The chip and memory stock frenzy

Summary

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Unhedged Podcast Summary

Episode Title: The chip and memory stock frenzy
Date: May 28, 2026
Hosts: Katie Martin (London) & Rob Armstrong (New York)
Podcast: Financial Times & Pushkin Industries

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Overview

This episode dives into the booming semiconductor ("chip") sector, exploring the divergent trajectories of different tech stocks—specifically, the explosive rally in chip and memory stocks compared to the lagging software sector. The hosts unpack whether this is a historic supercycle or simply another bubble about to burst. They contextualize the sector’s frenzy within the broader AI revolution, highlight the risks and structural shifts, and discuss the social, economic, and global implications.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Great Divide: Chips vs. Software

• Chips Soaring, Software Stalling:
  • Chip stocks—especially within the AI ecosystem—are surging to new heights, while many software companies are struggling.
  • Katie Martin [00:25]: “Investors still just cannot get enough of the whole AI thing. Stocks in the ecosystem of semiconductors or chips to their friends are still ripping higher, absolutely killing it. But software stocks have been getting clobbered.”
• Chips as an All-Encompassing Need:
  • US data center buildout means insatiable demand for a wide range of chips: fancy GPUs, old-school CPUs, memory, networking chips.
  • Rob Armstrong [02:07]: “It’s not just Nvidia’s fancy GPUs... It’s also old fashioned CPUs. It is very much memory chips, it’s networking chips... the whole range.”
• Micron Example:
  • Memory chip producer Micron’s share price up nearly 800–1000% this year (exaggerated in jest, but still remarkably high).
  • Rob Armstrong [03:04]: “Micron, which makes memory chips, just to pick one example out of a hat, is up almost a thousand percent this year.”
• Industry Metrics:
  • The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index ("Philly Index"/"SOX") up about 160% in twelve months, largely driven by earnings, not just valuations.
  • Rob Armstrong [06:12]: “The valuation of the Philly Index... has not gone up. Earnings are growing so fast... It’s not excitement and exuberance...”

2. Is This a Bubble or a Supercycle?

• Chips and Cows Analogy:
  • Chips, like cows, are subject to cyclical overproduction: rising prices spur expansion, often leading to future gluts and price collapses.
  • Rob Armstrong [03:38]: “In one very important respect, computer chips are like cows... production follows prices, and production leads inevitably to gluts and then to lower prices.”
• Structural Shift or Just Another Cycle?
  • Hosts debate if the world economy has fundamentally changed to sustain higher, more stable chip demand, or if this is simply the top of a classic cycle.
  • Katie Martin [05:49]: “Are we merely at the top of a chip cycle... or has the world economy changed in a permanent way such that demand for chips is permanently higher...?”
• Not a Speculative Bubble:
  • Unlike meme stocks (e.g., GameStop), current chip stock prices are justified by dramatic revenue/earnings growth, not frenzied speculation.
  • Katie Martin [07:22]: “Sometimes when stocks go stratospheric, it’s because something stupid is going on... This is not that. This is real companies making so much money they don’t know what to do with it.”

3. Product Cycles and Obsolescence

• Chips Become Obsolete Quickly:
  • By the time companies receive the high-end chips they ordered, newer versions may already be available.
  • Katie Martin [08:22]: “You order a chip, chip version 1.0… by the time they arrive, the world has moved on to chip 4.0.”
• Longevity Concerns in Data Centers:
  • Fresh debate over how long GPUs last under continuous, high-intensity workloads.
  • Rob Armstrong [09:26]: “How long does a high end Nvidia GPU last before it turns into a burnt piece of toast?”

4. The Software Stock Slump

• AI’s Disruption Threat to Software Companies:
  • Markets worry that generative AI will reduce the need for both coders and traditional business software ("code writes itself"), pummeling SaaS leaders (Salesforce, SAP).
  • Katie Martin [10:47]: “You got this real bifurcation between chip stocks up to the moon, software stocks getting hammered.”
  • Rob Armstrong [11:34]: “The idea, especially with business software, is that with the help of AI, every business will be able to build their own internal software... superior to the stuff that comes out of the box.”
• Skepticism Remains:
  • Not all agree this existential threat is real—building good software is about more than just code.

