NPR.

People who had American stocks in their retirement fund or share trading app like Robin Hood likely had a good year.

Notwithstanding a few bumps in the road recently, it was a very good year indeed.

That's right. From Microsoft to Micron, U.S. stocks are on a rocket ship. They're leaving the rest of the world behind.

And this outperformance has actually been going on since at least the Great Recession.

So a lot of people are now taking an America

first approach to their investments and forgetting about investing in the rest of the world.

Dan Villalon is with AQR Capital Management. The U.S. stock market has trounced the rest of the world.

And so it's really hard to argue why people should be rebalancing back into the countries that have

underperformed. Dan, though, is trying his best to make that argument.

This is The Indicator from Planet Money. I'm Adrienne Ma. And I'm Darien Woods. Today on the show,

Corporate American Exceptionalism. Dan makes the case for why a stock market hot streak might give

investors pause after the break.

What's in store for the music, TV, and film industries for 2025?

We don't know, but we're making some fun, bold predictions for the new year.

Listen now to the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast from NPR.

The SMP 500 is the index of 500 big American companies.

As of this recording, its value was up 24% in 2024.

In fact, on the whole, it's been an incredible last decade and a half.

There is a global stock index that tracks the value of public companies from all around

the world, and that's called the MSCI All-C-C-World

Index, and U.S. shares make up two-thirds of that. In other words, U.S. companies are valued at

...