I don’t watch TV and none of my friends my age have cable. Still, getting booked on a show like that feels special and I find it thrilling to get even a few minutes on the airwaves.

I arrived early Friday morning to the greenroom, where I met a couple of other guests waiting to go on before me. A makeup artist took the shine off my face while a producer with a clipboard looped a microphone through the back of my suit jacket.

I walked on set and sat down next to Stuart. As usual, we started talking about the stock market.

Then he asked me about Grok Bot, a relatively new AI tool from Elon Musk’s SpaceXAI which I’ve found so compelling and intuitive that I’ve become a power user in a few short weeks.

I gave Stuart a few examples of how I use the tool — video editing, content creation, research, email triage — then we cut to a commercial and I went home.

What typically happens after going on TV is that my friends see the clip when I post it on my own social media channels, then I get some emails or LinkedIn messages from older colleagues or my parents’ friends who caught me live.

But something extra happened this time.

Katie Miller, who hosts a prominent podcast and has a quarter-million followers on X, tweeted the segment and highlighted how I was using Grok Bot.

Then Elon Musk — arguably the most famous person on Earth — reposted it with three words “Try Grok Bot” to his 241 million followers.

Within an hour, the clip had almost 600,000 views on X.

Elon took a cable segment and put it in front of everyone cable no longer reaches. I don’t know how many people watch live TV these days, but it’s clear X reached far more of them this time.

There is a lot of luck at play with what I’m describing here. I post my news segments all the time and Elon has never once engaged with any of them.

But part of this is also a matter of surface area. Luck needs somewhere to land.

This clip traveled because it existed, and it existed because I’ve spent hundreds of hours on camera and have published millions of words on the internet the last few years.

Putting out a high volume of work on the internet remains the highest-leverage way to spend your time. It’s what opens the door to opportunity.

There is no secret formula. Draft and post, draft and post. Again and again and again with the knowledge that most of your efforts will fall flat.

…until the moment they don’t.

The more you publish online, the wider the surface area, and the higher the odds Elon Musk tweets your video clip.

You can watch my segment here.

That’s what I’ve learned building an independent media company.

Most readers discover me through a random chart on social media or a clip from my podcast. Others find an article through Google or ChatGPT.

My job each day is to make that first impression strong enough that they sign up for the newsletter or subscribe to the show.

That’s why our team just rebuilt the Opening Bell Daily website from scratch.

People may find us one idea at a time, but every idea needs a home that’s as compelling as the idea itself.

Every chart from my columns now has its own page, and our team is ramping up our news coverage beyond the flagship newsletter.

Full Signal episodes and clips are also archived alongside our written markets and macro coverage.

A few other lessons behind the redesign:

1. Charts beat essays. One clean visual that explains the market is almost always faster and more useful to investors and readers. Now we have a dedicated section of just charts.

2. Trust comes from showing your work. Posting stock picks on X is easy because the algorithm buries them in minutes. There’s a different sense of credibility that comes with a searchable archive of every call you’ve ever made. Now readers can look back at what we said and when.

3. Newsletter is still king. The flagship briefing I write each morning still drives our coverage and operation, as it has since we started the company. The site makes it easier than ever for new readers to sign up and stick around.

4. Write for the stranger who has never heard of you. New readers increasingly come to us through Google or an AI query, so every piece of content has to make sense on its own. So we prioritize brevity and intuitive design.

Every reader meets us through one idea.

Our job is to make that idea good enough that they come back for the next one.

The updated website is just the latest step in the forever game of learning how to better serve our audience. There is always more to do in a game that’s measured in decades.

If you have any feedback or ideas you’d like to see implemented, you know where to find me.

You can explore the new website here.

I spoke on stage at the Silvia Investor Summit in New York about the most important charts investors should pay attention to right now.

Alongside Anthony Pompliano, the plan was to walk through the numbers behind the AI bull market, midterm seasonality, and where capital is flowing.

Now, because I publish multiple charts every single morning, I live in my own bubble. When you spend your days staring at data, it’s easy to assume everyone else sees what you see.

As it happens, the two most popular charts from the session were the ones I almost cut last minute because they felt too obvious. Those ended up being the charts people took the most photos of and asked me about after I came off stage.

I find so much joy in my own work and routine, but the repetitive nature means I regularly forget what I know.

Niche financial topics suddenly feel commonplace and I have to remind myself most people do not live in the same mental bubble.

My sense is that whatever you spend your days obsessing over, you probably undervalue it. The ideas that you think are too basic to say out loud are usually the most useful things you can share with others.

The best part is that once you share them, you realize there’s almost always someone in the room who wants to learn more.

We just released my full talk as an episode of Full Signal today — I hope you find the information valuable. You can tune in on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.

And if you have not tried our company’s personal finance AI, Silvia, you can sign up for free at CFOSilvia.com. This is what I use to manage and track my investment portfolio, net worth, and monthly budgeting.

I am biased, but for anything related to finance it totally kicks the butts of ChatGPT, Claude, Muse and other AI tools out there.

Silvia has outperformed against its AI peers on a handful of finance benchmarks, too.

