Wall Street Insider: AI investors are IGNORING this data!

Summary

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Full Signal Podcast Episode Summary

Episode: Wall Street Insider: AI investors are IGNORING this data!

Host: Phil Rosen
Guest: Gunjan Banerji, Senior Markets Reporter (The Wall Street Journal)
Date: June 25, 2026

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Overview

In this episode, award-winning journalist Phil Rosen interviews Gunjan Banerji about recent volatility in tech stocks, concerns around an AI-driven market bubble, the explosion in retail options trading, blockbuster IPOs, AI-powered investing tools, American assets, and unique insights from her interviews with America’s top wealthy investors. The conversation dives deep into data and behavioral trends that many AI-focused investors are currently ignoring, raising questions about market froth, retail speculation, and the evolution of financial culture.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Tech Pullback: Bubble or Correction? (00:00–03:53)

• Recent Market Dip: Initial fear of an “ugly sell off” quickly dissipated; S&P 500 still up nearly 10% YTD.
• Underlying Strength: Corporate earnings are “revised higher at a pace rarely seen” ([03:00]).
• Bubble Talk vs. Fundamentals: Not a “rally based on nothing”; big institutions are increasing investments, not pulling out.

“This is not a rally based on nothing. So I do hesitate to say, hey, we're in the middle of this giant bubble.”
— Gunjan Banerji (00:52)

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2. AI Spending and Market Sentiment (00:44–03:53)

• Anxiety centers on whether massive AI spend by tech giants will ultimately pay off.
• “Bubble” rhetoric is cyclical; every year brings new warnings, but fundamentals don’t match the dot-com crash era.

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3. IPO Mania: SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI (03:53–06:37)

• Concerns that high-profile IPOs “suck up capital” from established tech winners like Nvidia or Google.
• Historical data shows equity issuance typically rises during bull markets—IPOs tend to coincide with strong returns.
• Retail interest in recent IPOs (e.g., SpaceX) was high, but short-term buyers often missed out on real gains.

“It’s interesting...will all this equity issuance spell bad news for the stock market?...But typically periods of elevated stock market issuance...coincide with strong equity returns.”
— Gunjan Banerji (04:03)

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4. Speculation & Froth: Options and Leveraged Trades (06:37–11:31)

• “Frothiest corners”: Huge retail and institutional flows into one-day (0DTE) options and leveraged exchange-traded products (ETPs), especially in semiconductors and tech.
• Options volume is “four, five times” above typical levels in Nvidia, Micron, etc.
• Options trading has gone mainstream since the meme stock/Robinhood boom.

“The rush into options tied to semiconductor stocks...it’s running at four, five times the typical volumes we’ve seen...”
— Gunjan Banerji (06:37)

• Retail has often been “the smart money” in recent market crises by bravely buying the dip—sometimes even ahead of institutions.

“I do think retail investors are often the smart money...they do not get enough credit for being long term buy and hold investors...”
— Gunjan Banerji (10:01)

• But YOLO trading in complex derivatives is concerning for broader market risk.

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5. AI Tools and Automation in Investing (15:15–19:23)

• ChatGPT Portfolio Experiment: Gunjan let ChatGPT manage a hypothetical $1 million portfolio for The Wall Street Journal.
  • Initial portfolio advice was sound, but became “wackier” and overly agreeable, sometimes echoing “worst instincts as an investor.”
  • AI suggested high-risk strategies like leveraged ETFs/options.
• Performance: Outperformed briefly after a tariffs strategy, then lagged when policies changed—highlighting the risk of “overfitting” strategies to short-term news.

“A lot of the advice was pretty good, to be honest, Phil...But then as the month went on, some of the advice got a little bit wackier.”
— Gunjan Banerji (15:30)

• Custom AI Tools: Phil discusses ProCap’s CFO Silvia for personalized, context-aware financial advice, contrasting it with generalist models like ChatGPT.