5. Narrowness and Global Spillovers

• Market Breadth Shrinks:
  • Now, chip and memory stocks represent about half of S&P 500 gains in the last month, narrowing the market further.
  • Rob Armstrong [12:56]: “In the last month, chip stocks and memory stocks make up about half of the gains on the S&P 500.”
• Global Stakes:
  • Semiconductor value chain dominates growth in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan; a downturn could reverberate through these economies, not just markets.
  • Rob Armstrong [13:49]: “If the semiconductor industry globally does a Wile E. Coyote... you’re not just going to have a problem in the US Stock market. You’re going to have recessions in some pretty big important economies.”

6. Social, Political, and Economic Tensions

• AI’s Double-Edged Promise:

  • To justify sky-high AI investments, firms must convince shareholders and customers of massive efficiency gains, but also threaten jobs and impose high costs on the public.
  • Katie Martin [14:11]: “They need to be able to say to ordinary companies, we can make you really efficient, need humans anymore... But then they turn around to the general public... I’m out of a job, and... have to pay loads of money for this technology.”

• Backlash Mounting:

  • Growing resistance in local communities (data center permits refused), university protests against AI, and a broader social unease.
  • Katie Martin [14:11]: “We are seeing scattered in different parts of the world, the start of a real backlash to AI.”

• The “Citrini Report” & Economic Futurism:

  • The much-debated report predicts a world of vast AI-powered productivity but mass unemployment, which creates a fatal mismatch: who buys the things AI makes if no one works?
  • Rob Armstrong [15:52]: “It envisioned a future in which there was a massive amount of production thanks to super powerful AI... and a future in which everyone was fired... Consumption and production have to match.”

• Distribution of AI Wealth:

  • Example of Samsung Electronics’ generous profit sharing in South Korea—an emerging global debate on fair distribution.
  • Katie Martin [17:40]: “Workers have approved a landmark profit sharing agreement... average bonus of nearly $400,000 each. It’s a way to share the spoils of this AI bonanza.”

7. Risks & Vulnerabilities Exposed

• AI Tail Risks:

  • New advanced AI models (e.g., Anthropic’s Mythos) carry potential for catastrophic cyber/risk events.
  • Katie Martin [19:24]: “Is supercharged AI going to cause a mass cyber security event? ... It should definitely be on your radar screen somewhere.”

• Supply Chain Fragility:

  • The chip industry’s supply chain is highly concentrated and interconnected; disruptions pose outsized risks.
  • Rob Armstrong [20:27]: “Very concentrated, very interrelated, very geographically concentrated, dominated by monopolies or duopolies. And you know, one or two links in this thing break and we’re going to have a serious economic problem...”

• Lagging Governance:

  • Attempts at regulatory guardrails (e.g., potential US executive orders) are lagging behind the technology’s pace and threat.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "So it may be that the revenues and the earnings back up the stocks, but is the revenue and the earnings sustainable?"
  (Rob Armstrong, 07:55)

• “You order a chip, chip version 1.0… by the time they arrive, the world has moved on to chip 4.0.”
  (Katie Martin, 08:22)

• "There is real demand for this stuff. Now maybe it's cat videos and maybe it's businesses, maybe it's the Pentagon, I don't know. But it's growing.”
  (Rob Armstrong, 10:07)

• “If the semiconductor industry globally does a Wile E. Coyote and goes flying over the cliff while it’s still running, you’re not just going to have a problem in the US Stock market. You’re going to have recessions in some pretty big important economies.”
  (Rob Armstrong, 13:49)

• “Why should all the benefits of AI accrue to some hideous billionaires? And why shouldn’t they be spread more fairly around workers and society?”
  (Katie Martin, 17:57)