After nearly a month on the road and three conferences in three states, I’ll be staying put in New York for the near future. A lot of exciting work ahead.

Have a great weekend.

At the start of September, I had never spoke at a conference before.

A few weeks later, I’d done it five times.

We tend to assume that becoming qualified for something is a gradual process. The idea that confidence leads experience (“fake it ‘till you make it”), though, is not what I’ve found to be true.

From what I can tell most people are more prepared than they realize, even if their own self-perception has not caught up.

Days after speaking in Huntington Beach at Future Proof, I flew to Houston for Robinhood’s HOOD Summit, where I woke up early to record a live episode of Full Signal before moderating a second panel that same morning.

Then I returned to New York just in time for my company’s inaugural Silvia Investor Summit, where I joined my friend Anthony Pompliano to discuss market charts and investments I personally own in my portfolio.

In the whirlwind of flights and hotels and last-minute preparations, whispers of doubt and jitters would creep in.

But then, each time I stepped onstage, focus replaced my nerves. Like muscle memory, my mind simply fell back to the hundreds of podcast episodes I’ve recorded the last year.

The novelty of the moment would suddenly feel familiar.

What I had anticipated being a sudden leap forward really was just the same practiced moves making themselves visible in a new format.

I know I’m not the only one who draws imaginary boundaries according to the things I’ve already accomplished.

And thinking this way makes sense. If you’ve never done something before, it’s natural to believe you have a long way to go before you’re up to snuff.

But what the last month revealed to me was the subtle but yawning gap between lack of experience and lack of preparation.

You can be the first as long as you have the second, but you’re cooked if you lack both.

The reminder I’m leaving for myself, as I write this on a Friday night in the office, is that just because you haven’t done something before doesn’t mean you haven’t been preparing for it.

That’s all for now folks.

Phil Rosen
Co-Founder & CEO, Opening Bell Media
Chief Market Strategist, Silvia Inc.

I write a markets newsletter each morning, host an investing podcast, and post charts across my social channels every day.

What you may not know is that I also serve as Chief Market Strategist at the public company Silvia Inc. (Nasdaq: SVIA; formerly ProCap Financial (Nasdaq: BRR)).

The name change we recently announced reflects what we have increasingly become — an AI company focused on building the best personal finance super-intelligence product possible.

I have an unusual vantage point on Silvia because I’m both an employee and power user.

Of course I am biased, but I do use Silvia every day, and did so even before I joined the company just over five months ago.

My job(s) requires me to move quickly across markets, earnings reports, economic data and equity research. In addition to helping me manage my personal portfolio, Silvia has increasingly become part of my professional workflow.

I use it to interrogate financial data, pressure-test stock picks and get up to speed on topics before going deeper myself.

Markets produce an absurd amount of information every day. General-purpose AI makes sorting through it all much easier. But finance leaves little room for hallucinations, inaccurate numbers or fuzzy sourcing.

That is what we are trying to solve with Silvia.

Over the last six months, our engineering team has rebuilt much of the technology underneath the product around finance specifically.

Silvia now combines proprietary data pipelines with a system that coordinates different models, tools and agents, including Silvia Analyst, our quantitative finance specialist.

Silvia Analyst is also the engine behind the investment research division I oversee, Silvia Insights (formerly ProCap Insights).

OpenAI, Anthropic and Google are building extraordinary general-purpose systems capable of tackling everything from coding and science to poetry and healthcare. I use all these tools too.

But we are not trying to make Silvia do all those things at the same level. We are working to make it exceptional at only finance.

And the early results are promising.

Our team created public benchmarks covering taxes, mortgages and credit cards that grade AI products on accuracy and their ability to cite primary sources.

Silvia finished first across all three against major AI products, and we’ve open-sourced the benchmarks for anyone to verify.

To be clear, this is not to say that I believe investors should outsource their thinking and judgment to Silvia.

I actually think Silvia — and AI more broadly — makes personal discernment even more important. As access to high level analysis becomes cheaper and more pervasive, the information itself becomes less of an advantage.

But the investors who can avoid getting bogged down by taxes, paperwork and portfolio mechanics can spend more time on the human judgment component of investing.

Having an edge as an investor today increasingly means knowing what tools to use to bulletproof your decision-making.

This is how I think about Silvia.

It does not make decisions for me, but it does compress hours of work every week while giving me the most helpful possible context for how I can grow my wealth.

You can try Silvia for free here.

Let me know what you think. I will share any feedback with our engineering team so they can keep making the product better.

Phil Rosen
Co-Founder & CEO, Opening Bell Media
Chief market Strategist, Silvia Inc.

Personal views only. Not the views of Silvia, Inc. or its affiliates.

It’s not every day you start a new decade.

Those of you who know me personally understand that I’m neither big on birthdays nor parties. But ahead of turning 30 in August, even I conceded that this one deserved something to mark the occasion.

My wife agreed, and she is not one to take half measures.

Kayt threw me the first birthday party I’ve had in years at a bar in midtown. Gold balloons touched the ceiling, waiters whisked appetizers and drinks, and a colorful mess of printed photos from the last decade adorned the tables and walls.

