AAP Podcast - Feb. 8, 202: Biden’s SotU, Powell and the Bard

AAP portfolio manager Chris Versace and TheStreet Smarts’ Todd Campbell have quite a bit to talk about on this week’s AAP Podcast. They jump right into it discussing President Biden’s 2023 State of the Union, sharing what stood out to them and why. Todd tied several of Biden’s agenda items to potentially help orchestrate a softer than expected landing for the economy. Chris recapped his take on Federal Reserve Chair Powell’s appearance at the Economic Club of Washington earlier this week and dished with Todd on changes in fed funds rate expectations. Todd also previewed an upcoming discussion in Smarts about the market’s valuation with Chris helping backfill the conversation with some supporting data he’s shared with AAP members previously.

After discussing why they both find the intersection of autos and chips an interesting area (and yes, particular stocks were named), they segued to artificial intelligence touching on the news this week from Alphabet (GOOGL), Microsoft (MSFT) and Baidu (BIDU). After boiling away the headlines, the question they are pondering is what’s the use case? Is this something that will be a game changer or much like the metaverse and virtual reality, is it more hype than substance in the near term? They also postulated which company potentially has the most to gain and which one the most to lose. And neither was impressed by Google’s landing on the name “Bard” for its AI technology, but then again Microsoft naming its search engine “Bing” wasn’t all that impressive either.