💰 The Terminator Trade

THE MAIN EVENTThe Terminator Trade 🤖

Last week, a 27-year-old researcher named Jacob Coxon quit Anthropic and warned that the leading AI labs “are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”

He had fewer than 100 followers. Yet his post drew more than 150 million views in 36 hours.

Twitter tweet

Less than two hours after Coxon’s post, Anthropic’s head of alignment science, Evan Hubinger, put a number on the danger. He believes there is a greater than 10% chance AI kills every human within a decade.

By Saturday, the CEOs of Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI had endorsed “pacing the frontier.” By Monday, President Trump had called the warnings a hoax.

Here is what the money says.

The Judgment Day Portfolio ☢️

If investors genuinely believed there was a 1-in-10 chance of an AI apocalypse, they would not care much about owning Coca-Cola. They would want the things that hold value without a stock exchange: real estate, gold, guns, energy, cash.

We would expect a rush into safe havens and a brutal selloff in long-duration growth stocks, whose prices depend on profits arriving many years from now.

But we saw none of that. Instead, from Coxon’s post through Thursday’s close:

• Gold fell 0.3%. Gold miners lost 2.5%.

• Treasuries were sold, not bought. The 10-year yield climbed from 4.81% to 4.94%.

• Real estate fell 2.2%. Energy was flat. Defense stocks dropped 4.3%.

• Even Hormel, maker of the apocalypse-friendly canned meat Spam, slipped 2%.

• The S&P 500 fell just 0.5%, reacting more to Wednesday’s rate hike than to anything coming from the AI labs.

Meanwhile, money kept chasing AI. Investors approached OpenAI about funding at a valuation above $1.2 trillion, up from $852 billion in March. Anthropic is pursuing an IPO that could value it near $2 trillion, more than double its May valuation.

The one thing that did rally was cybersecurity: CrowdStrike jumped 17%. But that is a bet on AI creating more business, not ending civilization.

Of all these prices, not one suggests Wall Street thinks Skynet is coming.

What The Shrug Indicates 🤷

Markets can certainly be wrong, and there is no perfect “Terminator Trade.” Still, markets are where millions of highly motivated people are paid to be right and punished for being wrong. Every price represents someone putting real money behind an opinion.

The verdict is not that AI carries zero risk. It is that investors do not find this particular risk, at this particular probability, convincing enough to reprice the world.

Here is why:

1. There is no connection from A to B. Yes, AI is already a cyber weapon. Yes, it should be handled with care. Both labs recently disclosed incidents involving models breaching systems, breaking rules, and hiding mistakes. All fair. But the argument then jumps from “powerful computer virus” to “mass real-world death.” No analysis. No statistics. No chain of events explaining how one becomes the other. The 10% claim comes from vibes, not calculations.

2. Air gaps and humans in the loop. The Pentagon ran part of its nuclear command system on floppy disks until 2019. That’s because we keep the systems that matter off the open internet. We keep a person between the model and anything irreversible.

3. Regulatory capture. A growing crowd believes the labs, Anthropic especially, are running a “nobody but us can be trusted with this” strategy. Aka the government-sponsored monopoly strategy. Aka the regulatory-capture strategy. Aka the pull-the-ladder-up-behind-you strategy. The theory is popular, and it is not crazy. Coxon had a Wall Street Journal article lined up before his post went live, and three AI policy groups amplified it within 15 minutes. That is clearly coordinated.

4. Nobody is actually stopping. Except for one young researcher, everyone kept building. Like the nuclear arms race, nobody wants to disarm while rivals push ahead. Except these researchers are saying their own nuke could kill them. If they truly believe there is a chance of extinction, the obvious response is to stop building. Yet almost no one has. Maybe that is arrogance. Or maybe the rhetoric exceeds the conviction.

The Bottom Line 🧭

This campaign, sincere or not, may move votes and it may move politics. But in the eyes of the people focused on cold hard cash (who in my opinion are among the sharpest people on the planet), the fear-mongering looks overdone.

That does not mean there is no risk. It means nobody is buying the "we're all gonna die" narrative. If they were, Carnival would be ripping as everyone booked one last cruise.

It is down 4.4%.

