Prof G Markets - Snap’s “Crucible Moment” Flops On Wall Street

Episode Date: June 18, 2026

Ed Elson is joined by Mark Gurman to discuss what investors thought about Snap's new AR Specs and what the launch says about the company's future. Then, Mark Zandi breaks down the Fed's latest interest rate decision and whether a rate hike is still on the table this year. Later, Vasant Dhar joins the show to explore what role AI should play in investing. Finally, Ed explains why he believes Snap's latest bet could be the final nail in the coffin for the company. Mark Gurman is the Managing Editor and Chief Correspondent for Bloomberg News. Mark Zandi, Chief Economist at Moody's Analytics. Vasant Dhar is a professor at NYU Stern, founder of SCT Capital Management and author of Thinking With Machines. Subscribe to the Prof G Markets Youtube Channel  Check out our latest Prof G Markets newsletter Follow Prof G Markets on Instagram Follow Ed on Instagram, X and Substack Follow Scott on Instagram Send us your questions or comments by emailing [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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market vitals. The major indices tumbled, following the Federal Reserve's press conference. More on that in a moment, treasury yield spiked, as did the dollar, and the odds of a rate hike before the year end are now at 62% on Kalshi. Meanwhile, SpaceX declined for the first time, since it went public, ending the day down 5%. Okay, what's happening? Snap just unveiled its new augmented reality glasses, and despite a lot of anticipation and a lot of hype, it was a bit of a flop. The glasses called Snap Spex feature an in-frame display,

which overlays apps onto the real world. They're priced at $2,195, making them significantly more expensive than Mehta's Rayband display glasses, which started $800. CEO Evan Spiegel called SnapSpex a leapfrog advancement and the computer of the future, but the market doesn't seem to agree. The stock closed down, almost 8% today, and it's now off 40% over the past year.

So here to tell us more about the SNAP specs and potentially why it was such flop to Wall Street. We're speaking with Mark Gurman, managing editor and chief correspondent for Bloomberg News. Mark, thank you for joining us. These glasses are all over my social media feed and not in a good way. Everyone is making fun of them. And I've got to say, I've looked at these things. I've seen the way that they sit on Evan Spiegel's face, particularly his ears. And I just think this thing is way too heavy and cumbersome.

And they don't seem to look very good. And I wonder if that's the problem here. What do you make of these snap specs? and also the reaction to them. I think for the available technology today, something that has augmented reality, something that's an all-in-one wearable headset, I think the design actually is quite good,

and I think the price is actually quite reasonable for the tech. Now, I don't think it's reasonable for a mass consumer. I don't think anything of this ilk is going to become a hit at $2,200 U.S., but I do think for what the state of this technology is, they are in a fairly good place. I think the 8% decline in their stock is, more a reaction to how expensive these are to develop and build and how much money Snap is putting into this product that is unlikely to become a smash hit. So I think that's what the concern

is stemming from. But in terms of the technology, it's intense technology, it's advanced technology, and I think it's an exercise that's showing us what eventually is going to be a mainstream computing form factor, because I do heavily believe in the augmented reality category. I'm just not sure Snap is going to be the one to take it to that next. level. What do we know about how much they're spending on this stuff? Because we know that META's been plowing, you know, tens of billions into this thing, Apple, the same, doing the same thing. But it's almost like they have the capital and the cash flows to do it. Snap is a significantly smaller company, and yet they're also going for the big fish in augmented reality. So what do we know

in terms of the spending and whether this is even possible for a company like Snap? They've spent billions on this, and I do think it is certainly possible for a company like Snap. If there's a scenario in which there is gigantic demand for these things, I think they are going to find a way to be able to get these into the hands of consumers. But I think early on, this is going to be the early adopter of early adopters. This is going to be developers. This is maybe going to be an enterprise play. If you think about the other products that have launched in this space,

None of them have been really taken, have really taken the world by storm with consumers. A lot of these are enterprise products. And a lot of these companies, they don't even sell the product anymore. Microsoft tried their hands on this with the HoloLens. Meta has tried their hands on this as well. The Quest is no longer the priority. It's all about the smart glasses. Magic Leap no longer sells their product anymore.

