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Guide to Investing in the Age of AI
Trish Regan is one of America’s most recognized financial journalists and digital media hosts. An award-winning reporter, author, television personality, and speaker, Trish is a leading economic and political thought leader who helps viewers to better understand the most critical issues facing the economy and American business today. With extraordinary access to newsmakers and industry sources, as well as a knack for anticipating opportunities and risks in investing, Trish leverages her knowledge of how the mainstream media works to enable subscribers to best understand the information moving markets.
Trish is the Co-Founder and Executive Editor of 76research. She is also the founder, owner, and host of the daily livestreamed Trish Regan Show with more than 80 million views per month. Prior to founding 76research with longtime friend Rob Hordon, Trish anchored some of the most highly rated financial programs at America’s most noted financial networks including CNBC, Bloomberg, and most recently, Fox Business News.
Throughout her career, Trish has interviewed numerous heads of state, including multiple U.S. Presidents, foreign leaders, Fortune 500 CEOs and other institutional, charitable, and government leaders.
Trish credits her start in journalism to her fifth grade position as school correspondent for her local New Hampshire newspaper. But, while Trish showed an early interest in reporting and writing, it wasn’t until years later that she chose to make journalism her career. In fact, she originally intended to pursue a career in finance and worked as an analyst in emerging debt markets at Goldman Sachs while a student at Columbia University. Fluent in Spanish, Trish focused primarily on Latin American sovereign debt markets including Argentina, Mexico, Venezuela, and Brazil, but when Bloomberg Television offered her an opportunity to work as a correspondent, she made the jump into financial media.
Beginning at Bloomberg in 2000, Trish was on the front lines as the dot-com bubble burst. She covered its aftermath from Silicon Valley and San Francisco as a correspondent at MarketWatch before moving back to New York to work as a correspondent for CBS News. In 2006, Trish returned to her financial roots as an anchor on CNBC’s top-rated daily markets program The Call where she reported on the 2008 financial crisis in real time. While an anchor at CNBC, Trish also reported business news for NBC's Nightly News and The Today Show. In addition, she produced and hosted the two most highly rated documentaries in CNBC's history – Marijuana Inc and Marijuana USA, which investigated a massive and fast-developing underground industry. Trish predicted that industry would soon become mainstream in her book Joint Ventures: Inside America's Almost Legal Marijuana Industry, published by Wiley & Co. in 2010.
In 2011, Trish went back to Bloomberg Television to anchor the network's afternoon market close coverage as host of Street Smart with Trish Regan. While at Bloomberg, Trish was the network's main political anchor for all political television coverage of the 2012 election, including both the Republican and Democrat conventions and the election itself. From 2013 through 2016, Trish also worked as a front-page economic columnist for USA Today, writing on the biggest trends in business, markets and the economy.
In 2015, Trish left Bloomberg Television to join Fox News and Fox Business as the anchor of her new program The Intelligence Report with Trish Regan during FBN’s market hours. She would later move to an evening program and become the only woman in cable TV at that time to host a primetime show. Trish Regan Primetime grew 8pm ratings to a level never before seen at Fox Business.
While at Fox, Trish Regan also anchored two Republican Presidential debates – making history as part of the first all-woman team, with colleague Sandra Smith, to anchor a Presidential debate. She also appeared as an economic and markets contributor to all Fox News programming and was also a guest anchor on Cavuto, Fox and Friends, The Five, and primetime programming. In addition, Trish anchored all primetime coverage of the 2016 Democrat and Republican conventions for Fox Business and was a co-host alongside Neil Cavuto, Maria Bartiromo, Lou Dobbs and Stuart Varney for the network's main political events. Trish left Fox in 2020 and began work on the creation of her own digital media enterprise which debuted in August 2020. Her focus now is her own program and 76research, although she still appears regularly on other platforms both in cable news and in digital media.
