Brutal Quarter Ends With a Rally — But Risks Are Rising

file paperwork.

“You get all the tools to build a real business identity from day one.”

A business address website phone number, operating agreement free guides and more at no

extra cost. And with Northwest, your home address, personally email and phone number, stay private. Don't pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for what you can get from Northwest for free. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com/profgfree and start using free resources to build something amazing.

Get more with Northwest Registered Agent at Northwestregisteredagent.com/profgfree.

Make your own garden or by cone start, cover the fruiling to the best price.

“From bundling to the top of an over-pusted garden, get a best-to-tollem-outdoor”

in your garden, and get a best-to-tollem-outdoor box in your garden. And a best-to-tollem-outdoor box in your garden. In your garden, get a best-to-tollem-outdoor box in your garden. In your garden, get a best-to-tollem-outdoor box in your garden. In your garden, get a best-to-tollem-outdoor box in your garden.

In your garden, get a best-to-tollem-outdoor box in your garden, get a best-to-tollem-outdoor box in your garden, get a best-to-tollem-outdoor box in your garden, get a best-to-tollem-outdoor box in your garden, get a best-to-tollem-outdoor box in your garden, get a best-to-tollem-outdoor box in your garden. Visit my 2006-20 in the Messecale tour. Now, take a look at it. Today's number? Fifteen.

That's the percentage drop in new reality TV shows that premiered in America last year. Competition in the space has been dwindling for a while now, as viewers flocked to what has become the nation's most popular reality TV show, it's called "The News." Well, from the prof. markets, I'm Ed Ellson, it is April 1st, let's check in on yesterday's market vitals.

The first quarter wrapped up with a bang as the major indices staged a dramatic rally on a potential end to the war.

More on that in a second, meanwhile the dollar dropped, treasury yields fell and finally Brent Crude declined, but remained above $100 per barrel. Okay, what else is happening? Wall Street was on track for its worst quarter in four years until a rally Tuesday softened the blow. The S&P 500 was down as much as 9% from its January peak, that was its worst quarterly performance since 2022, but Tuesday, it surged nearly 3%, meanwhile the Nasdaq was down as much as 13% from its peak, and entered correction territory that was at least until its blistering rally of nearly 4% on Tuesday.

That recovery came off to Trump told Aides he is open to ending the war even if the straight of Hall Moose remains closed. Then Iranian President Pasech Geyan said Tehran has the quote "necessarily will" to end the conflict in exchange for security guarantees, and with that Wall Street got the quarter ending rally it was waiting for. So here to help us unpack the markets performance so far this year we are joined by Kevin Gordon, head of macro research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research.

So Kevin, I was going to have you on here to break down the cellar for what was going to be one of the worst quarters ever, and then we get this big news. Trump says maybe the war is going to come to an end, Iran says maybe it's going to come to an end too, and then the market rallies, let's just start with your reactions to what we saw on Tuesday.

“He word is maybe, and I think today is sort of the final day of the quarter is emblematic of the whiplash environment that we've been in, and that's really how we've been characterizing this market.”

It's not impossible to trade, but when you're really kind of starving for accurate information out of both sides, in terms of what is the condition of the straight of Hall Moose, how is it, what is the traffic look like, what is the potential for that to get back online. What is the knock on effect going to be for the global economy, all of these unanswered questions. I think that just makes markets a little bit more aggressive and volatile when you get any snippet of good news, but also to the downside.

We've had our fair share, especially at the end of last week, that was sort of a clear example of kind of all the negative news compounding. So I think that today's move doesn't really surprise me. I think that one thing to sort of look at in terms of the strength of the durability of the move. I wouldn't put a whole lot of stock into it because if you look at the kind of underlying breadth and subsurface moves of the S&P 500 at least, advancing volume wasn't that strong. It was actually a little last night checked right before I joined you, so I'll have to check for the official closing stats, but last night checked it was actually stronger last Monday than it was today in terms of advanced relative to declineers.

But it was a lot of that mega cap strength reasserting itself because those have actually gotten hit.

