversify away from softening demand for cruises. Sandals has more than a dozen seaside resorts. Royal Caribbean’s shares are down 30% in the past year. They fell 10% on Wednesday when the deal was announced. 

  • Six White Flags: Mr. Taylor Swift, aka Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce wants Six Flags $FUN ( 0.0% ) , the flagging amusement park chain, to surrender. Kelce is a brand ambassador for the parks, brought on by activist investor Barry Rosenstein’s Jana Partners hedge fund, but their effort to ride the amusement group to better times has failed, with Six Flags saying last month that its second quarter loss doubled to $202 million from 99.6 million a year earlier. Now Jana wants Six Flags to sell itself. Six Flags shares are down 73% in the past five years, but gained 1% on Rosenstein’s call. They’ll need to find a buyer, of course.

  • Back on the porch: Grandpa’s back in his rocker, and all is well with Cracker Barrel $CBRL ( ▲ 9.09% ) . At least that’s what new CEO David Deno says as the quickserve chain recovers from a disastrous, and politically charged, remake of its logo that got the woke right enraged. Deno says he’s focused on serving a better chicken dinner. For the year ending next July, Deno told investors he expects revenue to grow slightly to $3.4 billion from $3.32 billion last year. Shares are up 78% this year, after tumbling more than 40% during the rebranding snafu.

  • Door Dash’s $131.5 Million tip: Chalk one up for New York City’s Democratic Socialist Mayor, Zohran Mamdani, as he fights for the man in the street. Hand-tailored suits and handmade leather brogues aside, Mamdani just won a big one for New York’s legion of delivereros, those guys on electric bikes who bring you your take-out sushi when you’re too tired to make mac ‘n’ cheese for yourself. Some $115 million will go to 264,000 delivereros, most of it for not paying them while they were on call, awaiting new pickup orders. DoorDash $DASH ( ▼ 0.92% ) expressed its regret, and is fixing its payment system, but it notes that 65% of the shortchanged drivers were owed $1 or less per delivery. 

ADVERTISEMENT

Most firms sell a product. We build plans and take positions. Keebeck is a modern family office for founders and families who want clarity, speed, and alignment.

We co-invest our own capital alongside clients, so the incentives stay aligned. One transparent fee. No product stacking. AI powers our research, cash-flow and tax modeling, and risk monitoring, so you get answers in real time and decisions that hold up in the real world.

Keebeck translates complex data into simple direction and stands next to you through the full life cycle of an investment, not just the pitch. Public markets. Private deals. Estate, tax, and governance. Liquidity when it matters.

We measure success in outcomes, not AUM. We show our work: every model, every assumption, every fee.

If you want spreadsheets, hire a software developer. If you want a partner with skin in the game, call Keebeck Wealth Management.

Keebeck Wealth Management. Helping you become the CEO of your capital.

END OF ADVERTISEMENT

AI-Yei Yei

  • About that AI Death Star: So is AI gonna kill us all? Maybe, but first it’s getting a lot of our attention while we still have it. Meta’s $META ( ▲ 4.69% ) new Muse, a personal assistant bot supposed to be Meta’s AI triumph, got rave reviews last week, sending Metra shares up 11% on Monday, but it’s already hitting some potholes. Amazon $AMZN ( ▲ 0.09% ) has blocked Muse from shopping there, and Google $GOOGL ( ▲ 1.4% ) and Microsoft $MSFT ( ▼ 0.6% ) are expected to launch their own AI personal assistants shortly. Meta shares are up 15% since Friday, reversing a slide that now has the shares up 1% in the past 12 months. But can Meta hold on? A number of analysts say Muse could boost Meta’s share price by as much as 20% this year. And before it kills us all, Anthropic $ANTHZZX ( ▲ 1.74% ) , the first major AI firm to call for a brake-slam this year, says it’s cashing out while it can: It still plans an IPO this year that would value the company at $2 trillion. That’s 20x its annualized revenue of $100 billion. To back up its bona fides as the AI firm to watch, Anthropic this week released a faster, cheaper and safer model, Opus 5.5.

