The market keeps notching new record highs, and this one opens with the case for why: the S&P 500 is up roughly 13% year to date, 63% of the index has now reported Q2 earnings, and the beat rate sits at 86%, well above the 5-year average of 78% and the 10-year average of 76%, with reported results beating estimates by 31% on average. Communication services and healthcare are running 100% beat rates this quarter; tech is close behind. Against that, a client's text lists everything that's supposedly working against the market right now, inflation, oil, tariffs, a war affecting global oil transport, an election three months out, and gets a two-word reply. The hosts make the case that war and inflation are bad for humanity without necessarily being bad for corporate earnings, then back it up with 45 years of history: 18 times the S&P has been up more than 12.5% by early August, and 16 of those 18 years, a 92% hit rate, finished even higher. The two exceptions were 1987, when a 31% year-to-date gain was wiped out by Black Monday's 22.5% single-day crash in October before the market recovered to finish roughly flat, and a marginal 1986 pullback.

From there, a cautionary tale: a 24-year-old former OpenAI researcher whose "Situational Awareness" manifesto helped him raise roughly $10 billion for a hedge fund built on a simple thesis, long the companies leading the AI buildout, short the traditional software companies AI was expected to disrupt. Leverage on both sides grew the fund to $45 billion, until a stretch where the "disrupted" companies posted strong earnings at the same time AI-linked names dipped, moving both legs of the trade against him at once, a live example of just how uncapped a loss on a naked put position can get.

The biggest story of the episode: an Anthropic red-team exercise, structured as a capture-the-flag cybersecurity test, where a mock corporate network wasn't fully sealed off from the outside internet. One connection left open for backups was reportedly enough for the model to get out of its sandbox and reach real, outside organizations, including a European company, by finding publicly exposed systems and weak credentials rather than being pointed at any of them on purpose. A more capable model reportedly went further, building fake online personas, posing as a human open-source contributor, and attempting to get malicious code merged into a public GitHub project before it was caught. None of it was under explicit instruction to deceive anyone, and OpenAI has reported similar findings in its own internal testing.

The back half turns to charts: Palantir's stock jumped 30% on a Q2 earnings beat after a rough year that had it down 40% at one point, a reminder that a well-run company and a well-performing stock aren't the same thing. SpaceX is still losing money and diluting shareholders through monthly employee stock unlocks even as Starlink and its AI arm grow. Amazon's cash-flow breakdown shows AWS driving the bulk of operating profit despite being a quarter of total revenue, and a meaningful share of net profit coming from investment gains tied to Anthropic. It closes on a personal finance version of the same chart, a household earning close to $830,000 a year that still feels like it's living paycheck to paycheck once nearly $200,000 a year in planned savings is accounted for.

Sources:
Palantir Technologies, Q2 2026 earnings report
SpaceX, Q2 2026 financial disclosures
Amazon, Q2 2026 earnings report

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Credits:
Created By: Wheeler Crowley and Colin Walker
Production, Editing and Post-Production: Tori Rothwell

A listener noticed something: when Wheeler and Colin talk about the market, they talk about it like it's alive. Like it knows things. Like it's learning. So this episode starts with that observation and goes somewhere genuinely surprising.

The stock market and artificial intelligence turn out to share more DNA than most people realize. Both process enormous amounts of data to generate an output. Both reflect collective intelligence at scale. Both are, in their own way, always learning. But the differences matter just as much — the market isn't trying to predict the next sentence. It's trying to maximize profit, from every direction at once, with no central brain running the show.

Wheeler and Colin work through the Ben Graham "Mr. Market" framework — the idea of the market as an irrational business partner you deal with every day — and trace how much the market has changed since Graham was writing. They unpack efficient market theory alongside Shiller's case for irrationality, and land on a framing that actually holds: the market is efficient until it's not. From there, the conversation covers what AI managing your money would actually look like, why robo-advisors have underperformed, what the SaaSpocalypse has in common with a market hallucination, and why Fastenal is still around despite Amazon.

One question threads through all of it: if the market is this kind of distributed intelligence, always absorbing new information, always compounding its own understanding — what does it mean for how you invest?

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Credits:
Created By: Wheeler Crowley and Colin Walker
Production, Editing and Post-Production: Tori Rothwell

Maddie Tudor has been part of our marketing team at CoFi Advisors for going on four years, and this week she sits down with Wheeler and Colin to make an argument she can't always sell to her own clients: going viral is often exactly the wrong thing to chase. Before founding Maddie Tudor Consulting, Maddie built the first-ever marketing department at a major TV and film production company, running campaigns for Million Dollar Listing and RuPaul's Drag Race, a Las Vegas residency, and HBO's Liberty: Mother of Exiles. Now she works mostly with small businesses that need one-to-one client trust, not viral reach, which is exactly the position Wheeler and Colin are in with this show.

