Yahoo Finance Invest liveblog: Exclusive conversations on AI, crypto, and the economy

November 13, 2025

Stream live for exclusive expert insights from top financial voices

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LIVE Updated 8 mins ago

Yahoo Finance

Updated 1 min read

Invest is streaming live all day at the top of this page. For the full schedule of interviews, see here.

As 2026 approaches, investors have arrived at a critical juncture.

On the one hand, the US stock market is trading near record highs as artificial intelligence investment and competition continue to underpin that growth. On the other hand, economic risks have increased this year as macroeconomic forces reshape global markets and concerns about an AI bubble swirl.

Stock market today: Dow, S&P 500, Nasdaq sink as Wall Street eyes fallout from US shutdown

Against this backdrop, the question emerges: What happens next?

At Yahoo Finance Invest, we’re convening an influential lineup of corporate executives, crypto innovators, and thought leaders across business and finance to explore various themes that are important to investors.

Click here to see full coverage from Invest

Join us from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. ET across the Yahoo Finance platform and streaming services, and following along with highlights below.

LIVE 23 updates

Featured

Robinhood (HOOD) CEO Vlad Tenev said public companies will have to begin catering more to retail investors, as better access for retail investing is a “wave that’s going to continue.”

“I think you have to remember, most companies, when they think about their business, dealing with retail investors is pretty secondary or ancillary, and they treat investor relations, particularly retail, as kind of a chore or something they’re forced to do,” Tenev told Yahoo Finance’s Brian Sozzi at Invest.

Tenev pointed to changes in how companies like Robinhood are communicating with investors, such as launching video earnings calls and taking questions from retail investors.

“Just last week, Opendoor, for example, became the first company outside of Robinhood to use our infrastructure to livestream their earnings to their customers,” Tenev said. “So you should expect that to be a growing trend in investor relations in the future.”

Watch the full interview here.

Yahoo Finance’s Allie Canal reports:

Read more here.
Coinbase (COIN) institutional head of strategy John D’Agostino said the biggest risk for crypto investors right now is timing the market.

“The idea of trying to time the market, I think, would be the biggest risk,” D’Agostino said. “The macro thesis, quite frankly, looks good. I know the price action recently hasn’t been great, but we’re looking at massive regulatory unlocks.”

D’Agostino recommended “a sober dollar-cost averaging approach,” given regulatory improvements and increased institutional adoption.

The Benchmark Company equity research analyst Mark Palmer also weighed in, saying that investors should remember that the asset class is still nascent in its development.

“As it pertains to AI, and I’d say this for crypto as well, you really have to be open-minded and flexible at this point, because we’re so early,” Palmer said. “Bitcoin is not even an adult yet. It’s still a teenager.”
Crypto and traditional finance are on a collision course to become virtually indistinguishable in the future, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said at Yahoo Finance’s Invest.

“Crypto and financial services are going to fully merge over time, and that’s kind of the bet that we’re making,” Tenev said. “You’re going to start to see banking-like products that are stablecoin-powered. And there’s going to be some ambiguity about whether that’s a crypto business or a tradfi business. But as the two fully merge, I think it’s going to be a little bit more difficult to cleanly separate.”

Robinhood has been quietly building an all-encompassing finance ecosystem that offers services from trading and crypto to prediction markets and traditional checking and savings accounts. It’s even, as Myles Udland notes below, providing at-home cash delivery. Investors have rewarded these forays into various financial sectors, as the stock is up 277% year over year.

When asked what the bigger opportunity was, crypto or prediction markets, Tenev demurred.

“I think those businesses, too, are not going to be distinguishable,” he said. “I mean, you look at prediction markets ex US, it’s generally on crypto rails.”

Tenev continued, “I think what’s going to happen is outside of the US, the dominant way to invest or get exposure to US assets, and later on, global assets, is going to be through tokenization and crypto technology, like you see with our EU offering. And then the US eventually will upgrade on the back end…”

Watch the full interview here.
Robinhood (HOOD) this week rolled out a new banking service meant to offer some of the features so-called “private banking” programs from larger rivals may include.

Among them? Cash delivery.

Speaking at Yahoo Finance’s Invest event on Thursday, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev discussed the new offering, noting that even as the financial world grows more digital, many people still have a use for cold hard cash.

“And as we started thinking about the types of features and services that the high net worth individuals would get, one of them is [that] they’re not going to an inner city ATM,” Tenev said.

“They’re getting cash delivered to their house. And surprisingly, even though we’re getting increasingly digitized, cash is still a very important part of the US economy, and people need it from time to time.

