Welcome to Industry Focus, the podcast that dives into a different sector of the stock market every day.

It's Monday, April 9th, and we're talking about vertical integration.

I'm your host Michael, and I'm joined by Matt Frankel.

Matt great to have you back on the show.

Always fun to be here.

Fantastic.

So we wanted to talk about vertical integration a little bit because, well, if you pay attention to the financial

news at all, there have been a lot of mergers and acquisitions just across all

kinds of different sectors. And what you really see across the board is the trying to take advantage of the low interest rate environment one last time before growth in the economy really pushes the Federal Reserve to continue raising interest rates

in a way that is going to make cheap debt increasingly difficult to come by.

And that... increasingly difficult to come by. And those mergers and acquisitions

increasingly are looking like vertical integration plays.

You know, if you think about in health care,

you see it with CBS and Aetna, right?

And a lot of the other health care mergers and acquisitions, you see it in a lot of other sectors too.

And frankly, those are just accelerations of trends we've seen toward vertical integration across

the board in a lot of areas.

You think about Walmart, you know, one of the things that really made Walmart powerful

in the first place was that they really controlled so much of their supply chain.

And we see this happening in financials as well, where there's just this integration kind of

just across the board.

And so there are kind of three main areas we want to talk about this,

...