They've become an AR lens supplier now based in the U.S. The Apple Vision Pro obviously has not taken off in the way that Apple had anticipated. So this is not a thriving category at this point. I think we're still in a very early stage here. What is it going to take for this stuff to work? Because we've been hearing about it for such a long time, and it seems like there's issues with how long it lost in terms of battery, like the look of them, motion sickness.

I mean, so many things. Like, what do you think it would look like to see an AR headset that actually is popular. A lot of things are going to have to converge. You're going to have to see a combination of all the battery life, which we don't have yet. You're going to have to see a price point in the $1,000 to $1 range, which we're not at yet. You're going to have to see that be in an all-in-one design that's nearly as thin and light as everyday glasses, and we're so many years away from that.

And you're going to have to see that all with visual fidelity and quality, where you can't really tell the difference between the real world and what you're seeing in the displays. because that technology has to look innovative, has to look impressive, it has to look highly legible. And so I think we're several years away from hitting any of those metrics, let alone all of them converge in simultaneously

into a singular product. But what we're seeing from Snap is the closest incarnation to that yet. I just want to read you a tweet that I saw. This is from a user Uncle Duma. This individual said, quote, Anyone who has ever built anything can tell you that there's a point in the development cycle where the sunk costs become too great,

and the entire org chart starts walking on eggshells around an exec who is too tunneled in to realize that his product sucks. That was in relation to these snap specs. And I think it does kind of capture probably what the concerns are on Wall Street, which is that Evan Spiegel is the founder CEO. He has, he and his co-founder at least have 99% of the voting power. he decides what to do as a company. He is going full steam ahead with this thing. And I think there are now concerns for the company,

which, you know, the stock has been really struggling that he's out over his skis or maybe in over his head or too committed to this vision. I'd just be curious to get your reactions to that view of Evan Spiegel in the direction of this company. I think investors are asking, why are we playing with hardware when, you know, the money is to be made on high margin products,

which is applications and software and AI. And so, yeah, the big question is, why are you from playing in hardware and burning all this money? And Snap recognizes this. This is why they've created a subsidiary called Spex Inc, which they're running this all through. I think it's going to help, you know, the numbers they're able to talk about in their, you know,

earnings reports and what have you. I think that's the driving force behind this. But, you know, they've been investing so much in this for 12 years. They are really one of the pioneers. in the AR space, if you think about the lenses and different overlays and such, you can do in Snapchat. So I think there's a lot to like from this product. It's just not something that people are going to buy. Say this just doesn't work out. Snap Spex, there are no sales, and it really is a flop. What do you think that means for the company? Like, is there a viable way out for Snap if

Spex don't mark? Well, the viable way out is being the platform or the app provider and becoming a hit software product like they were on the iPhone for these next generation of devices that someone is going to have success with, whether it's Apple, Amazon, or meta, or even Snap, someone is going to do this successfully and being able to transform Snapchat to being the killer app on that platform on that hardware will probably be their next step. But I think if this specs product is not successful, I don't think this is a wrap. I think they'll keep

trying and keep building and try to get out a subsequent version that's thin or lighter. My final question for you, Mark, would you ever buy these things or wear these things? It's hard to tell. I haven't used the latest version at this point. I'm going to have to see the use cases and how they would fit into my daily life. I am a huge believer in the AR glasses category. I will say that. All right. Mark German, managing editor and chief correspondent for Bloomberg News, Mark, we really appreciate your time. Thank you. Thank you, sir. After the break, the first unanimous Fed rate decision of the year. And for even more markets insights, you can subscribe to my weekly newsletter,

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That's ODOO.com. We're back with Profti Markets. In its first decision under Chair Kevin Walsh, the Federal Reserve held rates steady. It was the fourth meeting in a row that rates went unchanged, but it was the first time this year that the vote was unanimous. Still, the committee is divided on the par four. nine officials expect at least one hike this year, while eight expects to hold and one expects to cut. Meanwhile, Walsh declined to submit his own rate forecast and unusual move for a sitting chair.

