Meta’s Latest AI Agent… And An AI-Powered Hedge Fund 9/8/26

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23:32Welcome back to Fast Money. Shares of Apple down about a percent today ahead of tomorrow's big product launch event. The company widely expected to unveil a folding smartphone with a bendable display, marking one of the biggest changes to the design since the device's launch in 2007. It'll be the first launch since new CEO John Ternus took over from Tim Cook last week. There's also supposed to show off a lot of new watches and stuff like that. I mean, a whole product refresh. I mean, I'm going to be down on this one. I could be sleeping out like I used to for Kiss tickets or something. I mean, I want that foldable.

24:08You do? Yeah, I do. It's not small. I mean, it's large. No, well, you know. It's passport size. I can handle that. I mean, I think it's a case where you really have a— What won't fit in your pocket. That's important. I mean, I might buy new pants or something. But I know let's get back to this product release cycle is incredibly important for Apple. We've been poo pooing the last five product releases. You can make an argument. This is the most important one they've had in forever. Goes all the way back to 10. I think that's the point that Jeffries makes. I like it. And let's be clear. The Ultra, this pricing line is going to offset a lot of the issues they have with ASPs and memory.

24:43And, you know, I think it's going to put a little bit more of the, you know, the zinc back. I spoke to Craig Moffitt of Moffitt Nathan's Mike and I did in closing Bell Overtime. And he said the cost to manufacture this phone, including materials, probably$1 ,200. So, you know, ASPs may go higher on this, but the margins won't be great either. I mean, it's going to cost. There's more materials involved in this phone. And it's more in terms of the production of it, too. Well, let's see if there's also a different operating system that is vastly better. Right. Right. Which I assume there will be that there's a Siri like product.

25:17Siri's just given up at this point. I mean, as terrible as it's getting, I feel even worse. So I think that that will be also something that could sort of get the stock. Not that it's not going. It's done nicely. It's done nicely. It's north of 30 times forward. Yes, that's true. I think the fold is more signaling where they're going to go. They've had really iterative hardware for a long time now. Right. And this is going to be low single digits, is my guess, of the iPhones that they sell. And, you know, when you think about that Vision Pro, and that was meant to kind of, you know, define spatial computing and how they were thinking about things.

25:53That was a disaster. And they just didn't sell many. And I suspect they won't sell a lot of these folds. You know, the average replacement cycle for an iMac or a Mac is like five or six years. And those, on average, cost less than$2 ,000. They're probably in the$15 ,000,$16 ,000. So the idea that someone's going to go out and they're going to spend on the very first iteration of this product,$2 ,200, is not particularly likely. So it's signaling. And then to your point about Siri, they should have dropped the name, right? So it's going to be called Siri. Why wouldn't you? Siri's awful. And maybe they will, by the way.

26:25And the connotation there is. Guy's going to be logged on. He's going to be staring at this thing, you know what I mean, for like two and a half hours. It's going to be fun for you. But I think there's, again, I think there's almost more risk to this, as we've seen with WWDC. If these are not inspiring products on the hardware front, and then once we get this, you know, new iOS, and it's just not that differentiated, then I think you do have a little bit of risk. Then we've got to wait another year. There was a period of time where we'd be able to identify a Johnson, typically when he would pull his phone and flip it open in a restaurant or a sporting event.

26:57Now, obviously, yes, times have changed. You mean like a Motorola, like a client? Yes. Star Tech. When you say, forget it. No, what were you going to say? I'm just going to ask you what you mean by Johnson. Well, you know exactly what I mean, Tim. It's a family show. No, I think this is, you know, this is one. First of all, over the weekend, we saw a rival basically roll out the same thing. So once again, they're second. But it doesn't matter because I do think there's a faction of people that long for things like this. But they're already out. I mean, they've been out for years. With foldable phones.

