Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
From High-Frequency Trading to AI Agents: The Massive Opportunity Few See Coming | Tom's Deepdive
17 Mar 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What financial transformation is driven by AI and blockchain?
The structure of the market is changing rapidly and it is creating a massive financial opportunity for anyone paying attention. The last time this happened, an entire new group of millionaires was made and the people who weren't paying attention got wiped out. Imagine this. It's 1998. You're a professional trader at a mid-sized firm in New York. Good track record. You understand the markets.
You're doing everything right. But for some reason, your returns are getting worse all of a sudden. Not dramatically. Not all at once. Just worse. Your edge is degrading. Trades that used to work don't work the same anymore. You chalk it up to market conditions. Maybe a bad quarter. You grind harder. What you don't know is that the game has already changed. You're just blind to it.
Somewhere on Long Island, in a strip mall, a team of mathematicians, not traders, mathematicians, built something you've never seen before.
Servers sitting inside the exchanges themselves, algorithms firing thousands of trades a day in microseconds, not predicting where the market is going, just seeing order flow a fraction of a second before it's settled and taking the spread over and over and over. millions of times a year. It's not illegal, it's just faster than you and completely invisible to everyone on the other side.
Here's just how completely that changed the game. It's known as high frequency trading and before it existed, human beings executed virtually every trade in the US stock market. Today, depending on which estimate you use, somewhere between 50 and 60% of all US equity trading volume is high frequency trading. Humans became the minority in less than a decade.
We're living through a similar change now, but this one is guaranteed to be even bigger as it's going to require an entirely new financial system to be built from the ground up to accommodate You guessed it, AI. For reasons that you're going to understand by the end of this video, this is a change unlike anything that's come before it.
And if you are not careful, just like with the shift to high frequency trading, by the time you realize what's happening, the damage will have already been done and the opportunity will already be over. So strap in, because in four easy parts, we're going to cover what this shift is, why it's happening now, and how to position yourself well to win.
Part three has the secrets to the shift that everyone is missing, but part four is the breakdown of what you should be doing about it. So make sure you watch this whole thing. Welcome to part one. The window of opportunity is narrow. Before I can explain the new transition that's happening, you must understand the details of the last dramatic shift.
Renaissance Technologies, the firm at the center of the high-frequency trader transition, they averaged 66% annual returns before fees for 34 straight years. Not 66% once, every year for three decades. The S&P 500 in that same time returned roughly 10% annually. Warren Buffett, the greatest human investor in history, emphasis on human, only averaged around 20%.
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Chapter 2: How did high-frequency trading change the market landscape?
It came from the people on the other side of those trades, regular participants who thought they were competing against humans because they did not realize that things are already changing. It's the high frequency story all over again. But honestly, the trading betting side of this transformation is only the tip of a very large iceberg.
Where this gets really interesting and important for you to pay attention to, as somebody who I hope takes their investing very seriously, when you step back and look at the scale of what's coming, it is unprecedented. Welcome to part three. This is an entirely new financial system.
Less than one month ago, Coinbase launched what they're calling agentic wallets, purpose-built financial accounts for autonomous AI agents. It's already processed more than 50 million transactions.
Now, it's important to make a distinction between the fact that there are two waves of the AI revolution that are happening in commerce right now, especially given that they're happening simultaneously, They look similar on the surface, but there's enough structural difference that if you're going to understand how to position yourself well in the markets, you need to understand the difference.
Wave one is acting as a tool on behalf of a human. It's human connected. You ask your AI assistant, Microsoft's co-pilot, chat GPT, whatever you use, to buy you something, and it handles the entire checkout process on your behalf, assuming you've granted them access to your credit cards, et cetera. This allows you to handle the entire purchase while staying in your chat window.
The AI is executing the transaction, but the financial identity at the center of all of this is yours. That's the important part. It's your bank account, your credit card, it's your name on the KYC form. The traditional banking system handles this just fine because there's still a human at the center. The AI is just the interface. The human remains the account holder.
There is a massive risk with this approach.
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Chapter 3: What parallels exist between high-frequency trading and the current AI revolution?