Trish graduated with honors from Phillips Exeter Academy before going on to study opera at New England Conservatory and graduate cum laude with a degree in history from Columbia University. While at Exeter, Trish was the first-place winner of the Harvard Musical Association’s Competition for Excellence in Music, becoming the first singer to win the top prize since the organization was founded in 1837. She later studied opera and German at The American Institute for Musical Studies in Graz, Austria. Her operatic singing skills enabled her to represent her home state as Miss New Hampshire in The Miss America Pageant, where she won the talent competition and the first B. Wayne Award for the contestant with the most promise in the performing arts.
Trish's journalism awards have included multiple Emmy nominations for her documentary and investigative reporting. Trish was also recognized with a George Polk nomination for her long-form reporting covering the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina with a team from CNBC. While at MarketWatch in San Francisco, Trish was named SF’s Society for Professional Journalists most promising broadcast journalist.
Trish Regan was born and raised in New Hampshire. She now makes her home outside New York City with her husband and three young children.
A successful fund manager and stock picker, Rob Hordon has extensive experience investing across asset classes, sectors, geographies and strategies. With consistent emphasis on ways to preserve and grow assets and manage risk, Rob has offered guidance to thousands of financial advisors and wealth management professionals in the United States and abroad over the course of a multi-decade Wall Street career.
Rob’s professional investment career began in the late 1990s as an associate in the Equity Research department of Credit Suisse First Boston, where he covered wireless telecommunications stocks at the dawn of the mobile phone era. As a recent college graduate, Rob had a front row seat at one of the epicenters of the tech bubble. He witnessed for the first time the stock market’s potential to deliver immense value creation through innovation but also its characteristic tendency towards excess.
Rob went on to obtain his MBA from Columbia Business School, where he focused on security analysis and through his course work learned from some of the top investment practitioners in the country. Upon graduation from Columbia, he took an analyst role in the Risk Arbitrage department of a firm then called Arnhold and S. Bleichroeder Advisers, which would later be renamed First Eagle Investment Management.
For approximately seven years, Rob worked as a member of a small team that ran a hedge fund strategy focused on identifying mispriced long-short opportunities among companies involved in merger and acquisition activity. Just prior to the 2008 financial crisis, he transitioned over to First Eagle’s Global Value team under the auspices of the legendary international investor Jean-Marie Eveillard.
As an analyst on the team, Rob was responsible for initiating and covering several billion dollars of public equity investments across a wide range of industry sectors and countries. This move also reunited him with renowned Columbia Business School economist and author Bruce Greenwald, who had recently joined as Director of Research. As colleagues and mentors, Bruce and Jean-Marie would become the two most formative influences on Rob's investment career.
In 2011, Rob proposed and worked with the team to develop a new multi-asset investment strategy built around the same long-term value-oriented investment philosophy pioneered by Jean-Marie. As co-portfolio manager of the First Eagle Global Income Builder Fund, Rob was directly responsible for over a billion dollars of assets under management with a particular focus on dividend-paying stocks and credit instruments. Rob and his partner later re-created and managed this strategy at a London-based boutique investment firm, J O Hambro Capital Management, beginning in 2017.
In 2023, Rob teamed up with his longtime friend Trish Regan to form 76research, where he is Co-Founder and Chief Investment Strategist. This entrepreneurial venture merges his passion for investing, research and writing with his desire to help others benefit from the long-term wealth creation potential of the stock market.
The son of an economics professor and elementary school teacher, Rob is a proud husband and father of three whose interests include history, philosophy, sailing and world travel. He was born in New York City and grew up in northern New Jersey, where he attended local public schools.
Rob Hordon is a Chartered Financial Analyst. In addition to his MBA from Columbia Business School, he received his Bachelor’s degree in Politics from Princeton University and was awarded a Certificate in Political Theory. His senior thesis, entitled Justice without Truth: Contingency in American Moral Thought, explores how the philosophical tradition of American Pragmatism offers a roadmap out of the moral and political abyss of postmodern relativism.