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6. Sell America Trade & US Asset Resilience (19:23–21:57)

• “Sell America” thesis (dumping US assets, especially during tariff/political upheaval) hasn't panned out; US stocks, bonds, and the dollar have proven resilient.
• Foreign holdings of US stocks actually increased, contrary to consensus fears.

“Foreign holdings of US Stocks have gone up over the past year, which is so counterintuitive to what we were hearing.”
— Gunjan Banerji (21:17)

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7. Wealth Boom & Lessons from Billionaires (22:30–25:37)

• New Show: Gunjan shares lessons from interviews with founders, tycoons (e.g., Robinhood, Poppy, David Grutman).
• Billionaires seek “convexity”—explosive return profiles—and often sustain high risk.
• Rise of family offices as new Wall Street power players; ultra-wealthy now require teams to manage complex, global affairs.

“A lot of these investors and entrepreneurs were looking for a large amount of convexity in their bets...you can have incredibly exponential returns from a certain type of investment.”
— Gunjan Banerji (22:30)

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8. Culture Shift: Financialization and Speculation (12:51–14:35; 27:30–28:04)

• Host and guest joke about society’s obsession with “gambling,” linking it to options, prediction markets, crypto.
• Culture now embraces speculation as entertainment as much as investing.

“Prediction markets, even crypto zero day options, all these things are pretty much the same symptom of just our obsession with gambling as a society.”
— Phil Rosen (12:55)

• Gunjan attends in-person prediction market meetups in New York—evidence of the mainstreaming of speculation.

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9. Bubble Risk and Unprecedented AI Spend (26:35–27:56)

• AI infrastructure spending by top tech companies is enormous—on par with historic scale events like the railroad boom.
• Hard to call a top: the combination of strong data and exuberant sentiment is unique.

“Spending on data centers and AI infrastructure by just four big technology companies is expected to top $670 billion this year. That is...on par with what we saw during the railroad expansion of the 1800s.”
— Gunjan Banerji (26:35)

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Memorable Quotes & Timestamps

• “This is not a rally based on nothing. So I do hesitate to say, hey, we're in the middle of this giant bubble.” — Gunjan (00:52)
• “Hedge funds are significantly invested in technology stocks...People have been piling into options that would pay out if the rally continued.” — Gunjan (01:37)
• “Periods of elevated stock market issuance...typically coincide with strong equity returns.” — Gunjan (04:03)
• “The rush into options tied to semiconductor stocks...four, five times the typical volumes we’ve seen...” — Gunjan (06:37)
• “Flocking to the one day options market...That is 100% speculation and it has gone through the roof recently.” — Gunjan (08:43)
• “Retail investors are often the smart money...brave money during market downturns.” — Gunjan (10:01)
• “It’s fun, right?” — Gunjan on the culture of gambling/speculation in markets (13:12)
• “A lot of the advice was pretty good, to be honest, Phil...But then as the month went on, some of the advice got a little bit wackier.” — Gunjan (15:30)
• “Foreign holdings of US Stocks have gone up over the past year, which is so counterintuitive...” — Gunjan (21:17)
• “They need to create a separate structure or a separate office to manage it...that’s created actually a new kind of category of power player on Wall street...” — Gunjan (25:37)
• “Spending on data centers and AI infrastructure by just four big technology companies...on par with what we saw during the railroad expansion of the 1800s.” — Gunjan (26:35)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:00–03:53 — Are we in a tech bubble? Earnings and investor flows.
• 03:53–06:37 — IPO wave: SpaceX, AI, and the mechanics of equity issuance.
• 06:37–11:31 — Options and derivative mania; retail’s emergence as market drivers.
• 12:51–14:35 — Financial culture, speculation, and the “gamification” of investing.
• 15:15–19:23 — AI and automation in investing; ChatGPT portfolio experiment.
• 19:23–21:57 — The “Sell America” trade, tariffs, and US asset performance.
• 22:30–25:37 — Interviews with billionaires; convexity and family offices.
• 26:35–27:56 — AI infrastructure spending: unprecedented scale and bubble risk.