As a reminder, inflation remains elevated, reaching 4.2% in May, the highest reading in three years. Joining us to discuss this interest rate decision and Kevin Walsh's first press conference. We're speaking with Mark Zandi, Chief Economist, at Moody's Analytics. Mark, thank you for joining us on the show. The Fed has decided to hold rates here, which no one was surprised by. I think the one thing that really stands out to me, at least,

is that the vote was unanimous this time. No one voted to cut, which to me says that the Fed and all of its officials are really taking inflation seriously at this point, or at least maybe more seriously than they were before. what do you make of what we saw in this press conference? Yeah, that's right, Ed. I think they're taking the inflation very serious.

You know, as you point out, we're 4%-ish, and that's double the Fed's 2% target. And Chair Warsh did make a point several times about price stability and the 2% target. And then you got the dot plots, which are very clear that many of the Fed members want at least one rate high. this year or thinking there will be at least one rate hike this year and perhaps two.

And that was much more hawkish than I had anticipated, certainly for this first meeting for Chair Walsh, so. Yeah, I was a bit taken aback by how aggressive they were at this first meeting. Which is also striking given the rhetoric we've been hearing from the president, who has been aggressively calling for rates to be cut. This is what he was complaining about with Chair Powell for the longest time. There was a lot of debate over whether Kevin Walsh would kind of obey those demands, those sort of implicit demands, or if he would decide to be hawkish. He has decided to be hawkish here in a lot of ways defying the president.

Do you think that this could be, I don't know, maybe a point of tension moving forward? Were you surprised by the fact that he didn't do what the president might have wanted him to do? Well, you know, and he couldn't do it. And even if he wanted to, right? I mean, he's a vote on a committee with a lot of votes. And clearly the committee had a very different perspective on things. So even if he wanted to cut interest rates, that wasn't going to happen. And, you know, I think the data are pretty clear.

I mean, it's irrefutable that, you know, the inflation is just too high. And, yeah, there's some arguments as to why that might come back in as the Iran war winds down. And hopefully oil prices come in. in and stay down and that translates through. But there's a lot of reasons to be concerned that it would be more persistent as well. We talked last time about artificial intelligence and the impact that's having on inflation, which will be more durable. So, you know, I think the reality of what's going on is just too difficult to ignore. You just can't. And, you know, therefore, you have to be hawkish. The other thing to consider, I don't know if the president would think this way, but, you know,

I think it's clearly the case that if you start trying to cut interest rates in a world where everything screams you should be raising interest rates, you might get the federal funds rate target down. You know, by definition, you can get that down because you're the Fed. But long-term interest rates will go the opposite direction, though rise. And in fact, they did rise today. So I don't think he, Chair Walsh had any options here, right? He had to go along with this and be very hawkish in the way he's presenting things. Yeah, just look at the odds on Kalshi of a Fed rate hike. It started around 12 percent towards the beginning of the year. Now we're up to 62 percent. So traders believe that the likelihood is that we will see a rate hike. I think I would agree. I would be interested to hear your perspective on that too. But just going to Iran for a moment, we have seen this deal memorandum up for debate.

how real we think it will be, but seems certainly more real than previous announcements of deals that we have seen before, because Iran has signed up for this, and they've publicly spoken about it. Did we learn anything from the Fed, or at least on their views of how real this deal actually is? Because it seems that what happens in Iran is the most consequential event as it relates to inflation and prices. So it seems that there's something that we might be able to learn about what's happening in Iran from the Federal Reserve. Did we get any insight on that front or still unclear? I don't know that we get any insight into what's going on with Iran and how they're thinking about it.