Guide to Investing in the Age of AI
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On September 4, 2025, President Donald Trump welcomed the leaders of the most valuable enterprises in business history to a dinner in the White House State Dining Room. The main topic of the evening—powering “American AI dominance.”
A few months prior, one might have expected to see Elon Musk by Trump’s side at an event like this. Those days are over, at least for now.
Instead, he was flanked by First Lady Melania Trump and Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Meta Platforms. Many other giants of the tech world were at the table, from Apple’s Tim Cook to Microsoft’s Satya Nadella to OpenAI’s Sam Altman.
Trillions of dollars will be invested in building the foundation of the AI economy in the years ahead. A huge portion of that investment, if not most of it, will be guided by the individuals who joined the President that evening.
What a group—truly the best of the best. We’re here to talk about something that is changing the world already—artificial intelligence—and how we keep America the leader. We’ll talk investment, energy, chips, education, and doing it the right way. We’re going to cut red tape, speed permits for new data centers and power, and make sure the grid can handle what’s coming. We want the jobs, the factories, the training—right here. Tonight, I’ll ask each of you a simple question: How much are you investing in America? - Donald Trump (9/4/2025)
The dinner came at a pivotal moment for the American economy. AI is driving an investment boom that is reshaping every industry.
AI may also be on the cusp of having an enormous impact on the workforce.
Thus far, AI has almost certainly been a driver of net job creation. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been deployed to build AI data centers and related infrastructure. Many jobs have been created in connection with these initiatives.
Workers across the economy have also benefited from wealth effects from a booming stock market that has been fueled by AI.
But things may soon change as AI gets deployed across the business landscape.
Is AI a Job Killer?
Some people would argue that AI is like any other technological innovation.
As new and more efficient ways of getting things done emerge, certain jobs are eliminated—but new ones take their place. This is simply the path of prosperity.
The argument has much of history on its side.
Before the Industrial Revolution, almost everyone worked on a farm. Then workers moved into factories.
Today, the vast majority of American workers, more than 80%, are employed by service sector industries like healthcare, retail, education, finance and hospitality.
Yet many highly informed observers foresee a grim future for workers as AI gets entrenched. In these scenarios, demand for human labor quickly collapses in a world where machines can perform cognitive tasks faster and cheaper.
Dario Amodei is the founder of Anthropic, which operates Claude.ai. It is a privately held AI platform that received a valuation close to $200 billion in its most recent fundraising round.
Amodei has predicted that AI could replace half of all entry-level white collar jobs. He anticipates a spike in unemployment as high as 20% within five years.
Other key players in tech may not be as alarmist, but they are sending clear signals that AI means fewer workers, not more.
Amazon is the second largest private employer in the country. The company has 1.1 million employees in the United States.
Amazon has also been one of the main drivers of private sector job growth in the United States over the past decade. In 2015, Amazon had approximately 150,000 workers in the U.S. The company’s employee headcount has grown by 600%.
The CEO of Amazon, Andy Jassy, recently shared some thoughts on the impact of Generative AI. He predicted that the company’s workforce will start to decline as AI is deployed throughout his organization.
We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs. It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company. - Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon (6/17/2025)
Given that Jassy’s note was directed towards employees, he arguably had some incentive to understate future job reductions and avert panic. Yet at the same time he was preparing his workers for an inevitable reality.
What AI Means for the Economy
As AI transforms the economy, we see 3 big trends that investors should be focused on.
(1) Productivity gains
Jobs getting replaced by machines is bad for the workers affected—but it is good for the economy overall. This is the essence of productivity—more work getting done by fewer people.
AI has the potential to make businesses more efficient, which should translate into profit margin expansion. It will also make businesses more effective at targeting new revenue growth opportunities.
To the extent AI-related job destruction outpaces job creation, this will create slack in labor markets and potentially lead to higher unemployment. While that could hurt consumer demand and become a recessionary force, it opens the door to easier monetary policy.
Wages are a key source of inflationary pressure. When unemployment rises, that pressure abates.
