When I moved to New York in 2021, I submitted an essay about Manhattan to a literary magazine that I had no business writing.

To my surprise — and despite my lack of published essays and actual years in Manhattan — they published the piece.

I had written a love letter to a city I did not yet know.

I described the place with both the confidence of a lifelong New Yorker and the ignorance of someone who had just arrived.

(You can read the full piece here.)

Five years later, I read it with a strange nostalgia and tenderness.

So much has changed. In more ways than one I am not the same person who authored it.

At any rate, I do in fact now feel like a New Yorker. And while I write about business and finance each day, the city has kept my literary spirit nourished nonetheless.

The mythology of New York is old enough to have real texture and weight.

Writers have always been especially susceptible to it.

Literary types come because Whitman walked these streets. Baldwin sat in its bars. Didion named its particular dread so precisely you could feel it in your chest like a cold.

They (we) come because they have read too many books set here and not enough set elsewhere, and because somewhere in them lives the half-conscious belief that proximity to greatness is the same as achievement.

I arrived with ambitions I had not yet stress-tested against reality.

The city, I had decided, would do the testing for me.

It’s true you are not special here. I got that right in 2021. But it turns out to be clarifying rather than deflating.

Everyone around you is also trying. Some are failing. Some are succeeding at things beyond imagination.

As I wrote in 2021:

“Much of the allure, I think, comes from the same romanticism of Paris or Hollywood — the promise of being a star among stars and the fear of ignoring a talent you are certain is unique to only you.

…there’s something hopeful about looking up at skyscrapers while bumping shoulders with anonymous millions. The city gives me a sense of optimism that shields me from self-doubt and brings out a certain innocence in me.”

Half a decade and a few apartments later — Upper West Side, Upper East Side, midtown — I can confirm the indifference is real.

The skyline does not adjust for new arrivals. The subway does not wait. The throng of office commuters will walk straight through you if you linger too long.

And yet something about being genuinely unimportant to a place so alive turns out to be its own form of liberation.

The city is too large and too indifferent to sustain your self-consciousness or insecurities.

That, I think, is what I was calling innocence. Not quite naivety, but the loosening that happens when the pressure of your own ambitions gets outweighed by the sheer scale of everything around you.

There’s another line from that essay that has stayed with me:

“It’s a place where anything is possible, not so much because you are capable but because the city demands capability from you.”

New York is an intensifier, not a giver. It amplifies what you bring.

Meanwhile Paris aestheticizes failure and Hollywood is organized so thoroughly around stardom that even its casualties tend to perform it.

New York has no such sentimentality.

It just keeps moving.

If you allow it, the city absorbs you into its forward motion. And even if you don’t, it swallows you up anyway.

That relentlessness is democratic in a way that is both clarifying and, with the right lighting, motivating.

Five years is not really a long time but it feels so when measured against the expectations you set as a much younger person:

“If I discover I can make it in New York City, I doubt I’ll want to try to make it anywhere else afterward.”

I have not become the writer I imagined when I moved here.

I don’t have a great American novel to my name. I haven’t written fiction in years. The only chance my name gets mentioned in the same sentence as Hemingway is if I’m spotted reading one of his paperbacks on the train.

It isn’t at all a bad thing I have become something different than expected. That is it’s own gift.

Still, reading my own words back today reminds me that I am still working to live up to the ambitions of my younger self.

Phil Rosen
Co-founder of Opening Bell Media | Host of Full Signal

As a financial reporter I’ve met or interviewed hundreds of market strategists, economists and portfolio managers. One thing I’ve learned is that while everyone is drowning in data, the best investors are the ones with the best filters.

In portfolio management — as in life — success is mostly a question of how clearly you can see.

With my newsletter and show, I contribute an unusual amount to the morass of information that hits the internet.

Since I can’t speak to the personal situations of every investor, by definition that means some of the work I’m producing is indeed “noise” to a portion of the audience.

That’s where the cold discipline of software comes in.

On Friday, our team at Opening Bell Daily launched a new AI-powered investment dashboard to better serve our Best Ideas Club members.

The goal was not to give people more information to comb, but to provide a clean, intuitive tool to help see through the fog.

Ideally, this platform contributes less to the noise and stands in as a useful filter.

Now, for each of the weekly high-conviction stock picks I write about, members can log on to the dashboard to generate charts, key takeaways and risks for various investments with a single click.

For example, this chart below covers a stock we published last August.

It’s up 114% since then.

We have countless other stock picks that have performed even better than that one.

To be sure, I’ll be the first to admit that I haven’t had to spearhead a software product before.

AI agents and YouTube tutorials made the process smoother than it would have been a year or two ago, but finalizing it for launch was nonetheless a grueling test of humility and patience.

When you’re a small and lean team, you don’t have an IT department or quality assurance wing. Just a couple people working early mornings and late nights to solve problems and squash bugs.

Now that I’m on the other side of launch, though, I can recognize that this is one of the most engaging projects I’ve worked on.

The work itself is compelling to me. But the other component here is that I’ve felt a specific kind of magic in moving from describing a problem to engineering an elegant solution for it.

This presented both a technical and creative challenge that were a world apart from the usual editorial or business decisions I make each day.

To no surprise, building a filter is far more difficult than contributing to the noise.

I’ll still be in inboxes and on screens more often than some people prefer, but I’m proud that I’m now behind something that also helps people tune me — and everything else — out when it matters most.

Talk to you soon,

Phil Rosen
Co-founder of Opening Bell Daily | Host of Full Signal

If you want to join Best Ideas Club and access our new product, send me an email (philrosen4355@gmail.com) and I will send you a private 20% off discount code reserved for readers of this blog.

I’m lucky to have said the same thing at the end of 2024 — the year I quit my job to launch a media company, won a Fulbright award and proposed to my now-wife.

All that ended up being practice for what followed.

The first half of the calendar proved to be a head-rattling sprint and juggling act between running a business and planning a wedding from across the country.