Those are some of the hardest hit markets so far this year, even if you back it out actually over the past six months. So a little bit was a sort of this revision into those names, but also just sort of this classic momentum trade going in reverse where energy had been the leader today. It got hit the hardest similar with with tech and communication services. They had been struggling a lot and then they had found sort of the strongest move in the strongest bit today. So I wouldn't put a whole lot of weight into just one day, but especially because some of the background conditions, whether it is the breadth underneath the market or whether it is actually the fact that oil prices continue to move higher today.

“I think that in and of itself is a little bit of a reason to sort of step back and not extrapolate the move that we saw for U.S. stocks.”

I'm so confused as to why investors appear to be either buying or selling in huge numbers based on what Trump says.

But that seems to keep on happening. He says, okay, this was going to answer it and then markets go up and he's actually probably not and then markets go down. Is it your belief that what is happening, what happened in the markets wasn't necessarily a response to what happened in Iran because it was mostly a rally in the tech sector. Or all the two still quite related. Yeah, I mean, well, when you look at the contribution to the indexes gained today from tech, I kind of lump tech and communication services in with each other because they have kind of become that big tech that tech like trade lower case T.

They're clearly different sectors and they have very different make-ups in terms of their, you know, their membership profile. So it is important to make the distinction. If you combine those two, you're talking about around 40% of the S&P 500's market cap, so if they're advancing and doing well, pretty hard for the, you know, for the headline index to struggle vice versa, you know, a lot of what we were experiencing here to date. Right before the war, those sectors were struggling, it was sort of taking a step back from their leadership positions and that was kind of giving the illusion that the headline S&P wasn't doing as well, but underneath the surface you had actually seen a lot more improvement in the average stock doing doing quite well.

“The way that S&P 500, if you want to think of that as the proxy for the average stock, that had been doing well.”

So yes, I do think most of the move today was kind of just that snapback and that reversion for, you know, a part of the market that didn't necessarily get a lot of love or hasn't gotten a lot of love for the past six months. And I would add to it, you know, not only was the sort of the subsurface breadth not as good as I had mentioned earlier, but the flow data actually into a sector like tech was not very strong today. It was kind of high conviction on the part of traders, especially in the retail crowd. I was looking specifically at that cohort.

There wasn't a lot of high conviction in terms of that move really bringing them back in. Certainly nothing akin to what you had seen in April of last year when we were going through those what we were calling these, you know, rip your face off rallies. After you had gotten the series of delays for for imports for China.

What do you make of this quarter as a whole? It feels like there have been two major market moving events. I guess the first one was AI is killing software.

And I mean, some of the drawdowns we've seen, even in the companies that are technically AI companies like Microsoft, even Nvidia has gotten pretty crushed recently. That seems to be one story which surprised people for various different reasons. And then also Iran on what that has done to oil supply and what that may do to the economy. I guess I'd be interested to hear your reflections on Q1. I mean, I don't think these are two things that people necessarily predicted, but how does it change your outlook for the year and what are your reflections on what has been kind of an insane quarter.

It has been an insane quarter. I mean, insanely long quarter. I feel like it's been a year because, you know, this dates back even to Venezuela and Greenland. I mean, that was in the same quarter. It's hard to imagine that so much has got, you know, I've been joking that we're still in January.

“And so it just, you know, it just feels drawn out. But I think that, you know, for Iran in particular, yes, I think it will change the calculus of how we think about the trajectory of the economy moving forward.”

What's, what's difficult is, you know, there's just so many unknowns in terms of what is the, you know, what's, what is the strategy of of, of the US. And I think that matters in the sense of trying to figure out and sort of game out a scenario analysis for where oil ultimately ends up. Because I think that, you know, going up to $120, I'm just sort of, you know, using rounded rounded numbers out of the year. But $120 a barrel for for oil. If you get up to that, that doesn't really tell me much. I want to know what is sort of the floor after that and where do you ultimately kind of plane out and find a sustained floor.

To me, this is much more of a sort of direct to consumer shock versus something like liberation day last year, which was more of a direct to business shock, because those are the ones that sort of faced it first in terms of the import fees and in the hike and rates that they had to pay.

The consumer, as we've sort of learned, didn't face too much of that tariff burden throughout last year. There were bits and pieces and certainly in the goods market.

