Iran Prepares for U.S. Ground Invasion

0:00Hey, this is Jessica Mendoza, host of The Journal podcast, our show about money, business and power. If you're looking for more deeply reported stories like we share every day, consider becoming a subscriber to The Wall Street Journal. Visit subscribe.wsj.com slash thejournal, all lowercase, to subscribe now.

0:22Tehran recruits volunteers, including children, to defend against a possible U.S. invasion. Plus, the Trump administration amps up its defense of prediction markets. We'll look at how AI agents could put your brokerage account on autopilot. So, for example, this AI agent could be programmed or instructed to buy those protective puts whenever oil spikes. Or it could sweep cash into a higher yielding asset whenever you have an excess amount in there. It's Friday, April 3rd. I'm Luke Vargas for The Wall Street Journal. And here is the AM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories.

0:57moving your world today. China and Russia have opposed a UN Security Council resolution that would have allowed countries to use all necessary means to secure the passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz. The AP reports that the move has led Bahrain to water down its resolution to only permit defensive actions to protect ships in the strait. Here was China's U.N. Ambassador Fu Tsong heard via a U.N. translator. Authorizing member states to use force would amount to legitimizing the unlawful and indiscriminate use of force, which would inevitably lead to further escalation of the situation and lead to serious consequences.

1:44A vote on the resolution is expected tomorrow. Earlier this week, we reported that the United Arab Emirates was pushing for the U.S. and other allies to open the Strait of Hormuz by force, an effort that revolved around a Security Council resolution authorizing such action. Meanwhile, Iran is beefing up its defenses in anticipation of a potential ground assault by the U.S. Those preparations include reinforcing its Karg Island oil export hub by laying mines along its coastline and booby-trapping facilities. As Journal Middle East correspondent Benoit Foucault explained, launching a mass mobilization effort similar to one seen during the country's 1980s war with Iraq.

2:26There's been sort of a nationalistic reaction in Iran with a recruitment drive for people that will be willing to sacrifice their lives to defend the country, its territorial integrity, which got 1.8 million people signing up within hours of being launched last weekend. And there's been also recruitment of children officially for cooking and potentially medical services, but also many checkpoints. To Cuba now.

3:01The island's communist government says it will release more than 2 ,000 prisoners from its jails in what it's calling a humanitarian and sovereign gesture as it carries out negotiations with the Trump administration. The release of prisoners is timed for Easter celebrations and comes after Pope Leo expressed concern about worsening conditions in the country where fuel shortages have exacerbated blackouts. Yesterday, Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel and other officials watched as hundreds of people paraded along Havana's seafront to protest a U.S. oil embargo, riding bicycles, scooters and electric three-wheelers that have become the country's main modes of transportation.

3:45At the same time, Russia's energy minister says that Moscow plans to send a second oil tanker to Cuba after the U.S. allowed a Russian tanker carrying more than 700 ,000 barrels of oil to dock in the country earlier this week. Coming up, we'll look at the rise of AI agents that can watch the markets and make trades for you. And we'll look at why your morning coffee is a lot more expensive these days. Those stories and more after the break.

4:14Hi, this is Alex Osula, host of the WSJ's What's News podcast. We bring you the biggest news of the day, from business and finance to global and political developments that move markets. If you're looking for more insights and tools to understand the latest headlines, consider becoming a subscriber to The Wall Street Journal. Visit subscribe.wsj.com slash what's news to subscribe now.

4:43Would you let an AI agent trade on your behalf? The Journal's Hannah Aaron Lang reports that the technology exists to put your investment account on autopilot. And she joins me now to discuss how the privately held brokerage firm Public is making it happen. Hannah, online traders will know that for years there have been tools that basically let you weight your portfolio against a target allocation. There's also been ways to set limit orders and all sorts of things. What's new exactly here? Yeah, so for a while, kind of individual investors or retail traders, as we might call them, as you're thinking about managing your portfolio, there's a certain amount of time that you have to spend if you're actively managing your investments, kind of watching the market and timing your trades.

5:30So let's take the example of the market that we're in right now. Maybe if the price of oil spikes, you want to buy protective put options for your portfolio to hedge that risk. Or you maybe want to watch other market moves just to be sure that you're hitting buy or sell at the right time. And that kind of requires you to be at your desk watching what the markets are doing. What's new about this AI agent that public is rolling out, it's supposed to eventually eliminate the need to enter manual orders. So for example, this AI agent could be programmed or instructed to buy those protective puts whenever oil spikes, or it could sweep cash into a higher yielding asset whenever you have an excess amount in there.

6:10Or it could even slap a stop loss order on every single trade that you place. So you know automatically you're limiting your losses for any particular security you buy. So I think that these are things that in the past traders have had to enter manually. And the idea is that you could have kind of a litany of different AI agents managing and keeping an eye on different parts of your portfolio. So Hannah, the business case here for public, I mean, we know how expensive AI systems are to run. They use a huge amount of data and resources and power. The goal here is to bring in new users and then, I don't know, try to make money off of the fact that their money is in these platforms in the future.

