Ep 23: The Stock Market Explained with ONLY Taylor Swift Analogies

Jess: Jessie, I have a new motto for us.

Jessie: And what's that?

Jess: There will only be explanation because it's our reputation.

Jessie: Why does it feel like I've already stumbled into some sort of Swiftie land?

Jess: Jessie, it's happening. You have no idea what my brain has done. So first and foremost, if you are a Swiftie and find yourself clowning, I've been waiting for reputation to drop and I have been clowning so, so hard, but you will be a master of the stock market. I truly believe that because Swifties just sit there and decode everything and put puzzles together. And that's all the stock market is, is just understanding different components and what they mean and putting that puzzle together. And it is my duty as a fellow Swiftie to explain the market utilizing only Taylor Swift analogies. And I'm dragging you with me, Jessie.

Jessie: Hooray.

Jess: Don't sound so not excited. But I think it's good to do a recap. So we're going to explain what a stock is, what the stock market is, how a stock makes money, how to invest in stocks, but I'm only going to use Taylor Swift Technologies this entire time. By the end of the episode though, you will know the stock market all too well.

Jessie: I actually recognize that one.

Jess: Oh, that's good. That's my 10 minute timer.

[intro music: ding ding ding!]

Jessie: You're listening to Market MakeHer, the self-directed investing education podcast that demystifies the stock market from her perspective. We're your hosts. I'm Jessie DeNuit, the beginner investor learning how it all works with you and asking all the questions.

Jess: And I'm Jess Inskip, applying my almost 15 years of experience working in finance. Will be 15 in July and then we'll switch that over. Bringing as many Taylor Swift analogies as I can. Taylor's Version.

Jessie: Uh-huh. And not only are we back for a new season, but we also have a new refreshed logo, new photos, refreshed branding, website. And it's true that my holiday slash yule slash winter solstice gift to Jess is allowing her to basically give us a little refresher course on how to invest in the stock market and how the stock market works. but using all Taylor Swift analogies and references.

Jess: Thank you, Jessie. I really think that we can really push this to the next level.

Jessie: I'm not even gonna understand what most of the references are, but I'm learning, and I don't really know how I got coerced into this one, but I did give myself this black metal Taylor Swift version for the occasion. So that makes me feel a little bit better about what's going on. Not only that, but I do have my goddess and savior, Suzy Sue, in the background watching over this whole episode. So it makes me feel a little more goth and metal about the whole thing.

Jess: All right.

Jessie: Okay, we'll see.

Jess: Here we go. So excited.

Jessie: Okay, let's get on with it. So the stock market in what we call the Swiftonomics, Swiftology terms.

Jess: I'm already excited. Swiftology? Taylor's version. We're going to call it Taylor's version.

Jessie: Taylor's version of the stock market. In Taylor's version, what is a stock?

Jess: All right. So this entire thing is one very gigantic analogy. It's going to make everything make sense if you love Taylor Swift, but also if you don't, I promise. So. for a stock stock. I'm so excited. I can't, I put so much thought into this analogy, but imagine Taylor Swift songs are all like little individual companies, right? And anytime that a song is streamed or it's played on the radio or it's on a movie, it's played at any time or it's purchased, that song generates revenue. So each individually and to make that song It requires studio time, right? It's a team of producers, all comes at a cost, and that is the operating expense.

Jessie: So the songs are the stocks.

Jess: Right. So each individual song represents a piece of like the Taylor empire that you are owning. And it's a stock. We know we want Mother to own all of her catalog, but imagine if... you could own a piece of it too. And if it made money, you would make money too. And that's what a stock is, is you own a small piece of a company. In this case, we're just saying a song is a company. Like another good analogy, say you could own all of Taylor Swift's empire. So she makes money through so many different venues. She's got merch. She has the Era's tour. She has her music catalog. She does brand partnerships. She ends up in movies. All of that's revenue, but that comes with expenses. What does it cost her to make that money? A stock is a piece of a company. You own a piece of that company as a shareholder. And as that company makes money, so do you. And in this analogy, and in this entire episode, there is nothing else in the world but Taylor Swift. Nothing else exists. We are in Taylor Swift land.

