It's Tuesday and November 9th. Welcome to Marketfoolery. I'm Chris Hill with me today, the one and only Bill Mann. Thanks for being here.

How are you, brother? I'm doing all right. I'm doing all right. We've got Roblox shooting to the moon and PayPal falling from the sky.

But we have to start, might be the right word. Yeah, exactly. They're adding an owl and they're now PayPal.

We will get to that. We have to start with what I can only describe as the end of an era. When the Dow Jones Industrial Average was formed in 1896, General Electric was one of the original 12 companies in the average.

And it was there, stayed there for well over a century until it was replaced by Walgreens in 2018.

And this morning, CEO Larry Culpenance, the GE is going to split into three separate companies. The healthcare unit is going to be spun off in early 2023. The energy division will be spun off in early 2024.

And the aviation business will be the remaining company. And before we get to the underlying businesses and what this means for GE shareholders.

There are holders and potential shareholders, because the stock is up on this news. I'm curious how you felt when you saw this news, because I felt, even though I have never owned shares of GE and never seriously thought about owning shares of GE, I did feel a twinge of melancholy.

Yeah, I felt a little sad. I felt a little bit sad. I mean, General Electric Company is about to become three more specific electric companies. We'll see what they do with the names. Apparently, the aircraft division will retain General Electric.

Yeah, it's not just the end of an era. It's also the end of the great Jack Welch experiment. And the Jack Mel, Welch experiment, remember at the moment that he retired, he was perhaps one of the most revered CEOs in American commerce.

I don't think that it has been shown ever since then that he built sandcastles in the air, that this was a company that was built on really a great deal of financial engineering, some, you know, some, some things that just didn't turn out to be that sustainable.

This has been the long day new mall for that type of conglomerate where you've got the financial segment was spun off years ago, you know, it's, it's, it's not shocking to me, given, given how few conglomerates really make a go of it now that this has happened.

Yeah, and we saw, you go back a few years when she, I mean, was really running into trouble. We saw them selling off different parts of the business here and there. So this is probably where they were headed anyway.

And this is going to look, this is still for all of the downside for this stock from 2004 when it was the biggest public company in America and ever since then where it's sort of gone downhill.

This is still a 125 billion dollar company. This is not a small business. And so it makes about 80% from its low this year.

Yeah, which will bulkers to me.

It makes sense that it would take some time to unwind all of this. Do you have an early sense of what is going to be the most attractive part of this business because I look at the fact that Larry Culp is the CEO of General Electric and he has picked the business the one of the three businesses that he wants to run and it's the aviation business.

This is, so Joel Greenblatt in his book, you can be a stock market genius talks about this is exact situation and his advice is follow the executives follow the executives because they're making a decision that should be it should be pretty reasonably expected to be a logical move where they're they're spinning out parts that they don't really want to manage.

Or think are as promising. So I think that that's I think that that's good advice. I happen to think airlines are airline.

An aviation is a pretty good business up until the part that you're actually flying airplanes every you know supplying any component to that that that industry has been proven over time to be to be a really good business.

So I that makes perfect sense to me. Is there anything that's there any part of you as an investor that thinks yeah I'm going to buy a couple of shares here just to see I'm not going to expect much.

I'm just going to take it and see where it goes or do you think you know what we got a long way to go between here and 2024 when this is all done and I'm fine sitting on the sidelines.

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