Kaytlin and I were operating with half the usual timeline and double the stakes. We had relatives flying in from faraway lands like Hong Kong, Germany and England, many of whom had never before set foot in America.

The two of us — with work schedules filled to the brim and an ill-advised commitment to hosting regular dinner parties — spent every night and weekend parsing vendor contracts, building color-coded spreadsheets and shuffling seating charts.

If it had been clear in January just how much work the wedding would require, we may have thought twice before committing to such a compressed docket.

Fortunately — if painfully — we underestimated everything except ourselves.

And once something of this scale is set in motion, only two outcomes remain: tragic abandonment or smashing success.

After marrying in July, the world suddenly opened up, a consequence of both the peace that comes with marriage and the pragmatic result of tripling my mental bandwidth and free time.

Business boomed, I launched my own show and became a regular across a handful of financial news channels.

In August, I even had the opportunity to ring the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange, which meant I got to sign the legendary wall in the stairwell leading up to the bell podium.

Every passing month further confirmed that momentum is a lagging indicator.

You only experience the wins, the adrenaline and sighs of relief when the work is already done. Progress is almost always invisible in the present moment and then glaringly obvious in retrospect.

I know if I can hold onto that lesson, I’ll be better at all the things that matter most as a professional, as a husband, and as a man.

Three lessons crystallize as I write this today.

1. Commitment expands capacity

The wedding forced a level of decisiveness that bled into everything else.

The schedule moved so fast and offered such little wiggle room that I (we) had no choice but sharpen our priorities.

Optionality fell away but I ended up doing fewer things, better. With that came less noise and a ban on second-guessing.

The intensity of that season also revealed just how elastic our work capacity can be. But we wouldn’t have known it without committing to the mammoth task of the wedding.

New bandwidth comes from self-imposed, extreme pressure.

2. Burn the boats to make progress

Similar to the above lesson, the wedding as well as several choices made in the business confirmed to me that forward motion begins at the point of no return.

Once a decision become irreversible or too expensive to unwind, everything snaps into place.

Execution is no longer tied to motivation and becomes instead a matter of necessity.

Building in an escape hatch invites procrastination and shrinks the inevitable.

3. Leverage comes from consistency

The newsletter and show — and so, the business — have worked because they shipped on a fixed cadence.

Predictability builds trust, which amplifies reach, which creates leverage.

Traction comes from showing up without negotiating mood or energy.

Nothing meaningful happened after publishing my favorite articles or episodes. The inflection points would always come later, a result of a growing library and track record.

My life improved because of choices that narrowed rather than expanded my options.

In years past I’d try to keep as many doors open as possible. But recent history has taught me the value in closing the right ones.

It seems true that the life you want will only appear when you remove every alternative.

Thank you for reading, watching and supporting my work this year.

I will work hard to make sure the best is yet to come.

Happy New Year and I’ll see you in 2026.

Phil Rosen
Co-founder, Opening Bell Daily

On Thursday, Google unveiled a new version of its AI model Gemini, which has made waves specifically for its updated image generator, Nano Banana.

I spent an hour on it this weekend and I can confirm it is literally unbelievable.

I uploaded a selfie of a friend and me, asked it to swap in Elon Musk, and I had a new photo about 10 seconds later.

This tool is currently the worst it will ever be.

Google reported in August that Gemini had 650 million monthly users — 200 million more than what it reported in July. My guess is that this new update will usher in millions more in the coming weeks.

As more people use and therefore train the AI on their data, this thing is going to improve faster than our reptile brains can comprehend.

Its only limitation is the imagination of its users, and that might just be the part nobody is ready for.

Synthetic AI-generated content is already indistinguishable from human-created content, but the tools to generate the former are becoming cheaper and more democratized.

This extends to videos, voices, and personas, all done in minimal time and at zero marginal cost.

It’s only a matter of time (maybe it’s already happening under our noses) that we see entire organizations or newsrooms powered exclusively by AI.

This brings us to the “Dead Internet Theory.”

The idea has circulated in conspiratorial corners of the web for a decade, but it’s becoming increasingly relevant.

In simple terms, it claims that most of the internet hasn’t been human-generated for years — that bots, automation and algorithms make up almost everything we encounter online.

Here’s what Google’s new Gemini model came up with when I asked it to “create an infographic that explains Dead Internet Theory.”

Nano Banana made this in about 15 seconds.

According to the theory (which, again, predates ChatGPT), the volume of machine-made content far outpaces that of human conversation, creating the illusion of a vibrant internet community.

The people warning about this a decade ago now seem like prophets.

I texted the above photos to a handful of friends and only about one-quarter of them called them out as fake.

Everyone else was convinced I’d been at some celebrity cocktail hour.

What’s troubling is how easy, cheap and fast it was for me to create fictional photos. It would have taken me longer to physically take those selfies in real life.

The amount of content a human can produce grows linearly, manual post by manual post.

Yet AI-generated content has no human bottleneck. Its volume grows exponentially.

That will be especially true when synthetic content itself becomes capable of generating more synthetic content.

My friends and I already talk about seeing AI-generated videos on our social media feeds. If we aren’t there today, at some point there will be less human-made content on the internet than the alternative.

Once those lines cross, the texture of the internet will change.

But the AI tools will be so skilled and the content so convincing that we may not even notice.

Phil Rosen,
Co-founder of Opening Bell Daily & Host of Full Signal

Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this post, consider hitting the “like” button to help boost visibility. If the ideas resonated, I’d love to hear why — reply to this email or leave a comment below.

Over the last two years I’ve realized that building a business involves an alternating pattern of narrowing and widening focus.

When we launched Opening Bell Daily in April 2024, the company was built around a single product, the flagship newsletter I write five days a week.

I poured my energy into every variable underpinning that one thing.

The writing and design, interviewing sources, building readership, sponsorships, promotional content.

I had ideas for new projects along the way, but I’m glad I stuck to the discipline of keeping the main thing, the main thing. Relentless prioritization is the only way to make something good enough to expand into a second “main thing.”

After nearly a year of iterating on that first product, it was time to build a second — our paid membership for stock picks, Best Ideas Club, which launched in February 2025.