27:27Yeah. This is not a brand new category. And in China, there's a whole bunch. It's not like we've never seen them before. But this is the first from Apple. Yes. All right. There's a lot more Fast Money to come. Here's what's coming up next. Pharma stocks on the move. Both negative and positive trial results, sending key drug maker shares lower today. The details on the prints and how to play the health care trade from here. Plus, the Bitcoin baller is back. But it's not crypto fueling Brian Kelly's new venture. how AI and the rise of agentic trading is shaking up how BK gets down to business. You're watching Fast Money, live from the NASDAQ market side in Times Square.

28:06We're back right after this.

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29:32Try YouTube Premium for two months free at youtube.com slash premium. Trial eligibility varies. Terms apply. Cancel anytime. Welcome back to Fast Money Stocks. Lower to start the holiday shortened week as oil prices ticked higher in the latest tensions with Iran. The Dow leading the loss is falling more than 600 points. The S &P dropping half a percent. The Nasdaq Composite and Nasdaq 100, both the small losses. Slew of headlines hitting drug makers. AstraZeneca releasing full results from two successful late-stage trials on its experimental drug for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, boosting hopes it could generate multi-billion dollar sales for the company.

30:08Shares, though, fell over 1.6 percent. Novo Nordisk, meantime, scrapping two more trials for its experimental cardiovascular drug, further diminishing the drug makers' hopes to diversify beyond the weight loss market. and shares of Novartis seeing their worst day on record after saying it's a drug for a muscle wasting disorder failed in a late stage trial. What do you want to trade here, Guy? Well, as Karen mentioned on the call, Structure Therapeutics finds themselves sort of in the crosshair of all this. So as much as those stocks move, this stock moves seemingly a little bit more. Whether justified or not, here we are.

30:41It's had a miserable year so far. It's had some signs of life. But, you know, at$40, you're well below that level. If you think about where it was in December of last year, I mean, this stock doubled. And now here we are below the levels that it doubled from. So I think there's value. I think they get bought. But obviously, today's not a great day. Yeah. So today, and it had a wide range of price today, right? 48, 47, 8 at the high and then 40 where it closed. I thought the data was OK. Some mix, some good, some not as good. But I think, you know, with the enterprise value, they do have a billion four of cash or so.

31:16with the enterprise value now at, I don't know, one and a half or so billion dollars. To me, that's sort of interesting. I agree with Guy that this could be a takeover candidate. And, you know, you and I were talking in the break about, all right, well, two others are ahead, way ahead. But actually, some of this was better than Lilly's product. But I can't imagine the rest of pharma seeding the whole game to those two. So to me, this is still an interesting takeover target. However, I might be very, you know, slanted in my view because it is in bidet. That's right. Yeah. I just got to point that out.

31:48What letter is it? I don't know. It's G. It really doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter. Yeah. I think Novartis is the one you're talking about today because, I mean, again, they were collateral damage and it was$40 billion of market cap. And this is a company that I realized, you know, this was an exciting part of a pipeline. But Novartis, you're talking about 5 % to 6 % CAGR, EPS. I mean, you're not talking about a high-growth story, period. And this was a massive move. I'm along. So just to be clear. Coming up, the trader formerly known as Bitcoin Baller is back. Brian Kelly here to lay out his new venture.

32:26AI is trading, is fueling the fun. Fast Money is back in two. Good to see you, PK. Good to see you, PK.

32:44Welcome back to Fast Money. For months, we have been hearing about the rise of agentic trading with brokerages from Robinhood to Webull, letting retail clients make AI-powered investments. Professional money managers are also leaning more on agentic investing tools. And for one of our very good Fast Money friends, it's already paying off. AI has completely changed what my office looks like. Every bot has its own memory. I'm Brian Kelly. I'm a hedge fund manager at Bracket22. That's my company. Bracket22 is an investment and trading firm. I basically replicated the staff that I had at the fund with AI agents.

