An Argument Against the Old Playbook
Interest rates and oil prices may matter less to an AI-driven stock market when corporate earnings are growing fast enough to dominate traditional macro signals, according to investor Jordi Visser. He questions why a 25-basis-point move from the Federal Reserve should drive the investment narrative if AI-related earnings are expanding by more than 30% and the trade shows little rate sensitivity in his view. His argument is that investors may be over-weighting familiar macro indicators while under-weighting the scale of the AI growth cycle.
The same goes for oil, he argued. Year-over-year oil for the sixth contract was up 20% from a year earlier, yet the economy's engine has shifted. Households are not borrowing to buy homes or cars the way they once did; instead, net worth is rising because profit margins are booming and stocks are climbing. In Visser's telling, the economy is now digital, not rate-sensitive.
He offered a framework to explain why so many people misread this moment: there are 'static people, ' who assume one event mechanically causes another because a textbook said so, and 'dynamic people, ' who ask what other variables and government tools could change the outcome. Tariffs might spark inflation (or domestic manufacturing. An Iran conflict might spike oil) or new pipelines and domestic supply might blunt it. Most doomsday predictions, he said, come from the static camp.
When AI Agents Trade Against Hedge Funds
Visser splits today's market into three buckets: active traders bound by drawdown limits who feel every 50-basis-point wiggle, AI agents with fixed rules and no emotions, and longer-horizon retail traders who don't have to react to every data print. The agents, he believes, respond to what hedge funds react to, selling when a hot PPI print lifts rates, then piling back in front of the funds the next day.
The result, he acknowledged, is a 'herky-jerky' market that professional money managers find hard to trade. But that churn creates opportunity for those with a medium- to long-term view: if the smart money overreacts to old-world data, it hands better entry points to anyone who believes earnings will keep compounding. In his view, the people with the big advantage now are those who can look through the noise and know that rates and oil don't matter.
Crypto's Quiet Outperformance
Visser said he believes crypto is at the beginning of a mega bull market, and pointed to the quarter just past: Ethereum was by far the best-performing major asset (assets with valuations above $100 billion) roughly double Bitcoin's return, while the S&P 500 and Nasdaq sat around flat. The low correlation with stocks matters as much as the outperformance, he said, because the next leg could lift both together.
The catalyst he watches is the Clarity Act. Prediction markets put the odds of positive legislative action below 20% for this year, but Visser argued that any positive surprise would send crypto up 'far faster than people realize.' The reason is fiduciary: pension funds need regulation before they can invest at scale, and Bitcoin has been around long enough to qualify. In his view, it is a pension story, not a venture story, and a net new buyer entering the market.
Tokenization and the End of Revenue-Based Valuation
To answer the question he hears most (how do you value crypto?) Visser pointed to William Goyabber of the Ethereum Foundation, who compares valuing an ecosystem like Ethereum to how early investors valued the internet: in the 1990s, Amazon was measured in 'eyeballs' and clicks, metrics that meant nothing at the time. Visser asked ChatGPT to score Goyabber's 2015 TED talk on blockchain against what has happened since; the general vision scored about 8.5 out of 10, though individual components only around 5.
The proof point, in his telling, is Robinhood Chain, built on Ethereum through Arbitrum and now running 24/7 tokenized trading, volumes driven so far predominantly by memecoins, which he sees as the natural early phase. Visser wrote a paper on the company because Morgan Stanley upgraded the stock not on crypto revenues but because it is becoming 'a little bit like Apple, ' with multiple service revenue streams. He called Robinhood the company to study for understanding the merge of AI, crypto, and macro, and said tokenization is the bridge between the two financial worlds.
The $8 Trillion Argument for Looking Forward
Visser closed with a comparison meant to jar his audience loose from the 1990s. Bitcoin sits near a $2 trillion valuation, roughly the same as SpaceX, Anthropic, and, as he put it, an OpenAI valuation people may be underestimating. Four assets of that scale, none of which currently make money, together represent about $8 trillion of things he considers critical to the future. Against that backdrop, he said, debating the level of the fed funds rate means you are 'still left in a world of 20 years ago.'
His conclusions, it should be stressed, are a personal view delivered with conviction, not settled market consensus. Even he hedged on the Fed: he thought a 25-basis-point hike with a dovish message was the most likely combined outcome but said he didn't think it would happen at all, given political pressure, a lesson, he argued, in why the Fed is not independent. The durable point of his argument is methodological: value what the future economy is built on, and treat yesterday's macro signals with proportionate skepticism.