While related to the flagship newsletter, Best Ideas Club has demanded new skills and differentiated marketing and growth strategies.

What felt like diversification was actually leverage. The skills gleaned from the first product minimized friction in the second.

Getting this up and running took less time than anticipated. It’s become a hit with readers and I love working on it.

Two lessons here:

1. Work capacity increases over time

2. Mastery of one product accelerates mastery of the next

So with both the flagship newsletter and Best Ideas Club operating smoothly, I decided we had the bandwidth to launch a third product roughly eight months after the second — Full Signal, our new show.

The third episode went live this morning. We’ll be publishing about three episodes a week.

To get the show off the ground, my team and I have had a lot of late nights and early mornings, not unlike those early weeks in 2024 launching the flagship newsletter.

That should moderate as we get into a rhythm of booking guests, prepping interviews, and rehearsing on camera.

In sum, that’s five newsletters, one research report, and three shows each week — plus the social content, marketing and business that tie it all together.

From the outside, it may sound like an overloaded plate.

But in reality, it’s my new baseline of focus, one that’s widened so slowly and incrementally that it feels like a regular workload.

Because the ramp-up has been gradual, I’ve been able to acclimate to a new sense of “normal” at every stage.

The work I’m doing today may have flattened me six months ago, but that’s the point of sustainable growth.

Each stage of focus becomes the foundation for the next. Everything compounds.

What’s impossible today becomes routine tomorrow.

Phil Rosen,
Co-founder & Editor-in-Chief, Opening Bell Daily

Be sure to subscribe to Full Signal on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this post, consider hitting the “like” button to help boost visibility. If the ideas resonated, I’d love to hear why — reply to this email or leave a comment below.

I sat on the draft for several hours without hitting publish.

Posting my words to the internet felt vulnerable and embarrassing. I was afraid of how people would respond to my ideas.

But I’m glad I didn’t buckle under the nerves.

Without that first blog post I wouldn’t have arrived to this one.

Today I’m excited to announce a new venture.

I’m launching a new show called Full Signal:

Each week, I’ll unpack what’s driving markets and the economy through unique commentary, interviews and the signature charts and data visualizations from Opening Bell Daily.

And if you already read the newsletter, you’ll love the show.

We made it for the independent thinkers who are optimistic about where the world is heading, and the role financial markets play in it.

The first episode drops Wednesday.

Subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple.

Early momentum matters to new media ventures. If you are able to, send this to a friend to help me spread the news.

Thank you for your support.

Our team’s press release is copied below my signature.

Talk to you soon!

Phil Rosen,
Co-founder & Editor-in-Chief, Opening Bell Daily

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Opening Bell Daily launches new data-driven markets show ‘Full Signal’ for independent investors

Phil Rosen’s new video podcast brings award-winning financial journalism to investors seeking clarity in complex markets

NEW YORK, NY – November 4, 2025 – Opening Bell Daily, one of the fastest-growing independent financial media brands in the world, today announced the launch of Full Signal, a new video podcast show hosted by co-founder Phil Rosen.

Full Signal will feature in-depth interviews with leading investors, Wall Street strategists and executives, and include original data, commentary and Opening Bell Daily’s signature data visualizations.

“Independent investors are hungry for intelligent analysis that cuts through the noise,” said Rosen, a Fulbright scholar and award-winning financial journalist. “Full Signal brings the same clarity and independent thinking our readers rely on each morning – now in video form, for investors who are optimistic about where markets and the world are heading.”

New episodes will premiere multiple times per week onYouTube, X, and LinkedIn, as well as Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Full Signal expands on Opening Bell Daily’s growing media ecosystem, which includes its free weekday newsletter (syndicated each day on the Bloomberg Terminal and on Inc. Magazine’s website), paid Best Ideas Club research service, and its rapidly growing social channels.

Since launching in April 2024, Rosen and co-founder Anthony Pompliano have built Opening Bell Daily into one of the most influential voices in financial media, reaching millions of readers each month.

About Opening Bell Daily

Opening Bell Daily is an independent financial media company co-founded by Phil Rosen and Anthony Pompliano. The company delivers daily market analysis, research, and commentary to independent investors worldwide.

• Subscribe to Opening Bell Daily

• Watch Full Signal on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts

Contact:

Phil@openingbellmedia.com

Four years ago I stayed up all night preparing for a radio segment that never happened.

A local news producer had emailed me about a Business Insider article I’d written. She wanted me to do a three-minute segment over the phone.

It was the first time being asked to appear anywhere outside of print.

I knew the material well, but I still “studied” for hours like it was a college final.

An hour before airtime, the producer emailed me again. The schedule changed and I was off the schedule.

I didn’t say it out loud but I was relieved.

Fast forward to when I left Business Insider to launch Opening Bell Daily, I knew I had to move beyond the written word to grow as an individual and also build the business.

The same nerves came rushing back before I posted my first social video.

By this point I had published thousands of stories and two books, but getting on camera still felt foreign and uncomfortable.

Two friends of mine, Julia Munslow and Ryan Cheah — both prolific video creators — pushed me to post that first video.

They promised me everything gets easier after that first one.

That was 200 videos ago.

Julia and Ryan were right. I’ve since told the same thing to other friends and writers and creators.

That first social media clip has now led me to filming on a daily basis across my own channels and other networks — like in the above photo at the New York Stock Exchange! — and I’m having fun getting better each day.

I wonder how things would have panned out if that first radio segment never got cancelled.

I’ll have some news to share with you all about a new video venture in the coming days. It’s going to challenge me in new directions, and I’m excited to share the progress here along the way.

In the meantime, please subscribe to my YouTube channel, which will be the home of my next project.

Speak soon!

Phil Rosen
Co-founder & Editor-in-Chief, Opening Bell Daily

Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this post, consider hitting the “like” button to help boost visibility. If the ideas resonated, I’d love to hear why — reply to this email or leave a comment below.

I just attended a breakfast hosted by the Vanguard executives steering the legacy investment firm into the AI era.