Nearly everyone who brought a gift decided the best thing to get me was a book or two or three. This reminded me that my friends know me very well.

I’m glad everyone put the disposable cameras to excellent use, too.

Turning 30 removes me from the only role I’ve ever known as the “young guy” in the room. I can no longer fall back on playing dumb or green as a twenty-something.

I know now that youth serves as both an insecurity and a safety net.

At 22, I remember trying to act more experienced than I was so that older people would take me seriously. I knew I didn’t have the chops to back up the confidence I wanted to project, so I worked hard to emulate those who did.

What I missed back then was that nobody expected me to have the chops anyway. The very thing I was trying to overcome — my youth — gave me enormous latitude to screw up.

I made mistakes and changed my mind and acted ridiculous with effectively zero consequence because I was living through a chapter that does not come with high expectations.

Now, as I write this, I certainly don’t feel 30.

I actually feel the same. But now I realize the insecurities I associated with being young did not fade in proportion to the experience I accumulated. They simply change shape as you find bigger fish to fry.

Just a few weeks into being 30, for instance, I spoke at a conference for the first time. Ahead of my talk, I spent time with friends who had dozens under their belts.

I found myself mirroring their comfort in an attempt to shake my own jitters and prove to myself that I could keep up in the big leagues.

This seems like a forever story.

I can’t imagine there is a specific age when you stop looking around the room for people who have done things you haven’t yet but aspire to do.

I used to think moving goalposts meant a rigged game, but this increasingly seems like the whole point. The reward for competence is earning the chance to be uncomfortable somewhere new.

Funny enough, after I walked off the stage at the conference, someone I admire a great deal told me I had officially “made it” in the industry.

If this is what “making it” feels like, it’s remarkably similar to figuring it out as you go, pretending to be more experienced than you are, and looking around the room for someone who knows better.

So maybe 30 is not so different from 22 after all.

Then again, maybe I’ll understand when I’m older.

Let’s have ourselves a year.

Phil Rosen
Co-founder & CEO, Opening Bell Media
Chief Market Strategist, ProCap Financial

There’s only one conference in the world you can talk about the stock market on stage at lunch and then see Wiz Khalifa and Gym Class Heroes perform a blowout concert on the same stage by dinner.

That’s Future Proof. And there’s nothing like it.

That contrast captures what makes the event unique. Finance has always been a self-serious industry practiced behind closed doors inside marble conference rooms.

But Future Proof puts it on the beach, where attendees have no choice but to swap suits for board shorts.

It sounds unconventional, but as someone who’s personally made the jump from legacy media to new media, it feels representative of where the industry is going.

I had the opportunity to share the stage with my friend Sonali Basak, chief investment strategist at iCapital, for the first ever live recording of my podcast, Full Signal. We discussed the Federal Reserve, how investors can think about AI doomsday headlines and the best opportunities in the market right now.

(I’ll publish our conversation in the coming days. Subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube to tune in.)

I also moderated a panel with two investors who flew in from Miami — Fortuna Investments CEO Justus Parmar and a partner in his firm, Joseph Magazine, who is also an elected official as a Miami Beach city commissioner.

We talked about their America-first investment strategy, how investors can identify opportunities created by government policy and whether Miami is truly becoming “Wall Street South.”

These two conversations served as another reminder that the lines between the investing universe and everything else are blurring by the day.

The people who understand finance best increasingly have a pulse on politics, culture, and media.

This was the first time I had ever spoken onstage at a conference.

It felt that much more special because it’s an event I first knew as an enthusiastic attendee and fan, one of more than 5,000 financial professionals who make the trip to learn something new and meet good people.

The Future Proof and Ritholtz Wealth Management team is world-class, and while I’ve known them for some time, I felt nerves and flutters before both appearances.

Friends and strangers had generous things to say afterward, though in my head I kept wondering whether I had left the microphone damp from my clammy hands.

Progress, as I wrote last week, rarely feels as polished from the inside as it looks from the outside.

Between my two stage appearances and the 23 meetings I packed into two and a half days, I sat down with Mark Gochnour and Jake DeKinder for The Informed Investor, Dimensional Funds’ in-house podcast.

We discussed AI and markets, traditional versus new media, and my approach to long-term investing and stock picking.

LinkedIn News also interviewed me about running my own company, the ways a personal brand can accelerate a career, and what I would tell professionals who are nervous about publishing their work online.

That conversation felt like the through-line to everything else that happened this week.

For most of my career, my job was to observe and document financial markets, interview the biggest players and explain their ideas to readers.

I still do those things. But building Opening Bell Media has increasingly placed me inside the story, too.

Much of this I’ve unknowingly been preparing for by making myself extremely visible online for nearly a decade.

I’m only realizing as I write this just how much happened over the last couple days.

But that’s showbiz.

And that’s Future Proof.

I always loved the idea that confidence stems from evidence.

It’s much harder to execute with any certainty without sufficient reps. The same idea holds whether you’re shooting hoops or playing piano or writing a newsletter.

I am learning this in real time with Full Signal. My team released our 100th episode in August(!) and viewers write to me every day about how much better it is today compared to when we first launched last November.

