Jul 20, 2026 · 55 min · 12 segments
Host Richard Cunningham welcomes co-host John Coleman for July's Marks on the Market, joined by two veteran venture investors: Phil Jung, who helps lead the venture investing business at Sovereign's…
Mark PhillipsGuest
Phil JungGuest
Richard CunninghamHostSo technology, investing, AI, all of that good stuff with Phil and Mark's kind of early stage focus.
But I think just kind of first things first, let's zoom out a little bit and have a little bit of the macro kind of check in and conversation.
If you had to kind of summarize the state of the markets in just a couple of sentences right now, what would you be from your perspective? And then Phil and Mark will kind of come to you guys and let you chime in on that as well.
We continue to see the biggest concentration in a small number of names in the S&P 500 and its history, I think, since the railroad stocks effectively continue to see a massive gap in valuation between the mega stocks and AI related stocks and everything else.
And the fundamental economy, at least in the U.S., continues to plug along reasonably strongly, though not as strongly as the markets themselves.
Of course, that's massively concentrated in some of these hyperscaling technology stocks.
And the unemployment rate has held steady primarily because of a drop in labor force participation rate, which I think is the lowest since coming out of COVID in March 2021.
And there are a lot of factors that can play into that between an aging population, the appreciation of the stock market.
I feel like that's less likely in the next rate hike cycle just because of the soft employment numbers.
I was listening to another podcast this weekend And, you know, Anthropic is slated to have something like $100 billion in run rate revenue exiting the year this year.
So technology, investing, AI, all of that good stuff with Phil and Mark's kind of early stage focus.
But I think just kind of first things first, let's zoom out a little bit and have a little bit of the macro kind of check in and conversation.
If you had to kind of summarize the state of the markets in just a couple of sentences right now, what would you be from your perspective? And then Phil and Mark will kind of come to you guys and let you chime in on that as well.
We continue to see the biggest concentration in a small number of names in the S&P 500 and its history, I think, since the railroad stocks effectively continue to see a massive gap in valuation between the mega stocks and AI related stocks and everything else.
And the fundamental economy, at least in the U.S., continues to plug along reasonably strongly, though not as strongly as the markets themselves.
Of course, that's massively concentrated in some of these hyperscaling technology stocks.
And the unemployment rate has held steady primarily because of a drop in labor force participation rate, which I think is the lowest since coming out of COVID in March 2021.
And there are a lot of factors that can play into that between an aging population, the appreciation of the stock market.
I feel like that's less likely in the next rate hike cycle just because of the soft employment numbers.
I was listening to another podcast this weekend And, you know, Anthropic is slated to have something like $100 billion in run rate revenue exiting the year this year.
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