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7 Stocks That Could Become the Market’s Next Giants |
While investors keep piling into yesterday’s winners, a new group of companies is quietly building scale, cash flow, and influence. |
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These 7 Stocks Will Be Magnificent in the Second Half of 2026 reveals the names and tickers of companies positioned to benefit as leadership rotates. |
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🏭 The Rule That Replaced the Raise |
SEC Rule 10b-18 turned forty-four in November. Labor Day 2026 is the audit. |
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The plumbing that funnels American corporate cash to shareholders instead of workers has a birthday, and it turned forty-four this year. On November 17, 1982, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman John Shad signed Rule 10b-18 — a safe harbor against the market-manipulation provisions of Section 9(a)(2) of the 1934 Securities Exchange Act. The rule said corporations could repurchase their own shares in the open market without automatic prosecution, provided the volume, timing, price, and single-broker conditions were met. Four conditions. Zero limits on scale. |
Before Rule 10b-18, corporate stock buybacks were rare — a few hundred million dollars a year, market-wide, and executives had to weigh criminal-referral risk against every open-market repurchase. After Rule 10b-18, buybacks became the default use of corporate cash. Forty-four Labor Days later, the arithmetic tells the story the rule set in motion. |
Read the sequence. |
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🧾 THE RECEIPT |
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SEC Rule 10b-18 finalized. Release No. 34-19244; 17 CFR 240.10b-18. Chairman: John Shad. Safe harbor against Section 9(a)(2) manipulation charges for open-market repurchases meeting the four conditions. Source: sec.gov Federal Register archive. |
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Tax Cuts and Jobs Act signed into law. P.L. 115-97. Corporate rate cut 35% → 21%; deemed repatriation of accumulated foreign earnings at reduced rates. Source: congress.gov bill text. |
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S&P 500 buybacks $806B — annual record. Source: S&P Dow Jones Indices monthly buyback release (spglobal.com/spdji). |
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S&P 500 buybacks $922.7B — subsequent annual record. Source: S&P Dow Jones Indices monthly buyback release. |
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Real median weekly earnings, full-time wage and salary workers. Roughly flat to modestly higher in constant dollars across four decades. Source: BLS series LEU0252881600Q / LES1252881600Q. |
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Give the drafters their due here. Rule 10b-18 was written to solve a real problem. Executives with cash on the balance sheet, no acquisition worth making, and no better capex idea were being asked to hoard the cash out of fear that the buyback route was a criminal referral waiting to happen. The safe harbor was a rational answer to a real question — should returning capital to shareholders be treated as a form of market manipulation, or as a form of capital allocation? The Commission chose the second answer, printed the four conditions, and moved on. |
Notice what the pattern is not. It is not a story of individual CEOs going rogue. It is a story of a rule that gave a whole generation of chief financial officers a legal channel for the answer their compensation committees had already made rational. The safe harbor did not require the buyback. The safe harbor plus the incentive did. |
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of December 2017 supplied the second half. Twenty-one percent corporate rate, deemed repatriation of foreign earnings at cut rates, no strings on the balance-sheet windfall. The 2018 record printed inside twelve months. It was not a surprise. It was arithmetic on the four conditions Rule 10b-18 had already written. |
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Set the stack next to the alternative that Rule 10b-18 replaced. The 1934 Securities Exchange Act, Section 9(a)(2), treated open-market share repurchases as presumptively manipulative — a rule written in the wake of the 1929 crash and the operator pools that had run the pre-Depression tape. Congress had made a choice about what a public company was permitted to do with its own stock. Forty-eight years later, an appointed Commission unmade that choice, in a rule that Congress did not pass and has not repealed. The 1934 statute is still on the books. The 1982 safe harbor is the door around it. |
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"The rule was written for capital allocation. It became a mechanism for capital extraction." |
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The workers' share of the same corporate cash flow has an offsetting series — real median weekly earnings for full-time wage and salary workers, the one series the Fed's own dashboards do not lead with on FOMC day. Since 1982, the S&P 500 total return runs on the order of ten thousand percent cumulative, dividends reinvested. Real median weekly earnings for a full-time worker, in constant dollars, run on the order of a few percent cumulative across the same window. That is the arithmetic Labor Day is supposed to celebrate. Somebody in the room got a raise. |
The receipts sit next to each other because the arithmetic runs on the same corporate cash. A dollar spent on a share buyback is a dollar not spent on capex, not spent on wages, not spent on the training budget the CFO deferred and not spent on the maintenance line the board deprioritized. The safe harbor did not cause that reallocation. The safe harbor made it defensible. |
Watch the Q3 buyback authorizations |
Third-quarter buyback authorization announcements begin the week of October 13, alongside the start of Q3 earnings season. S&P Dow Jones Indices publishes the quarterly aggregate in December. The FOMC's September 17 rate decision will set the cost-of-capital math the next authorization cycle is priced against — lower rates mean cheaper debt-financed buybacks, which is how three of the last five annual records got built. |
The forward date to circle is October 13 — the start of the authorization window that will book the fifth full year above the $800B threshold. Rule 10b-18 does not expire. Neither does the arithmetic sitting under it. |
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📅 What to watch: Q3 buyback authorization window opens week of Oct 13 · S&P DJI monthly buyback release · FOMC Sept 17 statement, SEP release and Chair presser · any legislative test of the 2023 excise-tax sunset language in the next Congress. |
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Do you read Rule 10b-18 as a corporate freedom worth defending, or as a redirect of the raise that would have been? Reply, I'm reading every one this week. |
Good Morning Alerts covers the open the way this column covers the receipts — free, and short. Read this morning's brief. (From Good Morning Alerts) |
— Jack Garrison, Senior Contributor |
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