There was some past where we've actually started to see some past through earlier this year. But I think of this as more of that direct to consumer shock. And if you think about, you know, the two things that the average consumer in America, I would say probably the world, but in America in particular, you know, thinks about as the most important gauges of economic health. It's grocery prices in its gasoline prices. So to the extent that this starts to cause a little bit of a shift in how they spend their money, that I think will ultimately lead us to sort of change how we think about the trajectory of the economy.

“I will say though, there needs to be, I think, an important distinction and so far this is played out in the economic data that we've gotten.”

There doesn't need to be a distinction between what is a consumption shock and what is a labor shock.

Because if you, if you do hit the consumer spending power, or if you hit the sort of consumption basket, that's one thing. But if you start to take away consumer spending power via lower income, you know, through layoffs, that's a very different story. So far that hasn't been the case, initial jobless claims, you know, which we get every Thursday morning at 830 Eastern, those have actually rolled over. They haven't picked up much. We haven't really gotten any, you know, sort of company notices of mass layoffs across industries.

So as long as that's the case, I think that it will keep the economy sort of on track to grow.

“But I think it's, you know, it's probably relatively easy to say that we're going to have to take down, you know, growth estimates for this year.”

Just based on that consumer aspect alone.

Well, while you're on that point, we just had this news that Oracle is laying off thousands of employees, it kind of just came out of the blue. They just sent an email in thousands of employees were dismissed. And again, it is one of those stories of this was an AI story. And we have seen more of these. We've seen it with Pinterest. We saw it with Amazon. We saw it with block block was another big one. Are those AI layoffs stories significant enough to you to make, to pose real problems in the labor market going forward? Like, is that just more of a, this happens to a handful of tech companies.

And, you know, it might be very shocking for that industry itself, but not necessarily going to have a massive implication for the larger economy.

“Where do you land on these AI layoffs in terms of their impact going forward?”

I lean that way just because in, in just sort of simple math terms, I mean, the information sector. It's, it's hard because the BLS, you know, they don't have tech specifically carved out as a name of an industry, but information is essentially that that's the name that we can, we can sort of associate with tech. That's, that's a pretty low single digits in terms of the percentage share of overall payrolls. So number one, that's a pretty small sort of impact directly at least for overall payrolls. But number two, that share has actually been rolling over for a couple of, you're almost a couple of years now. So we've started to actually, we've continued to see, we started to see it a couple of years ago.

But we've continued to see this move away from, you know, tech dominance in terms of that share of employment growing, because it had been growing for a while, but now that's actually started to reverse lower. And it's been in favor of areas like health and education, I mean, you know, private health services. So we've seen that hand off. In that, in that timeframe, of course, the economy's continued to grow, the labor market is continued to grow, not in a, in a strong way, not as strong as we've been used to, but we've still continued to see economic growth.

So I think that it keeps that, you know, a little bit more radio syncretic. But at the same time, it is emblematic. I think of what's happening to the broader tech industry. And I think actually, brings up an interesting point about tech for this sort of next earnings season. What I found interesting so far, year to date, is that tech earnings revisions within the S&P 500. That sector has actually seen the most aggressive upward revision. So analysts have continued to get more optimistic on what EPS is going to look like for this year.

I'm going to be very sort of hawk I focused on in the next earnings season, whether that is driven by sort of this profit margin protection of, you know, laying more people off or whether they're actually continuing to see strong organic, you know, revenue and strong demand. I think those are two very different things. And that to me will determine a lot of the sort of the fate of where tech goes for the rest of the year. And it's striking because it's gotten so crushed this quarter. I mean, it's just one of those sectors where they keep on posting great earnings.

Keep on beating estimates by and large. And then they still get punished either way, just as we wrap up here, it seems as though as it stands end of Q1, 2026.

It seems as though investors are incredibly unankered from what is actually happening on the ground, because they're asking so many questions about what the future might look like.

“And they're not really willing or very interested in in looking at the previous backward-looking data, because everyone's view is kind of like, well, the future is in completely uncertain.”

We don't know what's going to happen in Iran. We don't know what's going to happen at the price of all. We don't know what AI is going to do to the job market, what it's going to do to software, to tech, et cetera. So it's kind of like a free for all is the way I feel right now. I'd be interested to hear if you agree, like, do you agree that this is the most uncertain time we've seen, at least in the past, I don't know, 10 years. The U-word I would use is actually unstable and unstable and uncertain are different.

