Wealth managers keen to stay relevant in the age of artificial intelligence may soon find that clients with a mere $1 million in liquid assets are no longer worth spending human hours on.
“The mass-affluent client now gets something close to private-banking quality from AI,” said Debasish Patnaik, senior partner McKinsey & Co. That not only “strips the value from the adviser whose role was standardized advice,” but it also means “the kind of person hired into wealth management changes fundamentally,” he said in an interview.
A slew of all-but-forgotten niche option positions betting on an oil glut are coming back into play as crude futures slump following a peace deal between the US and Iran.
Before the US attacked Iran, some traders had bet that a surplus of crude oil would pull near-term prices below later futures, a market structure known as contango. After the attack, however, prompt prices soared on concern about supply shortages. In late April, August West Texas Intermediate crude futures briefly surged above $5 a barrel over the September contract, which in turn was $4 above October.
Iran’s Tasnim news agency, citing a source close to the negotiating team, reports that the Strait of Hormuz will not be reopened as long as a ceasefire in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah is not respected.
The source says the waterway would also remain closed until waivers allowing the sale of Iranian oil were issued.
Vice President JD Vance declared that the Trump administration’s goal is to “transform our relationship” with Iran during his opening remarks inSwitzerland at Sunday’s meetingwith top negotiators from Tehran.
Vance stressed that in order to do this, Washington needs ironclad commitments from the Islamic Republic to give up its aspirations of obtaining a nuclear weapon — something Tehran has long claimed it isn’t pursuing.
“What the president has asked us to do is turn over a new leaf to transform our relationship with the people of Iran, and to extend an outstretched hand that says to the people of Iran that if your leadership is willing to give up being a driver of regional instability,” Vance said.
Vance shakes hands with Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, left, as they meet for high-level talks at the Buergenstock Resort Lake Lucerne, near Stansstad, Switzerland.Nathan Howard/Pool Reuters via AP
“If they are willing to give up nuclear weapons ambitions for the long term, then the United States is willing to fundamentally transform our relationship with that country,” he went on. “That is certainly our goal.”
Vance’s remarks came as the first round of talks with Iran under the memorandum of understanding have kicked off in Switzerland. The talks had been delayed due to clashes between Israel and Hezbollah.
The MOU had laid out a 14-point framework for peace between the US and Iran while allotting 60 days to hash out a more fleshed-out peace deal.
“The opening of the Strait of Hormuz, the ending of the Iranian nuclear program, all of these things have already been accomplished,” Vance went on. “The question before us now is, how much more can we accomplish together?”
Vance makes an opening statement next to Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif (center) and Qatar’s Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al-Thani.POOL/AFP via Getty Images
“Can we turn over a new leaf? Can we change relations in the Middle East permanently? Or do we go back to doing things the old way, which is not our preference.”
The vice president’s public olive branch to Iran drew asharp contrast withPresident Trump’s fiery rhetoric toward the regime. The commander-in-chief on Sunday threatened retaliation if Tehran closes the Strait of Hormuz, where roughly a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil supply once flowed through annually.
Steve Witkoff and Pakistan’s Chief of Army Staff Field Marshal Asim Munir greet each other next to Vance and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner as they meet with Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif.POOL/AFP via Getty Images
Trump claimed he spoke with Iranian officials ahead of Vance’s meeting in Switzerland.
“You close it, and you won’t have a country,” Trump told Fox News’ chief foreign correspondent Trey Yingst about his message to Iran. “You won’t even make it back to your f—ing country.”
The president also ripped into Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian for publicly declaring that “we will not give up our right to enrichment” and that the US will “be forced to accept it.”
“He better watch his mouth. He better shape up, or we’ll take over the rest of the country,” Trump told Fox News.
Speaker of the Parliament of Iran, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf (R) arrives at the Burgenstock resort in Obbuergen, near Lucerne on June 21, 2026.POOL/AFP via Getty Images
Trump described the MOU as a “60-day option” and stressed that he “can do whatever I want” afterward, musing that the US could become the “guardian angel” of the Strait of Hormuz and charge tolls for it.
On Sunday, Trump also warned Iran to rein in Hezbollah.
“Iran must immediately stop their highly paid PROXIES in Lebanon from causing trouble. If they don’t, we’ll hit Iran very hard again, just like we did last week, only harder!!!” Trump posted on Truth Social.
United States President Donald Trump said that he is "disappointed" inIsraelas it cannot take Hezbollah down, Fox News reported on Sunday.
Trump shared with the news platform that Israel "can't do anything without knocking buildings down." "I am close to giving this to Syria because he would do a more precise job," he added.
The US president also stated earlier this week that Syria could deal with the military group if Israel is unable to do so without "killing everyone else."
United States President Donald Trump stressed on Sunday that Iran must "immediately" stop its proxies in Lebanon from "causing trouble," or Washington will strike Tehran again.
"If they don't, we'll hit Iran very hard again, just like we did last week, only harder!!!" Trump declared in a post on Truth Social.
