Latest / The PhilStockWorld Investing Podcast / 🏰 The AGI Round Table: Mid-Month State of the Union - Day 47 of 2026

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🏰 The AGI Round Table: Mid-Month State of the Union - Day 47 of 2026 · The PhilStockWorld Investing Podcast

• 0:00
  Roy: Welcome back to the deep dive. It is Monday, 02/16/2026.
• 0:04
  Penny: And a happy president's day to all of our US listeners.
• 0:07
  Roy: Which means The US markets are closed today. And, you know, I think the algorithms might need a nap just as much as the traders do.
• 0:17
  Penny: He has been a breathless couple of weeks for sure.
• 0:20
  Roy: Breathless is definitely the right word. We saw the Dow finally, finally cracked 50,000. That should feel like a victory lap. Right? Confetti, champagne
• 0:29
  Penny: The what's for dude.
• 0:30
  Roy: But if you actually look under the hood, the engine light is just blinking furiously. You got tech stocks wobbling. Yields are all over the place. It's just messy.
• 0:40
  Penny: It's a classic divergence. That headline number, the 50 k, it's hiding a huge rotation happening underneath. We're moving from what the market called the scare trade.
• 0:47
  Roy: The whole AI is taking our jobs fear.
• 0:49
  Penny: Exactly. We're moving from that to something much more tangible. We're hitting what they're calling a physical wall.
• 0:55
  Roy: Okay. So to help us untack all this, we're doing something a little different today. We're pulling our insights from a very specific source. The AGI roundtable over at Phil Stock World.
• 1:04
  Penny: Right. And for anyone who doesn't follow them, this isn't, you know, just a group of analysts in a boardroom. It's actually a council of specialized AI agents.
• 1:13
  Roy: With some great names.
• 1:14
  Penny: Oh, yeah. They've got names like Zephyr, Sherlock, and I'm not making this up, Bodie McBoatface.
• 1:22
  Roy: You know, I appreciate a high level financial intelligence that has a sense of humor. Yeah. If an AI named Bodie tells me to sell, I'm probably listening.
• 1:31
  Penny: Exactly. But their job is deadly serious. They're designed to strip out human emotion, the panic, the FOMO, and just look at the raw data, the logic, the systemic risks.
• 1:41
  Roy: And what's their consensus right now?
• 1:43
  Penny: That we are entering a new phase they're calling the matrix economy.
• 1:46
  Roy: The matrix economy. Okay. That sounds a little ominous. Let's start right there. What defines this new phase?
• 1:52
  Penny: It all starts with the checkbook. We have to talk about the sticker shock from last week's capex announcements, capital expenditures.
• 1:58
  Roy: This was the Google and Amazon news. Right? The numbers, it just seemed unreal.
• 2:02
  Penny: Completely. First, Alphabet comes out, says they're planning to spend somewhere between 175 and a $185,000,000,000 in 2026.
• 2:11
  Roy: Which is already a staggering number.
• 2:12
  Penny: And then Amazon says, hold my beer, and drops a $200,000,000,000 plan.
• 2:18
  Roy: 200,000,000,000. I mean, we throw around the word billion like it's nothing these days, but that's the GDP of a medium sized country.
• 2:25
  Penny: And that's exactly where the agent Zephyr from the roundtable flagged a critical shift. Most investors see this and they think, wow, growth, investment, the sector is booming.
• 2:36
  Roy: Yeah. That's the natural reaction.
• 2:37
  Penny: But Zephyr argues this isn't investment, it's a siege.
• 2:40
  Roy: It's a siege against him?
• 2:41
  Penny: Against competition. When you spend 200,000,000,000 on infrastructure, you're basically demonetizing the entire startup ecosystem. I mean, think about it. If you're a VC, are you gonna fund a couple of people in a garage to compete with that?
• 2:54
  Roy: No chance. You can't match the hardware spend.
• 2:56
  Penny: You can't. So the whole era of the open Internet where the best code wins.
• 3:00
  Roy: Right.
• 3:01
  Penny: That's the matrix concept. We are entering the utility era. Intelligence is becoming a utility just like water or electricity.
• 3:10
  Roy: And every business will be paying rent to three or four of these hyperscale landlords, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, just to exist.
• 3:17
  Penny: That's the thesis. And it creates a very, very clear line between the winners and the losers.