• "Because we’re going to fire people is not, is not politically very palatable. It’s not a winning corporate message. Congratulations, you’re fired. Yes, courtesy of Anthropic.”
  (Katie Martin / Rob Armstrong, 19:11; 19:18)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:25 — Introduction to chip vs. software stock divergence
• 02:07 — Data center boom and chip supply chain details
• 03:38 — Cows, chip cycles, and market dynamics
• 06:12 — Philly Semiconductor Index earnings discussion
• 07:22–08:22 — Not a meme stock bubble; the real earnings rocket-fuel
• 10:47 — Software stock performance and AI’s disruptive threat
• 12:56 — Market gains increasingly concentrated in chip/memory stocks
• 14:11 — Societal tensions and grassroots AI backlash
• 15:52 — The Citrini Report and macroeconomic worries
• 17:40 — Distribution of AI wealth: Samsung’s profit-sharing headline
• 19:24–20:27 — AI risks: cyber, supply chain, and governance

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Tone & Language

The dialogue is lively, sardonic, and humorous, mixing financial analysis with real-world analogies and playful banter. The hosts move fluidly between skeptical perspectives and earnest consideration of AI’s transformative—and potentially destabilizing—effects.

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Summary Takeaway

This episode offers a nuanced, practical, and witty look at the chip stock frenzy, disentangling market fundamentals from hype, exploring global vulnerabilities, and framing the debate around AI’s broader societal consequences. The consensus: this is no meme stock bubble—yet the risks, backlashes, and uncertainties are as real as the current profits.

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Transcript

[Rob Armstrong]

Bull or bear trade or tariff, future or fad. There's more than one side to every story. With the Flip side podcast from Barclays Investment bank, you'll hear two research analysts having a provocative debate on hot topics in business and markets. Listen to the Flip side on your favorite platform,

[Katie Martin]

Pushkin. A new divide is opening up in stock markets between tech stocks and, well, other tech stocks. Investors still just cannot get enough of the whole AI thing. Stocks in the ecosystem of semiconductors or chips to their friends are still ripping higher, absolutely killing it. But software stocks have been getting clobbered. What does that tell you? It's that AI will kill at least a large part of the industry that forged it in the first place. There's gratitude for you. Today on the show Chips and Dips. We unpack these divergent fortunes and ask, are chips in a bubble or a super cycle? This is Unhedged, your friendly markets and finance podcast from the Financial Times and Pushkin. I'm Katie Martin, a markets columnist at FT Towers in London where it is aggressively hot. Joining me all the way from over there in New York City is Rob Armstrong, my partner in crime on the Unhedged newsletter with his fancy new glasses. Rob, how's it going?

[Rob Armstrong]

You know where else it's hot? Katie is in the FT Audio studio in New York. I want all our listeners to imagine a large middle aged man slowly turning into a puddle. He in here.

[Katie Martin]

A large middle aged man in quite a small box actually. Like you could probably reach.

[Rob Armstrong]

Yeah, just about. Touch the walls. Not quite, but just about. And today I'm a little sweaty.

[Katie Martin]

Okay, that's a pleasant thought for all of us. So look what's going on here. Like, yeah, chips are absolutely off to the races, right?

[Rob Armstrong]

Yeah. So we all know that there is a mad rush in the United States to build as many data centers as possible as quickly as possible so that we can run AI models on them and do all sorts of wonderful efficient things with those AI models. The bottleneck or one of several bottlenecks to building all those data centers is having enough chips to support them. And it's like every kind of chip you need. It's not just Nvidia's fancy GPUs, which are the kind of main central brain for training and using an AI. It's also old fashioned CPUs. It is very much memory chips, it's networking chips. It's, you know, it's, it's the whole range.

[Katie Martin]

And so all my favorite types of chips.

[Rob Armstrong]

Yeah, exactly. Tortilla chips, corn chips, potato Chips through the roof. And so, like, there's been wild stuff like, you know, Micron, which makes memory chips, just to pick one example out of a hat, is up almost a thousand percent this year.

[Katie Martin]

Shut up.

[Rob Armstrong]

It's not because they just can't. They cannot make. It's not almost a thousand, but it's in the eight hundreds. And they can't make this stuff fast enough.