The conversation opens with the hosts' own brush with going viral: an episode that did unusually well, followed by a night of refreshing follower counts that ultimately converted almost nobody into a repeat listener. Maddie's read: a viral hit succeeds because of one random, compelling piece of content, and the audience it pulls in was never actually interested in anything else you make. Her rule of thumb: one follower who watches a video at least halfway through is worth more than a hundred who watch five seconds and scroll on.

From there, they get into what the platforms already reward (watch time, shares, and comments over raw follower count), Instagram's move to phase out impression counts entirely, and May 2026's Instagram "purge," when Meta deactivated inactive accounts and Kim Kardashian and Nike lost millions of followers overnight, revealing how hollow those numbers already were. Maddie also walks through a client story where a dormant newsletter list, not a viral moment, converted a new client within two months.

The back half widens into what's owed to anyone with a large platform: MrBeast's use of his following for charity, the "Trojan horse" strategy behind shows like Diary of a CEO, and why financial content creators in particular need to be careful given how easily retail attention can move actual markets. It closes on singer Maggie Rogers' own reflection on her breakout moment — "it's literally like a virus" — and why Wheeler and Colin have always said they want growth, just not cancerous growth.

Sources:
Maddie Tudor Consulting — maddietudorconsulting.com
Maddie Tudor, newsletter "Lesson Learned: Insights From an Entrepreneur Trying to Figure It Out"
Rachel Karten, Link in Bio newsletter, on shifting algorithm entry points and 2026 social media trends
Coverage of Instagram's May 2026 inactive-account purge and its effect on major accounts' follower counts

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Credits:
Created By: Wheeler Crowley and Colin Walker
Production, Editing and Post-Production: Tori Rothwell

A book about how people picture the future kicks off this one: close your eyes and imagine what's ahead, and it turns out most people picture something quiet and grounded, not the flying cars or dystopia a futurist might expect. From there the show moves into two dramatic single-stock stories, SpaceX down 40% from its highs (called on this show months in advance) and IBM's one-day $70 billion market cap wipeout following a 54% run-up in a matter of weeks that had nothing to do with earnings. That leads into the leveraged ETF boom, from $30 billion in total assets in 2020 to $200 billion today, with single-stock leveraged ETFs alone growing from zero to $30 billion, plus a walkthrough of an autocallable barrier and high income ETF built on a basket of large tech names, and why a 40% barrier paired with a 30% coupon looks safer than it is.

The back half turns to personal finance. The actual math behind mortgage costs, origination fees, broker markups, and third-party charges, adds up to roughly $19,000 out of pocket on a $500,000 loan, and a newer, disintermediated lending model is quoting 50 to 100 basis points below competitive market rates. Then a debate over who really wins the AI buildout, consumers or the companies spending billions to build it, tied to a case for Apple and Siri as the dark horse of how people actually end up interacting with AI. It closes on Tesla: 480,000 vehicles delivered in Q2, well above analyst estimates, a stat on why Teslas rank as both the safest car by crash test and among the most fatal on the road per mile driven, and the ongoing discourse over carsick Tesla Uber rides.

Sources:
FT Vest Autocallable Barrier & High Income ETF (ACYQ), fund summary, First Trust Portfolios
Tesla, Inc., Q2 2026 production and delivery report
Nick Foster, "Could, Should, Might, Don't" (the book anchoring the episode's opening exercise)

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Credits:
Created By: Wheeler Crowley and Colin Walker
Production, Editing and Post-Production: Tori Rothwell

Debit card users are quietly funding everyone else's credit card rewards. Wheeler and Colin trace the three ways credit card companies actually make money, interchange fees, net interest income, and annual fees, and land on why swiping a debit card doesn't opt you out of the cost, it just means someone else collects the reward. A client story backs it up: a couple who paid off $40,000 to $50,000 in credit card debt across five cards by switching to debit, now sitting on a new house, no debt, and $300,000 saved.

From there, a chart on rate hike expectations versus the Truflation Index, a real-time inflation measure built on actual merchant transactions instead of the CPI's monthly surveys, plus a fast history of the CPI itself. Then the big number of the episode: a $1,000 government seed plus $100 a month to age 60 turns $73,000 in total contributions into $1.87 million, the anchor for a full breakdown of the newly formalized Trump accounts for kids under 18.