“And when they need it, we want to deliver it to them with the convenience they expect from other digital services. So, [a] high net worth individual gets cash delivered to their house in a truck. We figured out how to do that in partnership with Gopuff to the mass market.”

As for how the cash will show up at your door, Tenev said the delivery will be “discreet.”
Activist investor and Starboard Value CEO Jeff Smith walked through some of the companies he’s engaged with, including Salesforce (CRM) and Kenvue (KVUE). But there’s one company that has a special place in his heart: Papa John’s (PZZA).

Smith served as chairman of Papa John’s board from 2019 to 2023, helping to initiate a turnaround at the pizza chain.

“I love Papa John’s,” Smith told Yahoo Finance Executive Editor Brian Sozzi. “We did some great things at Papa John’s,” Smith recalled. “We improved the business tremendously. We changed the perception around the brand. We introduced Stuffed Crust Pizza for Papa John’s.”

Papa John’s has had a volatile year, as Apollo Global Management (APO) bid $2.1 billion to take the company private but then withdrew its offer earlier this month. Now, the company is reportedly looking for another buyer. (Disclosure: Yahoo Finance is owned by Apollo Global Management.)

When asked if he would consider investing in Papa John’s again, Smith didn’t rule out the possibility.

“I would never rule out getting back involved,” Smith said. “I think there’s a lot of opportunity at the company, but it has to be right for both people and has to make sense.”

Watch the full interview here.
Yahoo Finance’s Jake Conley reports:

Read more here.
Are we in an AI-driven stock market bubble? Truist chief investment officer Keith Lerner laid out the case that while valuations are a bit stretched, markets are not yet in “bubble” territory.

“There’s a couple of factors, but one is valuations by themselves,” Lerner said in a panel alongside Investopedia’s Caleb Silver and ADP’s Nela Richardson. “Valuations are rich, but if you look at the S&P Technology sector, we’re trading around 30 times. That’s expensive, but during the [dot-com] bubble, it was 50 times.”

Another point Lerner made is that corporate profits have been keeping up with rising stock prices.

“The north star of this bull market is corporate profits,” Lerner stated. “As the stock market has made a new high, corporate profits have followed. Now we have to see is that sustainable? A lot of that is driven by tech and AI, but we have seen that bearing out as well.”

Still, Lerner said it’s possible investors will see a correction. Stocks sold off on Thursday as the government shutdown ended and investors rotated out of technology stocks like Nvidia (NVDA) for more value-oriented plays.

“We had a big run,” he said. “We’re seeing a little bit of nervousness. But ultimately, I think that underlying trend for tech is still intact.”
Former Federal Reserve vice chair Lael Brainard thinks Fed Chair Jay Powell will loom large in history for one key reason — his fight for the central bank’s independence.

“I do believe that the single most important legacy will be [Powell’s] very determined efforts to guard the independence of the Federal Reserve, to make sure that the Federal Reserve maintains its institutional strength and resilience,” Brainard said during Yahoo Finance’s Invest event on Thursday.

“And, of course, that is the most important legacy he can hand to future Federal Reserve chairs,” Brainard added.

“It’s also the most important legacy to serve the American public, because it means that they can have confidence in low inflation and that it won’t require high unemployment to bring inflation down.”

Brainard, who joined the Fed board during President Obama’s second term and was named Fed vice chair under President Biden, served with Powell on the Fed’s Board of Governors for nearly a decade.

Powell was nominated to serve as Fed chair by President Trump in 2017 and was renominated to the role in 2021 by Biden.

During both his first and second terms in office, Trump has at various points criticized Powell for not cutting rates quickly enough. Earlier this year, Trump suggested that he could look to remove Powell from his post, but later said he wouldn’t fire the Fed chair.

The White House’s search for a successor to Powell is reportedly down to five candidates. Powell’s term is up in May.
The US economy would be suffering a lot more if it weren’t for artificial intelligence investments. That was the message on the bifurcated economy that former Federal Reserve Board vice chair Lael Brainard gave to Yahoo Finance’s Brian Sozzi at Invest.

“I think we have a very clear two-track economy,” said Brainard, who is also the former director of the National Economic Council.

“We have the AI sector, and … the leading sector is doing extremely well, but it’s not hiring,” Brainard explained. “And the rest of the economy is suffering. It’s suffering because it is less favored in the capital markets. It’s suffering because it is still trying to digest those tariffs.”

Consumers, especially the high-income consumers that drive spending, largely remain resilient, though affordability pressures continue to trouble households, driving sentiment to a three-year low.