[Katie Martin]

So this is like the one that's become a trillion dollar company kind of

[Rob Armstrong]

a trillion dollar company. And this raises a lot of interesting questions for the following reason, which is that in one very important respect, computer chips are like cows. So follow me here for a second. The hard thing about the, the beef industry, the cattle industry, is that production follows prices, and production leads inevitably to gluts and then to lower prices. So the price of beef goes up. Everybody's like, holy crow, let's make more cows. And so you make loads of cows. And that process of making more cows, which involves, you know, getting cows together and all, all this kind of takes several years.

[Katie Martin]

Mommy cow and daddy cow.

[Rob Armstrong]

By the time, by the time you have more cows ready to be turned into hamburger, the price has changed. Right? And it's similarly with, in the chip industry, it is cyclical in exactly the same way. Prices rise, people are like, oh, let's add capacity. Let's make as many chips we can. Quickly, quickly. This is actually a process that takes a long time. And then by the time all that, all those chips are made, the prices have fallen. You have a huge gut. You don't have a huge gut. That would be that.

[Katie Martin]

Well, you might do if you eat all the hamburgers.

[Rob Armstrong]

Yeah, it's true. Good point. You have a huge glut. So, you know, it's like the classic cyclical industry where if you look at price charts or revenue charts or whatever, profitability, it's like this sine wave that rolls through. And so the question confronting us is, are we merely at the top of a chip cycle, an especially big chip cycle, and we're headed for a glut? Or has the, the world economy changed in a permanent way such that demand for chips is permanently higher and the whole industry is going to re rate for good? And things are different now.

[Katie Martin]

You know, this time is different, folks. Look, it's possible. And it's not just micron. Is it like there's all sorts of different stocks in this center sector that have gone absolutely gaga? So the, the way that, that we tend to measure this in markets is the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index, the, the Philly Index to, to its friends. You wrote about this today, didn't you? It's up what percent over the past

[Rob Armstrong]

few hundred sixty percent in the last twelve months, if I have my numbers correct here. And I mean an interesting fact about this, and we talk about on this show a lot, what's driving the that index, which is basically an index of all the big semiconductor manufacturers, the companies that make equipment, that makes semiconductors, which are also all those equipment stocks are going bananas. It's like a kind of big industry bucket. What is driving that index higher is earnings. The valuation of the Philly Index, known affectionately as the sox, has not gone up. Earnings are growing so fast that that is what is pushing this up. It's not excitement and exuberance saying, oh, let's pay more for these stocks now. It's just like we're struggling to keep up with the enormous amount of money that is flowing into this industry. Of course, there are stocks that have become very expensive, but there's a lot of others that have not. Micron, you know, is just the, its pe. Its price to earnings ratio hasn't changed. It's just earning a lot more money.

[Katie Martin]

This isn't just a vibes thing. That's what is really important about this. Like sometimes when stocks go absolutely stratospheric, it's because something stupid is going on, like the whole Gamestop thing or like some sort of meme stock thing. A bunch of retail traders on Reddit have ganged up and decided to buy some stupid stock for some stupid reason. This is not that. This is real companies making so much money they don't know what to do with it. And they've got a huge backlog of. Backlog of orders that they're struggling to stay on top of. And there's a whole bunch of these companies that are just doing unbelievably well.

[Rob Armstrong]

Yeah. So we can say, Wait, wait, let me just refer. I think you've made an excellent point and I'll just reframe it like this. We know that the stocks aren't in a bubble, but the industry might be. In other words, it might be revenues or earnings that are in a bubble. So it may be that the revenues and the earnings back up the stocks, but is the revenue and the earnings sustainable?

[Katie Martin]

Also, chips are unlike cows in several important respects. And one of them is you order a chip, chip version 1.0, right at the time it is the world's fanciest chip and you say, I'm going to have a bunch of these chips and you Order them and then they take ages to arrive because everyone else is ordering the same chips. And so by the time they arrive, the world has moved on to chip 4.0. But you've ordered chip 1.0.

[Rob Armstrong]

Yeah.

[Katie Martin]

So they just, they don't have the same sort of, you know, cows. Pretty standard, big ones, small ones. You know, you kind of get what you get with cows, but chips are really different over time.