Jessie: Got it. Taylor Swift wonderland. Here we go.

Jess: Yes.

Jessie: Okay, so in this Taylor Swift land, we are part of the Taylor Swift world and we want to invest in it.

Jess: Yes.

Jessie: So we are investing in her songs and basically you were putting some money into our little Taylor Swift world portfolio by buying stocks, which are the songs. How do the songs make money?

Jess: As long as revenue. exceeds expenses. The songs will generate profit. So if it's streaming constantly, that's revenue. But as long as there is a lot of downloads and a lot of plays and there's more money than the cost to produce that song or create that song, the difference between those two that's revenue and expenses, that's called the profit margin. Right. And we want that to expand. You want to see revenue to increase or expenses decrease or a combination of that. But that's how the stock makes money.

Jessie: So what do you think her most played song is or like the best song is?

Jess: I'm a reputation girly and my Roman empire is I did something bad from the reputation tour. It like literally lives in my head right free. So in this analogy, her songs represent a company, but you could own a tiny piece of that song and as the song makes money. So do you. Jessie: Okay.

Jess: That's the analogy.

Jessie: Got it. Or that stock makes money, or in this case, that song, how many streams, downloads, whatever it's getting, is exceeding the cost it took to make that song and to pay everyone to help. That would be the operating cost in this scenario, right?

Jess: Exactly. And the difference with those two, just the profit margin.

Jessie: Right.

Jess: Love it.

Jessie: Okay, so we know what a stock is. It's a piece of a company, or in this case, it's a Taylor Swift song. And we know a stock makes money when their company's profits exceed their operating costs, the songs do well and they're making more money than it took to create them and pay to produce them. Then we're making money too. Okay. So how does the stock become available to buy on the stock market?

Jess: All right. So expanding on this analogy, let's say Dr. Taylor, Alison Swift. She. decides to issue her songs individually as a stock that we could buy. She'd work with somebody to get those songs listed, be the NASDAQ or the New York Stock Exchange. So that's where the exchanges come in and the IPO process, right? Just like we go buy a CD when it's directly released from Taylor. Just imagine that a CD has one song on it, not efficient, but it's going to work for the analogy.

Jessie: Like a single, you're buying a single.

Jess: You're buying a single.

Jessie: No one buys CDs anymore.

Jess: No, well, we buy Vinyls maybe, but we buy records now. buy everything from Taylor. Anyways, but you know, Taylor partners with Target. And so if you buy that single directly from Target or directly from Taylor Swift's website, that is part of the IPO process because Taylor is going to recognize a piece of that revenue. That's the IPO. It's listed one time. She only issues a certain amount though of singles. It's not like it's this infinite amount that's going to be produced. The second those singles find themselves on eBay or some type of secondary market. That is the stock market because the stock market is literally secondary and that's when supply and demand comes into play. It's literally shares being traded. So when you buy a stock on a stock market, you're not giving that company money directly at all.

Jessie: Right. If you weren't involved in that IPO process then... Right. Because the IPO process, wait, are they getting, they get money in the IPO process, right?

Jess: Yes.

Jessie: Because they're getting capital or they're getting like investors to, okay.

Jess: They are.

Jessie: When we talk about stocks as songs, we're talking about the secondary market, which is the stock market.

Jess: Exactly. But it's all about supply and demand. Just like on eBay, maybe you have this limited edition and it gets bid up really high or just like the, the Eras tour experience ticket master. Those are initially issued rate. You buy them at face value. That's the IPO process because Taylor's benefiting from that. But then there's this whole secondary market process, which is where those super high inflated processes are coming from, and that is a function of supply and demand, there is very little supply of those Eras tour tickets, but there is a ton of demand and that will make the price go up

Jessie: and it did, I'm sure.

Jess: What the stock market is, literally a secondary market where you buy and sell stocks and your brokerage firm connects you to that marketplace. That's like Fidelity, Merrill, E-Trade, all of those.

Jessie: Okay. So then I would love to hear how we measure the Taylor Swift stock market. What are our indices and how does that work?

