Prof G Markets - Wall Street Is Thriving on Chaos — Will It Last?

Episode Date: April 16, 2026

Ed Elson breaks down key takeaways from bank earnings with Saul Martinez, including how volatility from the war impacted results. Then, Ed explores Amazon’s acquisition of Starlink competitor Globalstar with Tim Farrar. Finally, Ed gives his take on Allbirds’ rebrand as an AI company. Saul Martinez is the Head of US Financials Research at HSBC. Tim Farrar is the President of TMF Associates.  Get your tickets to the Prof G Markets tour  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

Breaking news, the world is a mess, and it seems like it's just getting worse. So how do you find a way to move forward? Being hopeful acknowledges and embraces that things are difficult and asks, where can we go from here? Why our future depends on our ability to hope. That's this week on Explain It to Me, new episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Today's number five. That's how many cities prof. Markets will be visiting this spring when we go on tour. Yes, we are finally going live, starting

May 27th. We will be heading to San Francisco, L.A., Chicago, Miami, and we will be ending in New York. We are so excited about this. If you want to come watch the show, go get your tickets, starting today at 11am Eastern at Prof.gmarketsTor.com. I'll see you in person. Building is hell. The show goes up. Welcome to property markets. I'm Ed Elson. It is April 16th.

Let's check in on yesterday's market vitals. The S&P 500 hit a fresh record high on hopes for peace talks to the Middle East. The U.S. and Iran may extend the ceasefire another two weeks for more negotiation time. The NASDAQ also climbed while the Dow fell. Brent Crude was roughly flat on the day, hovering around $95 per barrel. And finally, Live Nation shares dropped 6% after a jury found that Live Nation and Ticketmaster held a monopoly in the events industry. Okay, what else is happening?

America's biggest banks just had a strong quarter and largely because of the war. Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley all reported higher than expected earnings for the first quarter of 2026, and that was fueled largely by an increase in trading volumes due to the volatility related to Iran. Equity's trading revenue alone jumped nearly 27 percent on average across the six firms. Still, the U.S. financial sector is up less than 3 percent over the past week. In the earnings calls, several of the CEOs struck a notably cautious tone as geopolitical uncertainty lingers. Jamie Diamond warned of, quote, wars, energy price volatility, trade uncertainty,

large global fiscal deficits and elevated asset prices. Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon also pointed out, quote, heightened uncertainty in parts of private credit and the conflict in the Middle East. And Citigroup's CEO Jane Fraser warned that, quote, one great first quarter does not a full year make. So here to break down, Wall Street's latest earnings from these big banks. We're speaking with Saul Martinez, head of U.S. financials research at HSBC. Saul, good to see you some solid earnings from the big banks this week. But I think the thing that really jumps out to me, and I think to investors too, is great quarter for trading.

And it seems like that was largely a result of this volatility related to the war. What do you make of this first quarter for the big banks? It was a good quarter, as you mentioned. And you had very strong earnings for share growth, the median EPS growth for the seven banks and investment banks that I cover was 23%. Underlying operating trends were good, but as you mentioned, you know, a key takeaway was that you had exceptional results

in capital markets businesses. And if you think about capital markets business, it is good to break them down into two broad buckets. There's the investment banking side where, you know, firms work with the clients or corporates and entails advising on M&A and underwriting and raising capital, that was very strong also, 29% year-on-year growth.