That was actually a key theme that we had coming into 2026 out that we in any way predicted, you know, the war that we're in right now. But, you know, instability is a little bit more, it's it's definitely less comfortable in terms of you can see these things that are shifting. You just don't necessarily know how to respond as an investor. So, not that we think you need to respond to all of these events. I would actually argue against that and say that, you know, you should be lengthening time horizons and really reassessing what your risk, your risk tolerance and your emotional risk tolerances and these environments.

But I think to your point, you know, somebody have been thinking about lately and going through all of these things that are happening right now. It's sort of a monster mashup of prior crises or it's sort of the ghost of prior crises, you know, past that are coming to haunt us all at once. Because you have the AI story, a lot of people, you know, liken it to the late 90s with the internet bubble. You have an energy crisis going on right now that people liken to 1990 or the late 1970s. But then you also have this, you know, terrifying regime that we're still in, which harkens back to 17 and 18 or, you know, even, you know, even last year.

“So it's all of this sort of happening at once and mashed up and I think that's what's causing a lot of the, you know, distress and the anxiety around.”

How can the market continue to do well or not sell off as, you know, as much as we'd expect with all of this going on.

But to me, it gets back to, I guess, a framework that I've been using for, for these moments, which is, what is the front page risk, what is the bottom line risk?

We've gotten through a lot of front page risks and faced a lot of that this year, whether it was Venezuela, whether it was Greenland, whether it was everything with the Fed. But the bottom line risk wasn't as acute or as sharp because it wasn't filtering down to, how is this going to affect us in P500 earnings? Because at the end of the day, it's probably what the market, you know, that is what the market cares about the most. This more recent conflict, you know, I think is is kind of narrowing the gap between those two.

So that's kind of what I'm on watch for is to see how much of this direct to consumer hit really manifest and how much of it grows. And then that's where I could see this translating from, you know, just the front page stuff to an actual bottom line risk. Alright, Kevin Gordon, head of macro research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, Kevin always love having you. Thank you for joining us. Thanks Ed. After the break, an update on the chip's market.

And if you're enjoying the show, please follow our new Prof. Markets YouTube channel. Starting next week, that is where you will find all of our new content on YouTube. The link is in the description, subscribe now. Hi, I'm Renee Brown. And I'm Adam Grant. And we're here to invite you to the Curiosity Shop.

A podcast that's a place for listening, wondering, thinking, feeling and questioning. It's going to be fun. We rarely agree.

But we almost never disagree and we're always learning.

That's true. You can subscribe to the Curiosity Shop on YouTube or follow in your favorite podcast app to automatically receive new episodes every Thursday. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. It's a shame when the best B2B marketing gets wasted on the wrong audience. Like, imagine running an ad for cataract surgery on Saturday morning cartoons. Or running a promo for this show on a video about Roblox or something.

No offense to our general listeners, but that would be a waste of anyone's ad budget. So, when you want to reach the right professionals, you can use LinkedIn ads. LinkedIn is grown to a network of over 1 billion professionals and 130 million decision makers according to their data. That's where it stands apart from other ad buys. You can target buyers by job title, industry company rules,

seniority skills, company revenue, all suit and stop waste and budget on the wrong audience.

“That's why LinkedIn ads, both one of the highest B2B return on ad spend of all online ad networks.”

Seriously, all of them.

It's been $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a free $250 credit for the next one.

Just go to linkedin.com/scot. That's linkedin.com/scot. Terms and conditions apply. This week, in two different courtrooms in the United States,

while not responsible for the content on their platforms,

“may be responsible for the way their platforms actually work.”

And that might change the way that social media works. This week on the Vergecast, we're exploring all of the ways that social media could change and might not. Plus, the 50th anniversary of Apple and why after trying every other phone I could find, I wound up just buying another iPhone.

On the Vergecast, wherever you get podcasts. We're back with Proft U Markets. The relentless rise of chip stocks has hit a roadblock. Last week, US memory chip stocks shed $100 billion in market value after Google revealed an algorithm called turbo quant that could reduce demand for the chips.

