IdeaHouse 2026 – Betting On Owner Operators In These Stocks

If “SaaS apocalypse” was the most-cited macro theme at IdeaHouse Omaha 2026, owner-operators and skin-in-the-game ownership were the most-cited investing principle. From a brand-new ETF whose entire premise is over-weighting companies where insiders have meaningful personal capital at risk, to founder-led franchises trading at negative enterprise values, to two pitches from the conference’s own co-founders – David Kwok and Sanjeet Mavi – ten of the day’s pitches focused on one overlapping area: leaders who own a meaningful slice of the business they run tend to compound shareholder capital. Here are all ten in the order they were presented.

10 founder-led, skin-in-the-game pitches — including both conference co-founders’ closing ideas

Haren Bhakta Pitches an Index That Bets on Founders With Skin in the Game

The Problem With Free-Float Weighting

Haren Bhakta, CFA’s core argument is a critique of how the S&P 500 assigns its weights. The index uses free-float-adjusted market capitalization, deliberately excluding shares held by insiders when determining a company’s weight. In practice, this creates a perverse outcome: as a founder sells stock, the company’s weight in the S&P rises. As a founder buys more, the weight falls. The index rewards insider selling and penalizes insider buying.

Bhakta argued this gets the incentive structure backwards. The best-performing stocks over long periods — he cited Walmart, Nike, and Berkshire Hathaway as historical examples — have tended to be businesses led by founders and executives who owned meaningful stakes and thought like long-term owners. Free-float weighting systematically underweights exactly those companies.

The IO 100 Methodology

The Insider Ownership Index (IO) 100 draws from the S&P 500 universe and selects the top 100 companies ranked by the absolute dollar value of insider ownership — shares held by executives, directors, founders, and other affiliated insiders as disclosed in SEC DEF 14A proxy filings. It then weights those 100 names by insider ownership stake rather than free-float market cap, giving larger positions to companies where insiders have the most at stake.

Building the index required assembling a proprietary dataset of more than 21,000 proxy filings spanning 21 years — data Bhakta noted is not available through S&P, FactSet, Bloomberg, or other standard financial data vendors. That research effort underpins the back-tested track record he presented.

The Power-Law Logic

Bhakta framed the outperformance thesis around what he called a power-law dynamic. Just as equity market returns are driven by a small number of exceptional compounders, insider ownership is dominated by a handful of individuals — Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE:BRK.A)(NYSE:BRK.B), Jeff Bezos at Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), and Elon Musk at Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) among them. Because these individuals own disproportionately large stakes in their companies, an index weighted by insider ownership will naturally concentrate in those names and should compound at a higher rate over time.

He also identified a structural catalyst specific to the Berkshire Hathaway position. When Warren Buffett eventually passes, his shares — currently excluded from the S&P 500’s free-float calculation — will move into the float, forcing every S&P 500 index fund to buy additional BRK shares as the company’s index weight mechanically rises. A similar dynamic would follow if Musk were ever compelled to reduce his Tesla holdings. The IO 100, by weighting these companies on total insider ownership already, captures that alignment now rather than after a float adjustment.

Performance and Drawdown Characteristics

Over the 21-year back-tested period since 2005, the IO 100 has outperformed the S&P 500 by approximately 300% in cumulative terms, or roughly 2 percentage points of annualized alpha. Bhakta acknowledged the index is more volatile than the broader market day to day – concentrating in 100 names with heavy insider ownership produces a more idiosyncratic portfolio than a 500-stock market-cap-weighted benchmark.

He pointed to one notable exception to that volatility profile: the index suffered smaller drawdowns than the S&P 500 during both the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 sell-off in 2020. His explanation was behavioral. Owner-operators with the bulk of their net worth tied to their company’s stock do not panic-sell during crises. They are structurally motivated to defend and grow the business through adversity, and that durability shows up in the share price when markets are under the most stress.

Access and the ETF Launch

Before the ETF launch, exposure to the IO 100 was available through independent registered investment advisors and Morgan Stanley advisors. The ETF is intended to give retail investors direct access to the strategy for the first time.

Bhakta told the conference audience upfront that this was his own product. His pitch was that the methodology is simple enough to explain in a few sentences, required a proprietary multi-decade dataset to build, and rests on a premise value investors have long held: the best businesses are the ones where the people running them cannot afford to be wrong.

The Closing Argument

Bhakta closed by noting that standard index investing has a flaw built into its construction. Every dollar flowing into a conventional S&P 500 index fund goes into a vehicle that, by design, underweights the companies whose leaders have the most conviction in their own futures. The IO 100 inverts that. By overweighting founders and executives who have concentrated their personal wealth in their own companies, the index puts everyday investors alongside the people who have the most to lose – and, historically, the most to gain.