33:20AI agents monitored everything for me 24 hours a day. Thanks for that, Houston. I used to have about seven or eight employees all around the world. A lot of them were based in New York. Between their salaries in compute and healthcare, my payroll is well into the millions of dollars per year. Now, when I'm using AI, I run somewhere around$30 ,000 to$40 ,000 a year total. And that's with every AI agent. That's with all my compute. That's with everything I need to completely replicate a hedge fund completely with AI. So let's meet some of the staff here. One of my agents is Steffi Graff. She's in charge of technical analysis.

33:56Steffi did this earlier today. Her job is to be the smartest and the best technical analyst in the world. Hey, Houston, show me the charge from the work that Desmond did. If you look at something like Desmond, who's my AI agent in charge of quantitative strategies, he'll come back with a quantitative point of view. They'll all bring that back up to Houston at Mission Control. He'll relay it to me. And then I use my human judgment and human insight to make the final decision. Here's the corporate brain. That's one agent talking to another. I would estimate I'm at least 10 times more productive with my AI agents.

34:27So now if you take a staff of 100, you've got a staff of 1 ,000. It's not necessarily just, hey, you can replace everybody with AI agents. You can make your existing employees at least 10 times maybe more productive. Joining us here on set is the man himself, Brian Kelly, founder and CIO of Bracket 22. I guess Steffi Graf in Houston couldn't make it. No, right here in my pocket. So it's funny, we were talking about this over a dinner over the summer, And basically, you started this out of curiosity about what AI could do for you. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. You know what? One day, I just decided to copy and paste a chart into it and see what it would do.

35:06And the next thing I realized is that, hey, wait a second. This can start to do quantitative research. This can do fundamental research. And I just started going down this rabbit hole. And it ended up building this entire, basically, a hedge fund research staff out of AI agents. How do you view the AI trade differently, knowing what you can do with AI yourself? I think, for me, the most valuable thing is that corporate brain we showed about. There are so many companies out there that are going to be able to use AI to take old assets and repurpose them, maybe find something new that they can do it.

35:39So I think we're just at the beginning of the AI trade. Yes, could it be a bubble in the build-out? But the use cases for AI is the second wave that's coming along. So, Beeks, when you think about this, I think all of us are in agreement. This is probably the first inning. Maybe it's the first pitch of the first inning. How important, though, is the qualitative judgments, let's say, by you as the portfolio manager? Because someone has to create the infrastructure. Someone has to create the framework for these agents to go out and do what they do. Yeah, there's no question about that. This is not something where you're just going to replace trading with AI agents, right?

36:09You still have to have the human in the loop. I call myself the meat in the seat. But that's the human insight. If you do say so yourself. But you've got to have. Let's meet me in the loop. It's good to be back. Anyway, you need that human insight because everybody else is doing this, right? All the quant shops have been doing this for 10, 20 years. So you're not going to beat the quant shops. Where you're going to put value in is something that a human being can do, where they can be creative, where you can put two and two together and come up with a thesis. And the research agents, that's what they do.

36:43They just go through and research everything for me. So cost of compute. Yeah. What's happening with that? Do you see spending more and more or using more and more, but maybe not spending more? What do you think happened? So, no, it's kind of interesting because now I use OpenRouter where I can choose different models. So I have the frontier models are for Houston and maybe the quantitative stuff. But then I can choose cheaper models. Some of the open source models are much cheaper. So my cost to compute has stayed pretty steady, at least on tokens. I mean, I might spend a couple hundred dollars a day on tokens.

37:13And then my cost to compute, everything runs in the cloud on AWS. And so that's a pretty steady number as well. I would not anticipate my costs going up that much over the next year. People will say, how are the returns, BK? So I'll ask the question to the meeting seat. How are the returns? So they've been better, right? I mean, I've only been doing this for the last six months or so, right? And so it's hard to say, was it just that the market was doing well or not? But I can tell you I'm making better decisions. I can tell you what I built there is really a decision support system for me. And more often than not, it keeps me from making a mistake rather than putting me in the right trade.

