“If you don't buy Boeing, you're probably buying Airbus. That's not how the ratings business works. They complement each other. So if you have a Moody's rating, you also need an S&P rating.”
The Investor's Podcast (We Study Billionaires) - The Investor’s Podcast Network · November 2026
Context
Stig was explaining why the credit ratings business, about half of S&P Global's operating income, is so attractive even though a few firms dominate it. He argues the big agencies are complements rather than substitutes.
Transcript
…the show. Can I ask you, Hari, whenever you hear, I know I'm completely digressing here, but now you brought it up. Whenever you hear OpenAI and Anthropic talk about that they want to be regulated, how much do you think they're actually saying, please create barriers of entry for our competitors?
…discussions, they always use pharma as an example saying, Do you want us to be like FDA, having an FDA for AI? It will slow down the innovation. It'll become like pharma and we don't want to get there. So that's that's an interesting comparison and to see how the AI industry is looking at pharma.
All right. Fantastic. Thank you so much, Hari. Toby, will you allow me to take it away with my pick? I took a new position just a few hours here before we hit record. And I know for a lot of people, a lot of the listeners, it's not a big deal because they do that all the time. It's been more than a year ago since I last initiated a position. I have all kinds of biases, like everyone else, I guess, but I sometimes tend to get bored. And so it's not good to get bored whenever you invest. And so I set up all kinds of guardrails for myself, not to invest too often. And one of the things that I do here, just holding this up here to the camera, is that I always force myself to read at least three years of earnings releases before I can put a cent into a stock. And lo and behold, it actually works quite a bit because that means that I don't think that, oh, this sounds exciting. Let me invest in that. Anyways, the stock that I'm going to pitch that I just took a position in here…
I'll go first. I'm a huge fan of SPGR. It's one of the world's great companies. Incredibly moti, incredible high returns on invested capital. Very well protected. As you say, if you think that the world's gonna keep on issuing debt, then stay away. But I think that's a pretty good bet that the…
I sometimes feel that it's whenever you see a stock chart that's moving sideways or even seeing one that's just going south, you're like, oh my God, this is an amazing opportunity. And then depending on your mood, sometimes you're like, oh, this has gone up for the past five years. It's probably…
Yeah, a very, very interesting pick, Steve. And as Toby said, this is one of those companies, Moody's and S&P Global,. Those of us who have been admirers of Buffett, we have heard Buffett saying Moody's or SP is like a great business. Always looked in envy because the valuations were always very…
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