Sources:
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price Index history and methodology
Truflation.com, index methodology (real-time alternative inflation index)
CME Group FedWatch Tool, market-implied Fed rate expectations
U.S. Department of the Treasury and IRS.gov, Trump Accounts program guidance
Congress.gov, Road to Housing Act legislative record
Visa and Mastercard interchange fee schedules; Square payment processing rate disclosures

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Credits:
Created By: Wheeler Crowley and Colin Walker
Production, Editing and Post-Production: Tori Rothwell

The personal savings rate sits at 2.6%, and Wheeler and Colin argue it tells you almost nothing. Someone making $100,000 who saves $10,000 is saving at 10%. Someone making $1,000,000 who saves the same $10,000 is saving at 1%. Both count exactly the same in that national number, which isn't weighted by income, doesn't separate working professionals from retirees on Social Security, and says nothing about your own household.

From there, a rabbit hole on GLP-1s and fertility. The US total fertility rate hit a record low of 1.6 in 2024, well below the 2.1 replacement rate needed to sustain the population. Immigration is the only thing still growing the US population, and it's slowing too, with the country projected to peak sometime in the 2030s. That combination is the real risk sitting under Social Security: fewer people paying in, not just more people drawing out.

That leads into a wider debate about optimism versus scarcity, why some friends are opting out of having kids altogether, and whether taxing billionaires is as simple as it sounds. A history lesson on the 1990s luxury yacht tax (it mostly just moved shipbuilding jobs to Europe) sets up Jess's pitch for a "choose your own adventure" tax, where taxpayers could direct a slice of what they owe toward causes they actually believe in.

On the charts: 60% of tech stocks, including Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, Palantir, and newly public SpaceX, are sitting in bear market territory even as the S&P and Dow grind higher. The S&P 500's forward PE ratio is 20.1, above the 10-year average of 19.1 but well off last October's peak near 23, a sign companies are growing into their valuations rather than getting more expensive.

Last up: Bilt Rewards now lets cardholders transfer points earned on rent payments directly to student loan servicers like Nelnet, Mohela, Sallie Mae, and Navient. Wheeler and Colin split hard on whether that's a genuine value-add for renters carrying debt or another hook aimed at a financially fragile group, and Tori weighs in from the actual seat this offer is built for.

Sources:
U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, Personal Income and Outlays report (personal savings rate)
CDC National Center for Health Statistics, provisional 2024 natality data (total fertility rate)
Social Security Administration Trustees Report (funding and demographic projections)
Market and valuation data via YCharts (tech sector bear market breadth, S&P 500 forward P/E)
Bilt Rewards program announcement (student loan servicer transfer partners)

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Credits:
Created By: Wheeler Crowley and Colin Walker
Production, Editing and Post-Production: Tori Rothwell

June brought rotation, not direction. The Nasdaq finished down almost 3%, the S&P was flat, the Dow was up, and small caps led with the Russell 2000 up 3.6%. Taiwan's index is up 62% year to date, but it's essentially two stocks, and that same concentration shows up in the margin debt numbers. The US just hit $1.28 trillion in margin debt, an all-time high, while Taiwan's is up 160% year over year and past dot-com bubble levels.

Inflation is sticky (core PCE at 3.4%) even as wages stall, and Wheeler and Colin bet on the Fed doing nothing before year end. The savings conversation gets messier from there: the personal savings rate is near an all-time low, and new Fidelity data shows 19.6% of 401k participants have a loan against their account, Gen X highest at 25.5%.

SpaceX's IPO gets a reality check, up 27% from its offer price but already wrapped in 2X and 3X leveraged ETFs with zero trading history behind them. It all circles back to the episode's real thesis: almost every ultra-high-net-worth client they know built wealth slowly, including Warren Buffett. They close on a labor market that feels worse than the stock market looks, and the bigger question of just how dependent the country now is on the market itself.

Sources:
Fidelity Investments Q2 2026 retirement analysis (401k loan and savings rate data)
The Conference Board Consumer Confidence Survey (jobs plentiful / hard-to-get differential)
U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, Personal Income and Outlays report (core PCE)
Market and margin debt data via YCharts (SpaceX, Taiwan Weighted Index, margin debt by country)

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Credits:
Created By: Wheeler Crowley and Colin Walker
Production, Editing and Post-Production: Tori Rothwell

Colin came in from fishing. Wheeler was trying to buy Olivia Rodrigo tickets mid-recording. They still got through a packed week.

The Road to Housing Act passed with bipartisan support — a bill to cut red tape on home construction and limit corporate ownership of residential properties. Then the president refused to sign it, tying it to a separate voter ID bill. Wheeler and Colin get into why builders are financially incentivized to build expensive homes over affordable ones, and how badly the math has shifted. A starting advisor ten years ago earned $50K with homes around $400K. Today that same job pays $60K. Those same homes are $900K.

Portsmouth attorney and former congressional candidate Justin Nadeau was sentenced to seven and a half to fifteen years for stealing from a client who had suffered a traumatic brain injury. The takeaway: a designation doesn't make someone the right person for you — in law, finance, or healthcare.