You mentioned volatility because it's interesting because historically high volatility has not been good for investment banking, but it has been good for sales and trading. But right now we're kind of getting, you know, we're hitting on all cylinders where trading results are really strong and benefiting from volatility. But it's not undermining deal-making. And I think a lot of corporates have now come to the conclusion that, volatility may be a feature of the system as opposed to a bug and have to continue investing and raising capital and doing deals. Now, on the trading side that you mentioned, yes, the war did help. I do think, though, that trading was already tracking. The markets businesses were already tracking to pretty good results even before the war. You know, on average, I think you had 17%

year-on-year growth overall, and as you mentioned, equities was a particular standout. I think one of the big questions, though, as we had, you know, go forward, is how durable these results are, especially in markets. You know, we've done some research in the recent past where we showed that a lot of the upwards revisions and earnings per share estimates for these banks, especially for Goldman and Morgan Stanley, where consensus earnings. for share estimates have gone up over the past, you know, 15 months or so by over 20 percent. The bulk of it has been driven by sales and trading results. And, you know, to the extent to which

they can continue to outperform is, I think, an important question. I think the results likely will continue to be good, but it's going to be hard to continue to grow, you know, 20 percent off of, you know, what are now much more difficult comparatives. Yeah, this seemed to me, because we were in this situation last year, and I remember it last year quite well, where, you know, the volatility that we were seeing in the market and the uncertainty that everyone was feeling was mostly a bad thing for most businesses, except for if you're on the other side of those trades, essentially, or if you're facilitating those trades. And so when tariffs happen, when Liberation Day happened, just total volatility, markets going all over the place, and yet it was a great quarter for many

of these banks because they were making so much money off of the trading. And here we are in a similar situation. It seemed as though that was sort of a one-off. But now that it's happened twice, I'm starting to wonder if this is just the market we live in. And these are volatile times. And sales and trading is now just core to the business at this point. What would you make of that? I think it is core to the business. So, you know, go back a few years, you know, early stages of the pandemic, you have huge increases in sales and trading. And I think a lot of us were saying, okay, well, it's going to go back to what it was pre-pandemic. And it didn't. And it's continued to grow. So obviously, when you have outsized volatility, that kickstarts things even

further. But the business has changed some. So it's not just, you know, intermediation, which you're talking about. But there's a financing piece of it. Things like prime brokerage and where, you know, investment banks are providing loans to hedge funds. That has grown a lot. If you look at the segment disclosures, for example, and you look at, you know, the market's businesses and the size of the balance sheets of these businesses, they are growing quite a bit. And that tends to be a little bit more durable than the intermediation side. But that has been a significant driver.

So these businesses are going. to be larger than they have been in the past. And the other thing is that, you know, corporates are being, you know, a more active in hedging rate risk. We have positive real rates across the curve. So, you know, there's more opportunities to trade rates, you know, volatility, you know, macro volatility, you know, monetary policy changes. All of these, you know, changes have led to, you know, expansionary monetary policy. All of these have created more opportunities for intermediation, even as the financing piece has grown. I think the question, though, from a stock perspective

and from the perspective of investing in these stocks is, okay, you know, it's going to remain much higher than it has been in the past, but can you continue to grow this business and can continue to surprise on the upside? And that's where I'm a bit more skeptical. Just slightly shifting to the economy here and what we can expect.

I mean, one of the nice things about hearing these bank earnings is they have so much data, so many points of light, that they're kind of a good source for understanding what's going to happen. The big question on everyone's minds right now is what is this war going to do to the economy? What is it going to do to gas prices? I mean, we've seen what it's done so far. Hasn't been great. The question then becomes, is it going to get worse? Did we learn anything on that front from these banks, perhaps, did we learn anything from these executives on their expectations for how the next few months

will play out on the economic front? I think there's a cautious optimism about the economy and that it'll continue to be resilient. I mean, the general takeaway from management teams is that sentiment is challenged, but the actual numbers are holding in pretty well. And unemployment's really important here, right? As long as people are employed and wages are going up, they're spending.

We hear a lot about the two-speed economy in a K-shaped economy, I think, you know, a better way to frame it is an E-shaped economy, where, you know, the high end is growing more, spending more than the low end, but there's no delta. There's no inflection in terms of the trends right now.