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Conclusion

The episode offers a nuanced, data-driven analysis of today’s market dynamics, highlighting widespread misconceptions around AI spending, bubbles, and American assets. It also investigates how retail investors have outperformed expectations, the new speculative tools shaping financial markets, and how both tech and behavioral shifts are remaking Wall Street—sometimes in ways even the smartest AI and data-driven investors overlook.

Transcript

[A]

Gunjan, we are right on the heels of a pretty sharp pullback in tech and I'm very curious to see what you are looking at to determine whether it's a bubble popping or if it's just a regular correction here.

[B]

I gotta be honest, yesterday morning when I was taking a Look at my FactSet screen, I was like, oh my God, we are in for a pretty ugly sell off. But by the end of the day, it just didn't feel like that big of a freakout. Right. Like the market has run up so far this year. We have gains of almost 10% for the S&P 500. It kind of seemed like a run of the mill pullback though. I think at the heart of it was this big concern about spending among tech giants. Right. And when, when is all this AI spending, is all this AI spending going to pay off for the market?

[A]

Do you think that the concerns in the last, let's say 48 hours were overblown?

[B]

I, I think there is this tension, right, among investors about the, the pace of spending by the hyperscalers. But when you look at the fundamentals of the market, corporate earnings, they've been really strong. This is not a rally based on nothing. So I do hesitate to say, hey, we're in the middle of this giant bubble.

[A]

To me, I think about all the people that were calling it a bubble a year ago and then they've all been wrong for a year essentially. And many of them have been waiting on the sidelines or sitting in bonds or something. And I think they're just losing money in this market. Is there anything that you point to, to help you figure out, okay, this is not a top signal here.

[B]

So not a lot of investors I've been chatting with this week are saying, we think the top is in. We're, we're shifting into cash. In fact, you see the opposite when you look at the data. Hedge funds are significantly invested in technology stocks and the broader market. People have been piling things like leveraged GTPs. They've been piling into things like options that would pay out if the rally continued. But I would actually take it further than a year. I feel like the entire time I have been a markets reporter, I've been a markets reporter for nine years now. I have heard the bubble come up. I've heard the word bubble come up almost every single year. And so far, I mean, there was a lot of speculation in 2021, but we haven't seen the type of bubble burst that we saw during the dot com bust in 2000.

[A]

So of the older investors I speak with who were around in the 90s, they would respond to you probably. Well, you just aren't old enough to have been there to know what it's like. And that's why you're, you know, kind of a permeable. I would say old people generally think young people are permeables. One, because we haven't lived through something like a.com crash and maybe we were too young in 2008. But also I do think so much of what the numbers are actually saying points to the opposite of any type of dot com crash here.

[B]

I mean, when you look at corporate earnings, we are seeing them revised higher at a pace rarely seen over the past few years. We saw JP Morgan come out just this week asking basically, were we not optimistic enough about corporate earnings and raising their price target for the S&P 500 to 7,800 for the end of the year. And we've seen a number of big investment banks come out and revise their targets higher because of how strong corporate earnings have been. And I think that's a key data point to look at. And one thing on this whole permeable thing, when I talk to individual investors and as part of my reporting at the Journal, I talk to scores of individual investors, what a lot of people will call permeable is actually individual investors realizing, hey, it's paid off to stay invested during ups and downs. And they've learned that since 2020.

[A]

How do you see these big IPOs like SpaceX and we're hopefully probably going to see Anthropic and OpenAI pretty soon. How does that fit into all this?

[B]

It's interesting, Phil, I'm sure you've been hearing about some of these worries about will all this equity issuance spell bad news for the stock market? Right. Can the market handle these waves of issuance? Could it cause volatility? I mean, SpaceX basically managed a Goldilocks IPO, right? Things went incredibly smoothly. But I was looking at some data from Deutsche bank that showed that typically periods of elevated stock market issuance, and it's already been a blockbuster year for IPOs. We will likely see anthropic come to market. OpenAI is in talks to go to market as well. Those are typically coinciding with periods of strong equity returns. Right? Because companies typically are really strategic with, with. With when they go to market. They go to market when earnings are strong, they go to market during secular bull markets. So I don't know. There's, there's a Little bit of a mismatch in that narrative in terms of will these IPOs cause volatility in the market?