I remember trying so hard to act normal — my best “fake it ‘till you make it” — through that first episode with Mike Green, who has spent decades as a leading voice and portfolio manager on Wall Street.

I was nervous about how I looked on camera. How my voice sounded in the microphone. Whether my questions made me sound dumb or young.

My clammy hands left my stack of notes damp and I’d sweat through my shirt.

That Mike has agreed to come back multiple times since that first episode is a reminder that rarely do other people pick up on the insecurities clanking around in your head. I’ve learned that things are seldom as uncomfortable or awkward as your brain wants you to think, particularly if it’s clear to everyone else you intend to work hard to improve.

Either way, I would not have been able to resolve my own misgivings without pushing through a high volume of reps.

It took more than 30 episodes for me to start feeling comfortable in the anchor chair. After about 60 I stopped feeling nervous about interjecting to keep the discussions focused.

Now, with episode #108 due this week, I’m not afraid to challenge my guests’ views, even if they have decades of experience on me.

Separate from the Full Signal franchise and brand and catalog of interviews, I feel I’ve finally built the stack of evidence I need to feel unshakingly confident in the work at hand.

Though my wife may disagree, the imposter syndrome has evaporated not because of an inflated ego but because every time I sit down to film I know I’ve done it literally a hundred times before.

I’m writing this on an airplane to Huntington Beach, California to speak at Future Proof, one of the most popular investment conferences in the world. I’ll be on stage Wednesday for a session titled, “Full Signal Live,” meaning it exists by definition because I committed to the podcast.

Today I receive 30 or 40 pitches a week from leading Wall Street firms, investment groups and investors who want to sit for an interview on Full Signal.

I’m seeing more inbound today as an independent operator than I did when I was a reporter at Business Insider.

There are suddenly a lot of smart people paying attention and more keep coming.

The only way I can rationalize it all is by falling back on the stack of evidence that the show sits on.

It’s a virtuous cycle. Confidence stems from evidence. Evidence feeds confidence. The best part is that the better you get at a thing, often the more fun the thing becomes.

I’m happy to have survived the clammy hands chapter to get to the fun one.

The pilot just announced we’re landing soon. Time to wrap this up.

One ask — if you haven’t yet, please subscribe to Full Signal on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.

And if you are attending Future Proof this week, come find me on Wednesday at the PCH Stage at 1 PM. I’ll be speaking with my friend Sonali Basak, the chief investment strategist for iCapital.

Otherwise I’ll see you at episode #1,000.

Phil Rosen
Co-Founder & CEO of Opening Bell Media; Chief Market Strategist of ProCap Financial

I have now hosted my own show for 6 months.

The best of the best investors, fund managers, market strategists and Wall Street veterans have joined me for conversations across the first 70 episodes of Full Signal.

Being on-air every week with smart people has forced me to level up my own market knowledge.

I have learned quickly that being able to write about finance from behind a laptop in an empty room is a different skill than being able to speak to it on camera, interrogate ideas on the spot, and shape a conversation into a publish-ready show.

Full Signal is a continuation of our team’s bet that the next great financial and investing show will not emerge from CNBC, Bloomberg or Fox Business, but that it will instead be built independently on the internet.

Until recently, financial television was defined by institutions with unlimited resources and wide distribution networks.

That model worked in a world where distribution was scarce and gate-kept.

The rise of social media, though, opened the playing field to anyone with the disruptor’s instinct and a little bit of ambition.

What we’re building with Full Signal — and with Opening Bell Media more broadly — would have been impossible 15 years ago.

As someone who started my career at Business Insider, I have first-hand evidence that independent voices are becoming more trusted than legacy players precisely because they are closer to their audience and less constrained by corporate incentives.

Full Signal is still in its early days. But the audience continues to grow across platforms and viewers tell me they appreciate both the long-form and unhurried style as well as the density of “insights per minute.”

Some of my favorite recent interviews:

• Lyft CEO David Risher on the future of autonomous driving

• The world’s leading oil analyst on the Strait of Hormuz

• Ray Dalio’s former right-hand man on the biggest market risks

As many of you have heard me discuss often the last several years, I believe we are in a golden age of independent media.

Full Signal is just one example of many that confirms the ambitious disruptors now have the edge over the incumbents.

If you have been watching or listening to Full Signal, thank you.

If you want to support the show, subscribing on YouTube, and leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify genuinely helps us grow and book great guests.

I hope you are having a great Memorial Day weekend.

Talk soon,

Phil Rosen
Co-founder & CEO, Opening Bell Media
Chief market strategist, ProCap Financial

Lyft CEO David Risher still makes time to drive Lyft passengers every 6 weeks.

It only makes sense, he told me, as someone maniacally obsessed with improving the customer experience.

David — who was an early employee at both Microsoft and Amazon — joined Lyft in 2021 as a board member before stepping into the CEO role in April 2023.

Since he took over, the company has become more profitable and grown its market share against Uber, which remains the category definer in the duopoly that is the ride-sharing business.

Lyft stock, though, has fallen 32% to start the year, despite coming off its best quarter on record.

The market believes autonomous driving will eat the ride share industry’s lunch.