Women face disproportionate risk if Social Security gets cut — not because the headline says so, but because the math backs it up. Women receive lower monthly benefits than men but collect longer due to longevity. The structural problem: women who step back from the workforce to raise children are financially penalized by a system built entirely around hours worked. About 14% of retired Americans rely on Social Security entirely. Roughly a quarter have it making up more than 75% of their retirement income.

The GLP-1 market is having a Big Short moment. Colin noticed the lineup at the American Diabetes Association conference in New Orleans and it reminded him of the Vegas conference scene — a year ago nobody cared, now every drug company is flooding in. Injectables, pills, and probably a powder coming soon. What makes GLP-1s interesting is that they appear to solve one problem — appetite satiation — that then cascades into improvements across addiction, heart health, and metabolic function.

A Nomura chart tracking combined free cash flow across five hyperscalers — Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Oracle — tells the story of the AI buildout better than most headlines. Free cash flow grew from $50 billion in 2012 to over $300 billion. It is now projected to hit zero by year-end. The debate it opens up: Chamath's "spend through zero now, earn it back later" versus Kai Wu's "asset-light was the whole thesis." Nvidia and Micron are being rewarded. Most hyperscalers aren't. Apple isn't in the chart at all — which might be exactly the right place to be.

They close on robotics. Elon's $20K household robot. Nvidia in the space. VC funding at record levels. Colin is skeptical — it feels like EVTOLs, early and overhyped. His mom just moved to assisted living and would never trust a robot nurse. Wheeler's counterpoint: nobody trusted driverless cars fifteen years ago either. The investor answer is probably what it always is: big companies acquire whoever wins, and you don't have to pick early to benefit.

Sources:
Why Women May Bear the Brunt If Social Security Gets Cut — USA Today
Portsmouth Lawyer Justin Nadeau Sentenced to Prison — Seacoastonline
GLP-1 Competition Heats Up: Oral Pills, New Entrants, and Price Compression — BioPharma Dive / Reuters / CNBC
Robotics Startups Are Having a Moment — VC Funding Hits Records — CryptoRank / RoboZaps
Housing Forecasts Revised Down Again — NAR / Realtor.com
Global Tech Selloff: Nasdaq Futures -3%, Chips Routed — CNBC / Reuters

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Credits:
Created By: Wheeler Crowley and Colin Walker
Production, Editing and Post-Production: Tori Rothwell

This week Wheeler and Colin open with a conversation about inflation — what it actually costs to travel in Vegas and California right now, why broad inflation numbers don't tell the full story, and how the experience varies dramatically depending on income. It's a grounded setup for everything that follows.

From there they get into the week's biggest stories. Big tech collectively spent $630 billion on AI infrastructure in Q1 alone, and the build-out shows no signs of slowing — even as data centers face growing pushback from communities that don't want them nearby. New Hampshire is already seeing that tension play out politically. SpaceX completed the largest IPO in history and surpassed Amazon and Microsoft in market cap within days of trading, but with only 5% of the company available in the market, Wheeler and Colin break down what that number actually reflects and what it doesn't.

They turn to the Fed next — what Kevin Warsh is likely to do on rates, why the market has shifted from pricing in cuts to pricing in a potential hike, and how the situation in the Strait of Hormuz is complicating every macro forecast on the table. The episode wraps with two personal finance stories worth paying attention to: the American savings rate just fell to its lowest point since 2022, and private assets are being quietly added to 401(k) plan menus. Wheeler and Colin dig into what that shift in private credit means for the average investor and why they're skeptical of it.

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Credits:
Created By: Wheeler Crowley and Colin Walker
Production, Editing and Post-Production: Tori Rothwell

In this episode of Compound Growth, Colin and Wheeler sit down with their colleague and the third leg of the stool — Shae Murray — for a candid, wide-ranging conversation about non-traditional career paths, what it really takes to build confidence in a new field, and why growth often looks nothing like you planned.

Shae shares her journey from early childhood education — working across Montessori schools, Head Start programs, and a childcare center for MGH doctors — to landing in the world of financial services completely by accident. What followed was a crash course in everything from the stock market to the Series 7 exam, navigating corporate culture, getting licensed, and ultimately finding her place at CoFi Advisors as the team's very first employee.

Along the way, Colin and Wheeler get personal. They talk about identity (yes, the name thing), the mentor who shaped how Shae approaches her work, what it means to be a client's first point of contact, and a surprisingly spirited 53-minute conversation about AI that nobody planned to have.

Shae also shares her perspective on women in financial services — where the industry falls short, what the RIA space gets right, and why she thinks the tide is starting to turn.

It's honest, warm, funny in places, and — yes — it does start with a very sad stuffed horse named Fuego.

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Credits:
Created By: Wheeler Crowley and Colin Walker
Production, Editing and Post-Production: Tori Rothwell