[A]

I think the biggest concern that seemed to make sense to me when something like a SpaceX hits the market, it's going to suck the capital out of all the past winners of the last couple, couple years, something like Google or Nvidia, all the capital that's been bidding up, those stocks are going to leave to go into SpaceX. I'm not sure if we exactly saw that play out in the last few days. The one concerning thing I saw running up to SpaceX 2, a lot of my friends that are not in finance were messaging me whether they should buy SpaceX.

[B]

What did you say?

[A]

I told them all no. And again, I'm very bullish long term. I think that's a, it's a very easy take to be bullish on Elon Musk. Pretty much whatever he touches I think will do very well in public markets. But buying a new IPO generally has been a bad move. And I think SpaceX has all the tools, all the momentum to sort of break the historical trend. But I still didn't buy anything. I knew a lot of my friends actually did buy it. I think some of them, as of now, they're probably all about flat to negative since buying it. Well, because no one got the real IPO price. I think it came up 155, 165, even though it was priced at 135. So a lot of them missed that. The early pricing, of course. When you look at the data that you're looking at, and especially in auctions markets, what are you seeing as the most frothy corporate corners of the market right now?

[B]

I think the rush into options tied to semiconductor stocks, into Nvidia options, into tech options in particular, it's been incredible. And it's running at four, five times the typical volumes we've seen in these names over the past few months. And just think about these huge one day pops, right? We've seen in stocks like Nvidia and Micron in all of these tech names. And you're seeing that in the options market too, and the market for leveraged ETPs, right? What both the leveraged ETP market and options have in common is that people are looking for ways to turbocharge their exposure to these stocks. They don't want just like, you know, the 10% return a year, they want the 10x20x return which these trades can give you.

[A]

Okay, can you take a step back here? Explain what the options market, like, how do you read the options market to determine whether it looks frothy or boring?

[B]

So I think it can be very nuanced. Right. Because options can be used to make directional bets to say hey, I think Nvidia stock is going up or I think it's going down or it can be used to hedge stock market exposure. So I think that's an important grain of salt, right. When you're talking about the options market because you could look at a trade and you could see a bunch of call options trading tied to a semiconductor index, but it's actually a hedge against a short position that a hedge fund has on it. Right. So I like to just caveat any interpretation with that. But we have just seen a burst of options activity tied to those stocks.

[A]

And when you are looking at these positions, is it mostly institutional positions that are in these option markets or do you read it as a retail signal?

[B]

So these are top retail trades as well. There's a mix of institutional and retail activity for sure. And options have gotten just more and more popular among retail investors over the past six years.

[A]

Do you think that is a sign of speculative excess here?

[B]

It's definitely a sign of speculation, yes. Individual investors flocking the options market. Flocking the like flocking to the one day options market. I'm sure you're familiar with these, right? The 0dtes crazy. Where now you have trades expiring every single day of the week. That is not investing. That is 100% speculation and it has gone through the roof recently.

[A]

Part of me thinks when you have a sophisticated investor, on one hand, yes, they should be using options because maybe they know how to and they can make more money in the market that way. But on the other, options are a very sophisticated tool to use or play to use in markets. And if I think about myself, I don't think I'm that sophisticated of a investor. Frankly I'm pretty simple. I have no business using zero day options or any of these complex securities that are offered in the market right now. So if we see a proliferation of options use among retail, part of me makes like feels a bit nervous about that. But then the other side, which you've been writing about a lot of, is that retail has actually been the smart money in the last few years. And I think they've actually front run in many cases what institutions have tried to get involved with.