Over croissants and sparkling water, global chief information officer Nitin Tandon and managing director Matt Benchener explained their ambitions to roll out a hyper-personalized ChatGPT-style tool to millions of clients next year.

As is, 95% of all client interactions are digital. Vanguard’s 2,500 customer service employees handle most of that.

The new bot — trained in-house on millions of clients’ proprietary data — will ultimately replace most of those 2,500 jobs, which Tandon told me have historically been high-turnover positions.

“Today’s chat feature is a live chat with customer support, but next year it will integrate Generative AI, so clients will soon be chatting with an AI model as the first interaction,” he said during the breakfast.

In 2021, the year before ChatGPT debuted, Benchener said the company’s platform saw 43 hours of downtime.

It’s engineers have since bolstered its infrastructure with AI. This year, Vanguard is on track for about 20 minutes of total downtime.

A 99% reduction.

The fact that Vanguard — a 50-year-old institution that moves far slower than the tech companies making headlines — is contorting its longstanding business model around AI should squash all skepticism around the technology.

To be clear, what’s coming is more than just another app.

The executives gave us a demo of an AI-powered platform that will actively “nudge” clients into being better investors, capturing stronger portfolio returns.

The bot is meant to act like a financial coach that never sleeps, tailored to every dollar and stock you own across retirement and brokerage accounts.

“We think advanced AI is going to be like an invisible hand, which impacts every aspect of client experiences,” Tandon said. “It will impact everything from how they interact with us all the way to the returns they get.”

“Like Jarvis from Iron Man,” he added.

If this goes as planned, the implications are seismic.

Should this new AI successfully “nudge” a fraction of Vanguard’s millions of cash-heavy clients into the market, it would unleash billions of dollars in fresh capital effectively overnight.

That would not only amplify Vanguard’s scale but potentially ripple across global asset prices.

And because 97% of Vanguard employees already use AI regularly, with half of them using it daily, according to Benchener, the firm seems likely to pair the external upside with massive internal productivity gains.

For a company as established as Vanguard to suddenly see faster coding, quicker compliance checks and leaner operations, the repercussions run deeper than a one-off modernization gimmick.

My sense is every other financial firm is actively working on their own versions of the same product.

Innovation begets innovation.

Who could justify doing anything else? The equation is not complex.

Companies that fail to embrace AI simply risk oblivion.

Phil Rosen
Co-founder & Editor-in-Chief, Opening Bell Daily

Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this post, consider hitting the “like” button to help boost visibility. If the ideas resonated, I’d love to hear why — reply to this email or leave a comment below.

Everyone is interesting if you ask the right question.

That’s what Rob Lawless told me over a coffee in midtown Manhattan in what was his 7,179th one-hour conversation with a stranger since 2015.

He’s meeting 50 new people a month right now, which puts him on track to reach his goal of 10,000 new friends within the next five years.

Before Rob, I’d never met anyone who connects with strangers for a living.

Most of us do so unintentionally. Hearing about what Rob’s doing made me want to do it more often, on purpose.

We connected because my friend Ted Merz met Rob through a friend of a friend last December.

Ted then wrote a blog post about becoming this stranger’s 6,689th new friend.

I didn’t understand. Everyone knows Robin Dunbar figured out decades ago that even the most extroverted people can only have 150 friends!

I wanted to learn more.

I messaged Rob on Instagram. His account is fittingly titled “Robs10KFriends” and he shares photos of everyone he meets to nearly 50,000 followers.

After more than six months of back and forth we found a time.

I put Rob one conversation closer to his decade-plus goal and he taught me his framework for unlocking great conversations.

The “FORD” approach — Family, Occupation, Relationships, Dreams — is meant to cultivate immediate and deep rapport between strangers.

This line of questioning unveils who someone is, how they spend their time, and where they want to go.

I can attest that — at least for he and I in a crowded cafe off Park Avenue — it worked like a charm.

Rob grew up in Philadelphia roughhousing with his older brother.

He’s as keen to take an eight-mile run as he is to attend a concert in a Brooklyn warehouse.

Now Rob gives keynote talks around the country to fund his ambitions of making 10,000 friends. He’s given talks in Berlin and India.

Literary agents have already approached him to write a book about the lessons he’s picked up along the way.

I asked him what stands out after connecting with 7,179 strangers.

Meeting people from so many different walks of life has given him more gratitude, Rob said, because it’s exposed him an unusual amount of reference points for his own life.

There’s no such thing as an easy life, he continued, but there is a much wider spectrum for a difficult one than you’d think.

(Strangers have told Rob stories of dead parents and unfulfilling careers, missed opportunities and regrets.)

He said the clearest pattern is that no one has their life entirely figured out.

Maybe that’s what makes strangers so relatable.

Here’s the photo of Rob and I and the post he shared on his Instagram account after we met.

It took seven years of writing online before I could muster the courage to publish my first video.

What I didn’t realize early on was that penning countless blogs, news articles and books actually helped prepare me for the camera.

High-volume writing forced me to string ideas into some semblance of coherence, which is the same process required for on-air work.

Since leaving Business Insider last April, I’ve found myself participating more and more in New York’s financial media ecosystem.

I’m doing far more and reaching a wider audience now as an independent journalist than I ever did in a mainstream newsroom.

It started with nervously posting my own short clips on social media, talking markets while walking through midtown Manhattan.

It felt awkward and uncomfortable.

But those led to podcast invites, some of which turned into repeat appearances and eventually larger stages on radio and TV.

I’m now a recurring guest on two different shows at the New York Stock Exchange.

I feel myself getting more relaxed with every segment. Some appearances are stronger than others, but even the ones I feel less confident about I know are pushing me in the right direction.

Like writing or or lifting weights or shooting hoops, it’s all about reps.

Of course, the engine behind it all has been my morning newsletter (I’ve skipped four days in 19 months — and that was for my wedding!).

The discipline of writing each day and being diligent in my reporting and interviews arms me with the context I can then speak to on air.

