Hello my friends, today is February 14th and this is Market's Weekly. So this past week was a very volatile week in markets as we've been discussing over the recent weeks. It really seemed to me that the market was losing momentum. Now this past week we saw the S&P 500 lose the 50 day moving average. On Friday it came very close to losing the 100 day moving average as well. That kind of reminded me of a wise person who traded through the dot com boom and bust that during the dot com a lot of people wouldn't broke selling it in a few years later, even more people wouldn't broke buying it. Now I'm getting the sense just the guess that we probably have to test the 200 day moving average around a 6500 because we really this trend doesn't doesn't look that great.
This past week we got a lot of tier one data. We got the non-farm's payroll spread. We got retail sales and we also got CPI. So first let's talk about the data. And secondly I started using cloud AI last week. Of course we saw huge amounts of selling in the SaaS stocks and even some bulk management stocks. Everyone that all the stocks that were perceived to be disrupted by AI. So I had to try the latest AI myself and I'm beginning to think that AI is going to be very good for bonds.
All right starting with the data. So we got a huge three huge prints last week. First of all, of course the non-farm's payroll sprint, the January print was delayed until last week and it was much better than expected. However it also came with the annual benchmark revisions and the benchmark revisions basically erased one million jobs created last year. So as we've been discussed before the market really doesn't care about revisions. It only cares about the monthly prints. If the monthly prints last year were accurate we would have had zero or negative monthly prints. And that would have been very upsetting to the markets. But now that we a year later we revise them all away the market really doesn't care.
What it does care about though is that it seems like the job market is improving. So the January report was better than expected and maybe we'll be right advised away a year from now. But at the moment it's better than expected and the market is going to perceive that to be good and that the economy is less likely to go into recession. But it also of course reduces the odds of fed rate cuts. Now we also got the retail sales and CPI last week. But people were talking about that we have to mention a little bit about seasonal adjustments. So throughout the year data is uneven because of seasonal effects.
For example people use tended to do a lot of shopping in November and December. That's a big holiday season. So retail sales there are going to be a lot more. And in January people tend to reset their prices. For example if you're a company and you want to raise or lower prices on your products or services you tend to do that in the beginning of the year. So there is some seasonality to how these the data is computed. And to make data more comparable month to month economists or statisticians tend to do these seasonal adjustments. So keep that in mind when thinking about the data.
So for retail sales the data was much lower than expected. They were basically flat month to month. And some people think that could be due to aggressive seasonal adjustments. Which are difficult to make because of course the economy is changing. Behavioral changes as well sometimes seasonal adjustments can be overdone or underdone. Moving on to CPI data CPI was better than expected. But still at the end of the day it's still about 2.5% above the Fed's target. One thing to note of course is that companies do raise their prices in January. And so these seasonal adjustments make the January print less accurate than other prints as well.
So all in all though this is I don't data that is no kind of positive right. You have better than expected job growth and you have inflation that's coming down. Of course the market didn't seem to really care about this. They were really more cared about what seemed to be happening in the AI world. And that is the AI is cannibalizing current companies. So that brings us to our next topic. So I've talked about AI before. I started trying to use AI to help my workload.
And in the beginning it was very disappointing. So I asked the AI to do basic things like tell me when Fed is just speaking and it really couldn't do that. It was amazing to me that I asked it to go on the Federal Reserve's website to look up who's going to be speaking this week and it could not do that. So that was very disappointing. But last week we had the release of the latest cloud model and we also had a carnage in a lot of software as a service companies.
The market, at least people who follow this, was thinking that the latest AI is really going to be very destructive to the value of these companies. Maybe there's more competition. Maybe consumers are going to move to spoke AI created, vibe coded platforms and so forth. We even saw some wealth management companies like Swaps go up aggressively because maybe AI can provide taxish fishing strategies in place of wealth advisors. So again I had to try this for myself. So I signed up for the cloud max plan. So that's like $100 a month. I got to use it. So what did I use it for?
Well, as you guys know, I am writing the second edition to my books such as Banking 101. The last one was five years ago. So between data now, a lot of things happen. So I updated all the data, added a whole bunch of new sections about you know, the Silicon Valley bust, Silicon Valley bank buzz, you know, treasury buybacks, QT all that stuff. So I basically updated everything and I felt like I was basically done with the mounting strip.
So usually what I would do is I would hire an editor, a freelancer, and pay him a few thousand dollars to go through this. And I would also hire some artists to make a new book cover for a few hundred dollars. And these are people that I was sourced through upwork.com basically sites that post freelancers. But this time I decided I would give AI a try. Since that's what all the cool kids are doing right now.