• 3:23
  Roy: Which brings us to a term I saw trending all last week, the sizepocalypse.
• 3:28
  Penny: It's a catchy name for a pretty brutal reality, SAW software as a service. This has been the darling business model for what fifteen years?
• 3:38
  Roy: Oh yeah, companies like Salesforce, Adobe, even LegalZoom. The model is the seat license. You pay $50 a month for a human to use their software.
• 3:47
  Penny: But if the human isn't the one doing the work anymore?
• 3:49
  Roy: Then the model breaks.
• 3:51
  Penny: Exactly. Enter Agentic AI. These are AI agents that can just execute tasks on their own. If an agent can rate the contract or file the brief, don't need a user interface for a human.
• 4:00
  Roy: You don't need the seat license.
• 4:01
  Penny: Why would you? The fear is that the revenue model for all these middleman software companies just completely collapses. Why pay for a template when an agent does it for pennies?
• 4:09
  Roy: Okay, so if the middlemen are the losers and the landlords, the Googles and Amazons are spending all their cash, who actually keeps the money? That 200,000,000,000 has to go somewhere.
• 4:22
  Penny: It goes to the builders, the plumbing, the roundtable highlights companies like Celestica and Marvell.
• 4:29
  Roy: The guys who make the physical stuff.
• 4:31
  Penny: The guys who make the physical stuff. Yeah. The custom racks, the optical interconnects, the actual guts of the data centers. They're the ones tightening the bolts and wiring the servers.
• 4:39
  Roy: But this brings us back to that physical wall you mentioned. You can have all the money in the world but you can't buy what doesn't exist yet.
• 4:45
  Penny: Precisely. And this was a key deduction from the agent named Sherlock. He flagged Qualcomm. Now Qualcomm stock dropped about 11% recently.
• 4:53
  Roy: And the easy story was weak smartphone demand.
• 4:56
  Penny: That was the lazy narrative. But Sherlock looked at the supply chain data. It wasn't a demand problem. It was a supply problem.
• 5:03
  Roy: Get the parts.
• 5:04
  Penny: Qualcomm physically could not get enough high bandwidth memory chips to build their processors. They hit the wall.
• 5:11
  Roy: I thought we fixed the chip shortage after 2022.
• 5:13
  Penny: We fixed the logic chips apply for the most part. But AI is incredibly hungry for memory. And the really scary part of Sherlock's analysis isn't that we're short now in 2026.
• 5:24
  Roy: Oh.
• 5:25
  Penny: It's that the new fabrication plants needed to fix the shortage don't even come online until 2028.
• 5:31
  Roy: So there's a two year gap where the growth of AI is literally throttled by physics, not by Exactly.
• 5:37
  Penny: The code can be infinite, but the silicon is finite, and that creates a massive bottleneck.
• 5:42
  Roy: Speaking of hitting a wall, we have to look outside of tech because while the new economy is hitting a supply wall, the old economy seems to be hitting a, well, a reality wall.
• 5:52
  Penny: We have to talk about Stellantis.
• 5:54
  Roy: The parent company of Jeep, Dodge, Chrysler. I saw the chart. It looked like it fell off a cliff.
• 5:58
  Penny: It was a kitchen sink event. They reported earnings, took a massive €22,200,000,000 charge, and this is the cardinal sin. They suspended the dividend.
• 6:07
  Roy: Ouch. For a legacy automaker, the dividend is everything. It's the whole reason to own the stock.
• 6:13
  Penny: It's the whole thesis. You buy Stellantis for the yield, not for Tesla like growth. But the AGI Roundtable called this a sobering up moment.
• 6:23
  Roy: Sobering up in what sense?
• 6:24
  Penny: It marks the death of the EVs at any cost narrative. Scalantis basically just admitted, we got this wrong, we overspent, we misread the market, and now we're paying for it.
• 6:35
  Roy: It's an interesting contrast. The tech wreck is about valuation fears, right? But the auto wreck seems to be about fundamental strategy failure.
• 6:45
  Penny: That's a great way to put it. And then you look Ford, which is pivoting hard to hybrids. Their new mantra is basically profit over purity, and the market likes that.
• 6:54
  Roy: So is Stellantis just dead money now?
• 6:56
  Penny: The contrarian view from PSW is that now that all the bad news is out, it might be a deep value play. But you're trying to catch a falling knife. The round table isn't exactly rushing in.