  • National-AI-ze? AI-adjacent exec Alex Karp, CEO of AI-powered defense and surveillance contractor Palantir $PLTR ( ▲ 0.36% ) , said in a TV interview that can only be described as bizarre, that AI is so unsafe, that the liability risk it poses to shareholders as a private company is impossibly large, and the federal government needs to nationalize all the AI companies. As if to drive Karp’s point home, Canada’s British Columbia province sued OpenAI $OPEAZZX ( ▼ 0.49% ) in San Francisco this week, saying the AI giant was partially responsible for a school shooting last year that killed nine people. The suit says OpenAI had flagged the shooter's account, but higher-ups at the firm rejected a recommendation to notify police and simply shut the shooter’s account. Speaking for the Trump Administration, Treasury Sec. Scott Bessent said the government would not be a “liability shield” for the hyperscalers. 

  • Space-Ex’d: Google $GOOG ( ▲ 1.22% ) is expected to be the first company to put a satellite into space to test the concept of orbiting AI data centers, and its experiment is raising a host of questions. The Google satellite, part of Project Suncatcher, is set to launch next month. It’s the size of a fridge, will use solar panels to generate electricity for its four tensor chips, about the size of a single rack in an earth-bound data center, and will run for a year, as Google tests the reliability of its tech in outer space. But the satellite is expected to last for only six years, before slipping out of orbit and burning up. That raises a host of questions for plans like that of Elon Musk’s SpaceX $SPCX ( ▼ 0.73% ) to put a million satellites into orbit and have data centers circling the globe: for instance, how to update chips in outerspace. Cooling the chips in the vacuum of space (where it’s cold but heat doesn’t transfer) is another issue Google hopes to address. The satellite is scheduled to be lifted off in a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, but the Falcon is being phased out over the next few years in favor of Musk’s Starship rocket, which has yet to prove its reliability.

Trumplandia

  • Strait jacket: The war on Iran has pushed diesel fuel up to $6.51 a gallon, and gasoline to $4.48, with Brent Crude hovering around $105 a barrel. That lower barrel price could portend a drop in retail prices, but for now, insurance costs and a diminishing supply of oil tankers are expected to keep prices high, even as the Saudis repair the pipeline that takes their oil to the Red Sea. The Trump Administration has proposed a development program with Gulf states and private investors to build alternative exits for Gulf oil and refined products, but no Gulf states have signed on yet. 

  • Oiling the machinery: it pays to have friends in high places: Two groups connected to the Trump family are making major oil deals for assets partially controlled by the U.S. government. In Venezuela, Trump ally and $2 million campaign donor Harold Hamm, chair of Continental Resources, said he’s reached agreement with the state oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela, to start drilling there. Financier and LA Dodgers co-owner Todd Boehly, himself a $2 million donor to pro-Trump PAC MAGA, Inc., is bidding for the sanctioned international assets of Russian oil major Lukoil. Boehly’s partners in the bid include the Emirati national security adviser, a Syrian-Qatari family that’s invested alongside the Trump family, and the US International Development Finance Corporation, a government agency run by Ben Black, the son of Trump friend and Epstein Files headliner Leon Black, who is the former CEO of private equity firm Apollo $APOON ( ▲ 0.07% ) .

  • Mortgage massacre. That house you wanted to buy? Might not happen. Mortgage rates just broke 7% for the first time since January 2025, a psychological barrier suggesting that a downward trend that saw rates drop to 6% earlier this year is over, as inflation, fuel prices, and stagnant employment put the squeeze on a traditional backbone of the U.S. economy. In one indication of trouble, earlier this week homebuilder KB Home $KBH ( ▲ 1.06% ) said revenue fell 20% in the third quarter from a year ago. “A move from 6 to 7 is a big change,” said Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, a housing finance professor at Columbia Business School told the New York Times, “and it will further dampen an already weak housing market.”

Want more Cheddar?

You’re clearly into smart people talking about even smarter things. Lucky for you, that's literally our whole deal at Cheddar. We interview the brightest minds in business, finance, and tech. If you'd like more in-depth analysis from interesting people, lcheck out our where to watch page and turn us on 24/7! Your wallet will thank you and so, more importantly, will your mind. But also your wallet. Remember that. 

Peter S. Green is a veteran reporter and editor who has spent more than two decades covering business and finance from Eastern Europe to New York City, and has worked for Bloomberg News, The New York Post, The New York Times and The Messenger. He lives in New York City and is always looking for the next big story. Email him here.