But the opposite is going to happen, David said, and Lyft is actually better positioned than its rival to capitalize on the AI era.

David joined me in New York City for a wide-ranging interview on Full Signal this week, riding a Citi Bike to the studio during a 92-degree afternoon.

We had a fascinating, no-nonsense conversation.

Among other topics, I pressed him on why Lyft stock has dropped 32% this year and underperformed Uber, how he sees autonomous vehicles changing the business, and whether he would entertain an acquisition offer from Google or Tesla.

This is one of the most unique conversations I have shared with someone on the show.

I hope you give it a listen — and do leave a review with you thoughts!

You can tune in on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.

I am looking forward to hearing your feedback.

Stay sharp and talk to you soon!

Phil Rosen
Co-Founder & CEO, Opening Bell Media
Chief market strategist, ProCap Financial

Good evening, my friends!

I’m writing to you from an airplane somewhere above Colorado. I’d planned to nap on this flight but I had something in my head I just had to put on paper…

I have been experimenting aggressively with AI for the last two years.

As much as it can supercharge productivity, I believe these tools risk making its users much dumber.

Rather than optimize for new skills or knowledge, AI pushes us to normalize — and so, seek out — increasingly quick fixes and low-friction outcomes.

In this sense, four of the five most-downloaded apps in Apple’s App Store effectively encourage you to bypass the difficult mental processes necessary to produce genuine understanding and independent thought.

I say this as someone who works at cutting-edge of AI and investment research.

With a team of engineers at ProCap Financial, I deploy AI agents each day to parse economic data, analyze stocks, pull SEC filings to produce robust research reports.

Our system can do all this in, quite literally, 1% of the time versus a comparable team of human analysts inside a legacy financial firm.

I am bias, but the results are remarkable.

The AI agents routinely surface investment ideas sophisticated enough to rival those from the leading investors and portfolio managers I interview on my show each week.

The technology just works.

But again, the allure of a more productive work day shrouds the risks in the tools.

While I don’t worry about mass white-collar unemployment or a Terminator-like war with the machines, I am increasingly troubled by the hijacking of our mental capacities.

I’ve also become particularly grateful that I went to college and entered the workforce before AI proliferated.

Because I’ve published thousands of articles the old-fashioned way, I entered the AI era with sufficient judgment to use AI as leverage without letting it replace the underlying thinking or skills.

Researchers at Berkeley published a new paper that found university professors have handed out 30% more A’s since ChatGPT debuted in November 2022, with a particular uptick in classes with more writing and coding.

After analyzing 500,000 grades from 2018 to 2025, they concluded that grade inflation “may also weaken human capital development if students, receiving higher grades, overestimate their mastery and underinvest in foundational skills.”

The researchers continued:

More broadly, if AI displaces skill-building tasks during learning, students may graduate with weaker capabilities in precisely the domains where AI is strongest, reinforcing a feedback loop between AI in education and AI in production that could accelerate automation and widen skill gaps in the labor market.

Indeed, competence has always been tied to friction — a lesson particularly important for young people.

But thanks to AI, producing high-quality work no longer requires the same repetition or concentration.

Now, it’s entirely possible to scale a learning curve without learning anything.

The worst part of all this, which the Berkeley researchers pointed out, is that these tools create the illusion of understanding. Fake fluency without true comprehension, included with an affordable monthly subscription to your app of choice.

Why struggle through a crappy first, second and third draft of an essay when ChatGPT can do it for you?

Why memorize anything when perfect retrieval is cheap?

It’s funny, thinking through the power of AI has made me more protective of the human parts of my work.

I still write my own financial column each day.

I still host a human-to-human interview show.

And this blog, of course, remains 100% human.

If you’ve followed my work for awhile, you know how much I value writing as a craft.

Writing teaches you how to think. It’s the one skill that’s upstream from everything else.

Without sitting to write each day, it’s plausible that I would gradually switch all my brain work from critical thinking to mere management and orchestration.

Tom Slater, an investment manager with Baillie Gifford, captured the idea in a recent essay:

Just as literacy gave us something new by repurposing something old, AI is reshaping the brain’s allocation of cognitive resources. The trade may be worth making. But right now, most people are making it without realising there is a trade at all.

I hope you don’t think I am a luddite for publishing this piece.

AI can absolutely turn you superhuman. That’s why I use it every day.

You should master it as soon as possible to unlock your time and do great work.

Just don’t turn your brain to mush in the process.

Phil Rosen,
Co-Founder & CEO, Opening Bell Media
Chief market strategist, ProCap Financial

I have some news.

It’s my first day as chief market strategist for ProCap Financial.

I’m joining Anthony Pompliano to build Wall Street’s first agentic AI research shop, ProCap Insights.

Over the last several weeks, we have been building an army of AI agents that can autonomously hunt for alpha, parse financial markets, debate one another, and produce world-class research reports and actionable trade ideas for independent investors.

All done at a fraction of the cost of traditional Wall Street firms and with just one human (yours truly) overseeing the work and providing editorial judgement.

To our knowledge, no existing human research team can generate research and investment edge at this scale and speed.