Stocks rallied yesterday, though, as investors bought the dip, but they are still down for the past week. Meanwhile, the Iran war is stoking fears of a supply crunch in helium,

a critical material in chip manufacturing.

Despite yesterday's broad market rally, Nvidia is still trading at a forward PE below the S&P 500 for the first time in 13 years. So lots going on in the chips market right now. Here to break down what's happening. We're speaking with Doug Oloflon, president of semi-analysis.

Doug, great to see you. This movement in the chip market that we're seeing is a little bit confusing. I mean, first Google comes out with this algorithm, turbo quant, which supposedly is going to kill memory stocks. People were calling it Google or memory's deep-seek moment.

But then the memory chip stocks rise yesterday, so did all the other semi-conduct stocks. What is going on here?

“Okay, so I think what we're actually seeing is a lot of leverage under the surface.”

Memory has been a really popular trait here today, and it's become very crowded. That's the most simplistic way to think about it. And I think SK Heinix, which is a cheaper altar, like the stockest cheaper on fundamental metrics, but it trades in Korea, has recently been talking about leasing an ADR. And because of that, that's going to kind of move some of the supply of rather some of the demand

for micron away from micron shares into SK Heinix shares. That's one simplistic way to think about it. The other side of it, I think, is just a lot of momentum on widening. One of the moves were very, like multiple senior deviations out of the normal, specifically for negative chip stocks and positive software stocks.

That's effectively been the most popular trait here today. And so what I think what you're witnessing in terms of confusing moves is more function of decrosing than fundamental information. And I definitely want to talk about Serbroquant, because like, Terbroquant's fake. I mean, I know other way to put this. Okay, and I can even give some like insider, baseball, I feel like that will really help.

One, almost always what happens is in a closed lab, if they're willing to publish a paper about it publicly,

that means that there's some kind of breakdown that means it can't scale at a larger amount. Because if, you know, if it did work at a larger amount, you just keep it inside, and you'll essentially increase your margin versus your competitors. It's so much so that I know that closed labs have a political movement.

“So pretty much like, if you want to screw someone's careers, you publish the findings that they worked on.”

I really don't think Terbroquant is a big of deal as people think. And if you scale it up, pretty much what happens is that there's an immediate throughput disadvantage. Partially, a big part of it, too, was comparing the quantization schemes. So it's like a 32-bit versus like, you know, I think it was like a four-bit. That difference alone accounts for meaningful uplift in the KV cash impression.

But last and not, not least, is the most important portion of this whole thing is if you get more context. And in the KV cash, essentially users will just use more context. So I think, I think it really is a nothing burger. Like, I really cannot express this enough. I know that if it was really, really special and secret incurred, it wouldn't have been released.

There are optimization techniques for KV cash that happen, and every of the leading labs. And this is just one of them that was published to the public. Yeah, it's interesting how the market reacted to that turbo quant release, which was, again, I mean, Google comes out with this algorithm. The idea is that it's going to reduce the amount of memory that is needed to run these large language models.

And everyone freaks out. But it appears that now markets are kind of re-understanding what's happening, because memory stalks and now rising again. And what I read is that Bunstein had put out some research saying, "We're not so worried about this.

Everyone decides to buy again. The point being, it seems that investors are, kind of don't know what's going on here, just on a technical basis. Like they're waiting for someone else to tell them, "This is the deal. This is what this means for you.

I would mostly agree with that.

“And I think it really comes out to risk appetite and what's happening at investors all around the world.”

Stocks that up go up very quickly, often have give it back very quickly. And I think that that's the big thing that we're witnessing. Micron trades really cheap on afford price earnings, but often times memory stalks kind of top out at a cheap price earnings, because they're inherently cyclical.

Now, in this point of time, I think what happens is as it becomes cheaper and cheaper and cheaper as the memory price goes up and up and up. Effectively, it's like a game of chicken. One day, the memory price will go down and what will happen is the shares, which often are very, very cheap at the top,

become the operating leverage is meaningful to the downside. And so, this is like the history of every memory cycle, but at this point in time, I want to be pretty clear about this. We still continue to believe that there is way more demand than there is supply, and supply has a neat constraint that pretty much there's no meaningful blocks of supply

that will come online until the second half of next year.

