Stocks Swing After Trump Extends Iran Timeline… What Yesterday’s Jobs Data Tells Us… AI Agents Are Coming for Jobs… How to Invest Before Agent Supernova
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As I write on Thursday morning, stocks are doing something we’ve become accustomed to lately — swinging wildly, keeping us guessing about what’s coming next.
Behind these fluctuations lies President Donald Trump and his speech to the nation last night about the situation in Iran. The short version: We are winning, but expect another two or three weeks of intense fighting.
Markets were hoping for an exit ramp. Instead, they were given a near-term timetable to continue fighting without a detailed framework for a ceasefire or a plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
Stocks opened sharply lower after the news, then stabilized, and are now bouncing. Oil jumped – with WTI and Brent trading above $105 a barrel, although both are well off their morning highs.
Overall, it’s one of those sessions where no one can guess the closing.
Since we covered the fallout from the war on Iran in the market yesterday digestlet’s switch gears and take a closer look at the data point that emerged yesterday that got a little lost in the excitement.
What did we learn from the ADP jobs report?
ADP’s March private payrolls report came in at 62,000 yesterday – ahead of Wall Street’s forecast of 39,000 and roughly in line with February’s upwardly revised total. On the surface, that’s a decent number.
But if you dig one layer deeper, the image becomes much less comfortable.
Two sectors – education and health services, and construction – accounted for almost all of the gains, contributing about 58,000 and 30,000 jobs, respectively. At the same time, the trade, transportation, and utilities sectors laid off 58,000 workers. Manufacturing lost another 11,000. And larger companies, with 500 or more employees, actually posted a net gain decrease.
In other words, the main number does a lot of heavy lifting to cover up what is really a two-cylinder jobs engine.
Nella Richardson, chief economist at ADP, puts it plainly:
We’ve seen two straight months of steady job growth, but most of it has been in healthcare. This is really the story.
Health care is changing the labor market.
One sector holding the labor market is not a sign of broad-based strength. It’s a sign of tight flexibility — and tight flexibility can turn into a problem when this sector hits a speed bump.
We will get the official ruling soon. The Bureau of Labor Statistics will release its March employment situation report tomorrow morning. The Wall Street consensus is for 57,000 nonfarm payrolls — a rebound from February’s ugly 92,000 job losses, 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 respond until Monday. It can be an interesting weekend and Monday morning session.
But the real threat will not appear in tomorrow’s work report
Even if tomorrow’s jobs report exceeds expectations, the structural backdrop to the labor market is changing in a way that one month of payroll data simply cannot capture. Let’s talk about why.
First, a quick introduction to the term you’ll hear a lot about: AI agents.
An AI agent is not just a chatbot where you can type questions. It’s software that can take action on your behalf – independently, 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 do something else entirely.
Think of it less as a calculator and more as a digital employee who never tires, never sleeps, never complains of illness, 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: A single engineer with an army of AI agents at his disposal should be 10 times more productive than an engineer without one. The math on what that means for headcount isn’t complicated.
Goldman Sachs estimates that AI could automate tasks that account for 25% of total working hours in the United States, and expects 6% to 7% of jobs will be replaced over the adoption period.
Jeremy Allaire, co-founder and CEO of Circle – one of the world’s largest stablecoin issuers – was straight forward on where this is headed when he spoke at the Economic Club of New York last month:
AI agents will replace a large proportion of the work currently performed by humans on a large scale…
It would be more dramatic in white collar work.
normal digest Readers will remember The Citrini Research scenario we covered in the February 26 issue – A self-reinforcing loop where AI capabilities improve… companies need fewer workers… displaced workers spend less… and the resulting margin pressure pushes companies to invest more in AI. Rinse and repeat.
This increasingly looks like a real danger.
Take the story we covered yesterday digestMass layoffs at Oracle. It affects 20,000 to 30,000 workers at a company that just posted a 95% jump in net income. This is the citrine ring in motion.
Bottom line: Tomorrow’s labor market data will tell us what happened to jobs in March. But the above dynamic tells us what is to come in this decade.
How to invest before the next supernova
The structural transformation presented above has a name – at least in the pages of this article Money and mega trends.
Brian Hunt, editor of this free daily email, calls it the “Agent Supernova” — and he’s spent the past two weeks outlining exactly what it means for investors.
Here’s Brian on the scope of what’s to come:
Within the next two years, the number of AI agents operating in the US economy is not expected to increase 10-fold… or 50-fold… or even 1,000-fold.
Try at least 100000X.
This is the next Supernova agent. Agents work with people. Agents work with other agents. Agents manage companies. Agents negotiate and bargain with other agents.
To bring this to life, Brian provides a simple example. A single restaurant could soon be running five dedicated agents simultaneously — one to manage cooking schedules, one to handle accounting, one to supervise staff, one to track supply orders, and a general-purpose agent that coordinates all the others.
Now, multiply this model across every business in the economy, and you begin to understand what 100,000x growth in AI customers actually looks like in the real world.
So, how do we invest?
Brian says this economic shift extends right through the semiconductor industry. AI agents don’t live in the cloud alone, they work “at the edge,” inside our phones, cars, homes, offices, hospitals, and factories. All of this requires specialized chipsets designed for the task.
One of the companies Brian has his eye on is… Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).
Brian calls AMD one of the safest bets on the proxy wave. while nvidia (NVDA) AMD still dominates GPUs, and AMD has captured nearly 40% market share in the CPU space – and is deeply integrated with hyperscalers like Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. As proxy AI shifts the computing mix toward CPUs alongside GPUs, AMD’s positioning looks increasingly strategic.
Brian has three other semiconductor names he is monitoring in this space. To get these picks absolutely free – along with his full Agent Supernova investing thesis – Sign up for Money and mega trends here.
So where does all this leave us?
The ADP jobs number this week was decent. The official work report to be released on Friday may also be “acceptable.”
But “decent” means doing a lot of work in a labor market where two sectors shoulder everything else, where monthly salary growth is roughly a third of its pre-tariff pace, and the most powerful tech companies on Earth openly plan for a workforce where digital workers outperform human employees.
The question for investors is not whether or not the March jobs number looks good. It’s about whether you’re in a position to swarm the AI agents that come after “Okay.”
We will continue to track these stories here at digest.
I wish you a good evening,
Jeff Remsburg
(Disclaimer: I own AMD.)
