forexlivehace 124d
Have a look at the IGV ETF, which has become the poster child for the latest market selloff. It's down 4.9% today and 32% since October.The thinking is clear: AI agents are going to rule the internet. You won't go to websites anymore, you'll ask AI to do things and everything will happen in the context window. Particularly vulnerable are companies that rely on you paying for an interface, like Thomson Reuters, which sorts and annotates legal data as a large part of its business. That data isn't proprietary and an LLM agent can take over, crushing a software business with a high monthly subscription cost.Much of the damage has been done to these stocks and we're getting to the point where people are sifting through the wreckage. The largest component of the IGV (look at that volume) is Microsoft, which is down 18% in the past six sessions, including 4.9% today. Notice on the IGV chart above that volume is surging and many are likely shorting it as a hedge, though that shouldn't really affect a behemoth like MSFT. I suspect the thinking is that if you need fewer white collar workers, you will simply need fewer licences for Windows and Office.On the flipside, winners are likely to be companies where their core data is generated by the business itselfthrough proprietary processes that can’t be scraped, licensed, or synthesizedby an LLM. Think of them more like utilities than software.Here are three in the financial space that have huge moats. Some have been beaten up and today's price action in TradeWeb (+9% on earnings as a software stock on a day like today) shows how quickly they could bounce back.All three aretrading below their historical average multiples because the market is lumpingthem in with the interface-moat companies getting destroyed. S&P Global (SPGI) - 24-26x forward P/ES&P Global’s moat hasnothing to do with its interface. It’s that S&P credit ratings are writteninto bond indentures, loan covenants, and Basel capital requirements byname. Replacing them would mean rewriting hundreds of thousands of legalcontracts and renegotiating regulatory frameworks across dozens ofjurisdictions. Nobody’s doing that.The S&P Dow Jones Indicesbusiness has over $17 trillion in assets benchmarked and more than $2.2trillion in ETF AUM directly linked to its indices. Commodity Insights (Platts)provides price assessments that serve as contractual benchmarks in physicalcommodity markets. These aren’t data products. They’re standards.The numbers are clean. Q3 2025revenue up 9% to $3.89 billion. Adjusted EPS up 22%. Ratings segment running60%+ adjusted margins. FY2026 consensus sits around $19.10—call it 11% growth.They’re returning roughly 85% of adjusted free cash flow to shareholders. At aforward P/E of approximately 24–26x, this is below the five-year average ofroughly 40x.Here’s what I find mostinteresting. S&P Global isn’t fighting LLMs for the interface—it’s embracingthe role of infrastructure. They’ve already signed data API partnerships withMicrosoft, Anthropic, Google, Salesforce, and IBM. If LLMs become the dominantinterface for financial analysis, S&P’s data becomes the layer underneathevery query. That’s not disruption. That’s a promotion.MSCI (MSCI) - 29-30x forward P/EMSCI’s indices aren’t dataproducts. They’re financial infrastructure. Trillions in institutional mandatesare contractually benchmarked to MSCI indices. Changing your index providerisn’t like switching software vendors—it requires board-level decisions,mandate renegotiations, and regulatory filings. Years, not quarters.The ACWI, EAFE, and EmergingMarkets indices set the benchmark for institutional asset allocation globally.Every dollar of new ETF AUM linked to an MSCI index generates licensing revenueat near-zero marginal cost. It’s one of the highest-margin businesses infinance.Revenue growth running around10–12%, EPS growth similar, driven by margin expansion and buybacks. Theforward P/E is roughly 29–30x—meaningfully below its five-year historicalaverage of about 42x.The LLM angle is simple. When anAI agent rebalances a portfolio, the benchmark will be an MSCI product. When anLLM answers “how should I allocate across international markets?”, it’llreference MSCI indices. The interface changes—from Bloomberg terminal to chatwindow—but the standard doesn’t. MSCI’s value is completely independent of thedelivery mechanism.Tradeweb Markets (TW) - 30x forward P/EThis is the rare name where LLMsare a clear positive.Tradeweb runs the dominantelectronic trading platform for fixed income. The moat is the two-sided network of liquidity providers and institutional buyers. Moreparticipants means better pricing means more participants. Classic networkeffects. And you can’t license “liquidity” from an alternative provider.Revenue grew approximately 13.8%year-over-year in today's annual report and it's debt free. Forward P/E isn't cheap at around 30x but it's grown revenues by double digits for 7 years in a row. What you’re paying for is the secular shift from voice-negotiatedto electronic trading in the $130+ trillion global fixed-income market—a shiftthat has decades of runway left. Bond markets are still far less electronicthan equity markets.Now think about what happens as AI agents start executing trades. Theyneed electronic venues with deep liquidity. An LLM routes an order to Tradewebfar more efficiently than a human trader negotiating over the phone. AI doesn’tdestroy Tradeweb’s business model, it improves it.Here's a comment in today's earnings transcript that's telling: "The geopolitical complexity kind of/drama whether or not we want to think about like the debasement trade or diversification away from U.S. assets. At a minimum, what we're talking about, obviously, is central bank policy divergence. From our perspective, what's that going to do? It's going to spur more cross-border trading, more global activity. And we have, as you know well, a global enterprise. And our international business is exceptionally strong. So in January, we saw exceptionally good results from our European swaps business, European government bonds. Very strong numbers coming out of European credit. The revenues there were up 40%. Big news obviously happening this month in Japan, our JGB revenues were up 30% in January." This article was written by Adam Button at investinglive.com.