There's not a worsening at the low end. It's kind of stable. In terms of spending. Just so I understand it, you're not seeing a worsening in terms of expenditure right now. I'm not, yes, okay, got it. So what I mean is like, if, you know, throwing these,

making these numbers up a little bit, but generally speaking, so if the high end is growing 10%, and low-income consumers are growing 2%, the 2% is not getting worse. It's staying at a lower level. It's just that there's not a worsening trend at the low end. It's kind of the baseline trend is the same.

But, you know, credit is good at, like credit quality has been good across consumer across commercial loan growth is picked up a little bit. You know, as I mentioned, corporates, you know, are now thinking volatility is a feature, not a buck, so you're seeing some investments. But, yeah, I mean, the economy, you know, we're in a low, higher, low-fire type of economy,

but, you know, if the thing to watch is unemployment. If unemployment goes up, then that thing, things change. But up until now, we haven't seen that in the sort of, you know, the baseline, economic trends, spend volume growth on debit cards, volume growth on credit cards. It hasn't really changed much. So there's a cautious, there's some caution, as you mentioned, you gave some of the quotes. But, you know, I think most management are saying, like, what we're seeing on the ground isn't really changing much.

There was an interesting quote from the JP Morgan CFO, who was asked about this question, like, what are we seeing with consumer spending, how is the war and how all gas prices affecting spending habits among consumers. And he said, quote, there's really, there really is not anything new or interesting to say this quarter. We've looked at it through every angle, and it all looks consistent with prior trends

and fundamentally healthy. And it seems like this is the big question that we're all trying to tackle. You would think if gas prices are rising 20, 30 percent, that that's going to be a real problem. But then what we're seeing is that consumer spending is kind of stable

ish. It's not really changing from where it was before. And I guess the big question that I'm asking is like, why is that? Why aren't we seeing a pullback? Why aren't we seeing a deterioration? Sometimes I think, well, maybe it's just because the top 10% or the top owners are just buoying the entire thing, but it is very hard to tell. And it does seem important from an economic perspective, because if you do see a pullback in that spending, that could be a real problem for earnings. Well, I mean, you know, One thing about J.P. Morgan is their client-based, especially on the credit card side, tends to be more affluent. So there is that. And it is a proportion of household, I'm not an economist, but as a proportion of household income, gases, you know, gasoline is less than what it, you know, was, you know, in the 70s and 80s. So I think it will be interesting when you get some of the consumer finance companies reporting next week, especially those who focus more on, who have bigger businesses at the lower end, what they're saying and what they're seeing will be, important, you know, important to consider. But the other thing is, like, we're still pretty early on. I think if gas prices stay, you know, $4 or wherever they end up at for an extended period of time,

does it start to put, you know, more strain on household finances, especially at the lower income level that it has. The other thing, you know, we just mentioned that'll be, that's interesting on this point is tax refunds are tracking ahead of what they were last year. So that, you know, is putting some more money in the pockets of lower. income, especially the lower income, and the predisposition of that income cohort to get, to spend additional income tends to be a little bit higher. So, you know, eventually that effect may fade out. But, you know, tracking that and seeing how much is being spent and how much is being saved or used to pay down debt is also an interesting thing to monitor right now.

Yeah, we will definitely be tracking that. That's a great point. Okay. Saul Martinez, as head of U.S. Financial's research at HSBC. Saul, always appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks for having me on. Appreciate it. Off to the break, Amazon Challenges Starlink. And if you're enjoying the show, please follow our new Profi Market's YouTube channel. The link is in the description.

This is advertiser content brought to you by Virgin Atlantic Ed. A couple weeks back, I got you a birthday gift not to pat myself on the back, but it was a pretty good one. It was indeed. You surprised me with Virgin Atlantic, upper-class tickets to London. So tell us all about it.

It was pretty incredible. From the moment I entered that upper-class cabin, I have to tell you, I felt like a VIP. Anything I needed, a drink, snack, assistance with the seat. Flat seats. Flat seats. Flat seats. Exactly. Had the four-course meal.