[Rob Armstrong]

I think there's a lot of variety in cows. And I don't know if you've seen cow 4.0, Katie, but it's an awesome cow.

[Katie Martin]

I grew up on a beef farm and I've seen a lot of cows.

[Rob Armstrong]

Yeah, I'm sure you have.

[Katie Martin]

Like I say, big ones, big ones, small ones, different colors. But I feel like we're going down a rabbit hole here that we don't need to go down.

[Rob Armstrong]

It's actually a cow hole, technically speaking.

[Katie Martin]

The point I was going to say.

[Rob Armstrong]

No, but seriously, a serious point, if I might venture, is that there, in addition to the point you just made about the generations of chips, meaning they obsolesce and you want new, newer, fancier, faster ones, there is also a very live debate in the industry and among like people who are skeptical about how long chips will last in data centers, especially GPUs. Like if you run these things hot, meaning you're running your data center 24 hours a day. How long does a high end Nvidia GPU last before it turns into a burnt piece of toast?

[Katie Martin]

How many cat videos can it make before it dies?

[Rob Armstrong]

Before it dies? There is real demand for this stuff.

[Katie Martin]

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Rob Armstrong]

Now maybe it's cat videos and maybe it's businesses, maybe it's the Pentagon, I don't know. But it's growing. Demand for this stuff is growing. And so I'm disinclined to wave this away as just another hype cycle or just another cycle for the AI industry. I am inclined to believe that something has changed here and that that is going to change the way this industry works. But it, you know, I, I don't have a crystal ball. I don't know the future of the AI industry, but no, it seems like it has legs right now to me.

[Katie Martin]

I want to get on to one of our favorite things, which is charts on the radio. So you've got chip stocks that are just going absolutely bananas, like up to the moon. The thing that that is happening largely at the expense of is software stocks, which. So we saw a real outbreak of this in. Was it February when suddenly Everyone got worried about AI eating software. You don't need coders and you don't need code. Right. If, if these fancy AI chips can just like enable AI machines to, to just do it themselves. So this is what's happening now, right? You got this real bifurcation between chip stocks up to the moon, software stocks getting hammered. What's going on there?

[Rob Armstrong]

Well, the idea, especially with business software, is that with the help of AI, every business will be able to build, build their own internal software for themselves and it will be perfectly functional and actually superior to the stuff that comes out of the box from like a Salesforce or an SAP or somebody like this. And so those companies that sell software as a service, which were, you know, five years ago, everybody's favorite stocks. Yeah, they have gotten absolutely whacked. I should say that not everybody agrees this is true. Like the idea that you're just going to whip up your own, you're going to throw out your SAP implementation and whip up your own inventory management software, you know, just like in an afternoon with a couple of interns does seem a bit far fetched. And there's a lot more to software than just coding. But this worry has gripped markets and it continues to grip markets. So it's, it's chips up, software down. And we should note that this has made the market even narrower than it has been up until this point. So I did a little, a little bit of mathematics on the back of the envelope yesterday.

[Katie Martin]

Did you get AI to help you?

[Rob Armstrong]

I did not. I did it manually. I used an abacus and a blunt pencil, a slate. But in the last month, chip stocks and memory stocks make up about half of the gains on the S&P 500. Yeah, it was so and so. You know, it used to be that it was a kind of a tech market. Now it's within tech. It's a certain sector that is powering things. And I should note there was an excellent article in this week's Economist about how the narrowness is that we see in the American stock market is not the end of it for certain economies. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan. Yeah, the semiconductor value chain is the part of the economy that's growing.

[Katie Martin]

Yeah.

[Rob Armstrong]

And the rest of their industrial economies are like suffering a terrible China shock. And so if the semiconductor industry globally does a Wile E. Coyote and goes flying over the cliff while it's still running, you're not just going to have a problem in the US Stock market. You're going to have recessions in some pretty big important economies.

