Does Trade-Related Work Compound Capital?

Trade-adjacent stocks, real-world economics, and what the S&P 500 doesn’t show.

Editor’s Note

This piece grew out of a question I’ve been pondering for a while: in a market increasingly dominated by software, AI, and an asset-light scale, what happens to businesses tied to physical work? Not as a political statement, and not as nostalgia, but as a capital allocation question.

What follows is an attempt to look at that question empirically.

Most of the last decade has belonged to digital technology and software.

For most of the past decade, equity markets have rewarded asset-light, software-driven businesses. Scale expanded. Margins expanded. Multiples expanded even more.

But beneath that narrative sits a parallel economy built on work that cannot be digitized away — maintaining equipment, servicing facilities, handling waste, training technicians, and keeping infrastructure operational.

I wanted to test a simple question: have companies tied to that physical-work ecosystem compounded capital as effectively as the S&P 500?