Got my champagne. Very delicious. Enjoyed the food. And the journey home? The journey home was great. I went to the Virgin Atlantic LHR Clubhouse. That's the Heathrow Clubhouse. Heathrow Clubhouse was awesome, got myself a coffee, headed over to the meditation pod that they called the soma dome.

Kind of felt like a sort of spaceship where you relax and think nice thoughts. So I did that for a little bit. Then we went over to the wing, which are these acoustically sealed booths where you could do some work. You could even record a podcast. I didn't do that, but maybe I should have. It was a very enjoyable experience. So, Ed, the real question here is, what are you planning to get me for my birthday? See the world differently with Virgin Atlantic.

Flying should be more than just transport. It is part of the adventure. Go to virginatlantic.com to learn more. Tickets and lounge access provided by Virgin Atlantic. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. It's a shame when the best B2B marketing gets wasted on the wrong audience. Like imagine running an ad for cataract surgery on Saturday morning cartoons or running a promo for this show on a video about Roblox or something.

No offense. to our Gen Alpha listeners, but that would be a waste of anyone's ad budget. So, when you want to reach the right professionals, you can use LinkedIn ads. LinkedIn has grown to a network of over 1 billion professionals and 130 million decision makers according to their data. That's where it stands apart from other ad buys. You can target buyers by job title, industry, company role seniority, skills, company revenue, all suit can stop wasting budget on the wrong audience. That's why LinkedIn ads both one of the highest B2B return on ad spend of all online ad networks. Seriously, all of them. Spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a free $250 credit for the next one. Just go to

LinkedIn.com slash Scott. That's LinkedIn.com slash Scott. Terms and conditions apply. This episode is brought to you by Tell Us Online Security. Oh, tax season is the worst. You mean hack season? Sorry, what? Yeah, cybercriminals love tax forms. But I've got TeleSense online security. It helps protect against identity theft and financial fraud so I can stress less during tax season or any season. Plans start at just $12 a month. Learn more at tellus.com slash online security. No one can prevent all cybercrime or identity theft. Conditions apply. We're back with Prof. Gmarkets. Amazon is making a big bet in the satellite race. The company is acquiring telecom company Global Star for about $11.6 billion, giving its Leo net,

formerly known as Project Kuiper, access to satellites, spectrum, and direct-to-device technology. That is the technology that allows satellites to connect straight to phones beyond the reach of cell towers. This deal will help Amazon compete with SpaceX's Starlink, which still has a major lead in scale and service. Amazon also announced a major new customer in Apple. Amazon Leo will power emergency texting features on iPhones and Apple Watches, extending Global Star's existing partnership with Apple. Amazon gained about 3% on the news. Global Star surged nearly 10% on the news.

We'll hear to discuss what this acquisition means and give us kind of a refresher on the satellite industry. We're speaking with Tim Farrah, president of TMF Associates. Tim, thank you for joining me. So what do you make of this deal? And for those who aren't familiar with the telecom world and the world of Starlink and Global Star and all these,

names. Give us a little bit of a refresher on what this means for the industry. Yeah, I mean, so we went through this round of building out of these satellite systems 30 years ago when Global Star first got started. It and Eridium wanted to sell everyone a satellite phone and they spent billions of dollars to do that and no one really wanted them back then. So now, you know, the last few years, Global Star has been working with Apple to put messaging into every iPhone. This deal shows that other companies are interested as well. We've seen a lot of hype about Starlink with their partnership with T-Mobile. AST is in partnership with AT&T and Verizon.

And this is another entry to the market where they're trying to all catch up with Starlink, frankly. What makes satellites better? You mentioned that people didn't really care about satellites 30 years ago when they were building them. Now suddenly satellites are very exciting. All those names. I mean, Starlink, obviously everyone's very excited about it. AST, which has been one of the best stocks in the market for the past year. What makes satellites so exciting right now?