37:48So I would say I'm a better trader because of it. Time will tell if the returns are there. Brian, I'm not sure if you're out raising money, but the hedge fund space is all about it's a cult of personality. It's also a lot of times people are investing in a team. And I'm just kind of curious as you talk. I don't know if you're out raising money. If people have if if investors have a view about Steffi Graf and Houston, because, you know, in many cases, having been in the hedge fund space for a long time, people sometimes are just looking at your org chart. They love to be able to check a box and say you have that.

38:21I'm just curious what you're hearing from people as they listen to your product. So I haven't been out personally raising money. As I talk to people, though, that is a big thing, right? People still want to have a team behind it. If somebody's going to give you hundreds of millions of dollars and you're managing billions of dollars, they still want to see if you have a compliance team, that you have a GC, you have all these things. I would say that really, if you were out there raising money, The pitch is our team is going to be 10 to 100 times more efficient. We're going to be able to find things faster and better.

38:49But you will still have, in theory, that GC. You'd have a meet-in-the-seat for the equivalent high-level jobs. Yes. But those people will be much more efficient. So I have a GC just in case, and his job is to review all of the contracts. But then ultimately that goes to a real lawyer. BK, it's so good to see you. It's so great to have you on the desk. I'm getting edge yet again. Can you just stay here for the rest? I mean, just leave him. Can I ask him another question or no? I mean, he's still here, so I don't know, but I want to go by the guy. Anyway, Bitcoin used to be, you know, the Bitcoin baller.

39:23I'm curious. Do you follow the space still? What are you thinking? I do. And we actually talked about a month ago and I was like, it's a 50 50 shot. Things have changed completely. I'm more bullish on Bitcoin than I've been in two years right now. Really? And that is because of the Treasury buyback, financial repression. So that's our tailwind. But there's actual real use cases now. So agentic payments are going to be running on crypto rails as well as tokenized stocks are going to be running on crypto rails. So I've got a macro tailwind while I wait to see what's going to happen with tokenization and agentic payments.

39:54So I actually have a full position in crypto that I haven't had in two years. Wow. That speaks volumes. We miss BK. We do. He wrote the book, 2014. I know. The Big Bang. Yeah. Leading edge. We are welcome back here anytime. Of course, that goes without saying. Brian Kelly. Coming up, auto stocks at a crossroads. But which way is the Chartmaster steering where Carter Worth sees Ford and GM driving next when Fast Money returns?

40:42Welcome back to Fast Money. Shares of Ford and General Motors both down today. But the chart master says it might be time to take both these automakers for a drive. Let's bring in Carter Braxton Worth of Worth Charting to lay out the case. Hi, Carter. All right, let's get to the case. Go through several charts. The first couple are a basket of these two stocks. So if you were looking at a two-stock basket, equal weight of Ford and GM, this is what that security, this basket looks like. That is an excellent setup, basically a major move higher, a big consolidation just now toying with the breakout.

41:15Another way to draw the lines, this is the same set of lines, but on the longer term chart. And what's key here is we're only a little bit above where we were in 2021. So to make that point, you can annotate it a different way, next iteration. It's a major, obviously, bottoming out formation in the 2022-23 sort of sell-off, recovery, and only slightly above the former high. A little bit of fundamentals for the next two. Take a look. So here we are. We have, again, that same chart. Look at the combined revenues for these two companies back in 2021,$263 billion. And here we are at$374 billion, future unknown.

41:55We know predicting earnings and revenues are basically impossible as Wall Street continues to try and take a look at net income. Then and now, 16.7 versus 19. So are they cheap? Are they not? Maybe it's all about to come apart, but the charts are good. Let's end with those two. Let's look at them on their own. So here is General Motors. Again, a double, 40 to 80, consolidating and just now toying with the prospects of a breakout. and Ford, of course, which was very jumpy back in April, as you see they're moving sort of overdone, if you will, but pulling back from that 18 to here, 13, 14, and we like it higher.