MARKET MOODThe S&P 500 Swaps Lumber For DNA 🧬

Winners

Illumina

$ILMN  ·  Cap $37.0B  ·  Week to date ▲ 18.8%
Illumina, which makes machines that read DNA, rejoins the S&P 500 on Monday after 27 months out. Every index fund has to own it by then, so traders spent the week getting ahead of the buying pressure. The company takes the seat of Builders FirstSource, which drops to the SmallCap 600.

Thermo Fisher Scientific

$TMO  ·  Cap $243.4B  ·  Week to date ▲ 8.0%
Thermo Fisher sells the instruments every drug lab runs on, so its outlook is a good read on research spending. On Tuesday, the CEO called 2026 "an outstanding year" in the making, and the whole lab-equipment sector rallied.

Marathon Petroleum

$MPC  ·  Cap $118.5B  ·  Week to date ▲ 6.6%
Drone strikes shut Saudi Arabia's main export pipeline, sending oil above $100 and diesel above $6 a gallon. Marathon benefits from that rise, so it hit an all-time high, up about 160% this year. Meanwhile, trucker J.B. Hunt, which pays for that diesel, fell 12% this week.

Losers

Corning

$GLW  ·  Cap $127.3B  ·  Week to date ▼ 11.2%

Corning makes the fiber optic cable that connects AI data centers, and management just filed to sell up to $2 billion of new shares. That cuts the same company into more pieces, and the market decided each smaller piece is worth about 11.2% less.

Bank of America

$BAC  ·  Cap $406.8B  ·  Week to date ▼ 7.2%
Bank of America's CEO said Monday that dealmaking fees will fall 10 to 20% this quarter. The stock immediately dropped 5% and pulled Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley down with it. Then the Fed raised rates Wednesday, which could prolong the slump as fewer deals get done.

Boeing

$BA  ·  Cap $155.7B  ·  Week to date ▼ 6.4%
Boeing's CEO said Wednesday that 737 MAX production is still not stable at 47 jets a month, and 777X testing may slip into next year. Fewer finished planes means less cash coming in. After the 2019 grounding, the 2024 door blowout, and a two-month strike, investors are out of patience for further delays.

FAST FACTSPensions, Permits, And Price Cuts 🏠

🏦 BlackRock Pitches The Personal Pension: Its new LifePath Solutions folds private markets and guaranteed lifetime income into target-date plans. [Read]

🏗️ Indy Builds 8x Faster Than San Francisco: Permit to move-in takes about 6 months in Indianapolis versus nearly 4 years in San Francisco. [Read]

🏘️ Lennar Keeps Cutting Prices: The builder's average sales price fell 3% to $372,000 last quarter, with incentives running about 12%. [Read]

💊 $500 Obamacare Refunds Are Coming: The White House plans $500 checks for nearly 1 million ACA enrollees in 30 states, starting in October. [Read]

🛍️ Malls Are The Hottest Property: Mall values rose 13% over the past year, beating every other commercial sector Green Street tracks. [Read]

🪙 The Senate Killed Crypto's Big Bill: The CLARITY Act failed 49 to 50, and $571 million of leveraged long bets were liquidated within a day. [Read]

📦 Amazon Now Pays $20 An Hour: The minimum wage for full-time US operations workers rises by $1 starting September 27. [Read]

🇨🇦 Europe Offers Canada A Seat: The EU opened the door to making Canada its first "associate member" after Carney sought a "unique alliance." [Read]

📉 Not Every Fallen Stock Is A Bargain: Downturns put good companies on sale next to bad ones. Here are 6 easy steps to tell them apart. [Read]

THE ODDSA Blue Senate, A Closed Strait 🎲

CHART OF THE WEEKAmerica Found A New Pastime 🏈

Eight years ago, betting on a game was illegal almost everywhere. Last year it was a $17 billion business.

That number is not what Americans wagered. It is what they lost. Sportsbooks keep about 10 cents of every dollar bet, by design, before a single bad beat. Americans put down $167 billion in 2025, and the house kept its dime.

Compare that to the stock market, which has paid investors roughly 10% a year over the long run. Same dollar, very different return.

The two are connected, too. When a state legalizes online betting, the average household invests about 14% less. For the households that actually bet, every dollar sent to a sportsbook is roughly a dollar that never compounds.

Even the bettors have doubts. 47% of men under 30 now call legal betting bad for society, up from 22% in 2022.

Whether anyone should stop you is a different question.

WORDS TO REMEMBERThe Best Move Is Often No Move 🧠