So I uploaded everything into cloud and asked him to kind of, you know, be my editor and proofread it. And he said that it would take six hours. And so I waited for six hours. And what I got back was, you know, I guess he gave me like a few suggestions, updated some data points and things like that. Some very general stuff. I thought it was actually pretty, you know, just not that special.
But you know, maybe it's my fault. Maybe I'm not prompting cloud correctly. So this is what I did. I pumped him in a more precise way. I said, could you look at the reviews that I that are posted on Goodreads on Amazon? And there are a lot of reviews. And can you bring that feedback in mind? Can you go through the manuscript and can you give me some suggestions? And also just no broad suggestions as to what work you do better and so forth like that.
So this time it only took a few minutes. Maybe it's already in his memory or something like that. He came back with actually something that was pretty helpful. Give me a list of suggestions. Give me a separate word document detailing this. And you know, looking through it, some of them were not that great. Silas, the good course. Some of them were pretty good.
One of them, for example, was that in your reviews, people suggest you having a gloss read gloss. So did they can look at these acronyms, QT, FOMC stuff like that. That was pretty good suggested. And some of them also suggested that, hey, maybe you could have summary chapter for bullet points, you know, kind of like a textbook at the end of the textbook, you kind of give you a summary as to what you should be, what you should have learned from this chapter.
I thought that was pretty good suggestion as well. And so I asked Cloud, could you do that for me? And like just like that, it created wonderfully made glossary, wonderfully made bullet points. I thought that was pretty cool. I'm guessing that it could do more to help me with my manuscript, but I'm probably not prompting it well enough.
It did tell me though that it was very good and well written. And so I think it's just part of its job, like any employee. When I went to ask it about helping me create a new cover from an updated version, I gave it my prior cover and you know, gave it some ideas and it immediately basically like rock gave me a number of ideas and ways to pursue.
And that's actually exactly what my like a real human cover designer would have done. He would have given me a few design choices and then I would have no decided which one to go and how to advance it. So I'm probably just going to use Cloud as an editor. I think it's really good enough. And honestly, I don't know some of the human, it's hard for me to know if the human editors that are good or not until after the fact. But for the artistic stuff, I think I'm still going to hire a real designer. I think having that human artistic touch, she is something that I'm not really sure that Cloud can fully do right now. The covers he's shown me are very good. But I guess I'm just not competent enough in my own judgment and prefer someone who I, a proper artist to do that.
But that immediately got me thinking as to just what the implications of this are. So just, you know, first, first, first principle, first level thinking. So I would have spent a few thousand dollars on a editor, freelance editor and now I'm not going to do that. I'm going to use Cloud instead, Cloud which costs $100 a month, which of course, does not cover its operating costs, right Cloud Anthropic continues to lose money. So first impact of course is that I get fast service and better service like goods and services are produced by Cloud AI. And immediately everything is, is my readers supposedly benefit and I benefit as well. However, this is not really going to show up in GDP data because I'm just playing Cloud $100 a month and Cloud is losing money.
And it's kind of like how people who use AI and create all sort of funny videos and memes. These are actually goods and services that are produced, but of course you don't really pay for them. And so, and they people don't pay to see them. And so you don't really impact GDP. However, this editor that I would have hired, he's not going to be hired. So that is going to increase unemployment and actually reduce GDP because he would have produced goods and services that I paid for, but he's not. And so maybe someone else hires in maybe not. My guess is just that on macro scale on the margins people like him are just not going to be working.
And so obviously, slight upward pressure on unemployment, improvement in goods and services, the quality of it, but improvements that don't show up in GDP. So that's kind of an interesting combination, but honestly kind of common when we think about technology over the past few decades, right? So your iPhone, for example, is much better than was 10 years ago. It doesn't really cost that much more. So when you think about paying for stuff, it doesn't really show up in GDP, but the quality of the services is better. And I think this seems to be an extension of that.
显然,失业率略有上升,对商品和服务的质量有所改善,但这些改善并未在 GDP 中体现出来。这是一种有趣的组合,但在我们回顾过去几十年的技术发展时,其实蛮常见的。比如说,你的 iPhone 比 10 年前好多了,但价格并没有涨很多。所以当你考虑消费支出时,这种质量的提升并不会反映在 GDP 中。我认为这就是这种情况的一个延伸。
Now thinking more broadly, let's say, how does this impact business assistance or for that give you an example of what I'm doing with my, with the second edition of the book. But you can generalize this, for example, to writing a newsletter, right? So if I use AI to help me with my workload and sometimes I do, for example, the Fed released a lot of confidential documents, I believe in 2020. And they do that on a five year lag. And so I had AI look through it to see if there was anything interesting. Now otherwise, I either would not have done this or would have taken me a long time because it's literally hundreds and hundreds of pages to look through. And the AI was helpful in looking through that. So that helps me in that it makes me a little bit smarter and more able to provide a slightly better product to people who subscribe.