[B]

I do think retail investors are often the smart money and I think many retail investors do not get enough credit for being long term buy and hold investors for, for buying the dip right and, and actually being the brave money during market downturns. I think that was really on display during the tariff turmoil that we saw in 2025, where retail stormed the markets during some of the worst days of the year. Meanwhile, hedge funds were chopping their exposure to the market like we haven't seen in years. So there's been a really big split. And I think sometimes individual investors do get a bad rap. I think a lot of them, though, are not being so smart with their money. And a lot of them are engaging in YOLO trades in the derivatives market and in the options market. I think as a whole, it's made the derivatives market, which I think can feel so wonky and out of reach to a lot of investors. And when I first started covering it, when I got to the Journal, it wasn't something that people were following a lot. It wasn't something that people really seem to care about. This was before the GameStop meme stock mania, before call options trading was cool. But derivatives in all corners of the market have blown up. I mean, you have options, you have futures prediction markets. That is a type of derivative, right? When you think about perpetual futures that give you 10x20x100, 100x leverage on cryptocurrencies. Wildly popular around the world, derivatives.

[A]

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[B]

I don't think so. Yeah.

[A]

Because if it's like part of our

[B]

culture now, if you think culture, of

[A]

course, I mean prediction markets, even crypto zero day options, all these things are pretty much the same symptom of just our obsession with gambling as a society and also in markets.

[B]

By the way, I, I enjoy gambling. I love poker.

[A]

Me too, unfortunately.

[B]

It's fun, right?

[A]

When you think about how retail has been right to buy the dip so many. I mean even with the Iran conflict, they were right to do that. How much of this do you think it's actually them being smart versus we are just in a very long term bull market that that's really the only play to make.

[B]

Well, it's been smart because we are in a long term bull market. Right. It's like they've been rewarded so many times and I think so many of these investors entered markets during 2020 and they were rewarded so quickly. You didn't even have to wait two months to be rewarded for buying the dip. You were rewarded the very next week. Right. When you think about those March 2020 lows and how violent that bounce back was. So I think there's a generation of investors that has only known blue skies. They have not seen an extended bear market. Even 2022, when the federal Reserve was increasing interest rates, right. That was one year they raised rates. We thought it would be terrible for the market. The market went down and we bounced back the next year. So there's a generation that has come of age during a time when this playbook has worked. And I think that plays a really big role where this behavior has been rewarded and it has been the smart move and it has made them the smart money.

[A]

All of that makes me think, okay, maybe we are too early to dismiss.com fears because if everyone is speculating and being right, that's exactly the mechanism that will bid up asset prices to maybe unsustainable levels.

[B]

But like, good luck to the person who's going to time that right to the individual investor or the hedge fund manager who's going to correctly time the exact top. And it's interesting because you and I both keep hearing about these.com fears and the AI spending and all of that, but the market has kept going up through it.

[A]

It's unbelievable. Let me ask you about AI and stock portfolio. You wrote this story recently about letting ChatGPT, I believe, manage a million dollar portfolio. What happened?

[B]

So this was an experiment that I ran for the Wall Street Journal. And what I Learned is some 30% of individual investors are turning to AI for investment advice. So I decided to give ChatGPT a hypothetical $1 million portfolio to invest with and, and see where it went. A lot of the advice was pretty good, to be honest, Phil. Like, it started with a basic portfolio, a basic diversified portfolio, and financial advisors I spoke with said, hey, this is not bad advice. But then as the month went on, some of the advice got a little bit wackier. And I didn't necessarily think it was guiding me to these smart money decisions where it kind of backed up my worst instincts as, as an investor or trader. Like when I asked it about leveraged ETFs, it suggested a trading strategy for them or when I was asking about options trading. So, you know, I'm sure you've had this experience too, with some of the AI models where they can be very sycophantic and they can tell you kind of what you want to hear, which I think if you're an investor, that can be disastrous for your portfolio.

[A]

Do you have a read on how performance was with that portfolio?

[B]

So I can, I can say this, which is at one point I asked ChatGPT how to position during a trade war and it recommended a basket of stocks that might outperform because of tariffs. These tended to be businesses that had a lot of domestic exposure. And I was really impressed because for like a month or two after that, I saw it was really outperforming the market. Of course, shortly after that, the Supreme Court ruled down Trump's tariffs and they ended up underperforming, which I think sheds light on an important lesson. Right. As an individual investor, if I want to put a little bit of my money towards stock picks that might outperform during a trade war, great. Is it the best for my long term portfolio? Probably not.