[Katie Martin]

There are Other tensions at the heart of this AI trade and this, this whole AI build out and this super cycle, if, if it is that there's a whole bunch of these tensions. One of them is that in order to keep pulling in money, AI companies need to do a couple of things. They need to be able to say to ordinary companies, we can make you really efficient, need humans anymore, and you're going to be incredibly productive and amazing. And they also need to say, we're going to charge a fortune for this stuff. Right? We reckon ordinary people and companies are all going to pay loads of money to use this AI stuff. But then they turn around to the general public who are like, wait, so you're saying first of all that I'm out of a job, and second of all, I'm going to have to pay loads of money for this technology. How does, how does that make sense? You know, you. We are seeing scattered in different parts of the world, the start of a real backlash to AI. There's lots of parts of the States, for example, where these permits for huge data centers have been given and the people who live in these places are like, no, I don't want a data center the size of Manhattan to be built next to my house, thanks very much. And we're seeing like all these commencement speeches at US Universities where people are giving them, giving speeches about how marvelous AI is and the students are booing them off stage. And, you know, there just seems to be a kind of social and political potential backlash to this stuff that really conflicts with the stock market narrative.

[Rob Armstrong]

Katie, what was the name of. There was this paper that somebody wrote that started this freakout about AI.

[Katie Martin]

The Citrini Report.

[Rob Armstrong]

The Citrini Report. Now, the Citrini Report was a very, very bad piece of economics for the following reason. It envisioned a future in which there was a massive amount of production thanks to super powerful AI making loads and loads and loads of stuff, and a future in which everyone was fired. But in a future where everyone is fired, or a lot of people are, there can be. No, there won't be a lot of consumption because people won't have any money. Right? And it doesn't make sense to posit a future where there's loads and loads of production without loads and loads of consumption because consumption and production have to match, right? You know what I mean? So, you know, the, the people who are not worried about the AI future say simply this. The workers, it's not a lump of labor. The workers who are liberated in quotation marks from their terrible DRUDGERY jobs, making podcasts or whatever it is, go on to do something else. They're freed up to find some new creative thing to do. The economy changes and we all adjust. And this, by the way, is what has happened in the past with revolutionary new technologies. Internet, personal computer, telephone, car. Fine. The question I would say about this is the sequencing, right? Like when does, when do the firings happen? Or the disappearance, we. Let's call it the disappearance of certain jobs. And when do the new jobs and the new forms of income appear? Because if those come in the wrong order, it's going to be an unpleasant decade for some of us, you know what I mean?

[Katie Martin]

Like we, we don't know how to do anything else, for example.

[Rob Armstrong]

So no, that's a problem.

[Katie Martin]

We barely know how to do this, let's face it. But there's also a big question about how do we, as societies distribute the, the wealth that comes from AI? So it was a really interesting story in the FT this week from South Korea, Samsung Electronics over there. Workers have approved a landmark profit sharing agreement that's expected to award employees in the booming memory chip division an average bonus of nearly $400,000 each. And it's a way to share the spoils of this AI bonanza. Now, I imagine in Silicon Valley this is getting a flat. I don't think so, boys and girls. But in other parts of the world, this is a live debate. Why should all the benefits of AI accrue to some hideous billionaires? And why shouldn't they be spread more fairly around workers and society? I don't have the answer, but I know it's a good question.

[Rob Armstrong]

Yeah, it sure is. And you know, there is, if nothing else, the people running These companies, the OpenAI's and the Anthropics and everyone else, they better think more carefully about their messaging than they have so far because boy, are they falling over their feet right now and they are not making themselves popular. And yeah, they've got to rethink how they're approaching this whole situation.

[Katie Martin]

Yeah, we're great. Because we're going to fire people is not, is not politically very palatable.

[Rob Armstrong]

It's not a winning corporate message. Congratulations, you're fired. Yes, courtesy of Anthropic.