Even in the absence of falling inflation, the Federal Reserve has as part of its dual mandate the obligation to maximize employment levels.
Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s Jackson Hole speech in August 2025 was a clear signal that rising unemployment would be met with lower interest rates and easier monetary policy in general.
An AI productivity boom could therefore lead to earnings growth (via efficiency gains) and easier monetary policy (lower interest rates and greater financial market liquidity). This is an attractive combination for investors in stocks and potentially many other financial assets.
(2) AI winners and losers
The rising tide of AI may lift all boats—on average. But some may sink, while others rise much higher than the rest.
To call AI disruptive may be an understatement. It has the potential to be the most disruptive technological trend in history.
Many businesses will thrive, while others decline because they are closely attached to old realities and practices.
Not all tech companies will win, either. Many software companies, for example, may find their core products and systems supplanted by superior AI-based alternatives that are cheaper.
(3) Massive infrastructure investment
While many future impacts of AI remain unclear, one change to the economy that seems inevitable is that much more electricity will be consumed—a key area of focus at Trump’s dinner.
What AI is capable of doing seems limitless, but AI itself has two basic requirements: supercomputers and the energy needed to power them.
Projections vary widely, but there is widespread agreement that after decades of basically flat U.S. electricity consumption (thanks to energy efficiency gains), we are now at an inflection point.
The National Electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA) projects 2% annual growth in U.S. electricity consumption per year over the next 25 years. This will be driven primarily by AI data centers and electric vehicles (which are linked to AI via self-driving cars).
Electrification is an AI-related investment theme that will have impacts across a wide range of industries as the world ramps up its ability to generate and transmit electricity.
AI will likely become more energy-efficient over time, but this will only drive down the cost of AI computing capability and thereby stimulate more demand for AI.
NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang recently praised President Trump for his understanding of how intertwined electrical energy production is with U.S. success in AI. Meanwhile, Sam Altman has described electricity as the limiting factor on AI growth.
I think it's hard to overstate how important energy is to the future here. Eventually chips network gear that will be made by robots and will make that very efficient and will make that cheaper and cheaper, but an electron is an electron. Eventually the cost of intelligence, the cost of AI will converge to the cost of energy and it'll be how much you can have. - Sam Altman (5/8/2025)
In terms of the impact of AI on the economy, we need to consider not just what AI will do but what AI requires to do it. In addition to lots of Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) and data centers, AI needs an enormous amount of electricity and related infrastructure.
An AI Roadmap for Investors
Investors can debate whether AI growth expectations are too high or too low, or what the real effects on workers will be. But one thing seems clear: AI isn’t a fad.
AI is a powerful transformative technology that will reshape the world for the rest of our lives. Investors therefore need to take an AI-centric approach to all investment decisions, from asset allocation to individual security selection.
We propose 3 key pillars for long-term investing in an economy that will increasingly be defined by AI.
(1) Own productive assets
AI is a boon to business owners, who can replace workers with technology. The good news is, anyone can become a business owner by investing in stocks.
The worst case scenario for workers—AI leads to massive labor market slack—could be the best case scenario for stocks.
Massive efficiency gains lead to higher profit margins as fewer workers are needed. A larger pool of unemployed workers means there will be less upward pressure on wages.
In this highly disinflationary scenario, the Federal Reserve and central banks around the world will likely pursue monetary policies that are highly accommodative in order to promote employment and support consumers.
In other words, they will print money.
Owners of stocks have the opportunity to win twice in a sense—earnings grow (thanks to higher profit margins and monetary easing) and the earnings become more valuable as the cost of capital plunges.
Historically, one might have thought of stocks as adding to one’s overall financial risk profile—what if there is a recession that causes a stock market downturn and increases the risk that I lose my job?
AI potentially reverses the relationship. In an AI economy, one’s increased risk of job loss is essentially the reason stocks will perform well.
(2) Own scarce assets
AI productivity gains have the potential to lead to monetary expansion as inflation pressure declines and unemployment rates tick up.