I’ll continue to run Opening Bell Daily and host my show, Full Signal, as CEO and co-founder, only now with a bit fuller of a plate. Nothing changes there.

Newsletter subscribers got the scoop before sunrise this morning, of course.

If you’ve been reading my work for a while, you know I’ve been thinking about this intersection for a long time, the intersection of fast-paced markets and cutting edge technology.

ProCap Insights is me putting that conviction into practice.

I have picked up a lot building Opening Bell Media over the last two years, and I’m ready to put those lessons to work in this new role.

What I’ve learned getting that business off the ground will propel this one forward.

Here’s what I know does not work:

• Vague macro takes or boilerplate advice is not valuable to anyone

• General “stocks to watch” lists are boring and cliche

• Readers want less information, not more of it

• Research that takes a week to produce is stale by the time it’s published

And a few things that do work:

• Specific, actionable trade ideas with clear timelines

• Speed is the best moat to building a new company, especially in the age of AI

• Independent investors and retail are more than qualified and eager to read institutional-grade work

Our first batch of free research is already live. You can go read all the available reports now at ProCapInsights.com.

Take a look and let me know what you think.

Phil Rosen
Chief Market Strategist, ProCap Financial | Co-founder of Opening Bell Media | Host of Full Signal

I haven’t had a job for two years.

That’s because it’s the two-year anniversary since launching Opening Bell Daily.

I’m in a lucky spot where each day I get to figure out both how to build a business as well as report on the most unpredictable financial markets in history.

Strangers and friends tell me my work helps them make sense of their money and how it fits into the world around them. That never feels normal. I hope it never does.

The constant context switching pushes me most.

A typical day includes back to back meetings with sponsors and prospective interview guests, filming an episode of my show, debugging the code for our portfolio-tracking software, commuting to a studio for a TV segment.

Then there are the dozens of charts I post across social media each day.

Emailing with readers around the clock. The media dinners and events I host for Journalists Club.

It’s a chaotic juggling act that I’d be sad to give up.

And all of it is anchored by the newsletter.

The act of sitting to write each day is what allows me to keep my brain in order, converse with people smarter than me, and operate a financial media company with context and depth.

The writing habit is the engine. Everything else is downstream.

I don’t know what this company or the work will look like in another two years. But I feel confident that the newsletter will still go out each morning.

Once the morning email stops, everything else will lose its punch.

Onward to year three!

Phil Rosen
Co-founder of Opening Bell Media | Host of Full Signal

P.S. If you haven’t subscribed to the newsletter or my show, Full Signal, please do!

When I moved to New York in 2021, I submitted an essay about Manhattan to a literary magazine that I had no business writing.

To my surprise — and despite my lack of published essays and actual years in Manhattan — they published the piece.

I had written a love letter to a city I did not yet know.

I described the place with both the confidence of a lifelong New Yorker and the ignorance of someone who had just arrived.

(You can read the full piece here.)

Five years later, I read it with a strange nostalgia and tenderness.

So much has changed. In more ways than one I am not the same person who authored it.

At any rate, I do in fact now feel like a New Yorker. And while I write about business and finance each day, the city has kept my literary spirit nourished nonetheless.

The mythology of New York is old enough to have real texture and weight.

Writers have always been especially susceptible to it.

Literary types come because Whitman walked these streets. Baldwin sat in its bars. Didion named its particular dread so precisely you could feel it in your chest like a cold.

They (we) come because they have read too many books set here and not enough set elsewhere, and because somewhere in them lives the half-conscious belief that proximity to greatness is the same as achievement.

I arrived with ambitions I had not yet stress-tested against reality.

The city, I had decided, would do the testing for me.

It’s true you are not special here. I got that right in 2021. But it turns out to be clarifying rather than deflating.

Everyone around you is also trying. Some are failing. Some are succeeding at things beyond imagination.

As I wrote in 2021:

“Much of the allure, I think, comes from the same romanticism of Paris or Hollywood — the promise of being a star among stars and the fear of ignoring a talent you are certain is unique to only you.

…there’s something hopeful about looking up at skyscrapers while bumping shoulders with anonymous millions. The city gives me a sense of optimism that shields me from self-doubt and brings out a certain innocence in me.”

Half a decade and a few apartments later — Upper West Side, Upper East Side, midtown — I can confirm the indifference is real.

The skyline does not adjust for new arrivals. The subway does not wait. The throng of office commuters will walk straight through you if you linger too long.

And yet something about being genuinely unimportant to a place so alive turns out to be its own form of liberation.

The city is too large and too indifferent to sustain your self-consciousness or insecurities.

That, I think, is what I was calling innocence. Not quite naivety, but the loosening that happens when the pressure of your own ambitions gets outweighed by the sheer scale of everything around you.

There’s another line from that essay that has stayed with me:

“It’s a place where anything is possible, not so much because you are capable but because the city demands capability from you.”

New York is an intensifier, not a giver. It amplifies what you bring.

Meanwhile Paris aestheticizes failure and Hollywood is organized so thoroughly around stardom that even its casualties tend to perform it.

New York has no such sentimentality.

It just keeps moving.

