Your Job Is Probably Safe From AI… For Now

At Porter & Co. we are determined to be your best source of investing, economic, and financial insight, and your first choice for information about what to do with your money… in the entire world, bar none.

This is Porter & Co.’s Sunday Investment Chronicles. Every week, the Porter & Co. research team pores over thousands (and thousands) of articles, reports, social media posts, analyses, regulatory filings, and anything else we can get our hands (and eyes) on to understand what’s happening in the world of investing and finance – and to uncover the most original, compelling, and double-head-fake ideas…

… and we curate the best of those here. We do it all the old fashioned way: Hours of reading and brainpower (no AI curation here). We read everything – for you.

In Case You Missed It… What We Published Last Week

In Monday’s Daily Journal, we revisited the topic of tariffs, with S&P Global having just reported that the fees imposed by the Trump administration will cost U.S. businesses an added $1.2 trillion in expenses this year. 

We reminded readers that a tariff is a tax on U.S. citizens. It is not paid by the country whose goods President Donald Trump targets. The tariffs are paid by the company that is importing those goods into the U.S. The company can then eat those new costs or pass them on to the end buyer. Increasingly, it seems, those costs are going to consumers. The country where the goods are produced does not pay anything. The only repercussions to them – say, China or Canada – is that U.S. companies might eventually buy fewer goods from them.

We received a number of emails about the tariff essay – some supportive of our take, and some not supportive. Porter replied to one reader who took issue with our position, saying:

In regards to your specific claim that these tariffs have a noble purpose (bringing jobs back to America) and so therefore they should be embraced, I’d be willing to bet every last penny of my net worth that the net impact of these tariffs (and the inevitable matching retaliatory tariffs) is a substantial loss in U.S. employment. Increasing the cost of production will not lead to more business activity – only less. And that means all forms of business activity, including, obviously, employment.”

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Tech Frontiers editor Erez Kalir brought his wisdom to Wednesday’s Journal, with an essay titled “Find A Different Game,” in which he told the story of the late Jim Simons – perhaps the world’s greatest investor – and how he took a decidedly different approach to finding winning stocks. Erez pointed to two holdings in the Tech Frontiers portfolio that have followed this approach – to great success. Erez concluded…

Most of us, alas, cannot emulate Jim Simons and build our own RenTech. But we can learn from his success and apply his most essential lesson to the domains of AI, biotech, the blockchain, and beyond: In markets, as in life, “edge” rarely comes from being slightly better at the same game as everyone else. It comes from finding an entirely different one.”

Also in Wednesday’s Journal we assured readers of our continued belief in owning shares of Philip Morris International (NYSE: PM), after a one-day 10% decline following its Q3 earnings release. We ultimately concluded that we consider the recent decline to be a tremendous buying opportunity for long-term investors.

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On Thursday, Marty Fridson educated readers with his latest Distressed Investing market analysis, titled “When Ecstasy Turns To Agony.” In last week’s installment of this monthly feature, Marty provided for readers some insight into what might happen if market turmoil leads to some big sell-offs:

With sellers far outnumbering buyers, the available bids are far below objective valuations derived from careful weighing of risk and reward. The result: The bonds of clearly viable firms get repriced to levels more appropriate for bonds of companies that proverbially have one foot in the grave. That’s the scenario you can expect to see play out once again when today’s raging bull market gives way to FOGSHTG – Fear of Getting Stuck Holding the Bag.”

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On Friday, Porter ended the week of Daily Journals by reminding readers of the hidden potential in the biotech sector right now. Cumulatively, he reported, from January 2023 to October 2025, semiconductor stocks rose 133%. But biotechs have hardly budged. He pointed out that XBI, the major biotech ETF, has only gained about 30% in that period. But biotech is where the incredible gains in artificial intelligence (“AI”) will be put to their most profitable use… Erez Kalir’s Tech Frontiers has had at least five 2x gains in biotech stocks since he launched it last year – and the portfolio has a remarkable annualized return of 54.5%.If you’re not already a subscriber to Tech Frontiers… call our Customer Care team at 888-610-8895 or internationally at +1 443-815-4447 for more information on becoming a subscriber.

The Best Things We Read Last Week

Out of the hundreds of sources of investment, finance, and economics news and insight we regularly review – our Bloomberg terminal, hedge-fund letters, annual reports, the financial news media, Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) filings, investment newsletters, newspapers, X (Twitter) threads, conferences, podcasts, and more – here’s what we’ve read that we think you might find interesting.