I have a lot more to improve on but I’m having a great time learning and improving.

Below are links to some recent segments. Let me know if you want me to put these video roundups together periodically.

• Taking Stock: Fed rate cut preview

• Yahoo Finance: Forget the September Slump

• On the Tape w/ ‘Big Short’ Investor Danny Moses: Facts Can be Stranger Than Fiction

• New York Stock Exchange: Fed policy and job market risks

Talk soon!

Phil Rosen
Co-founder & Editor-in-Chief, Opening Bell Daily

This chart may well turn out to be the story of the decade.

Thanks to artificial intelligence, the technology sector’s impact on economic growth is accelerating even as its share of total jobs shrinks.

In 2021, the year before ChatGPT debuted, the information and technology sector contributed 0.22% to real GDP growth.

By 2025, that’s climbed to 0.56% — more than a 150% increase in four years.

Employment meanwhile tells the opposite story.

The sector in question accounted for 0.08% of job growth in 2021. This year that has turned outright negative to cap an 87% decline in four years.

It’s a snapshot of how AI enables more with less.

As technological output and innovation surge forward, payrolls in the economy’s most closely watched sector are contracting.

For decades, economic progress and job creation moved hand in hand. When there was work to do, companies and governments filled factories and offices with armies of employees to meet productivity goals.

AI is severing that relationship in real time.

Large language models, cloud tools and robotics are decoupling output from employment, opening the door for economic growth to accelerate even as job creation dwindles.

In the near term, this dynamic boosts efficiency and margins.

It’s a clear win for shareholders of the largest and most advanced companies in the world — capital will continue to flow to firms that can scale without hiring.

Revenue per employee will explode, bringing the top-heavy stock market with it.

The advantages become clear when I think about my media startup, Opening Bell Daily.

My co-founder and I haven’t had to hire any employees since launching in early 2024 because so much of our work is streamlined by AI.

What costs us $20 a month today would have required several full-time salaries just a couple years ago. AI has simply raised the bar for hiring to the point that adding headcount is hard to justify.

When you look beyond quarterly earnings reports, the outlook turns murkier.

We don’t exactly know what happens to an economy, its workforce and social contract when demand for human labor collapses.

The fluctuations in GDP and payroll contributions offer a window into the defining paradox of the AI era: Fewer people are needed to drive more prosperity.

It’s at once exciting, strange, and difficult to grasp.

While the chart above focuses only on the technology sector, I sense that it’s a preview of what’s to come for the broader economy.

If it takes fewer workers to generate more output in the most innovative industry, the same thing will likely happen across less disruptive sectors others, too.

Phil Rosen
Co-founder & Editor-in-Chief, Opening Bell Daily

Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this post, consider hitting the “like” button to help boost visibility. If the ideas resonated, I’d love to hear why — reply directly to this email or leave a comment below.

"We will never forget."

Those words adorn the walls inside and outside the New York Stock Exchange today on September 11, twenty-four years after the World Trade Center attacks.

My friend Jay Woods — in 2001 a market maker on the trading floor and now chief strategist for Freedom Capital Markets — reminded me that September 17 marks another date worth remembering.

That was the morning the New York Stock Exchange reopened after the attacks.

US markets had been closed for four days, the longest halt since 1933. The world was still in shock. Professional sports hadn’t resumed. Airports remained empty.

Late-night TV hosts like Letterman and Leno had gone dark, unsure of how to make people laugh again.

And yet, in the financial center of the world, lights flickered back on.

“We got the building open and went back to work that day,” Woods told me after this morning’s opening bell ceremony. “It was a sign of resilience — you can knock America down but we’ll still get back to work.”

He said the motto at the time, “let freedom ring,” took on a greater meaning when the opening bell rang on September 17th, 2001.

Woods remembers commuting by boat into lower Manhattan that day with his colleagues. Armed guards greeted them at the dock, pressing American flags into their hands as they got off the boat.

Traders that morning walked through checkpoints into the exchange perimeter, past photographers, police and the smell of burning plastic and ash still rising from Ground Zero.

Once inside, Woods said he learned that two members of the exchange community had been killed in the attacks. In the absence of texts and social media, traders had scattered on 9/11 not knowing which colleagues had survived.

And yet, trading resumed.

Stocks fell more than 6% that day but no one seemed to mind the losses. The fact markets had opened at all told the world America was still standing.

In the days that followed, first-responders were invited to the exchange, meeting applause as they walked through the crowded trading floor.

As share prices declined, Woods said his clients called him not to ask why their stock was dropping but to check in to see if he was okay.

“Just going to work that day had a small part in bringing the country back after 9/11,” Woods said. “To be on the floor that day was one of the most patriotic things I’ve been involved with in 33 years.”

Phil Rosen
Co-founder & Editor-in-Chief, Opening Bell Daily

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He’s worked at the same place for eight years.

During his first few years at the company he would conduct two or three interviews a week, meeting potential hires for the engineering team.

Over the last year, however, he said those calls have “fallen off a cliff.”

He now does just one or two interviews per quarter.

Indeed, there are now fewer programmers in the US today than at any other point since 1980, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics — and that’s across a four-decade stretch when America’s total workforce has nearly doubled in size.

I had this conversation a few days after I read the new working paper out of Stanford detailing how employment for young software developers has dropped nearly 20% since ChatGPT came out in November 2022.

That, according to the researchers, is a structural shift that’s more likely to accelerate than reverse as technology gets smarter.

As I wrote last week, generative AI automates much of what used to be done by entry-level programmers. The boilerplate tasks that were once relegated to junior developers can now be handled by large language models.

As the tech employee I met confirmed, the on-ramp to a career in software engineering is narrowing fast.

Remember, for decades this path was straightforward and foolproof:

• Get a computer science degree

• Land an entry-level job

• Build skills as support staff on simple projects

• Earn promotions to senior roles

But if ChatGPT is taking on an increasing share of that early work — in college and on the job — the pseudo-apprenticeship model breaks down.

I’ve observed a similar occurrence across media and finance too, albeit to a less severe extent.