Well, back then, you know, the phones were big and expensive, and people didn't really feel the need to buy, you know, an expensive phone for the few times they go outside cellular coverage. Now this is being put into regular smartphones. and so the idea is that people will use it a lot more because they don't have to buy a separate phone. But we still don't really know how much they will use it. I mean, cellular coverage is pretty good outside of a few national parks.

And T-Mobile has seen probably a lot less usage than they might have expected on their service with Staling. Now, you know, these new systems, Staling's going to upgrade its satellites, AST is trying to build out these big satellites. and we don't know what Amazon's going to do, but we assume it's going to be yet more bigger satellites as well. You know, that's going to offer better services. But is that going to cause people to buy these services

and pay for them every month? I don't know. I think it's a lot harder to call than it is for, like the broadband services that Sarlink's providing today where, you know, they've got about 11 million users around the world and it's very much proven as a solution. Director device is still an unproven market in my book. It sounds like the real differentiators, or the reason that satellite might be better than regular broadband cell coverage is that you can use it in, say, a national park and maybe you can use it on a plane.

I mean, basically places where coverage doesn't already exist. Is that understating what is exciting about it, or is that really it? Is that really the differentiator? It really is about places where people don't have coverage. Now, it's actually illegal. to use your phone on a plane. Most people don't think about it and they use the Wi-Fi, but using it direct to either a satellite or a cell tower is illegal

at the moment. But out in a national park, yeah, you don't necessarily have coverage. The problem is that these services, you know, instead of you're communicating with a cell tower that's a mile away, you're now communicating with satellites hundreds of miles up in space.

That means that the services isn't so good. It doesn't work in buildings. And the data rates today, you know, a few hundred kilobits to a few megabits for second, maybe a little bit better with next generation services, maybe as much as 10 megabits for second. But still, I'm getting hundreds of megabits for second on my phone, you know, in any sort of urban area around the country, and it worked in building perfectly fine.

So these limitations of the satellite services, you know, are going to offset some of the need for this service out in a national park. You seem quite skeptical and almost bearish on satellite as a network and as a service. Would I be mischaracterizing you there? Or do you think that, I mean, this has been one of the really hot sectors recently. A lot of people are really excited about these companies. Do you think that there's too much hype? Well, I think that the broadband service, as I said earlier, has proven itself already.

We've got 11 million selling users. The good thing about that is, you know, you stick a dish on your roof and it's got a lot of spectrum to use. it's got a lot of power it can use to get to the satellites, and there's 10,000 satellites up there. These directed device satellites, because it's using the same phone that you would be using to communicate with the terrestrial tower, it's never going to have the performance

that the terrestrial networks will deliver. And so, yeah, I think that this market is perhaps a little bit overhyped at this point in time. How much of an overlap is there between telecom and space? I mean, this is sort of a distinction and I wonder if this is part of the reason why the hype is being bucketed together into the satellite systems,

because when I think of Starlink, I think of rockets, I think of SpaceX launching incredible vehicles, rockets into space. I think the same thing when it comes to this acquisition. I mean, I associate it with Project Leo, which of course is the new name for Project Kuiper, which again, I associate with space launching stuff up into the atmosphere, which gets me all excited.

I mean, are these two separate industries that we need to sort of distinguish between a little bit more? Well, the telcos are definitely excited about the possibilities here. I mean, they've struggled really with 5G to develop new services and increase the spend that customers make. So I think they're always interested in any new opportunity. And like you say, the hype around space may get customers excited. But we still don't know if they're going to pay for it at the end of the day. And, you know, yeah, the limitations of this service, you know, I look back to the 1990s when everyone thought that Iridium and Global Star were going to have tens of millions or hundreds of millions of customers around the world. You know, they ended up with a few hundred thousand subscribers at the end of the day and went bankrupt.

