Toby Howell

Mortgage rates are still extremely elevated right now, but San Francisco luxury market doesn't care.

If you wanted a physical representation of the K-shaped economy where the top half of the economy is doing very well, the bottom half is struggling, this is the emblematic of it.

This embodies it in San Francisco.

That's where a lot of people have been using the term, kind of in jest, but the permanent underclass.

If you missed out on these AI startups, then you're never going to be able to afford a house.

You're

K-shaped economy is a word we mention all the time on this podcast.

Just look at the SF housing market to see it playing out in real time.

So I was reading Bloomberg's Matt Levine and his thoughts on this.

The trickle-down effects of agents getting involved with stock trading is that retail investing might become a lot more similar because maybe the agents start recommending a lot of the same stocks to retail buyers.

The most stereotypical retail buyer, Matt Levine says, is buying the dip.

So you go on to your agentic protocol.

You say, hey, every time this market dips more than 2%, buy.

That becomes something different.

that is reliable on a mass scale and then maybe hedge funds realize that hey, we're gonna get all this exit liquidity as soon as the market opens because all these agents are executing the same trades.

That's kind of the broader picture of if we go down this path.

The other counterpoint to that though is how popular is this actually going to be because again,

It's a little bit more complex than Robinhood is making it sound.

This is from Robinhood's own overview that says, you'll first need to connect a third-party AI agent and then follow the on-screen steps to connect it with your agentic account through the Robinhood trading model context protocol.

So maybe it's not as simple as they're making it seem and it won't lead to these large ripple effects, but it's fascinating to see which path this is going to take.