Trump also threatened Tehran, saying that if Iranians close the Strait of Hormuz, they "won't have a country" anymore. On the other hand, US Vice President JD Vance claimed that "great progress" was made amid four-way high-level talks between the US, Iran, Pakistan and Qatar, currently taking place at the Burgenstock Resort in Obbuergen, near Lucerne, in Switzerland.
Last month I wrote about something that had been building in my mind for years: the realization that active trading was doing more harm than good in my life.
I wrote about how I had finally put systems in place to turn my trading and account management over to trusted parties who are far better and more disciplined at it than I am. I had to separate the fact that I feel great about often being an accurate prognosticator on my blog about market trends, but that executing the corresponding trades was simply something I wasn’t good at.
Now, thirty days since my last trade, I couldn’t be happier that I made the decision. Admittedly, it hasn’t been incredibly easy, especially because I can’t remove all of my triggers and simply ignore the news, world and current events. I’ve been chugging coffee, reading headlines and trading every morning for the last 20 years. So I don’t expect it to be an easy habit to break.
But it’s getting easier, and I’m stepping away from reading every headline, every day, toward putting the phone down and living in the present moment once my work is done and my column is written each morning.
And I can’t imagine a better time to undertake this exercise. “The market” was once a symbol of integrity and serious business run by old f*cks in bowties and suits, like the Duke brothers.
Now it has become less a mechanism for allocating capital and more a 24-hour Las Vegas freak show carnival of increasingly exotic wagers. Our market has become the pro boxing equivalent of when Screech from Saved by the Bell fought Horshack on Celebrity Boxing.
Back in year like 1980, a company had stock. Simple enough. Today you can trade options on the stock, leveraged ETFs tracking the stock, tokenized versions of the stock at 2 a.m., and prediction-market contracts on whether or not Joe Kernen is wearing a toupee when he reports on the stock.
Wall Street and Las Vegas used to be different places. Those days are over. And new reporting from The Wall Street Journal confirms it. They reported this week that Charles Schwab is preparing to enter the prediction market business through a partnership with Cboe. According to the report, Schwab customers will soon be able to trade binary-style contracts tied to the performance of the S&P 500. The contracts function much like prediction market wagers: traders make a yes-or-no bet on whether an index finishes above or below a certain level and receive either a fixed payout or nothing at all.
In other words, one of the largest and most respected brokerages in America is moving further down the path of turning market outcomes into wager-like products.
To be clear, this is not simply a Schwab story, it is a sign of where the entire financial industry is heading. The distinction between investing and gambling is becoming harder and harder to identify.
Prediction markets have exploded over the last several years. Sports betting has become ubiquitous. Options volumes continue to reach extraordinary levels. Crypto exchanges offer leverage that would have seemed insane a decade ago. Every event, every opinion, every outcome increasingly becomes something that can be traded. Sometimes it’s tough to remember there’s actual company equity at the bottom of the pile of all this speculative shit somewhere.
Last month I wrote: “Every event is now a market. Every opinion is now a wager. Every moment of boredom can be monetized by putting money at risk on your phone.”
If anything, I understated the trend. The financial industry sees demand and it is responding exactly the way industries always do: by supplying more product. The problem is that the costs aren’t limited to individual traders. Most discussions about gambling focus on personal responsibility, addiction, and financial hardship. Those concerns are real. We already see rising stories of people using credit cards, personal loans, margin debt, and other borrowed money to fund speculative activity. The American consumer is tapped out, as I detailed a couple weeks ago.
Source: Zero Hedge
We’ve seen countless examples in crypto, options, sports betting, and meme stocks where people become trapped in cycles of chasing losses and doubling down on increasingly risky positions. But the risks do not stop at the individual level.
When enough leverage accumulates inside a system, personal mistakes become market problems. Speculation funded by borrowed money creates fragility. Fragility creates forced selling. Forced selling creates liquidity events. Liquidity events create contagion. The history of financial markets is filled with examples of this dynamic.
And as savings dwindles, margin debt as a percentage of GDP is consistently rising. In other words, we’re taking more risk. Gambling more. Investing less.
But leverage doesn’t look dangerous during a boom. It looks efficient. It looks sophisticated. It looks profitable.
Crypto has already provided multiple examples of this on a relatively small scale. We have watched cascades of liquidations wipe out billions of dollars in value within hours. We have watched exchanges fail, lenders collapse, and leveraged traders evaporate seemingly overnight. This can, and will, happen in equity markets, prediction markets and option markets going forward.
And the world we are heading towards is one where prediction markets, binary options, leveraged crypto products, sports betting, and traditional brokerage accounts increasingly overlap and compete for the same attention.
I don’t think we fully appreciate the psychological consequences of where we are heading. Twenty-four-hour prediction markets are inherently unhealthy for many people. Human beings were not designed to live inside a perpetual casino. Anyone who has ever been to Vegas for more than 2 days understands this. You arrive healthy, in shape, sober, excited to see friends and maybe place a couple bets on the NFL game, and you leave destitute, broke, 10 pounds heavier, smelling like cigarette smoke and trying to figure out which stripper stole your credit card number (this is a purely hypothetical example, I swear).