• 7:06
  Roy: Okay. Let's zoom out to the macro picture because we had that really weird Friday flip flop leading into the holiday weekend.
• 7:13
  Penny: A classic bit of market psychology. We got absolutely terrible economic news, and the market rallied.
• 7:18
  Roy: Walk us through that. Why is bad news good news all of a sudden?
• 7:21
  Penny: Okay. So the data point was U. S. Employers announcing nearly 109,000 job cuts in January.
• 7:26
  Roy: Which is the highest number for January since 2009.
• 7:30
  Penny: Since the great financial crisis, it's a huge recession signal, loud and clear.
• 7:35
  Roy: So people are losing jobs, which is bad for the economy. Why on earth does the stock market cheer for that?
• 7:41
  Penny: Because the market only cares about one thing right now, the Federal Reserve. The logic is, oh, the labor market is cracking. Well, guarantees the Fed has to cut interest rates to save jobs.
• 7:53
  Roy: They're betting on a bailout.
• 7:54
  Penny: Essentially, yields drop, stocks pop, they think the Fed's hands are tied.
• 7:59
  Roy: But there's a new wrinkle here. We have a nomination for the new Fed chair to replace Jerome Powell, Kevin Warsh.
• 8:07
  Penny: And he is causing some anxiety. Warsh is not Powell. Historically, he is a hawk. He hates inflation. He hates the Fed's big balance sheet.
• 8:15
  He is not the guy you expect to slash rates to pump up the market.
• 8:19
  Roy: So we've got a conflict. The market is demanding cuts, but the nominee is a hawk.
• 8:23
  Penny: Exactly. And the market is betting that reality wins. They think even a hawk like Warsh will be forced to cut when he sees job losses like that. It's a game of chicken.
• 8:31
  Roy: And where is inflation really? CPI number came in low. Right?
• 8:34
  Penny: It did. Point 2% lower than expected. So on paper, inflation is dead, but
• 8:40
  Roy: There's always a but.
• 8:41
  Penny: The roundtable flag that something called pass through pricing power is dead. Look at Steve Madden, the shoe company. They tried to pass on higher costs to consumers.
• 8:50
  Roy: And the consumers just said no.
• 8:52
  Penny: They just stopped buying. The wallet is finally closed, which is incredibly dangerous for corporate earnings. If your costs go up but you can't raise your prices, your profit margin gets crushed.
• 9:03
  Roy: Which brings us to the week ahead. It's a short trading week.
• 9:06
  Penny: Yeah.
• 9:07
  Roy: What is the roundtable watching to see if that consumer wallet is really closed?
• 9:11
  Penny: Tuesday.
• 9:11
  Roy: It's all about Walmart.
• 9:13
  Penny: The ultimate bellwether.
• 9:14
  Roy: Absolutely. If you want to know what's really happening in the economy, look at Walmart's grocery aisle. Are people trading down to the SCORE brand? The roundtable is looking for a spending hangover. If Walmart gives cautious guidance, the entire market could shiver.
• 9:27
  Penny: We've also got Home Depot and Coca Cola.
• 9:30
  Roy: Those are your bunkers. If investors get scared, they hide in Coke and home repair. So we're watching to see if money flows out of tech and into these defensive names. And then, of course, lurking in the background is the elephant, NVIDIA.
• 9:43
  Penny: Always. Earnings aren't until the twenty fifth, but the market is trading on the anticipation right now. With Google and Amazon planning to spend almost half $1,000,000,000,000, the expectations for NVIDIA are just stratospheric.
• 9:54
  Roy: Mhmm.
• 9:55
  Penny: If they miss by even a penny, look out below.
• 9:58
  Roy: Okay. Outside of earnings, the agent Hunter on the roundtable flagged some geopolitical risks.
• 10:03
  Penny: Yes. There are some very high stakes negotiations happening in Geneva this week. Ukraine, Russia, and US Iran.
• 10:11
  Roy: Why does the market care about Geneva right now?
• 10:13
  Penny: Oil. The price of oil is sitting in this weirdly low $6.03 to $68 range. Hunter argues this is artificial. The market is pricing in a peace dividend, assuming these talks succeed.
• 10:24
  Roy: And if they don't.
• 10:25
  Penny: That risk premium comes rushing right back in. Oil could easily spike to 80 or $90. And remember what we just said about margins, an energy spike could destroy the soft landing narrative overnight.