That's because the long lead time items of like building the whole clean room takes a long time. And so, that's kind of going to be this continued supply demand gap that we see in the market. I just want to shift to some other names here. Nvidia, as an example, which is, as I mentioned,

is trading at a Ford PE that is below the S&P 500 average. In fact, Nvidia's Ford PE is now lower than X on mobiles, Ford PE, which is pretty remarkable.

“What has changed in terms of the Nvidia narrative here?”

Why is it? I mean, this is the AI company. And yet, investors are saying, we're not so excited. In fact, we're more excited about X on mobile. This is a hard question, and one that I've been answering to a lot of my clients. It's really hard for us to understand why the big companies trade the way they do.

I'm going to actually look to history a little bit, for example, of a company that won so, so independently in its market that the earnings multiple collapsed. The company that comes up with mine is Apple. Apple, once upon a time, in the late teens, or maybe even in mid teens.

I don't know, late teens, I think it traded for eight times earnings X cash. The entire time, the company was growing at a healthy clip, but what happens is, sometimes effectively, if you think about it, there needs to be an incremental buyer. It's a single biggest company in the world.

It's a well understood story, and I think what's going to happen is the stock will probably continue to work based on its earnings growth, which if the reason why the four earnings is so low is because they're expected to grow over 70% revenue this year, and that's a pretty remarkable revenue growth rate

at a company that their size. I think Nvidia is going to be fine,

“but I think part of it is, when you're at the top,”

there is kind of a whole different special set of second rules,

and they're the single biggest company in the world. The flow, the liquidity kind of really fights against you. You become such a big portion in indexes. It becomes a little bit of a battle, I think, from a supply and demand of your shares.

What I think is capping near-term, let's say stock revisions, and I think continuing execution is what will make Nvidia's stock, and the value of its earnings be valuable again. Because you can look at other parts of the market for AI, and there's many, many, many different parts that trade for authority,

very healthy times, multiples of earnings, because there's a lot of excitement. I think it's just a difference in magnitude of scale. Yeah, if Apple is the comparison that it would lead me to believe that, perhaps this is a good buying opportunity. I certainly seem to think that about Microsoft,

which is, I was just looking, it's now trading roughly where it was off deliberation day, after that meltdown last year. Microsoft is another AI company, building the data centers, getting absolutely crushed right now,

metered by the way is in a slightly similar position, also trading near where it was off to the meltdown after liberation day. Just before we go here, I'd love to get your views on those two names, meta, Microsoft, and why they too are getting claw, but at least so far this year.

Yeah, I think it's really interesting, and I think it's time to think about how AI impacts both through business models, because I think that that's the big difference. Microsoft, I think the big difference is that they're a horizontal software company with Office 365, and there is no company that has challenged more than they are at a core basis

from chatGPT, from anthropics, co-work, and obviously they're working really hard to fast-follow, kind of like they did with teams in Zoom, right? And you can already select as well. But at the same time, when the pace and the speed of the market is moving so quickly in AI,

I think that there's a real invalid reason to question the longevity of Microsoft's core business. Office 365 is under threat of AI is going to be doing a lot of the information processing

Now at the same time, Azure happens to be the biggest, you know,

we'll call it Neo Cloud in the world, right? They are the single biggest infrastructure player, and that business is working at a very healthy clip. So I think that there's a kind of a narrative headwind to Microsoft, where they have kind of barbarians at the gates of their core business.

But at the same time, you know, the barbarians at the gate happened to be their biggest customers, right? So there's this kind of this push and pull, but at some price, I believe you're kind of going to be able to get Office for free because the value of the Azure portion and the revenue acceleration from that, and then if you include or ex-out windows, the stock becomes pretty cheap.

But I do believe that there's going to be quite, so like, look, it's probably a very cheap and exciting stock, but there is definitely some narrative headwinds.

“I think on the other side of it, you have the meta, right?”

meta, meta's business model is actually, you can argue, one of the most advantageous in terms of, like, high ROI spending. And that's also another question I think the hyper sailors are coming to. ROSC is going down as they spend all these big dollars, but they're able to get pretty good returns on capital on this huge base.