If you allow it, the city absorbs you into its forward motion. And even if you don’t, it swallows you up anyway.

That relentlessness is democratic in a way that is both clarifying and, with the right lighting, motivating.

Five years is not really a long time but it feels so when measured against the expectations you set as a much younger person:

“If I discover I can make it in New York City, I doubt I’ll want to try to make it anywhere else afterward.”

I have not become the writer I imagined when I moved here.

I don’t have a great American novel to my name. I haven’t written fiction in years. The only chance my name gets mentioned in the same sentence as Hemingway is if I’m spotted reading one of his paperbacks on the train.

It isn’t at all a bad thing I have become something different than expected. That is it’s own gift.

Still, reading my own words back today reminds me that I am still working to live up to the ambitions of my younger self.

Phil Rosen
Co-founder of Opening Bell Media | Host of Full Signal

As a financial reporter I’ve met or interviewed hundreds of market strategists, economists and portfolio managers. One thing I’ve learned is that while everyone is drowning in data, the best investors are the ones with the best filters.

In portfolio management — as in life — success is mostly a question of how clearly you can see.

With my newsletter and show, I contribute an unusual amount to the morass of information that hits the internet.

Since I can’t speak to the personal situations of every investor, by definition that means some of the work I’m producing is indeed “noise” to a portion of the audience.

That’s where the cold discipline of software comes in.

On Friday, our team at Opening Bell Daily launched a new AI-powered investment dashboard to better serve our Best Ideas Club members.

The goal was not to give people more information to comb, but to provide a clean, intuitive tool to help see through the fog.

Ideally, this platform contributes less to the noise and stands in as a useful filter.

Now, for each of the weekly high-conviction stock picks I write about, members can log on to the dashboard to generate charts, key takeaways and risks for various investments with a single click.

For example, this chart below covers a stock we published last August.

It’s up 114% since then.

We have countless other stock picks that have performed even better than that one.

To be sure, I’ll be the first to admit that I haven’t had to spearhead a software product before.

AI agents and YouTube tutorials made the process smoother than it would have been a year or two ago, but finalizing it for launch was nonetheless a grueling test of humility and patience.

When you’re a small and lean team, you don’t have an IT department or quality assurance wing. Just a couple people working early mornings and late nights to solve problems and squash bugs.

Now that I’m on the other side of launch, though, I can recognize that this is one of the most engaging projects I’ve worked on.

The work itself is compelling to me. But the other component here is that I’ve felt a specific kind of magic in moving from describing a problem to engineering an elegant solution for it.

This presented both a technical and creative challenge that were a world apart from the usual editorial or business decisions I make each day.

To no surprise, building a filter is far more difficult than contributing to the noise.

I’ll still be in inboxes and on screens more often than some people prefer, but I’m proud that I’m now behind something that also helps people tune me — and everything else — out when it matters most.

Talk to you soon,

Phil Rosen
Co-founder of Opening Bell Daily | Host of Full Signal

If you want to join Best Ideas Club and access our new product, send me an email (philrosen4355@gmail.com) and I will send you a private 20% off discount code reserved for readers of this blog.

I’m lucky to have said the same thing at the end of 2024 — the year I quit my job to launch a media company, won a Fulbright award and proposed to my now-wife.

All that ended up being practice for what followed.

The first half of the calendar proved to be a head-rattling sprint and juggling act between running a business and planning a wedding from across the country.

Kaytlin and I were operating with half the usual timeline and double the stakes. We had relatives flying in from faraway lands like Hong Kong, Germany and England, many of whom had never before set foot in America.

The two of us — with work schedules filled to the brim and an ill-advised commitment to hosting regular dinner parties — spent every night and weekend parsing vendor contracts, building color-coded spreadsheets and shuffling seating charts.

If it had been clear in January just how much work the wedding would require, we may have thought twice before committing to such a compressed docket.

Fortunately — if painfully — we underestimated everything except ourselves.

And once something of this scale is set in motion, only two outcomes remain: tragic abandonment or smashing success.

After marrying in July, the world suddenly opened up, a consequence of both the peace that comes with marriage and the pragmatic result of tripling my mental bandwidth and free time.

Business boomed, I launched my own show and became a regular across a handful of financial news channels.

In August, I even had the opportunity to ring the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange, which meant I got to sign the legendary wall in the stairwell leading up to the bell podium.

Every passing month further confirmed that momentum is a lagging indicator.

You only experience the wins, the adrenaline and sighs of relief when the work is already done. Progress is almost always invisible in the present moment and then glaringly obvious in retrospect.

I know if I can hold onto that lesson, I’ll be better at all the things that matter most as a professional, as a husband, and as a man.

Three lessons crystallize as I write this today.

1. Commitment expands capacity

The wedding forced a level of decisiveness that bled into everything else.

The schedule moved so fast and offered such little wiggle room that I (we) had no choice but sharpen our priorities.

Optionality fell away but I ended up doing fewer things, better. With that came less noise and a ban on second-guessing.

The intensity of that season also revealed just how elastic our work capacity can be. But we wouldn’t have known it without committing to the mammoth task of the wedding.