Brainard predicts that overall third quarter GDP will hold up, but that there’s nuance to how different parts of the economy are performing.

“The economy at the top level is strong,” Brainard said, “but again, it’s being driven by this really important set of investments in AI. The rest of the economy under the hood is really stuck.”

Watch the full interview here.
Affirm CEO and techno-optimist Max Levchin weighed in on the debate about how advancements in artificial intelligence will reshape the labor market. While we can’t ignore the safety risks, Levchin argued that using AI at work is likely to make humans better off.

“I’m not at all worried about the loss of jobs,” Levchin told Yahoo Finance’s Brian Sozzi at Invest. “I do think the robots are coming.”

Instead of coming for everyone’s jobs, Levchin argued that AI “will open up our world to do more interesting, more intellectually stimulating jobs.”

He acknowledged that some “will lament the loss of their manual labor” but that this is comparable to similar periods in the past when automation changed work.

Still, he warned that precautions should be taken to avoid bad actors who may try to weaponize AI.

“I would definitely invest a few serious cycles into making sure we don’t end up in the sort of a Skynet universe, not so much because the robots will evolve consciousness and want to kill us all, but because there are plenty of people out there who would love to wreak havoc by breaking into these robust operating systems and doing bad things,” Levchin said. “So security is important. Safety is important. I think we’re going to solve those problems.”

Watch the full interview here.
“How will retail adapt to this new world where the transaction happens entirely or primarily inside the bot?” asks Affirm (AFRM) founder and CEO Max Levchin.

Any retailer knows that the “second sale is the one you want,” Levchin told Yahoo Finance. The retailer has to spend money and energy enticing a prospective customer to make their first purchase, but once that purchase has been delivered and the customer is satisfied with a good product, that’s when you as a retailer win the “second sale” of a returning customer — where profits are made.

But with AI driving customers to products instead of that customer having to walk into their local store to seek something out, the retailer could lose that interaction — and potentially the second sale.

“One of the things that we can anticipate is the relegation of the store to much more of a fulfillment role where the chatbot is the one that helps you pick,” Levchin said. “But would the retailer in question actually get the easier second sale? Will you know which bike shop had the part that ChatGPT had you select?”

Levchin, who founded Affirm in 2012 after co-founding PayPal in 1998 and working at the payments platform’s CTO until 2002, cautioned that he doesn’t see “local bike shops” or even Amazon going anywhere soon. Customers still enjoy the analog discovery experience.

But agentic shopping, Levchin said, is something retailers are going to have to adapt to if they want to survive.
Palantir (PLTR) co-founder and CEO Alex Karp defended the stock’s sky-high valuation at Yahoo Finance’s Invest on Thursday, saying that financial advisers “robbed” investors with their bearish views.

“I do have a bone to pick with, like, traditional financial people, including their minions, the analysts,” Karp said to Yahoo Finance’s Josh Lipton. “Do you know [the] money you robbed of people with your views on Palantir?”

Palantir has a market cap of $421 billion and trades with a forward price-to-earnings ratio of 185, according to Yahoo Finance data.

The stock has surged a whopping 133% since the beginning of the year, leading many on the Street to view shares as “priced for perfection” and leaving shares vulnerable to a pullback if cracks in the AI story emerge.

“We see significant downside risk if the company was to miss sky-high expectations or see a significant slow-down in customer adoption due to failing internal AI project deployments as PLTR’s model is corelated to many of these projects, in our opinion,” HSBC analyst Abhishek Shukla wrote in a note.

But Karp brushed those concerns aside and drew a divide between the “elite” investors who he views as largely selling the stock and the average investors — “the truck drivers, the plumbers” — who he says continue to buy Palantir stock.

“By my reckoning, Palantir is one, if not one of the very few, if not the only [stock], where the average American bought and the average sophisticated American sat on the sidelines or sold,” Karp said.

Read more here and watch the full interview here.
Yahoo Finance’s Laura Bratton writes:

Read more here.
Ted Leonsis, who owns the NHL’s Washington Capitals, the NBA’s Washington Wizards, the WNBA’s Washington Mystics, as well as the Monumental Sports Network, detailed how recent sports betting scandals in the NBA and the MLB “shook us all to the core.”

Leonsis told Yahoo Finance Executive Editor Brian Sozzi at Yahoo Finance Invest that while the establishment and regulation of legal gaming and gambling made sense since “there was that there was $100 billion of illegal gambling being done,” we are seeing flaws in the nascent system being exposed.