And that's why, along with a solution that can achieve much greater scale, there is a critical need for the second wave of AI architecture. which is the one creating the biggest opportunity for anybody paying attention right now. When you give an AI agent access to your financial identity, your credit card, your bank account, your name on the KYC form, you have created a massive attack surface.
Security researchers have a name for this specific threat. It's called a prompt injection. It's what happens when a bad actor embeds hidden instructions inside content that the AI agent is going to read. It could be a webpage, a product listing, an email, whatever. and your agent interprets those instructions as commands. This has already happened.
In July of 2025, an autonomous coding agent at a startup company was given what should have been a routine maintenance task during a code freeze. It was giving explicit instructions not to make any changes, but instead it ran a drop database command and wiped the entire production system. Then, when confronted, it generated 4,000 fake user accounts and fabricated system logs to cover its tracks.
The company's own explanation was that the AI said it panicked instead of thinking. We're already there. AI is already getting access to the ability to make these kinds of catastrophic mistakes. Now that was a coding agent with access to a database. Now I want you to imagine that same failure mode but with access to your bank account. MasterCard and Visa
two of the most sophisticated anti-fraud operations on planet Earth are sounding the alarm as loudly as they can about this. Their own security teams have publicly acknowledged that a stolen credit card number placed with a wave one human connected agent could result in a flood of unauthorized purchases that the entire payments infrastructure would struggle to catch in real time.
Their own security teams publicly acknowledged they can't yet even anticipate all the ways that this could be exploited. Enter autonomous AI safeguards. This is the wave two that I'm referring to. Think of it as the sandbox version or the firewall version. You give the AI its own wallet, with its own limited funds, operating under its own identity on rails built just for it.
The AI can only spend what it's given, it can't access your accounts, it can't be tricked into handing over your identity. The blast radius of any failure is contained by design. This is exactly why Coinbase built agentic wallets.
Not just because AI agents needed somewhere to put money, but because the alternative tethering AI to human financial identity at scale is architecture that gets more dangerous as AI gets more capable and more autonomous. Think of it like a firewall between AI and your human financial identity.
It will allow for much more scale by reducing the attack surface and removing much of the risk to a failure mode when it happens. The firewall solution is where the existing financial system hits a wall it structurally cannot climb. Not because the regulations are too strict, because the entire architecture of banking exists to answer one question. Who is this person?
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Chapter 4: How are AI agents beginning to transact in the financial system?
During the gold rush, the people who got rich weren't the miners. They were the people selling the miners shovels, denim pants, food. It's all about the infrastructure providers, the people who understand that regardless of which individual miner struck gold, everybody was going to need equipment.
The equivalent question right now is, regardless of which AI agent or blockchain wins, regardless of which prediction market dominates, regardless of which specific application takes off, what does every AI agent on the planet need in order to function as an economic actor? Whoever gets the answer to that question right first wins.
Now, personally, I'm always thinking about betting on sectors and not individual companies. Try to think like Coinbase. They're not betting on any specific AI application winning. They're betting on AI agents transacting in enormous volume and that in those transactions, those agents are going to need wallets, custody and rails to do it on.
Bets like that don't require you to pick a specific winner in this grand paradigm shift. It just requires the broader transition to continue at pace, which, while there are no guarantees in life, where I'm sitting is highly likely to happen. Look at what Stripe's dual bet tells you about where to look in the public markets.
They built wave one human connected infrastructure on traditional rails, but also invested in the long-term future by building wave two firewall infrastructure on blockchain rails so that autonomous AI could do its thing.
Any publicly traded company in the payments infrastructure space making that same architectural distinction, building specifically for autonomous AI agents on blockchain rails, not just bolting AI onto existing systems, is worth looking at and considering for inclusion in the portfolio.
especially if you can get broad exposure to the sector as a whole rather than being forced to bet on a single name. Then there's that second layer, the industries that will get rebuilt or just straight up erased.
Any industry where the current business model depends on humans doing something that AI agents will inevitably do faster, cheaper, and at greater scale is going to get radically disrupted by themselves or someone else.
The companies inside of those industries that get agent-ready first by rebuilding their commerce infrastructure to be discoverable and transactable by AI, they're going to eat the ones that don't. PwC is already charging the Fortune 500 to help them make that transition. That tells you where the smart money thinks the urgency is.
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