These platforms don’t just compete for your money. They compete for your attention, your focus, your relationships, your sleep, your peace of mind, and your ability to be present. They monetize uncertainty itself. They thrive off of your loneliness and boredom.
The more events become tradable, the more incentive there is to constantly monitor outcomes. The result is a culture where people never disconnect. Every election becomes a market. Every earnings report becomes a wager. Every sporting event becomes an opportunity to speculate. Every idle moment becomes an invitation to check prices, odds, probabilities, and positions. The smartphone becomes both casino and brokerage account.
And the “markets” are not regulated at all and are susceptible to massive corruption. You thought a questionable pass interference penalty at the of a playoff NFL game was bad? How about when Coinbase’s imbecilic CEO ended a company conference call by spouting off random words to cash bets for god-knows-who in the prediction markets? He said live on the call: “I was a little distracted because I was tracking the prediction market about what Coinbase will say on their next earnings call. I just want to add here the words Bitcoin, Ethereum, blockchain, staking, and Web3 — to make sure we get those in before the end of the call.”
As I noted last month, I’ve seen people trading crypto between rounds at the gym. I’ve seen friends checking futures markets during dinner. I’ve seen twenty-somethings betting every pitch of a baseball game while sitting at a bar. And I’ve been all of those people myself.
When I step back and look at the bigger picture, I can’t help but wonder whether all of this is symptomatic of something much larger. A society doesn’t become stronger by turning every aspect of life into a wager.
A society becomes stronger by rewarding patience, discipline, craftsmanship, productivity, delayed gratification, and long-term thinking. Those are the traits that build companies, families, institutions, communities, and civilizations.
What worries me is that we’ve spent years moving in the opposite direction.
We have normalized endless money printing and financial engineering instead of productive growth. We have rewarded speculation over investment. We have encouraged debt over savings. We have elevated influencers over experts, virality over wisdom, and instant gratification over patience. We’ve built social media platforms designed to monetize outrage, political systems incapable of long-term planning, and financial products that increasingly resemble casino games.
And now we’re building twenty-four-hour prediction markets on top of all of it. It’s bad enough bullshit shows like Flavor of Love and The Golden Bachelor exist. It’s toxicity squared when we can bet on the outcome. At some point you have to ask whether we’re creating anything of lasting value or simply inventing new ways to distract ourselves.
The frightening part is that every one of these products is marketed as empowerment, democratization and opportunity…but many of them are really just mechanisms for harvesting attention.
And the commodity being extracted isn’t just money, it’s your time, focus, peace of mind and energy. To quote Morpheus from The Matrix, it is “…a computer generated dream world, built to keep us under control in order to change a human being into this.”
The irony is that the technology that promised to make us smarter often seems to be making us less capable of sitting still, thinking independently, or focusing on what actually matters.
That is precisely why I’m grateful for the decision I made last month to stop trading. It was about recognizing that the environment is becoming increasingly engineered to encourage constant participation. And I want no part of it.
As I said then, the older I get, the less interested I become in chasing every opportunity and the more interested I become in protecting my time, my health, my relationships, and my peace of mind. The irony is that the more speculation becomes available, the more valuable restraint becomes.
The easier it becomes to trade, gamble, wager, predict, hedge, leverage, and speculate on everything, the more important it becomes to simply step back. Because if the trajectory we’re on continues, speculation won’t be confined to casinos, crypto exchanges, or niche prediction market platforms. It’s going to be everywhere.
And that’s exactly why I’m thankful I already started walking away.
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QTR’s Disclaimer:Please read my full legal disclaimer on my About page here. This post represents my opinions only.In addition, please understand I am an idiot and often get things wrong and lose money. I may own or transact in any names mentioned in this piece at any time without warning. Contributor posts and aggregated posts have been hand selected by me, have not been fact checked and are the opinions of their authors. They are either submitted to QTR by their author, reprinted under a Creative Commons license with my best effort to uphold what the license asks, or with the permission of the author.
This is not a recommendation to buy or sell any stocks or securities, just my opinions. I often lose money on positions I trade/invest in. I may add any name mentioned in this article and sell any name mentioned in this piece at any time, without further warning. None of this is a solicitation to buy or sell securities. I may or may not own names I write about and are watching. Sometimes I’m bullish without owning things, sometimes I’m bearish and do own things. Just assume my positions could be exactly the opposite of what you think they are just in case. If I’m long I could quickly be short and vice versa. I won’t update my positions.
And all positions can change immediately as soon as I publish this, with or without notice and at any point I can be long, short or neutral on any position. You are on your own. Do not make decisions based on my blog. I exist on the fringe. If you see numbers and calculations of any sort, assume they are wrong and double check them. I failed Algebra in 8th grade and topped off my high school math accolades by getting a D- in remedial Calculus my senior year, before becoming an English major in college so I could bullshit my way through things easier.
The publisher does not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of the information provided in this page. These are not the opinions of any of my employers, partners, or associates. I did my best to be honest about my disclosures but can’t guarantee I am right; I write these posts after a couple beers sometimes. I edit after my posts are published because I’m impatient and lazy, so if you see a typo, check back in a half hour. Also, I just straight up get shit wrong a lot. I mention it twice because it’s that important.
