How much money would you save up if you invested your spare change in the stock market? The answer, in practice, seems to be about $2,500 over nine years, Felix writes.

Why it matters: One of the most controversial concepts in the world of financial advice is the idea — sometimes called "the latte factor" — that saving small amounts of money can add up to significant wealth over time. Now we have empirical evidence as to whether that's true.

Zoom out: Can abjuring avocado toast get you enough money for a house downpayment? No. But the magical lure of compound interest is strong.

• "The simple math of giving people a tool to take advantage of compounding is fundamentally necessary for everybody," says Seth Wunder, the CFO and CIO at Acorns, a company founded to bring investment products to everyone.

Zoom in: Acorns' flagship product rounds up all your debit card purchases and invests that spare change in the market. If your avocado toast costs $14.25, then $15 would leave your account, and $0.75 would get invested.

What they found: Acorns shared with Axios a spreadsheet showing what happened to the money invested by the cohort of Acorns customers who were verified in 2015 and whose accounts were still open as of March 6, 2024.

• In total these customers contributed $270 million in roundups and another $543 million in scheduled deposits. They also, of course, withdrew some of those savings from time to time. By February 2024, they collectively had $426 million in savings.

By the numbers: To get a feel for what those numbers work out to on a per-person basis, I took the average monthly roundup of $2.5 million and divided it by $43, which Acorns says is the average amount rounded up per customer per month, to arrive at a cohort size of just over 57,000.

• Then I assumed that total assets and net inflows, respectively, could be attributed to roundups and scheduled deposits in proportion to the relative size of those flows.
• After making those assumptions, I ended up with the chart above — the accuracy of which has not been confirmed by Acorns and should be taken as a good-faith estimate from Axios, rather than anything official.
• The chart shows that the cohort contributed a gross amount of about $4,700 per person over the period, and a net amount, after withdrawals, of about $1,750. Add in another $750 in investment returns from a surging stock market, and they end up with roughly $2,500 in total from their roundup savings.

The bottom line: "The beauty of spending $3.75, and having 25 cents left over and put into an investment account, really does add up to meaningful amounts of money," says Acorns' Wunder.

• Now we know just how meaningful the amount is — enough to buy a decent vacation, but not remotely enough to make a down payment on a house.

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JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon uses his annual shareholder letter, out this morning, to set out a global agenda for what might be called Pugnacious Hegemonic Neoliberalism: Pro-America, pro-military, pro-trade, pro-capitalism, pro-DEI, anti-China, Felix writes.

Why it matters: Since Dimon took the helm as JPMorgan's CEO 20 years ago, he has steadily reinvented himself. Today, the technocrat-turned-thought leader has become, for all intents and purposes, a politician. The only question is whether he aspires to actual political office.

The big picture: Dimon's 61-page manifesto will be more palatable to Democrats than to MAGA Republicans; it even reprints in full a WSJ editorial from George McGovern, whom Dimon describes as "one of the most liberal presidential nominees in our lifetime."

• That said, Dimon takes care to put Donald Trump's favorite phrase in bold italics. "Ukraine's struggle is our struggle, and ensuring their victory is ensuring America first," he writes.

"Every time I see the American flag, it reminds me of the values and virtues of this country and its founding principles conceived in liberty," writes Dimon, in language not often seen in the annual reports of multinational financial services conglomerates.

• "In the rest of this section, I try to answer the question: What must we do to ensure that the world stays safe, not only for America but for freedom and democracy?"
• "Only America has the full capability to lead and coalesce the Western world," Dimon adds. "There is nothing more important."

Between the lines: Dimon finds space to devote four pages of his letter to a full-throated defense of diversity, equity and inclusion.

• JPM's Advancing Black Pathways program, he writes, "focuses on strengthening the economic foundation of Black communities because we know that opportunity is not always created equally."

The bottom line: In terms of foreign policy, Treasury Secretary Jamie Dimon would be entirely aligned with Joe Biden.

• Don't expect him to be aligned, however, with a bank regulation regime he describes as "duplicative, inconsistent, procyclical, contradictory, extremely costly, and unnecessarily painful."

This chart shows the Tesla share price over the course of one trading week. A big drop overnight on Monday; a rally to a high of $176.92 in the early afternoon of Thursday; a 9% plunge between then and late morning on Friday; and then a final spike up in after-hours trade on Friday afternoon, Felix writes.

Between the lines: It's possible to point to some of the moves in this chart and find obvious causes for them — a Reuters story here, a tweet there. But the big picture is just that Tesla is a highly volatile stock, which has traded as high as $414 per share in late 2021 and as low as $108 in early 2023.

The bottom line: Tesla is the most fun mega-cap for short-term traders and volatility junkies. If you don't like where it's trading now, just wait five minutes.