Jess: Love this. All right. So we measure the stock market by the indices. The three major S&P 500, Dow Jones, Nasdaq, but there are thousands of those. In this case, and in this analogy, it's going to be an album is that index. All your songs are on an album. So you may have a reputation index and that index is all of the songs for reputation. And there are certain criteria to be on the reputation index. There's a midnight index in 1989. Index, a Speak Now index, all the albums. The index is the albums. When the songs go up in value, the songs are streamed so much and they make a lot of revenue. They have those healthy profit margins. Then the index goes up in value or down, which is like impossible with anything Taylor Swift related, but to be balanced and be very careful with the stock market concepts. But some songs can be in multiple indexes. maybe you'll have an index called collabs and that's going to have songs from different albums, right? Or you might have the entire Taylor Swift collection and that's one index. And there's overlap. You could have multiple songs in multiple indices. The billboard top 100, only hits, things that are on the radio, but it's criteria. And those are specialty indexes where the songs could move in and out of the index, depending if they meet that criteria. But the important point here is the stock market is literally just a measurement. When you hear what is the S&P 500, what is the Dow Jones Industrial Average, what is the NASDAQ, those are just different albums in this case. That's a measure of all of those songs performance. So how much have they been streamed in this case or made that revenue? is that stock going up or not? And you just add it together and that equals your index. That's all the stock market is, the way we measure it anyways.

Jessie: Did you already kind of like think about which album the S&P 500 would be in this instance or the NASDAQ or Dow Jones?

Jess: I feel like if it was the S&P 500, that would probably be the hits playlist. And then the Billboard 100 would be the Dow Jones. And since the Nasdaq is tech heavy, I was teetering between reputation and folklore, you know, because it's more growth oriented, if you will. And both of those represent growth in my opinion. Maybe speak now. I wasn't sure with Nasdaq. Who knows? We might edit that out.

Jessie: Maybe we post that to our social media channels so the Swifties can chime in because I obviously have no idea.

Jess: Okay, we can figure it out for sure.

Jessie: If anyone wants to chime in on what they think, which album is which indices, go ahead. Jess: We can get so deep into this with one too. Oh, it sounds so good.

Jessie: Maybe join the Facebook community and y'all can talk about it in there.

Jess: I'm so excited. So the stock market, it's all about figuring out what price something is worth. What is that stock actually worth? And in this analogy, what's the song worth? So it all depends on the consumer.

Jessie: Okay, right.

Jess: And since the stock market centered around the consumer and this analogy, it's going to be the Swifties.

Jessie: Oh, right.

Jess: It's going to be the Swifties. Yeah. The performance of the songs really depends on the Swifties. And you can make this really literal. So as in, do the Swifties have savings? Are they employed? Can they spend their money? Do they feel good about spending their money? If so, then they'll probably more likely to go buy things because they have the means to do that. So looking at economic data to understand consumer sentiment is extremely important because it's literally what are people going to buy because that goes directly to revenue and it affects the stock market altogether.

Jessie: I'm assuming her tour was like always sold out.

Jess: Yes, for sure.

Jessie: So people are like hungry for every little thing she does.

Jess: There is economic data that everyone has access to where you can see the amount of money markets or the amount of savings. And that may be going down, but then we get retail sales where consumers are still spending. And then consumers were still spending on services, which is travel related things, which is literally going to the Taylor Swift concert. So wherever the consumer is willing to spend their money is where you can find investment opportunities.

Jessie: Yeah. So how do these stocks, Taylor Swift song stocks go up in value?

Jess: All right. So we know as in you and I. and our listeners who's made it this far. There are lots of ways that stocks go up in value. First and foremost is when they have earnings. Think about what makes Taylor songs more valuable. She goes on tour. Maybe that's her surprise song. And now you have a new perspective on it and you're going to listen to it more, more streams, more revenues. Remember that she releases a vault track. You might access that album more. Now that whole index is going up. It's all about this promise of value that you as someone who is invested in that song being listened to more, you are going to say, what is going to make that song be listened to more? That song going to be making more money. It's all about this promise of value. That is why news makes the stock market move. Because yeah, events, they have... They have an impact on the stock market. And we find out though, if her giving that surprise song or releasing that vault track, that impact quarterly when they report earnings, when stocks give us their report card. And just imagine, be amazing, if Taylor would get on an earnings call, because she's obviously going to be CEO of this entire company, and she would tell us how her songs were doing last quarter. She'd be like, you know what? I went on this many eras tours, and I released this vault track, and we saw positive revenue here, and here. And remember, it's each individual song as a company. So she would only be doing that for, I did something bad, my favorite song of all time. You know, and she would tell us how well that's been doing. So imagine there's a lot of Taylor Swift's, which would be amazing, but impossible and