New bandwidth comes from self-imposed, extreme pressure.

2. Burn the boats to make progress

Similar to the above lesson, the wedding as well as several choices made in the business confirmed to me that forward motion begins at the point of no return.

Once a decision become irreversible or too expensive to unwind, everything snaps into place.

Execution is no longer tied to motivation and becomes instead a matter of necessity.

Building in an escape hatch invites procrastination and shrinks the inevitable.

3. Leverage comes from consistency

The newsletter and show — and so, the business — have worked because they shipped on a fixed cadence.

Predictability builds trust, which amplifies reach, which creates leverage.

Traction comes from showing up without negotiating mood or energy.

Nothing meaningful happened after publishing my favorite articles or episodes. The inflection points would always come later, a result of a growing library and track record.

My life improved because of choices that narrowed rather than expanded my options.

In years past I’d try to keep as many doors open as possible. But recent history has taught me the value in closing the right ones.

It seems true that the life you want will only appear when you remove every alternative.

Thank you for reading, watching and supporting my work this year.

I will work hard to make sure the best is yet to come.

Happy New Year and I’ll see you in 2026.

Phil Rosen
Co-founder, Opening Bell Daily

This episode is sponsored by Public: https://public.com/openingbell

Subscribe to Opening Bell Daily: https://www.openingbelldailynews.com/subscribe

Follow Phil on X: https://x.com/philrosenn

Follow Phil on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philrosen/

Timestamps:

0:00 - Intro

0:30 Government debt, macro outlook

3:43 - New economic regime

8:41 - K-Shaped economy

11:56 - Public & Generated Assets

13:04 - Tech-heavy economy

15:51 - AI impact on labor market

18:13 - New economy jobs

20:17 - A new investing strategy

31:08 - Index rebalancing

Disclosure: Brokerage services provided by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Investing involves risk. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga. See terms of Match Program at https://public.com/disclosures/matchprogram Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.

#podcast #investing #markets #macro #stocks #bitcoin #fed

This episode is sponsored by Public: https://public.com/openingbell

Subscribe to Opening Bell Daily: https://www.openingbelldailynews.com/subscribe

Follow Phil on X: https://x.com/philrosenn

Follow Phil on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philrosen/

0:00 - Intro

0:25 - Bullish on stocks

2:20 - Earnings driving stocks

4:30 - AI bubble debate

7:30 - Circular financing and OpenAI

9:00 - AI and job market

10:30 - Walmart

12:15 - AMD

14:00 - Public & Generated Assets

15:20 - DR Horton

17:25 - Quanta Services

18:55 - How to value AI stocks

21:45 - Tesla

26:00 - Crowdstrike

28:55 - Nancy’s ETF strategy

30:20 - ServiceNow

Disclosure: Brokerage services provided by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Investing involves risk. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga. See terms of Match Program at https://public.com/disclosures/matchprogram Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.

#podcast #investing #markets #macro #stocks #bitcoin #fed

This episode is sponsored by Public: https://public.com/openingbell

Subscribe to Opening Bell Daily: https://www.openingbelldailynews.com/subscribe

Follow Phil on X: https://x.com/philrosenn

Follow Phil on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philrosen/

0:00 - Intro

0:30 - Labor market outlook

2:50 - AI and layoffs

3:57 - AI driving new jobs, productivity

6:30 - Broad AI adoption in economy

7:15 - Youth unemployment

11:00 - Public & Generated Assets

12:07 - AI capex and GDP

15:30 - Economic vs. asset price bubble

16:55 - AI isn’t dot-com bubble

17:50 - What investors misunderstand on AI

19:16 - K-shaped economy

22:55 - Consumer spending

25:55 - Inflation and tariffs

26:55 - Affordability and consumer sentiment

28:00 - Bias of sentiment surveys

30:30 - New Fed Chair, Fed independence

33:55 - White House policy

36:48 - What economists got wrong on tariffs

Disclosure: Brokerage services provided by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Investing involves risk. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga. See terms of Match Program at https://public.com/disclosures/matchprogram Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.

#podcast #investing #markets #macro #stocks #bitcoin #fed

This episode is sponsored by Public: https://public.com/openingbell

Subscribe to Opening Bell Daily: https://www.openingbelldailynews.com/subscribe

Follow Phil on X: https://x.com/philrosenn

Follow Phil on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philrosen/

TIMESTAMPS: 

0:00 - Intro

0:30 - AI trade and rotation

6:19 - Magnificent 7 turned Lag 7

8:25 - Dot-com bubble parallels

12:09 - Public & Generated Assets

13:37 - Sentiment impact on prices

14:14 - Opportunities outside tech

18:14 - Macro outlook and risks

21:21 - Unstoppable bull run

23:23 - Trading through tariffs

25:30 - Federal Reserve outlook

30:52 - Inflation and consumer spending

33:01 - Stocks are not the economy

35:43 - Sectors for 2026

40:00 - Hard to be bearish

Disclosure: Brokerage services provided by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Investing involves risk. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga. See terms of Match Program at https://public.com/disclosures/matchprogram Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.

#podcast #investing #markets #macro #stocks #bitcoin #federalreserve