6:49Yeah. Publicate is to a relatively sophisticated clientele when it comes to investing. So these are folks who understand how the market works. They probably have decent sized portfolios. But Publix is also trying to maybe lure those clients from other platforms, maybe a Webold or a Robinhood or a Betterment, these kind of different digital investing platforms. Brokerages are racing to roll out these different AI tools. This is something that Robinhood and brokerages like eToro already offer in some capacity to investors trading on their platform. And I think Publix idea here is that they're one of the first to really roll out agents with this much capability across the different accounts of your portfolio.

7:30And the newness, being the first to do this in the brokerage industry, they're going to maybe bring more sophisticated, wealthier investors to the platform in that way. OK, big, splashy tech. What about big, unsexy safeguards? How is this being managed? Of course, there's no backseas in the markets if you've, I don't know, set the wrong parameters for your AI agent to trade on your behalf. Yeah, I think that's a big question here. I spoke with the co-CEO at Public, and he told me there are plenty of safeguards here. So this is how he explained it. You start by forming your strategy or your thesis with the AI agent, and you go back and forth to conceptualize what trade we're talking about here.

8:11and you approve which accounts the agent's going to trade from, which assets to buy or sell, whether the trade is going to be one time or recurring, then once all those parameters are set, there's a workflow that's offered for you to edit, review, and of course confirm before the agent goes live. The idea is that there's specific parameters that the agent can operate in, you're proving everything, and after the agent goes live, it keeps a log of every transaction that it's made and also every step of its workflow. So the different things it's checking to see if it should execute a trade. So traders can review that at any time as well.

8:48Executives were adamant about the fact that this tool doesn't engage in any independent decision making. So you're not necessarily letting an AI agent run rogue and manage your portfolio the way you might trust, say, a financial advisor. But it is trading in the background for you, supposedly within the exact parameters of what you're instructing it to do. This is for the investor who is aware of their portfolio, maybe is aware of different hedging strategies they might be able to utilize and wants to have a little bit more of a hand in how they're managing their investments. But again, maybe doesn't want to be sat down at their desk watching the candlestick charts every hour that the market is open and maybe just wants to put a few tools in place so things can run in the background as they go about their day.

9:33I've been speaking to Wall Street Journal markets reporter Hannah Aaron Lang. Hannah, appreciate you. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you guys.

9:43It's Jobs Day. March's employment report is due out at 8.30 a.m. Eastern, and it could go a long way toward clarifying whether a big jobs drop in February was a blip or the start of something more serious. Most economists are expecting a bounce back after the U.S. labor market shed 92 ,000 positions in February. Federal regulators are mounting a legal defense of prediction markets, with the Commodities Futures Trading Commission suing Arizona, Illinois, and Connecticut over their efforts to ban sports and election betting on Calci and other platforms. The civil complaints contend that the federal regulator has sole authority to regulate the contracts listed by Calci and others, and asked courts in the states to prevent them from applying their own gambling laws to the contracts.

10:29Prediction markets have grown quickly in recent years, and the Trump family has taken a financial interest in the industry, with one of Trump's sons serving as an advisor to Kalshi and its largest competitor, Polymarket, which has a data partnership with Dow Jones, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal. Kalshi declined to comment while a Polymarket spokesperson applauded the suit and said that prediction markets are federally regulated financial instruments. And I'm afraid that we've got to end the week talking about price hikes. Beginning later this month, Amazon will start charging third-party sellers a new 3.5 % fuel surcharge, a fee that could get passed along to shoppers.

11:09United Airlines is joining JetBlue in upping checked luggage charges, with first and second bags jumping today by$10 each and a whopping$50 for a third checked item. And as journal reporter Inti Pacheco told us, not even your morning coffee is insulated from rising prices thanks to tariffs, higher labor costs, and bad weather in Brazil and Vietnam. The average cost for a pound of coffee is the highest it's ever been. Some big companies have said that when the first round of tariffs came around last year, they quickly increased prices to cover costs and tariffs have been eliminated and the commodity price has gone down, but retail prices are still high.

11:52Commodity coffee prices dipped in November after President Trump pulled back the 40 % tariff on Brazilian food items, easing pressure on businesses that rely on coffee sales. But now higher freight costs because of the Iran war and stepped up trading in unroasted green coffee futures markets are driving them back up again. The farmers in Brazil or in Colombia are selling their coffee to importers from the U.S. And they sell at a specific price. But all these other factors like the weather or the tariffs play into what the price of that bag of green coffee is. And so hedge funds are placing big bets on what the cost of the green coffee will be.

12:35and that immediately drives up the cost of the coffee itself. Coffee outpaced many other grocery items in the inflation tracking consumer price index last year. So might I suggest a cup of humble tea. And that's it for What's News for this Friday morning. Additional sound in this episode was from Reuters. Today's show was produced by Hattie Moyer. Our supervising producer was Daniel Bach. And I'm Luke Vargas for The Wall Street Journal. We will be back tonight with a new show. So otherwise, have a great weekend and thanks for listening.

13:32help navigate the markets, consider becoming a subscriber to The Wall Street Journal. Visit subscribe.wsj.com slash take on the week to subscribe now.