“I think that the leagues were able to self-report and able to look at anomalies in gaming and gambling, and that the system worked,” Leonsis said. “Now, unfortunately, because it’s such in the spotlight, you know what happened a couple of weeks ago, it shook us all to the core, because fans need to trust that they are seeing real-time competition and that the outcomes are fair.”

He added that “I want to remind everybody it was our technology that was able to find it, and that sports gaming is really moving into the class, like Wall Street is where you can find something that’s happening that is untoward.”
Retail investors now wield considerable power in the stock market.

And to analyst Dan Ives, this puts the retail investor at the “adult table” of financial markets, a space previously reserved for hedge funds and other top institutions.

“The reality is that retail investors used to be at the little kids’ table at Thanksgiving, and you give them a little cookie. Now they’re at the adult table,” Ives said during Yahoo Finance Invest on Thursday.

“They’re front and they’re front and center. Because if you look from Palantir (PLTR), to Robinhood (HOOD), to Tesla (TSLA)… this is a very important investor class that’s very informed.”

Ives, who is always colorful in analogizing his coverage of markets and tech, also told Yahoo Finance that investors are still underestimating AI, saying that this boom is a party that will go until 4:00 a.m. — and it’s only 10:30 p.m. right now.
Wedbush Securities managing director Dan Ives acknowledged that being a Tesla (TSLA) bull takes a lot of patience.

“Robotics, Optimus, that’s what you’re playing for,” Ives said at Yahoo Finance’s Invest. He noted the Tesla play isn’t about the electric cars the company is known for, but about CEO Elon Musk’s pitch to build a robot army — using its Optimus humanoid robot and artificial intelligence technology.

“This, in my opinion, is the most important chapter ever from Musk and Tesla, the AI chapter, autonomous and robotics. I think we’re talking $2 [trillion], $3 trillion in terms of market cap — best physical AI play besides Nvidia.”
Strategy (MSTR) executive chairman Michael Saylor said he thinks bitcoin (BTC-USD) will be a larger asset class than gold (GC=F) by 2035.

“We’re in the digital gold rush,” Saylor said in response to a viewer question at Invest. “And 2035 is the .99 year. That means that 99% of all the bitcoin will have been mined in the year 2035. If you want bitcoin, you need to get it between now and then, because the last 1% of bitcoin comes out over 100 years.”

“There’s no doubt in my mind, bitcoin will be a larger asset class than gold by the year 2035,” Saylor stated.

Bitcoin has a market cap of just over $2 trillion, according to Yahoo Finance data. It’s significantly below the estimated market cap of gold, valued at approximately $29 trillion.

Gold has rallied over the past five days to trade around its three-week high. Year to date, the precious metal is up 62% versus a 10% gain for bitcoin.
Strategy executive chairman Michael Saylor pushed back against short sellers, like Jim Chanos, betting against the stock.

“Nothing great has ever been created by a short seller,” Saylor said at Yahoo Finance Invest on Thursday.

“I don’t really think about Jim Chanos,” he said. “I think that there’ll be some skeptics. They don’t really appreciate what bitcoin is doing. They don’t understand digital capital. They don’t understand digital credit.”

Since May, veteran short seller Jim Chanos had been placing bets against shares of Strategy, which pioneered the corporate bitcoin treasury model that has since been adopted by other companies. Last week, however, Chanos said on X that he unwound his position on Strategy.

Strategy stock is down 22% year to date, with most of that drawdown occurring in the past six months, while bitcoin is up 10% during that time frame. Short interest in Strategy currently hovers around 8.80%, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence.

Still, Saylor remains bullish on the outlook for the digital economy.

“I think the irony is the fundamentals of the industry are so much better today than they were 12 months ago that you’ve now got an extraordinary risk, reward opportunity,” he said earlier in the interview. “Now is a much better time to invest.”
Mohamed El-Erian, chief economic adviser at Allianz, is warning that lower-income Americans are under “significant pressure” and that a halt to their spending would weigh on the economy as a whole, Yahoo Finance’s Jennifer Schonberger reports.

“This is not an isolated concern if the lower household incomes stop spending, not because they don’t want to spend, but they’re not able to spend. That will contaminate upwards for the economy as a whole,” El-Erian said in an interview during Yahoo Finance’s annual Invest conference.

The economy has become increasingly bifurcated as higher-income consumers continue to spend while lower-income households have been forced to pull back, Jennifer writes. El-Erian said that lower-income consumers are “near recession” at a time when inflation is stuck at 3%, layoffs are surging, AI is changing the workforce, and debt levels are high as credit cards have been maxed out.

Read more here or watch the full interview here.