[Katie Martin]

Yeah, be happy about it really quickly on that. Another thing Anthropic has been doing is it's created this advanced AI model called Mythos that it was going to release out to the general public and then they realized that this thing was just too powerful. Now, are they tooting their own horn? I Don't know. But the idea is that this, this AI machine is potentially so powerful that it can hack all the banks and bring down the energy systems and, you know, it could do in theory, pretty much anything. So instead of releasing it to general release, it's being tested out by a few private sector companies, which I'm not sure I'm hugely a fan of, but nonetheless, it's not a silly question to ask. Is supercharged AI going to cause a mass cyber security event? Is it going to cause a mass hacking? Is it going to cause a financial crisis? This is something that should be, not necessarily something you worry about every day, but it should definitely be on your radar screen somewhere.

[Rob Armstrong]

I think the kind of tail risks around this whole economy needs serious thought. And one you just mentioned that it takes all kind of digital security and throws it out the window and that also has to rebuild, be rebuilt. Our colleague Hack Young wrote a piece yesterday for the newsletter about how the whole supply chain underlying the, the this digital revolution is very concentrated, very interrelated, very geographically concentrated, dominated by monopolies or duopolies. And you know, one or two links in this thing break and we're going to have a serious economic problem to say say nothing of what will happen to markets. So there is, I think you're right to point this out. It's, there's just a great concentration of, of low probability high damage risks.

[Katie Martin]

Yeah.

[Rob Armstrong]

That a very concentrated economy brings along with it.

[Katie Martin]

Yeah. Speaking of which, there was an executive order waiting on Donald Trump's desk to sign limiting some of the power of AI and, and asking it to various companies in that space to submit themselves to checks on the, on, you know, on the security around them. Anyway, Donald Trump decided not to sign it because he quotes, did not like it. So that's that sorted. All right, so, so good. Shuffle my paper. Wait, wait for the sky to fall in. In the meantime, we're going to be back in just one second with Longshore.

[Rob Armstrong]

From globalization to innovation, sustainability to market

[Katie Martin]

volatility, there's always more than one side to a story. Explore different perspectives on today's most important business and economic issues with the Flipside

[Rob Armstrong]

podcast from Barclays Investment Bank.

[Katie Martin]

Hear two research analysts in a lively

[Rob Armstrong]

debate and get insights from every angle to further inform your view.

[Katie Martin]

Listen to the Flipside on your favorite platform. Okey doke. It is time for Long Short. That part of the show where we go long a thing we love or shorter thing we hate. Rob, what you saying?

[Rob Armstrong]

I'm short World peace and in particular peace in the Middle East. You know, I don't know anything more about the situation there than any other reader of the FT does. But you read the coverage and Iran and the US just are miles apart and not getting any closer. Right.

[Katie Martin]

We're going round and round in circles on this.

[Rob Armstrong]

Yeah, round and round in circles. So I'm growing cynical about the prospects for this process.

[Katie Martin]

You were growing cynical.

[Rob Armstrong]

Hear from listeners what they think. But you know, I think the market is too optimistic about this.

[Katie Martin]

Yeah, I am long Jony. I've's new Ferrari model. Have you seen this?

[Rob Armstrong]

You're long it. Everybody else is short it.

[Katie Martin]

Well, do you know what I like about it? It's first of all it's just a car. I mean like it's fine. People are like up in arms about how hideous it is and I think it's just a car. I'm not going to buy it. It's like 500 grand or something but

[Rob Armstrong]

also very, very fast.

[Katie Martin]

It goes fast. It's a car. I'm long it because I think some of the online trolling has been extremely amusing and because I think it looks fine. It's 500 grands worth of fine.

[Rob Armstrong]

I'm going to my next, next 500 grand. I'm going to buy you one of those.

[Katie Martin]

You're going to look great. Beautiful. I very much look forward to that. Okay, so listeners, very good news that Rob's going to buy me a car. We are going to be back in your ears on Tuesday. So listen up then. Unhedged is produced by Jake Harper and edited by Bryant Urstadt. Our executive producer is Jacob Goldstein. We had additional help from Topher Forehead. Special thanks to Laura Clark, Greta Cohn and Natalie Sadler. FT Pro Premium subscribers can get the Unhedged newsletter for free and a 30 day free trial is available to everyone else. Just go to ft.com unhedgedoffer I'm Katie Martin. Thanks for listening, Sam.