I mean, I'm sure they're as uncertain as we are about how this is going to play out. That's playing into their thinking that maybe we need a rate hiker too here just to keep things for inflation. from becoming even worse in the context of the uncertainty around the war. But I didn't learn anything per se about the war and how that might unfold. I'm guessing there is in the dark about this as everyone else is. This thing can go in lots of different directions. I will say, Ed, I mean, I'll push back on the rate hike. My sense is the economy is also pretty soft.

Yeah, we did get a couple three months of good job numbers, but I suspect that's not going to be sustained. particularly as the deficit-financed fiscal stimulus that we've enjoyed since the beginning of the year fades into the background, and we're still paying higher prices for gasoline and grocery. So I think the Fed's got a problem not only with inflation, but they are also going to have a problem with growth, which is going to complicate things even further for them. Oh, wow. So you would bet then that we probably won't see a hike this year? I mean, where do you stand?

No, I don't think so. my sense is that, you know, it's clearly inflation screams for a rate hike, but the job market will be telling a strong story that rate hikes don't make any sense. It may be rate cut, and that'll go to a draw, and we don't get any change in policy this year. That would be my thinking. So, but, you know, a lot of script here to be written. But my sense is, as we move into the summer months, the economy's going to start to weaken again. All right. Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics. Mark, always appreciate your time. Thank you.

Any time, Ed. AI is taking an outsized presence in the market, from AI companies going public to the rise of AI agents trading on a user's behalf. Now, more than ever, investors need to consider what role AI should actually play in their portfolios. So, joining us to discuss that is an AI-reactual. researcher who brought machine learning to Wall Street decades ago. Vassant Da is a professor at the NYU Stern School of Business, founder of SCT Capital Management, and author of Thinking with Machines, his new book. Vassant, thank you for joining me on the show.

You are an AI researcher. You founded a hedge fund that specializes in machine learning and machine learning-based investment. So you were quite early to this. AI is now taking over. So I'd be interested to hear from you how AI is changing investing and if we should be using it to invest. Yeah, you're right. You know, when I went to Wall Street, when I brought Machine Learning to Wall Street, it was, AI was sort of a, you know, it was a thing that people viewed with suspicion. You know, you had economists who were used to sort of linear models, and you had physicists who were used to, you know, physical kinds of models.

And machine learning sort of fell in this awkward space. They didn't quite know what to make of it. And my objective really was to see if I could get a machine to learn how to trade, right? That was just an open question. You know, it wasn't clear to me that was even possible. And, you know, after a few years, I had a conversation with Scott actually in 2015, you know, called, should you trust your money to a robot? And I sort of broke the investment landscape into three holding periods, you know, high

frequency, short-term and long-term, high-frequency being intraday, short-term being days to weeks, and long-term being like weeks to months to years. And at that time, my position was that AI had tremendous potential in investing in the high-frequency in the short-term space because there was sufficient data. And machine learning methods were actually capable of picking up on the nuances in markets that, you know, the cruder linear models sort of missed. And I recall that Scott ended that conversation by saying, okay, so trading flows with appear, but private equity and, you know, long-term investing is safe. And I said, yeah, that's

pretty much the case. And ironically, I'd had a similar conversation with Damogoran in 2015 about, you know, whether we could, you know, simulate him. And at that time, we felt it just wasn't possible with the tools. But in 2022, with, you know, the emergence of LLMs, we sort of revisited that. And now, three years later, three-plus years later, you know, we're getting ready to release the Damodran bot next month. for commercial use. And I'm fairly confident that we've actually managed to simulate his kind of thinking to a reasonable degree.

So to the extent that you actually believe in sort of a free cash flow model to the firm fundamental approach to investing, we've actually managed to do that reasonably well. So, you know, I think we're close. And, you know, we're there where AI can actually play a pretty significant role in sort of long-term systematic investing. What was it about long-term investing that made it difficult to use machine learning for long-term investing previously?