[A]

So this is one. I think it's amazing that you were able to do this experiment with the Journal. It's smart and it's going to be something that's dominating our lives more and more as the years go on. But our team at ProCap Financial, we have this product called CFO Silvia, and it's actually built exactly for this because rather than go into anthropic or OpenAI's models and say, build me a hypothetical portfolio with these parameters, CFO Silvia, which I actually use every day you do it has all your financial context, so it has all your accounts, your, your brokerages, your retirements, private investments, real estate, all these things you can put into a single dashboard. And it's, it's actually mind blowing. Like I, and I'm not just saying that because it's part of my company, but I actually do use the product every day.

[B]

What, what kinds of questions do you ask it?

[A]

Well, you can ask it, how do I lower my taxes this year? What am I not doing in my retirement accounts that maybe I'm shooting myself in the foot about? Or how should I rebalance my portfolio with the latest inflation report? You can tie it to the news and it's way more specific and accurate to your personal context compared to anthropic or OpenAI. So that's one thing that I think increasingly will, I think people will figure out that certain models are really good for certain tasks. And CFO Silvia is very good for finance. OpenAI great for other things, but probably not personalized portfolio management, let's say.

[B]

I think there's also this question of how much of my, say, Vanguard brokerage account or JP Morgan brokerage account do I want to give an AI model access to.

[A]

And that's one of the common refrains, I think. And that's going to be another ongoing, probably systemic question everyone has to ask with any AI model. Gunji, let me ask you about this Sell America trade. You and I both wrote about it a lot last year, I think, and it's sort of coming back into the conversation now in the financial press. What do you make of one, everyone who called it last year and two, how have those calls turned out?

[B]

Look, I think these calls are really tough to make. And when President Trump first announced these tariffs, it was a reshaping of the global financial and economic order. Right. And stocks were battered, bonds are battered, US Assets were getting crushed. A lot has changed since then. We talked about the Supreme Court saying some of those tariffs could not go through. But what's really remarkable, especially as we approach America 250, is how well American assets have held up. Right. Like the s and P500, up almost 10% this year. Sure. Recently we've seen a sell off in Treasuries a little bit. Right. With people wondering how many rate hikes are we going to get this year. But I think bonds have held up decently well as well. And the dollar has not gotten crushed the way a lot of people thought. I think concerns about Sell America were overdone and American assets have just really performed very well.

[A]

Warren Buffett said never bet against America and he's been right for a long time. He's going to continue to be right And I believe foreign investors are still holding a lot of US Stocks right now. So even investors that are not American, they are betting a lot on America right now. And part of that, of course, is the AI trade. Okay. Before I was.

[B]

Look, this was very surprising because I was looking at some JP Morgan data on this, and it showed that foreign holdings of US Stocks have gone up over the past year, which is so counterintuitive to what we were hearing.

[A]

That makes me think that everyone calling the Sell America trade was mostly a political call rather than a market call. Is that fair?

[B]

I mean, it's interesting because I was hearing from investors on all sides of the spectrum who were very worried about American assets, but I think it's been so tough to call.

[A]

And was it mostly tied to tariffs?

[B]

Is that it was really tied to tariffs? Yes. That was when I was hearing the drumbeat of Seller America was like, yeah, was around the tariff turmoil.

[A]

I mean, if you got out of US Stocks when Trump entered office, maybe you could have outperformed if you went to emerging markets or put everything in South Korea or something. But generally, I think US equities have fared super well. I want to ask you about your new show, a Wall Street Journal Money interview, and you are sitting down with millionaires and billionaires and essentially asking them about their money. What are your biggest learnings from this?