This dynamic may drive up asset prices, especially when it comes to supply-constrained assets. In essence, there will be more money and more wealth chasing an otherwise unchanged supply of potential investments.
After a very strong start to 2025, the price of gold stagnated for several months but started moving again as the Fed pivoted in response to employment concerns.
If we are indeed at the tipping point of more severe and sustained pressure on labor markets, all signs point to a Federal Reserve that is already prepared to cut rates and expand the money supply.
Under the leadership of whoever Trump nominates to replace Powell, the Fed’s inclination to ease in the face of potentially rising unemployment levels could be even greater.
Gold may not be the first investment that comes to mind as an AI play, but it could well be a major beneficiary of the monetary policies that result from AI productivity gains.
Bitcoin, like gold, is a supply-constrained savings instrument that stands to benefit from easy monetary policies. In the context of AI, there are additional paths to upside.
There are two key drivers of Bitcoin appreciation—Bitcoin adoption and fiat currency money printing. AI, in our view, supports both.
Bitcoin adoption simply refers to more people in the world coming to view Bitcoin as a way of storing capital. Bitcoin, like any financial asset, should grow in value as demand for it rises.
We are in the very early days of AI agents in a financial context—autonomous software systems that make their own decisions and engage directly in financial transactions.
As AI agents emerge, they will tend to utilize digital forms of money, like Bitcoin, which dominates the cryptocurrency market.
(3) Apply an AI lens to stock picking
Success in stock picking is fundamentally about finding businesses that will fare well in the future and avoiding those that will not.
It is not enough to be aligned with the mega-trends that drive the economy, but investing in businesses that sit in opposition to these powerful forces is often a bad idea.
As Warren Buffet famously said: "When a manager with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact."
Just as some workers will become more valuable in the AI economy as others become redundant, some businesses will thrive, while others sink.
Every company will tout an AI strategy. It is up to investors to figure out which ones are credible and which ones are just wishful thinking.
We have adapted our process to an AI-first approach to stock picking in which we evaluate long-term business prospects in the context of what we view as high probability AI outcomes.
Simply put, we want to make sure we select businesses that are likely to benefit from observable changes in the economy brought about by AI.
This goes beyond a superficial analysis of which businesses are direct AI plays. Key considerations we focus on include:
• Customer captivity—will revenue be lost to AI-based competitors?
• Adaptability—does the company have capacity to integrate new technology?
• Efficiency opportunities—will AI cut costs?
• Alignment with macro shifts—electrification beneficiary?
• Valuation—is the AI upside overpriced or ignored?
Productivity gains may provide broad-based upside for stock market investors in general, but as AI separates winners and losers, the shifting landscape should favor a highly selective approach to stock picking.
How 76research Can Help
AI is changing everything, and investors around the world are scrambling to stay on top of it. We are committed to helping individual investors understand and stay informed about the rapidly evolving AI landscape.
We accomplish this through our regularly published 76report newsletter and our Model Portfolios.
Recent AI-focused topics addressed in the 76report include:
Oracle Flying High on AI Tailwinds
NVIDIA Reports: The AI Race Is On!
Surviving (and Thriving) in the AI Economy
How to Use AI to Become a Better Investor
Subscribers to our Model Portfolios receive the 76report and access to all of our top investment ideas.
Our American Resilience Model Portfolio is focused on durable growth opportunities, including several direct AI plays and downstream beneficiaries of AI trends.
Our Inflation Protection Model Portfolio is skewed towards ideas that will benefit from potential monetary expansion fueled by AI-related productivity gains, including several gold-related and commodity-based investments.
Our Income Builder Model Portfolio represents a highly curated selection of high-dividend stocks that we anticipate will benefit from AI-driven trends, like automation and electrification.
The AI Revolution will change how we work, how businesses compete, and how investors build wealth. These changes will touch every one of us.
At 76research, we’re here to make sense of it. Our goal is to show you where the real opportunities are, how to avoid the hype, and how to invest with confidence as this new era unfolds.