Jessie: well, the older songs. Like our older albums that have been there forever, the classics, which could be the blue chip stocks, but they might have a comeback or keep doing well because she does all those little puzzles and whatever, right? People are like figuring things out and linking it to other things that she's done.

Jess: Yeah. Anything that's a promise of value that seems like it will affect the positive outcome of the stock. Like unemployment goes down depending on the circumstances. More people will have more money. Therefore you think the stock's going to do better. Microsoft announced that they're integrating Copilot into their PCs and it's all chat GPT and they listened to us and they brought back Clippy and that's where you can use it. But that would be news and that would make Microsoft stock go up in value. Same type of concept. If Taylor announced that she was going to do something with, I did something bad and did this super really cool collab with Selena Gomez, stock soaring.

Jessie: Yes, that makes sense.

Jess: Or Beyonce and just give us all what we want.

Jessie: Yeah.

Jess: Please. Oh my God. Anyways

Jessie: You really think that's coming?

Jess: Yes. Yes, I do. Yes. There's all the Easter eggs are there.

Jessie: Oh, interesting. I can't imagine what a song with those two would sound like, but I would definitely tune in and listen.

Jess: I mean, I just got goosebumps, and I think I would transcend to the heavens.

Jessie: Oh my god.

Jess: And it would be bliss.

Jessie: All of the Swifties and the Beehive would be just like, they just. Transcend to another realm and we never see any of them again. And then I'm stuck here with everyone else.

Jess: It's the force of nature. We'd bring you along with us. Don't worry. Analysts would cover each one of Taylor's songs. They'd look at all of those external factors, all of their releases and the news, her costs, because now it's a public company, past revenue, how it's affected it, apply their models, they are going to set earnings per share expectations and determine how much one share of her song is worth. and how much earnings it's going to make each quarter, how much is expected. That's analyst expectations and do that with stocks.

Jessie: Right.

Jess: And then when we have these earnings calls, Taylor might tell us that I did something bad, beat the analyst expectations set of $5 per share and made $6 that quarter. So it beat by $1. The stocks all of a sudden going to soar. So it's soared on the news, but once the news comes, analysts are going to adjust that expectations. And then once Taylor tells us exactly what happened and it's even better than it soars again, it just keeps going. And this is Taylor Swift. So obviously if this was a real stock, it would be going to the moon.

Jessie: Yeah, to the moon.

Jess: But then she might announce that she's going to buy back some of the shares of that song that will make the stock go up. And she might say, I'm excited to announce that I'm dropping, I did something bad, Taylor's version. Yes, please. And that will make the stock go up. And she may say, hey, I made $6 per share of this song. Everyone gets $1 dividend. Or she may take that extra earnings and put it back into the song, make a really cool music video with Beyonce. And that I think explains growth versus income stocks.

Jessie: Yeah, no, I think you're right. Yeah. Hold on.

Jess: There was a lot there. It was a super long analogy. This is the longest analogy ever. Jessie: You're right though. Did you cover the dividends part too?

Jess: Yeah. She would announce a dividend to be paid at a later date, but that's the difference. There are lots of different types of stocks. The two main categories are growth and income. And so it's growth if you take the earnings and it's not distributed to shareholders. So you would want that company. or Taylor in this case, to put those earnings back in and then grow the company more. But that's considered a little more risk, whereas a dividend's a little more steady because you get an income. It's like, okay, when you make money, I make money too because you pay it to me in cash, I realize it. But in this case with growth, it's when you make money, the stock's gonna go up in value and I make money too, but you actually don't make that money until you sell the stock.