And, you know, although the broadband world, Starlink is doing great and Amazon may well follow suit, in this directed device world, we still don't know. And I think the lessons of Eridium and Global Star from the 90s were that people didn't want to pay for a service that they didn't use very often and they had to use outside, you know, with a line of sight to the satellite. You know, people make their calls indoors and they don't want to go out in the rain or the cold or the heat

to make a call unless it's an emergency. And then are they going to pay for it every month? What would you say to the people who would point to Staling can say, you know, this operation, it's not its own company, really, but this program has, you know, millions of users. It's really the bulk of SpaceX's business in a lot of ways, and it's growing really rapidly. What would you say to those people who say, this is, you know, this is a bulk case. This is an industry that's growing and they're succeeding. Oh, no question about that on the broadband side. You know, Starlink has done an amazing job of ramping up

that market and it's generated. I think the reporting was $11 billion. of revenue last year. But, you know, the reporting on the deal between Starlink and T-Mobile is that it's less than $100 million over the last few years. And it's still very small and sort of anaccent market. So, yeah, we're going to have to see how it develops, you know, and it's still early days here. Broadband, yeah, all great and lots of opportunity there. Director Device, say the jury's still out, and I am skeptical.

Just for our listeners, I mean, what actually is the difference between those two things and how important is that distinction, broadband versus directed device? Right. So the broadband service, you know, you go and buy a Starlink terminal online or you go and buy it in Best Buy or Home Depot for a couple of hundred dollars. You know, Starlink will even send you one for free if you sign up to their service. And you stick that dish outside somewhere on the roof out in your garden. you could take it with you when you go camping. You know, that service is delivering hundreds of megabits for second at a cost of, you know, $50 to $100 a month, typically. And, yeah, people really like it,

and it gives very comparable performance to terrestrial broadband solution from your cable company or from AT&T or Verizon. Directed device is just this sort of handheld service in your phone, and it's much more limited. at the moment it's limited to a few apps, things like WhatsApp and X, and it's going to develop further,

but it's really limited to those sort of low bandwidth applications. And most particularly, you have to take your phone outside to use it, generally speaking, and that's a barrier to use, definitely. And so what is Global Star's business mostly focused on between those two? It sounds like mostly directed device. Yeah, Global Star is just doing the direct device. It's the service that enables your iPhone to work and send messages when you're out in a national park. You'll get a little prompt on your screen saying you want to connect to a satellite.

That's the Global Star satellites. And Global Star is building more satellites with help from Apple. Now Amazon's going to take that on and build even more satellites, presumably, which will be even more capable. And some of that will get through Apple's iPhones. Amazon will presumably want to sell it in other ways as well, and we'll have to see what they deliver. But they're playing catch-up to Starlink in that directed device face, just like they're playing catch-up in the broadband world with the Amazon Leo constellation.

Just before we wrap up here, what do you think was the rationale for Amazon? I mean, investors seemed to like it. It was the stock gained about 3%. It could be other forces as well. But generally, it seems that investors are quite excited about this acquisition, what do you think was the impetus and the rationale behind it? Well, I think that Amazon feels, you know, we're seeing a lot more bundling between fix and mobile.

We're seeing it in the terrestrial world as well, while the telcos are trying to sell you broadband at home and a mobile phone. The cable companies are doing the same thing. Sollink's now going to do that as well with both its broadband service and its director device service. And I think Amazon felt they needed to match them while than just being stuck with the broadband service alone.

Do you think it was a good idea? I think it's a lot of money to pay for, to get into this business, and it's going to take some time to see, you know, whether the market shakes up. I mean, obviously, SpaceX has spent the best part of $20 billion on buying Spectrum, too, but the Spectrum they bought, you know, if it doesn't work out, they can go and sell it back to AT&T or Verizon or T-Mobile and get their money back. Amazon's not making the same back. Global Star Spectrum is a lot less useful for on terrestrial towers

than the Echo Star spectrum that SpaceX bought. So Amazon's got to have this market work out for it. And as I say, we don't know if that's going to be the case. All right. Tim Farrah, president of TMF associates. Tim, fascinating stuff. Thank you for joining us. Thank you.

