RJ Hamster
Trump’s Iran Update Spikes Volatility. Now What?
Stocks gyrate after Trump extends the Iran timeline… what yesterday’s jobs data tells us… AI agents are coming for jobs… how to invest ahead of the Agent Supernova
Editor’s Note: Our InvestorPlace offices are closed tomorrow for Good Friday.
If you need assistance from our Customer Service team, they’ll be happy to assist you when we re-open Monday.
Have a wonderful Easter Weekend!
As I write on Thursday morning, stocks are doing something we’ve grown accustomed to lately – swinging wildly, keeping us guessing about what’s coming next.
Behind the volatility is President Donald Trump and his address to the nation last night about the situation in Iran. The short version: we’re winning – but expect another two to three weeks of heavy fighting.
Markets were hoping for an exit ramp. Instead, they got a near-term timeline for continued fighting with no detailed ceasefire framework or reopening plan for the Strait of Hormuz.
Stocks opened sharply lower on the news, rallied back to flat, and are now bouncing around. Oil has jumped – both West Texas Intermediate Crude and Brent trade above $105 a barrel, though both are off their morning highs.
Overall, it’s one of those sessions where the close is anyone’s guess.
Given that we covered the Iran war’s market implications in yesterday’s Digest, let’s shift gears and take a closer look at a data point that came out yesterday that got a bit lost in the excitement.
What did we learn from the ADP jobs report?
ADP’s March private payrolls report came in yesterday at 62,000 – ahead of the Wall Street forecast of 39,000 and roughly in line with February’s upwardly revised total. On the surface, that’s a decent number.
But dig one layer deeper, and the picture gets a lot less comfortable.
Two sectors – education and health services, and construction – accounted for nearly all the gains, contributing 58,000 and 30,000 jobs respectively. Meanwhile, trade, transportation and utilities shed 58,000 workers. Manufacturing lost another 11,000. And large firms, those with 500 or more employees, actually reported a net decline.
In other words, the headline number is doing a lot of heavy lifting to cover up what is really a two-cylinder jobs engine.
ADP’s chief economist, Nela Richardson, put it plainly:
We’ve seen two consecutive months of pretty steady job growth, but most of it has been in health care. That’s really the story.
Health care is transforming the labor market.
One sector carrying the labor market is not a sign of broad-based strength. It is a sign of narrow resilience – and narrow resilience has a way of becoming a problem when that one sector hits a speed bump.
We’ll get the official verdict soon. The Bureau of Labor Statistics releases its March Employment Situation report tomorrow morning. Wall Street’s consensus is for 57,000 nonfarm payrolls – a bounce from February’s ugly 92,000 job loss, but still well below the pre-tariff monthly average of roughly 180,000.
One wrinkle worth noting: the stock market will be closed tomorrow for Good Friday. Whatever that number says – good, bad or ugly – investors won’t be able to react until Monday. It could make for an interesting weekend and Monday morning session.
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But the real threat won’t show up in tomorrow’s labor report
Even if tomorrow’s jobs report beats expectations, the structural backdrop for the labor market is shifting in ways that a single month of payroll data simply cannot capture. Let’s talk about why.
First, a quick primer on a term you’re going to hear a lot more of: AI agents.
An AI agent isn’t just a chatbot you type questions into. It’s a software program that can take actions on your behalf – autonomously, without you guiding each step. It can browse the web, send emails, book appointments, manage files, execute transactions and coordinate with other AI agents, all while you’re doing something else entirely.
Think of it less like a calculator and more like a tireless digital employee who never sleeps, never calls in sick and can be cloned infinitely at almost no cost.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang put it bluntly at his company’s GPU Technology Conference last month: one engineer with an army of AI agents at their disposal should be ten times more productive than one without. The math on what that means for headcount isn’t complicated.
Goldman Sachs estimates AI could automate tasks accounting for 25% of all U.S. work hours, projecting that 6% to 7% of jobs will be displaced over the adoption period.
Jeremy Allaire, co-founder and CEO of Circle – one of the largest stablecoin issuers in the world – was direct about where this is headed when speaking at the Economic Club of New York last month:
AI agents will replace a huge percentage of work that’s currently performed by humans on a massive scale…
It’s going to be most dramatic in white-collar work.
Regular Digest readers will recall the Citrini Research scenario we covered in our February 26 issue – the self-reinforcing loop where AI capabilities improve… companies need fewer workers… displaced workers spend less… and the ensuing margin pressure pushes firms to invest even more in AI. Rinse and repeat.
Increasingly, that’s appearing as a real risk.
Take the story we covered in yesterday’s Digest, Oracle’s mass layoffs. They’re affecting potentially 20,000 to 30,000 workers at a company that just posted a 95% jump in net income. This is the Citrini loop in motion.
Bottom line: Tomorrow’s labor market data will tell us what happened with jobs in March. But the dynamic above tells us what’s coming this decade.
How to invest ahead of the coming Agent Supernova
The structural shift playing out above has a name – at least in the pages of Money & Megatrends.
Brian Hunt, editor of this free daily e-letter, calls it the “Agent Supernova” – and he’s spent the past two weeks laying out exactly what it means for investors.
Here’s Brian on the scale of what’s coming:
Within the next two years, the number of AI agents operating in the American economy isn’t poised to increase by 10X… or 50X… or even by 1,000X.
Try at least 100,000X.
This is the coming Agent Supernova. Agents working with people. Agents working with other agents. Agents running businesses. Agents negotiating and haggling with other agents.
To bring this to life, Brian offers a simple illustration. A single restaurant could soon run five specialized agents simultaneously – one managing cooking schedules, one handling accounting, one overseeing staff, one tracking supply orders and one general-purpose agent coordinating all the others.
Now, multiply that model across every business in the economy, and you start to grasp what 100,000X growth in AI agents actually looks like in the real world.
So, how do we invest?
Brian argues that this economic shift runs straight through the semiconductor industry. AI agents don’t live in the cloud alone – they run “at the edge,” inside our phones, cars, homes, offices, hospitals and factories. All of that requires specialized chips built for the job.
One company Brian has his eye on is Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).
Brian calls AMD one of the safest bets on the agentic wave. While Nvidia (NVDA)still dominates in GPUs, AMD has carved out nearly 40% market share in the CPU space – deeply embedded with hyperscalers like Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. As agentic AI shifts the compute mix toward CPUs alongside GPUs, AMD’s positioning looks increasingly strategic.
Brian has three more semiconductor names he’s watching in this space. To get those picks totally free – along with his full Agent Supernova investment thesis – sign up for Money & Megatrends here.
So, where does all this leave us?
This week’s ADP jobs number was decent. And Friday’s official labor report may well be “decent” too.
But “decent” is doing a lot of work in a labor market where two sectors are carrying everyone else, monthly payroll growth is running at roughly a third of its pre-tariff pace and the most powerful tech companies on earth are openly planning for a workforce where digital employees dwarf human ones.
The question for investors isn’t whether the March jobs number looks okay. It’s whether you’re positioned for the swarm of AI agents that will be coming after “okay.”
We’ll keep tracking these stories here in the Digest.
Have a good evening,
Jeff Remsburg
(Disclaimer: I own AMD.)