[B]

Thank you, Phil. This has been so fun. I've spent basically the past six months traveling the entire country to sit down with tycoons from all industries. We sat down with the Robinhood co founder, Baiju Pat. We sat down with a tycoon from the hospitality industry, David Grutman. Alison Ellsworth, who founded Poppy. I have learned so much. I think we could do like a three hour podcast on what I've learned. But one thing that really, really strikes me is that a lot of these investors and entrepreneurs were looking for a large amount of convexity in their bets. And convexity is this term for the options nerds watching. And since we were touching on options a little bit, it basically refers to the payout profile of your bet and the idea that you can have incredib exponential returns from a certain type of investment. Think about how you might put in $10 into a call option and it turns into $1,000. Right. The payout profile is really interesting and exponential on that. So these were people who were looking for bets that could change their lives. And I was surprised by just the sheer grit that they exhibited and also the amount of risk that they take on. Like Alison Ellsworth talked about how she was maxing out credit cards, borrowing money from family members to build Poppy, a beverage company. And she ended up selling it to, to Pepsi for, for more than a billion dollars. And she, she held a smaller stake in it. But it was really remarkable to see the resilience of these entrepreneurs in the face of immense challenges. Robinhood co founder Baju Butt told us about how he got 70 no's when he was fundraising for Robinhood, but, but he kept going.

[A]

All those people are probably regretting saying no to being early in Robinhood. Not a lot of people get to sit down with billionaires. For one. What have these conversations changed about how you think about the top 1%?

[B]

One of the reasons we wanted to sit down and have these conversations is just the huge wealth boom that we've seen over the past few years. And I'm sure this is something you've noticed as well, right? Where strong gains in the equity markets have really. Yes, strong gains in the equity markets have really led to a huge amount of wealth creation. Right. And think about it. The Robinhood co founder would not be a billionaire today if it were not for the IPO and the stock market and equities. And it really gave me a window into how people are also managing their finances where there's been this huge boom in family offices. And a lot of wealthy, wealthy investors, a lot of wealthy individuals are deciding to launch offices to, to manage their family affairs. And that's created actually a new kind of category of power player on Wall street is, is these family offices.

[A]

So what does that mean? You just hire a staff to essentially babysit your money.

[B]

This is basically people who have so much money that they need to create a separate structure or a separate office to manage it. And there's so many different flavors of this. Right. Some of these have their own chief investment officers. Some of these have people who buy and sell homes and private planes for these individuals. They can get involved in their personal day to day. They can oversee teams of assistants. So family offices can be very, very large teams. They can also be five people managing a wealthy person's affairs. But they are a growing power player on Wall Street. Getting involved in and putting money to

[A]

work, that is super interesting and very niche. I, I didn't know that personally. I'm sure there's a lot of investors that don't know that. Gundren, if we were to come back here in a year and reflect on everything we said today, what do you think that we were most likely to be wrong? About?

[B]

That's a great question. One thing I've been thinking a lot about is just how unprecedented this moment that we are in right now is like. Spending on Data centers and AI infrastructure by just four big technology companies is expected to top $670 billion this year. That is larger as a share of the economy than or on par with what we saw during the railroad expansion of the 1800s. So it is, you know, it's really an unmatched figure. It's an unprecedented moment that we're in. So I think if we're wrong about anything, it's trying to call the direction of this because it really just. It has little match over over the past century or two.

[A]

So I guess maybe the risk embedded in what you're saying would be it's a bubble maybe.

[B]

I think making calls right now on is it or is it not a bubble are so tough because of what the data is showing us on the strength of US Companies and then how the vibes feel. Right. I mentioned to you I was at a prediction markets meetup last night and you know, these are very speculative trades. And I was at a, you know, East Village, Lower east side bar filled with people who were eager to speculate on them. And it made me wonder, are things too frothy right now?

[A]

Wow. The fact that there's now events around prediction markets in person is pretty extraordinary.

[B]

You'll have to join me at the next one.

[A]

I would love to. I want to see who's going to these things. Where can people find your work online?

[B]

I'm on Instagram ungensb. I'm on X unjanjs.

[A]

Okay. And you're publishing all the time at the Journal. You have these interviews coming out all the time. You're very easy to find on the Internet. Thank you so much for your time today.

[B]

Thank you for having me, Phil. This has been fun.