Big news in the world of footwear. Shares of all birds, the once popular shoemaker that sold itself for parts the other week, are soaring on news that the company is making a bold pivot from shoes to wait for it, AI. Yes, yesterday morning, the company announced that it is changing its name from all birds to new bird AI, and they will seek to acquire, quote,

high-performance, low-latency AI compute hardware and provide access that hyperscalers are unable to reliably service, end quote. You literally cannot make this up. And what is perhaps more extraordinary is that the stock rose, wait for it, 630% on the news. This is quite possibly the dumbest headline we will read all year. The shoe company is now an AI company and apparently everyone wants in. But in a funny way, it is very significant because it's so stupid because it tells you something about the market environment which we now

find ourselves in. To be blunt, we find ourselves in a bubble. I mean, expectation. for AI have become so untethered from the reality of AI to the point where investors are now actually pitching their company that sells shoes could be credibly recourse as a company that sells compute. And people are out there actually buying this nonsense. And to be clear, Allbirds isn't the only company making a ridiculous AI pitch like this. A few months ago, we talked about a company called Fermi, for example, this AI data center firm that recently went public. And we pointed out that the company actually had no business model, and had no infrastructure. All they really had was a PowerPoint deck and a sales pitch, which used the word data centers and

AI and compute a bunch of times. And we predicted that the company would implode. And indeed, the stock has fallen more than 80% since the IPO. And they were also recently sued for securities fraud. In other words, they are well on their way to imploding. But the point being, this is now becoming a major trend in the financial markets now. If your business sucks, if you have no revenue, if you're an old shoe company and you need a get out of jail free card, you can always just pivot to AI. That is the playbook. But we should also be clear, this is not going to lost. I mean, you cannot become something else by simply saying that you're something else. Eventually, the hype will have to run out. And my prediction here is that all bird's stock

going to absolutely crater at some point. Will it be tomorrow or the next week? I don't know. At some point, it's going to have to come down. That doesn't mean that every AI company is in trouble. Far from it. The ones that are actually innovating, the ones that are building real business models

around real technology, those companies are going to succeed. And so the big question for investors in AI is fast becoming the following. And that is, can you distinguish between what's real and what's fake? Can you figure out what's true? and what's bullshit?

New Bird AI? The shoe company that also sells compute, that also sells AI hardware? Well, the headline speaks for itself. This is bullshit. Okay, that's it for today. This episode was produced by Claire Miller and Alison Weiss, edited by Joel Passon and engineered by Benjamin Spencer.

Our video editor is Brad Williams. Our research team is Dan Shalon, Isabella Kinsel, Chris Nodonoghue and Mia Silverio, and our social producer is Jake McPherson. Thank you for listening to Property Markets from Profitue Media. If you liked what you heard, give us a follow. I'm Ed Elson, and tune in tomorrow for a conversation with Labor economist, Catherine Ann Edwards.

The Madamy Holmes bike for brain health supporting Baycrest returns on May 31st for its fifth anniversary with a new start and finish at the Aga Khan Museum. Join thousands of cyclists as we take over the DVP and Gardner Expressway in support of dementia research and brain health. Riders of all abilities are welcome, and both regular bikes and e-bikes can participate. Bring your friends, family, or corporate team, and make an impact. Register today at fight for brainhealth.ca.

Let's talk groceries, specifically your groceries. With Instacart, you want your groceries just the way you like them, right? Well, the Instacard app lets you do just that. They have a new preference picker that lets you pick how ripe or unripe you want your bananas. Shoppers can see your preferences up front, helping guide their choices. Instacard, get groceries just how you like. When a country's productivity cycle is broken, people feel it in their paychecks, their communities, their futures. What does this mean for individuals, communities, and businesses across the country?

Join business leaders, policymakers, and influencers for CGs' national series on the Canadian Standard of Living, productivity, and innovation. Learn what's driving Canada's productivity decline and discover actionable solutions to reverse it.