42:31We like them both, and they've been handily outperforming other major manufacturers, as all we know, BMW, Mercedes, Volkswagen, Toyota, Tesla, the list goes on. Carter, great to see you. Carter Braxton Worth. You know it's after Labor Day when Carter's wearing a tie again. You like either of these. I love the fact that Carter's using some funny mentals and also showing the combined revenue inflection. But to me, it gets back to a couple of things. GM started rallying in that chart that he showed, not just because the company's never been run better and their EBITDA, but really their free cash flow continues to set record levels.

43:08And so the stock becomes cheaper and cheaper. But the interpretation of what EV had to be, what they had to be, as Tesla no longer became a car company. And I mean, whatever you think Tesla is, is when GM could finally start rallying based on its core business. Its ice business was given zero credit. And meanwhile, I think this is a company that, at least in the auto space, is on the leading edge. Coming up, a rough day for retail, adding to an already weak year for the group. The names to watch and our traders giving them a try on more fast money into.

43:48Welcome back to Fast Money. The consumer trade under pressure today with the XRT retail ETF dropping over 2 percent, marking its lowest close since June. Some notable laggards today, Dollar Tree, Dick's Sporting Goods, Etsy and TJX, which is now down nearly 25 percent from its all-time high hit in June. Karen, what do you see in this weakness? Anything look good here? So, you know, I think oil obviously doesn't help sentiment at all. But TJX, to me, has been really disappointing. I do own it. They seem to have sort of lost their way a little bit. They had a difficult last quarter. It's now trading as a market multiple, which it hasn't in quite some time.

44:25So that sort of interests me, except, you know, Ross Doors and Burlington have actually done a better job lately. But I would think if I owned no TJX, I would buy some right here. BK has stuck around. Oh, good. What is your opinion? So, you know, I'm going to go on the AI theme, and I'm going to say Etsy, and it's going to sound weird, right? But here's the thing. Everything digital is going to be abundant. Everything human-made is not going to be, and it's going to be extremely valuable. And so what's the market space for human-made stuff? Etsy. So that would be my call. Like the guy on me sock puppet, right?

44:57I mean, AI can't replace that. You cannot replace it. Why would you want it? It's kind of too bad. Capital One made its all-time high in January. American Express in December. Both have traded poorly since. I'm not going to make a big deal. MasterCard and Visa are lower today. You mentioned the dollar stores. I think it all speaks to this higher rates environment that we find ourselves in. It has pressure on the consumer, which I think will continue. A little bouncing, Lulu, but the carnage in athleisure is not something you want to be bottom picking here. And valuations, you have no idea what the valuations are in these names.

45:30I don't think you know what the growth trajectory is. All right. Up next, final trades.

45:42It is time now for our final trade, and we have an extended one today because our friend Brian Kelly stuck around. BK. Good to stick around. I'm going to go with Palantir for the final trade. Haven't done that in a while. Timbo. We needed like six more boxes for his agents. I'll go with Rio Tinto. I think the integrated mining play has a lot to do. I'm going to have Steffi Graf and Carter Braxton-Worth would go head-to-head. Karen. Yes, first of all, thrilled that you're back. Just want to say it again. Mine is Zoom Communications. I know we've seen the IGV come in a little bit. Stock was a 110, not very long ago, 96 and change today.

46:16I like it. Stan? Yeah, so last five years, we've seen the empowerment of individual traders, people like to watch our show, that sort of thing. I mean, I think this really gives them that much more of an edge, everything you're talking about. Levels of playing. I think it really does, and I think it's super cool. And risk management, too. IGV had this big run. I don't think you chase it here. We got Oracle. We got your Palantir. But we got Adobe reporting this week, too. I don't think you chase it. Guy. Before Mac Moran. We missed you, Mel. For the point. Thank you for watching Fast Money. Brian Kelly, again, you're welcome back anytime.

46:49Mad Money starts right now.

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