Of course, the US economy across the board is adding fewer jobs every month.

Innovative technology has always displaced jobs (lamplighters were undoubtedly upset at the advent of the light bulb), though what’s different this time is that, for many, the floor is falling out before their careers even start.

To me, the danger here isn’t just declining employment for new grads, but a hollowing out of the talent pipeline entirely.

No novice engineers today means no seasoned veterans tomorrow.

The engineer I met likes his job, gets on with his colleagues, and still enjoys conducting the increasingly rare interview.

He, like myself, sees the irony of the moment.

The AI tools that make him more valuable than ever are the same ones wiping out jobs for anyone who wants to follow in his footsteps.

Phil Rosen
Co-founder & Editor-in-Chief, Opening Bell Daily

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Since ChatGPT released two years ago, employment for software developers under 25 has dropped nearly 20%, yet headcount for those over 30 has held steady or climbed.

A new working paper out of Stanford suggests this is a structural, lasting change to the economy and not a blip.

Generative AI automates much of what used to be done by entry-level programmers. The debugging and documenting and other boilerplate duties that fill the day of a junior developer can now be handled by large language models.

As a result, new grads who once filled these roles are competing for a shrinking pool of jobs.

What’s striking, too, is just how insulated older, more experienced engineers have been during the same period.

According to the paper, AI has implicitly put a premium on "on-the-job" wisdom.

Companies seem to be hiring for the tacit knowledge — judgment, management, interpersonal skills — that comes from experience, rather than credentials or raw technical ability.

AI, in effect, has made it harder for newcomers to latch onto the bottom of the career ladder, while reinforcing those who were able to get on a few years prior.

It also doesn’t help that Gen Z endured the COVID-19 pandemic, which some evidence suggests had a more nefarious second-order effect of mass-stunting of soft skills.

[You can read more about Gen Z’s economic malaise here.]

In any case, the researchers did find evidence that this phenomenon seems particularly insidious for software developers.

Young people’s unemployment rates relative to older peers did not decline to the same degree across sectors like first-line production supervisors, stock clerks, or health aides.

Marketing and sales managers, though, by virtue of being more exposed to AI displacement, saw similar generational splits.

It’s also worth noting that young people across all industries do face a more challenging outlook for jobs than their older peers, as the chart below illustrates.

As the Stanford team put it: “Economy-wide employment continues to grow, but employment growth for young workers has been stagnant.”

Even that divergence started when ChatGPT arrived in November 2022. It marked the first domino in the mass adoption of AI.

All evidence now points to an acceleration rather than a reversal.

To be sure, this shift opens up new opportunities for the young people who are most fluent in AI. Many of the most innovative startups of the last two years were launched by teenagers using ChatGPT.

For them, the collapse of traditional entry-level roles offered an invitation to build great products and businesses.

Still, the broader job market data is not ambiguous.

The “junior developer” role that once gave novice, inexperienced engineers their wedge into the industry is disappearing.

For everyone’s sake, whatever replaces it better be something young people find worthwhile.

Phil Rosen
Co-founder & Editor-in-Chief, Opening Bell Daily

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It captures how dramatically AI is rewiring both society and the economy.

For the first time ever spending on data center construction will eclipse investment in traditional office buildings this year, according to data cited in a New York Times report.

The two categories are roughly even today but by 2026 the gap is projected to widen sharply, reflecting the trillions of dollars being reallocated in the name of AI, super-intelligence and cloud computing.

That divergence highlights two structural changes:

1. The rise of physical spaces for robots: Data centers and high-tech factories will house the GPUs and hardware fueling exponential AI growth.

2. The decline of physical spaces for humans: Remote work has lasted well beyond the pandemic, and millions of people have made their home offices permanent.

No matter what you think of AI, this is the direction investors and corporations believe the world is heading. Digital-first productivity over a physical presence.

Capital flows tell the story. This second chart from The Wall Street Journal underscores the point.

Since ChatGPT’s debut in late 2022, four of the most consequential companies in the world — Meta, Google, Microsoft and Amazon — have nearly tripled their combined quarterly capital expenditures to $100 billion.

The trajectory runs nearly vertical.

I have no idea whether AI is closer to the internet bubble or Industrial Revolution. Smart people have conflicting views on this.

But in this moment, it’s clear that the dollars are moving extremely fast in a single direction.

Notably, few companies seem concerned about hedging their bets.

And according to Big Tech’s balance sheets, the spending won’t run dry anytime soon. No companies in history have had deeper moats or higher profits.

For context, Meta alone — the parent company to Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — sees over 3.4 billion actives users every single day(!).

Bubble or not, Meta isn’t going away.

Investor Paul Kedrosky says that spending on AI infrastructure, measured as a percentage of GDP, has already surpassed what was spent on telecom and internet infrastructure during the dot-com boom.

That’s not without consequence, as Kedrosky notes:

• Northern Virginia loses hundreds of acres of land a year to data centers

• One third of data centers are now next to housing, schools, playgrounds and churches

• Some neighborhoods have been completely encircled by data centers

In other words, we’ve long crossed the Rubicon.

Local communities are being reshaped as rapidly as the global economy.

Even if we eventually realize that some portion of the AI promise proves overhyped, the infrastructure will already be in place. It isn’t easy to deconstruct all that concrete and steel.

To this day we have a glut of unused, outdated fiber optic cables running underground — relics of the dot-com era.

Internet companies in the 1990s built out these expensive networks as fast as possible because everyone — executives, investors, celebrities, the public — was convinced that nothing would be enough to meet bandwidth demand.

Something I’ve learned reporting on financial markets is that we are prone to overestimate innovation in the short run and underestimate it in the long run.

Anyone who says they know what part of the cycle we’re in today is lying to you or themselves.

That said, the concrete is being poured either way.

Phil Rosen
Co-founder & Editor-in-Chief, Opening Bell Daily

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Now that ChatGPT and other large language models can generate text faster and cheaper than any point in history, fewer people are interested in reading them.