I mean, we know that machine learning has been used for high-frequency trading, you know, the stuff that is less long-term, short-term stuff, but then AI comes along and now it's possible. Why is it possible now? So, you know, the traditional view of machine learning is supervised learning. You have examples that you learned from.

there just weren't sufficient examples or training data to learn from, right? You know, the mother-in is sort of exceptional in terms of the number of reports he's written, you know, which go into sort of the low thousands maybe at this point. But that isn't sufficient data to really train an AI,

like, you know, considering how, you know, compared to how much data there was in the high frequency in the short-term space. So there just wasn't enough training data. What's different now, you know, and this is something I write in my book, is this emergence of general intelligence, where the machine knows something about everything,

and the division between common sense reasoning and expertise is broken down. To me, that's like the big deal about AI that's made it a general purpose technology. That was always the hindrance, that we sort of drew this artificial boundary between expertise and common sense. And with LLMs, that became available.

So now you can build on this sort of substrate of a machine that has common sense, and you don't need as much training data because it's ingested sort of the wisdom of humanity on the internet. And now it's a question of like, you know, tilting it in an appropriate direction, such as a value or a fundamental approach like Demodran does, right? And that's what's made it feasible for, you know, reasoning about sort of long, longer term investment horizons. I'd be curious what Demoderin thinks of the Demoderant bot. Have you spoken with him about it? Does he have a view on the fact that he's

being automated to a degree? So I've discussed the SpaceX valuation with him. He published his report and then that ran the bot several times on it. And I shared it with him and asked him what he thought. And he thought that it's thinking is, you know, mirrors his, you know, relatively closely, even though the bot was much more bearish than he was. His valuation was like $1.2 trillion. The bot had a hard time justifying anything above half a trillion. So he actually feels that it does a reasonably good job of simulating him, where it falls short, in my estimation, is in sort of the quality of framing questions, right? He has a sort of exceptional ability to sort of frame the problem in a way that then sort of, you know, drives the analysis. You know, we've tried really hard to do that,

and the machine's got quite good at actually, you know, coming up these framing questions. But in my estimation, that's where it falls short, you know, relative to its master. Well, half a trillion dollars on SpaceX. I think the Demoder & Bach might be the first, well, the only person, entity in the market is more bearish on SpaceX than I am. So it's quite a striking number. Vassant Da is Professor at NYU Stern, founder of SCT Capital Management and author of Thinking with Machines. Vassant, this is fascinating. Thank you for joining us.

Thanks for having it on the showhead. We end this episode back where we began with a. few words of remembrance for Snap. I know Mark is more optimistic about the technology and the company, but the stock has fallen more than 90% in the past five years. It is now less valuable than Domino's Pizza and roughly as valuable as the gap. And to add insult to injury, they have now come out with what might be the ugliest wearable in wearables history, and that is saying something. In addition to weighing 132 grams, which is five times heavier than a regular pair of glasses, and about as heavy as a baseball, the Snap specs were also incredibly expensive to build.

The company dished out an estimated $3.5 billion creating this product, which is equal to more than half of the company's annual revenue. In other words, unlike Apple, which made a somewhat calculated gamble on its headset, Snap has literally bet the farm on this thing. And Evan Spiegel has said as much. He called this launch his crucible moment, and the street was still less than impressed. The stock immediately lost a tenth of its value.

Snap has been sliding for a long time now. But in my view, this might just be the nail in the coffin. In the words of Dr. Seuss, my message to shareholders is the following. Don't cry because it's over. Smile because it happened. Snap, we will miss you. Okay, that's it for today. This episode was produced by Claire Miller and Alison Weiss

and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our video editor is Brad Williams. Our research team is Dan Chalon, Isabella Kinsul, Kristen O'Donohue, and Mia Silverio. And our social producer is Jake McPherson. Thank you for listening to Profty Markets from Profi Media. If you liked what you heard, give us a follow. I'm Ed Elson.

Tune in tomorrow for our conversation with Barry Rittles. Support for this show comes from Odu. Running a business is hard enough. So why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odu. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more.

And the best part, O-DU replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try O-D-U for free at O-D-O-D-O-O-com. That's O-D-O-O-O-O-com.