That's like a side thing, but meta specifically can sit there and use all the GPUs that they have to make better recommendation learning models, and sell higher value ads with more impressions. So they can make the users that they have more engaged, as well as the value of the advertising slot for the user more valuable.

And you can see this in CPM's going up, and impressions could to use a stable out. And so they have a really high ROI opportunity, but at the same time, they also are missing something really important, which is a core fundamental AI lab.

And so they have this ability to monetize the GPUs at a high rate,

“but I think that there is a fear and concern that they're going to”

kind of be left at the roadside, and Zuck said this many, many times. He doesn't want to lease the future. Like, kind of how he was, he had to essentially rent Apple's toll booth, right? He wants to own a foundational AI lab.

And so I think that that's going to be a big part of the value of the company in the future, and I think the misexecution in avocado, which is their large pre-trained model that they just recently finished, wasn't as good as other Chinese open source products. That's kind of the rumor, and I think because of that,

people are viewing that as meta isn't going to do a really good job from AI perspective. So that's kind of the narrative I think around meta, but I do think that they're the most scaled player with a meaningful ROI of deploying AI into their core business,

“and I think meta will continue to do well.”

So, Zuck's not the type to lose, he's very competitive. So that's kind of the meta story I think on the other hand. Dr. Loughlin, president of semi-analysis, very interesting time to be the president of a semi-conductive research company. So I can actually thank you, Doug, and appreciate your time.

Yeah, thank you so much. So here's the latest on the insider trading scandals that continued to come out of the White House. According to a new report from the Financial Times,

U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Heggseth tried to make a multi-million-dollar investment

in a defense fund before we went to war with Iran. That was according to multiple people familiar with the meta. Reportedly, Pete Heggseth's broker at Morgan Stanley had contacted BlackRock to invest in the Defense Industrial's active ETF on his behalf. And again, crucially, this was shortly before we bombed Iran,

the decision which Pete Heggseth was responsible for. Now, to be fair, they didn't go through with that investment, but not because they gained some form of moral clarity on the matter, but because it turned out they actually want Abel to invest, because that fund was not yet available for Morgan Stanley clients to buy.

So that is why they didn't invest. At the same time, we also have no knowledge of whether they decided to simply invest in a different defense fund. For all we know, they could have just gone and bought another one. And that would add up because this is becoming something of a trend in this administration. Also, before we attacked Iran, Trump's children invested millions of dollars in military drone companies

that had contracts with the Pentagon. We have covered that before. Before we attacked Venezuela, the new Secretary for the Department of Homeland Security bought up a bunch of oil and defense stocks. Again, that was before we went in and captured Maduro. Before Trump announced liberation day and tanked the stock market by one of its largest margins ever, more than a dozen government officials decided to sell significant amounts of stock

at basically exactly the right time.

There are plenty of other examples, which I review in my latest newsletter simply put, which you can read on [email protected]. I go through all of the scandals that we've seen, but the point being, inside a trading is now standard ubiquitous, whatever you want to call it in this administration.

a different defense fund or perhaps other defense stocks after he had literally tried

“to buy it and gotten rejected by BlackRock.”

And again, he's down to do this because there are no consequences anymore.

The SEC has been gutted, enforcement actions have plummeted, and the number of prosecutions for white collar crime have literally been cut in half.

“This is all by design. However, you know all of this because I've told you all of this before,”

but here I am telling it to you again, because we are seeing the same news again.

Another inside a trading scandal, one of a series of inside a trading scandals that have already been reported,

“who knows how many scandals haven't been reported, but one thing remains pretty clear,”

at least to me, we have not seen the end of this. Okay, that's it for today. This episode was produced by Claire Miller and Alison Weiss, edited by Joel Passen, an engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our video editor is Brad Williams, our research team is Dan Schlon. Isabella Kinsel, Chris, now Donna Hugh, I'm Miss Vario, and our social producer is Jake McPherson.

Thank you for listening to Prophecy Market's from Prophecy Media. If you liked what you have, give us a follow. I'm Ed Alson, I will see you tomorrow. With the help of Dr. Dr. Rikung, the manufacturer of the Heherch Dallas, based on Amazon's performance from the year 2025 in Rosbrotanian and the EU.