Odd to point out, but is it that surprising?

Writing — generally and historically a difficult task even for professionals — has become effortless in the same moment reading is rare.

A new study from the University College of London and the University of Florida concluded the share of Americans 15 or older who read from a book or magazine every day has cratered over the last 20 years.

It peaked at 28% in 2004 and now hovers at about 16%.

The share of parents reading with children has also fallen, though not as precipitously.

My guess is, for most people, it wouldn’t be that difficult to arrive at similar conclusions anecdotally among friends and family.

The sharp decline in reading isn’t so much a story of shifting tastes but one of crowding out.

We do live in the “attention economy,” after all. Boring old-fashioned books can’t compete with the dopamine that comes from TikTok videos, infinite scrolling apps, and algorithms that know how to tickle your most based preferences.

Reading is slow and linear and have a beginning and end.

Screens are fast, engineered and endless.

The irony is that just as reading diminishes, the supply of words is exploding.

AI makes it possible to churn out entire books in a minutes. What once took years of discipline and headache can now be automated.

For this reason I’ve come to approach new release titles — those in the post-ChatGPT era — with skepticism as to whether the author really wrote the thing.

It’s a different feeling than learning of a celebrity author’s ghostwriter. What requires less human effort to create becomes inherently less human to consume.

To me, the idea of an AI-generated book conveys a sense of foul play.

My own experience as a young author feels relevant.

I published two books — the first a collection of travel essays, the second a collection of fiction — two years before ChatGPT changed the world.

[If you’re interested, my books are available on Amazon.]

I was proud to have written them at the time, but with the advent of AI, I feel renewed pride that I had it in me to craft two books without any technological shortcut.

That is the paradox of this moment.

The flood of machine-made words will likely accelerate Americans’ already-flatlining reading habits. It cannot be productive for anyone that the loop between writing and reading is snapping in real time.

If both sides collapse (that is, if we stop reading and we stop writing) then words will be relegated to content — the same category as TikTok or Netflix, untethered from the attention and effort that once made them possible.

One lesson I’ve learned from a lifetime of books is that indifference has never made good work better.

Phil Rosen
Co-founder & Editor-in-Chief, Opening Bell Daily

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Two of my guiding beliefs have always contradicted one another:

1. Serendipity drives everything

2. There is no such thing as coincidence

Most of the time, I can lean one way or the other without reconciling the two.

Not today.

This afternoon, I was unexpectedly included in a group to ring the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange — the ritual that marks the end of the trading day, broadcast globally to millions of viewers.

I had gone to the exchange to celebrate the launch of a new financial show, Taking Stock, which will air weekdays at 4 PM ET. I’ll be joining as a recurring commentator to talk markets and investing.

But a weekly segment hardly explains why I was given a spot in the bell-ringing ceremony with the show’s biggest stakeholders.

This honor is typically reserved for public company executives, celebrities and superstar athletes.

In any case, afterwards I — alongside the media and finance heavyweights leading Taking Stock — signed the historic wall in the stairwell that leads to the bell.

Everyone who has ever rung it inscribes their name there in permanent marker.

That, somehow, now includes me.

When I asked several producers and exchange executives — many of them friends — who had added my name to the closing bell list, no one had an answer. Just smiles and shrugs and enthusiastic handshakes.

So I can’t explain this bucket-list experience.

What I do know is that I’ve spent the last four years writing everyday about the very markets I looked out on from that podium.

No amount of work guarantees something this cool, but the effort does make it feel less like coincidence.

Maybe it was luck.

Maybe it was a mistake.

Either way, my name’s on the wall.

Phil Rosen
Co-founder & Editor-in-Chief, Opening Bell Daily

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Today I turn 29.

On my birthday last year, I sent out the 100th edition of my financial newsletter.

Today’s edition was #360.

Two years ago, I marked the day with 27 lessons in 27 years, which became one of my most-read pieces of the last decade.

I’m not one for celebrations, but I do see utility in using a birthday to take stock. My 28th year has been my most consequential yet:

• Got engaged in Italy

• Won a Fulbright award in Germany

• Married in California

• Our media startup — now 16 months old — has grown every quarter

• Hosted nearly 300 guests for Journalists Club events

It’s strange to compress 12 months of diligence and logistics into a few bullet points.

A list feels dishonest in its brevity. Bullets hide texture — the doubts, recalibrations, urgency.

What stands out isn’t just that good things happened, but that all of them marked culminations of efforts from years prior.

I have to remind myself that even the podcasts I joined this week, for instance — one with the New York Stock Exchange, the other with Danny Moses of “The Big Short” — were not sudden breaks, but dividends of steady work.

The older I get the more I grasp how a life well-lived is an exercise in compounding. Tiny, inscrutable moments that accrue into a fulfilling narrative.

Here’s what I wrote on this day last year:

A realization I’ve had in the last 12 months is that, ideally, each passing year makes you more comfortable doing what you want to build a reputation for, and nothing else.

That feels more true today.

Narrowing focus has accelerated my life in the best directions. The paradox of ruthless prioritizing is that it makes life feel both slower and faster.

Slower because you spend more time solving deep, deliberate problems; faster because you stop bleeding energy on shallower pursuits.

The danger of a good year is mistaking the milestones for the story. I see them instead as punctuations.

The real story is in the ordinary days at the office.

Dinners with friends.

Early mornings in the gym.

Drafting a newsletter.

Dates with my wife.

Even the most beautiful wedding — ours really was perfect! — is just the visible tip of a much longer accumulation.

In life, as in markets, compounding is an invisible wonder of the world.

Like scrolling through engagement photos or glancing at a plaque on the wall, efforts manifest most clearly in hindsight.

And right as you happen to take stock, it’s time to turn the calendar again.

Phil Rosen
Co-founder & Editor-in-Chief, Opening Bell Daily

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My now-wife and I just got married at the end of July.

It was a perfect wedding.

Kayt and I celebrated with loved ones near my hometown of Thousand Oaks, California over three events in three days — a “white-out” welcome party, the wedding, and a day-after brunch.