However, I'm not able to charge more for that and it does not increase the amount of subscribers. So it's an improvement, but it really doesn't show up in GDP. So I think there's that's probably going to be really common for a lot of industries. Just thinking back through the industries that I've been involved in in the past. For example, my first job was at a law firm and at a law firm, a lot of the work that lawyers do, well, it depends. But broadly speaking, if you're a junior associate in litigation, you would be spending a lot of time researching legal cases on Westlaw, Lexus Nex says or something like that.
AI can definitely do that very well and much better than any associate can. If you are someone on the transactional side, you would be editing contracts, for example, on honestly, it would be basically getting a contract that the firm did for like JP Morgan and then updating the terms for contract for Morgan Sally deal, you know, fine and replace literally fine and replace JP Morgan and Morgan Sally, updating the numbers, you know, 100 million to 200 million in the conforming changes in case of law change, like that. The AI can do that really well as well. So from a junior associate perspective, you're not going to need as many of them.
AI 完全可以胜任这些任务,而且比任何助理做得更好。如果你是处理交易事务的人,比如说你要编辑合同,通常的工作就是拿一份公司为类似摩根大通量身制作的合同,然后更新它的条款以适用于摩根·萨利的交易。基本就是查找并替换的工作,比如,把“摩根大通”替换成“摩根·萨利”,然后更新一些数字,比如从1亿美元改成2亿美元,还要根据法律变化进行调整。AI在这些方面也做得非常出色。因此,从初级助理的角度来看,可能不再需要那么多人力了。
From a partner, senior associate perspective, it's going to make you a lot more efficient. So at the end of the day, though, what happened, it seems, yeah, the first thing that will happen is that it's going to save your time. One thing you can do with your time is to do other productive things or you can simply shrink your time.
On an individual basis, it's me watching more TV. On a firm level basis, it's having a small head count, which anecdotally we hear firms are doing. Now, from a productivity standpoint, the firm is not going to be charging less because it, you know, it's using AI more about the junior associates. Okay, so law firms are a little bit different because they're built by the hour, but generally a corporation, it's not going to adjust its pricing, revenue structure immediately. So it's probably going to be reaping those efficiency gains through higher profits and lower higher profits to lower head count.
But when you think to the second stage of this, though, I mean, at the end of the day, there's not going to be more aggregate demand, right? It's kind of like going to my newsletter example. If I'm able to produce this more efficiently, it doesn't necessarily mean that I'm going to have more subscribers. And so from a law firm or any other services business, even though you are more efficient, you need fewer people can have higher profits. It doesn't necessarily mean that you expand your customers. It doesn't mean that you can charge higher prices.
So first off, it's going to be GDP neutral because you continue to produce the same amount of services and instead of and you have higher profits, but then again, it's kind of you kind of cannibalizing what you would have what the what the worker you laid out would produce. But afterwards though, you know, unless you have greater demand so that you actually produce more goods and services, you're not going to increase your active GDP. And if you're firing workers, you're going to reduce your active demand eventually.
And the economy, so it seems like this would ultimately be on the second step. Just kind of demand negative. It would actually shrink GDP because it doesn't actually increase the aggregate demand of the economy because you're firing more people who in theory would have been sources of demand. At the end of the day, everyone will have higher quality, good, high quality services, right? You would be able to access like some of the smartest, what, like the smartest, advice smartest information you could with a click of a button, either through AI directly or through some kind of professional who is employing AI.
So your quality of life will be higher. But it's, I don't see, I don't think it's going to show up in GDP for the reasons I cited earlier. So that's kind of an interesting conundrum. And the implications for markets is that, well, some, of course, we already see this creative destruction happening right now. Companies first again are going to have higher profit margins. So that's good. But then some companies will be completely superseded. And so that's about for them.
Eventually, though, you're going to have competition and those high profit margins will be completely lower. You know, it doesn't level the playing field a little bit. And that's small companies will have access to tools and resources that they would not have had access to before. So if you have higher unemployment, you know, and maybe massive disruption to be in the financial markets, as we've stored through all this creative destruction, who's winning, who's losing, and even the winners eventually have low profits, that seems like it's going to be soft market negative.
So when you put that together, I'm beginning to think that the ultimate AI trade is, it's going to be bonds. You're going to have a lot more rate cuts, lower employment, higher unemployment, lower stock prices, more financial market volatility. So I'm getting the sense that maybe that is going to actually be the ultimate good AI trade. But we'll see. In any case, those are my thoughts right now. Thanks so much for tuning in and I'll talk to you next week.