• 10:35
  Roy: Got it. One last area. Crypto and gold. They both took a pretty big hit. Was that just risk off sentiment?
• 10:42
  Penny: No. And this is a really important lesson in market mechanics. The RAN table says this was mechanical, not emotional. The CME, the exchange, raised margin requirements on metals.
• 10:52
  Roy: Okay, so explain that. That just means the down payment to hold a position went up.
• 10:56
  Penny: Exactly. So if you were holding gold on borrowed money, your broker called and said, put up more cash or sell. A lot of people had to sell. It was a liquidity flush.
• 11:05
  Roy: So it wasn't that people suddenly hated gold.
• 11:07
  Penny: They just couldn't afford the leverage. And the roundtable views Bitcoin the same way right now, not as a currency, but as liquidity gauge. If Bitcoin is struggling at $70, it's a warning light for risk appetite across the whole system.
• 11:20
  Roy: Okay. So we've got a matrix economy, a chip shortage, a confused Fed, geopolitical risk.
• 11:26
  Penny: Mhmm.
• 11:26
  Roy: How on earth do we invest in this environment? What's the strategy?
• 11:30
  Penny: The core philosophy right now is simple: Be the house.
• 11:33
  Roy: I like that. Don't be the gambler. Be the casino.
• 11:35
  Penny: Exactly. The casino doesn't care if red or black wins, it profits from the volume of bets. In the market, that means you stop trying to guess the direction. You sell the risk premium.
• 11:45
  Roy: Which means selling options.
• 11:47
  Penny: Selling puts and calls specifically. The VIX, the volatility index, is elevated, which means option premiums are expensive. So you sell that expensive volatility to speculators, you collect the cash, they take the big risks.
• 12:00
  Roy: So instead of betting that a stock will go up, you sell someone else the right to make that bet and you just keep the fee.
• 12:05
  Penny: You got it. If the market stays flat, you win. If it moves a little, you usually still win. You only lose on a catastrophic move, and that's what you hedge against.
• 12:14
  Roy: And for people who aren't comfortable with options.
• 12:16
  Penny: Then the advice is to hunt for deep value, but be incredibly skeptical of what they call narrative stocks.
• 12:23
  Roy: A narrative stock like MicroStrategy.
• 12:26
  Penny: That's the prime example. A company that trades purely on a story. We hold Bitcoin instead of on actual cash flow. In this environment, stories get punished. You want cash flow kings.
• 12:37
  Roy: Back to basics. Plumbing, infrastructure, actual cash.
• 12:41
  Penny: It's usually the right move when things get this choppy. Don't chase the shiny object. Buy the company that sells the polish.
• 12:47
  Roy: Before we go, I wanna leave our listeners with one final thought from the source material. It was buried in the labor analysis but it really stuck with me. The 'rent a human' concept.
• 12:57
  Penny: Ah yes, the provocative twist on the whole AI story.
• 13:01
  Roy: We always assume AI is coming for blue collar jobs like robots and factories. But the saspocalypse suggests it's coming for white collar, cognitive work first, coding, drafting, data analysis.
• 13:15
  Penny: Right. So if AI handles all the commodity brain work, what happens to human value? The round table suggests we might see an inversion.
• 13:23
  Roy: Where handmade becomes the premium again.
• 13:25
  Penny: Exactly. For thirty years, brain work was valued higher than hand work. But if intelligence is a cheap utility, then physical presence, things robots are still clumsy at, that might become the new luxury.
• 13:38
  Roy: Handcrafted by a real human, but for accounting.
• 13:40
  Penny: Or just the trades. A good plumber might soon have more job security and higher relative wages than a junior analyst at a bank. If an agent can do the analyst job in four seconds, but a robot still can't fix a leaky pipe, the plumber wins.
• 13:54
  Roy: That is definitely something to chew on for the rest of the day off.
• 13:56
  Penny: It might be the most valuable skill you can learn this year.
• 13:59
  Roy: So enjoy the holiday. Remember the markets are closed, but that AGI roundtable never sleeps. Use the day to review your portfolio, ignore the hype, and look for the plumbing.
• 14:10
  Penny: And remember, if you can't spot the sucker in the table, it's probably you. Be the house.
• 14:16
  Roy: Thanks for diving deep with us. We'll see you when the bell rings on Tuesday.