A true canon event, relatives traveled from Hong Kong, Germany, England, Canada and all over the US to share the special moment with us.

Now that we’re on the other side of the wedding, I can confirm the rumors are true: Nothing is as painstakingly detail-heavy as planning a wedding.

That’s particularly true for one stretched across multiple events, organized from across the country, and squeezed into a six-month timeline instead of the typical 12 to 18.

Like most worthwhile ambitions, planning a wedding requires going through hell to reach heaven. It demands its pound of flesh.

For us this manifested as an endless deluge of vendor contracts, color-coded spreadsheets, and logistical headaches that our day jobs forced us to relegate to late nights and weekends.

That’s the funny thing about planning a wedding.

You work extremely hard to create a celebration of love, yet the months leading up to it test your patience, communication and — yes — love for one another more than anything else to that point.

I’ve now only been married for two weeks, but I feel confident enough to say that planning a wedding offers a sort of compressed crash-course on marriage itself.

In both contexts, individual preferences have to come to terms with shared priorities.

You have to make many thousand decisions with your partner — some trivial, some expensive, others mind-numbing — and in the process you learn that each decision itself is secondary to ensuring you arrive at every conclusion as one team.

The budget conversations weren’t really about numbers, just as the seating chart wasn’t really about chairs.

As it happens, it was in planning the wedding that I found the words for the vows I shared standing at the altar with my wife.

The whole process has put the two of us through a special kind of temporary, necessary chaos, which brought with it a lesson in essentialism.

Bandwidth limitations filtered out what wasn’t necessary to the mission of the wedding — a lesson I suspect will prove useful over the course of a very long marriage.

Phil Rosen
Co-founder & Editor-in-Chief, Opening Bell Daily

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AI has made intelligence both cheap and astronomically expensive.

Fast-improving tools like ChatGPT have lowered the barrier to entry for nearly everything. Anyone can draft legal contracts, create art, write poetry or code.

People like me can build productive businesses without a large team.

But when everyone can access the same world-class tools, competence itself becomes commoditized. What once took years of training is now drag-and-drop.

And in the process of democratizing knowledge, AI has done the same with mediocrity.

(Think of the AI-generated slop that now fills our Instagram feeds.)

So yes, the professional playing field is easier to access than ever before. But it’s not remotely more level.

Innovation has a habit of killing gatekeepers while crowning a new ruling class — that is, the few who can best wield the technology of the moment.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has the cash to take advantage of this. He’s poaching top talent from leading competitors like OpenAI with $100 million pay packages to work in his company’s newly announced “Superintelligence” division.

Does that sound crazy to you? It does to me.

But maybe I’m not smart or well-capitalized enough to understand the gravity of the situation.

Zuckerberg and other executives like Sam Altman seem to believe that the potential glory of building the best thinking machines justifies giving engineers NBA-sized compensation packages.

“As the pace of AI progress accelerates, developing superintelligence is coming into sight,” Zuckerberg wrote in a recent company memo. “I believe this will be the beginning of a new era for humanity, and I am fully committed to doing what it takes for Meta to lead the way.”

There’s always a chance that a market this hot turns out to be a bubble.

But that doesn’t change the fact that the very best engineers in this moment have more leverage than ever.

The astronomical premium on AI talent underscores exactly what I’m trying to unpack in this essay. When we have tools that make infinite knowledge free, the ones who can wield them best can generate exponential value. Everyone else gets the scraps.

That’s the paradox of abundance.

When everyone has access to intelligence, intelligence alone loses its edge. It’s no longer about what you know, but how you use it to separate yourself from others.

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Execution at the bleeding edge of AI is now the scarcest and most coveted asset in the economy. That’s why the professional class is in the midst of a reordering.

The most plum jobs will no longer go to the most experienced or credentialed. Capital will flow to the select few who can leverage AI with taste, originality and technical fluency to broaden the frontier.

Case in point, Microsoft announced it was laying off 9,000 employees on Wednesday — the same week it circulated a memo telling staff “using AI is no longer optional,” and days after news broke of Zuck’s $100 million hiring blitz.

Meanwhile:

• Microsoft and Google’s CEOs both said AI now writes 30% of company code

• Amazon’s Web Services chief said the need for human coding is shrinking

• Zuckerberg predicts 100% of Meta’s code will be AI-generated within 18 months

• Anthropic’s CEO said AI could wipe out 50% of all entry-level white-collar work within 5 years

It’s a brutal top-down message from Big Tech. Average is being automated out of existence and mediocrity can no longer hide among broadly talented ranks.

If it’s true that a sizable chunk of the world’s most expensive code is already being written by AI, the value of writing decent code goes to zero.

In its place comes unique taste and industry-moving AI capabilities.

To me, these fringe ideas will soon become hardline rules for white-collar work:

• AI handles all grunt work

• Competence is bare minimum

• Keeping your job requires vision for the future

Soon, knowing how to use AI tools won’t be enough. The winners of this new order will be those who can best leverage human intelligence to direct artificial intelligence toward useful, productive outcomes.

We are already witnessing AI eliminate jobs. My old employer, Business Insider, cited AI-driven productivity gains as a reason for its latest layoffs.

Arguably more concerning, though, is how AI is rapidly repricing who gets paid at the extremes.

Yes, rising unemployment is painful and disruptive. But layered on top of that is a total reevaluation of economic value, which seems far more existential.

The bottom is falling out for white-collar work while the top is being bid into the stratosphere.

In theory, AI offers a rising tide. More people have more tools and more opportunities within reach. In practice, it’s revealing a perverse form of inequality.

A new breed of talent is capturing an outsized share of economic upside and societal influence.

It’s made for a strange, exciting, troubling, confusing moment.

Intelligence is pervasive and cheap. Genius is expensive. Competence is commonplace and knowledge is commoditized. Talent is the new capital and taste commands a premium.

If the last five decades rewarded knowledge, the next one will reward discernment.

Phil Rosen
Co-founder & Editor-in-Chief, Opening Bell Daily

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