Jessie: Right. And that's when you gotta...

Jess: It's the end game.

Jessie: There we go. Like there's gotta be something here that I'm feeding you.

Jess: Yes. Actually, Wonderland is a song. You say it all the time.

Jessie: I know. I didn't know that for a long time because you kept like last snickering every time I talked about Wonderland and I'm thinking like Alice in Wonderland. And then you're like, you have no idea. You're making Taylor Swift references all the time.

Jess: All the time.

Jessie: That's just the whimsical little creature in me. I understand it. I'm just too dark and goth for it. So yeah.

Jess: She'll release a dark and goth era and then you're gonna be bought.

Jessie: Yeah, if she starts doing like We'll get there. dark synth wave. Yeah. Something that'll be interesting.

Jess: I left out a lot of other Taylor Swift analogies because I'm pretty sure I can definitely explain anything stock market related, utilizing Taylor Swift analogies.

Jessie: Don't you have like a whole Swiftenomics presentation that you've done, I assume? at some point.

Jess: So not a presentation, but I did do a research report on literal Swiftenomics as in we had an inflation problem where people were spending too much on services. And so my theory was that it was Taylor Swift and Beyonce partnered with boomers who were taking cruises all the time and retired. But that was correct. Yeah, because services inflation started coming down once the tour stopped.

Jessie: Yeah.

Jess: Swiftenomics. Just a couple more things. Long live the walls we cash through. Very important here with financial literacy. We covered actually two episodes and really condensed it with a really long analogy. So if this doesn't make sense and you're tuning in for the first time, go check out Understanding the Stock Market. We're full of so many fun analogies and thank you for participating.

Jessie: That are not all Taylor Swift.

Jess: Mostly, gradually we bring more and more Taylor Swift.

Jessie: And by we, she means her. Jess. And then Jessie, I do it unknowingly somehow.

Jess: It's amazing.

Jessie: Jess is planting like mind seeds in me all the time.

Jess: Yes.

Jessie: and we share the same brain anyway, so.

Jess: It's true. But if you want to understand how the stock market works or how to invest in the stock market, it definitely begins with understanding what the stock market is, how do you access it, how does the stock market move up and down in price. which is purely based on consumer sentiment and behavior and economic events, all these other factors and how does that affect the stocks. And that really has to do with where people are spending their money because it's just a bunch of companies. And when companies make money, their stock prices go up mostly.

Jessie: And hopefully you make money too. And that is how you make your money make money.

Jess: That's right. It's by investing in the stock market and the key is diversification. But we've got so many episodes on that.

Jessie: If you are a Swiftie or you're tuning in for the first time, hopefully this all makes sense to you as well. Jess will entertain your Swiftie references and connections and puzzle pieces and analogies all day long on all of our social channels and our Facebook community group. So

Jess: I absolutely will. Thank you, Jessie, for being able to tolerate it.

Jess: Like I said, I do think she is brilliant. I will. Uphold all women that are like doing amazing things and she's definitely one of them even if I'm not totally into that kind of music. It's fine. We'll still allow it.

Jess: Are you just asking if it's over now? I really hope that you stay, stay.

Jessie: Anything else?

Jess: Well, if you found this helpful, please share it with a Swiftie or anyone. We want everyone to experience the stock market all too well.

Jessie: And that's why I allow Jess to do an entire Taylor Swift analogy for the stock market so that we can, everyone can learn it. No matter who you are or what you listen to.

Jess: That's right. Remember you're not on your own kid. We got you. And if you have a question, we'll make you a mastermind.

Jessie: I can't even add to it. I just don't even know.

Jess: Would've Could've Should've, Jessie.

Jessie: You can always go to our website. marketmakeher, H-E-R, podcast.com, where you can subscribe to our super cool, fun email list and we will not spam you. And we have tons of free resources on the website.

Jess: Don't forget to comment, leave us a review, helps the algorithm, helps share the wealth. Jessie: No other Taylor Swift thing there.

Jess: Don't be a foolish one.

Jessie: And as always, when you build knowledge, you break barriers.

Jess: There will only be explanation. This is our reputation.

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