Wall Street Breakfast Podcast: BofA Says Think BIG

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The next big investing theme of the 2020s is B.I.G. – BofA. (00:23) Tesla is said to boost output at German plant on stronger sales. (01:22) North Korean hackers used ChatGPT to fake military IDs – report. (02:11)

This is an abridged transcript.

According to BofA, Wall Street is embarking on a new investment theme encompassing bonds, international stocks and gold.

Strategist Michael Hartnett notes that so far the three biggest investment themes of the 2020s have been ABB (Anything but Bonds), ABC (Anywhere but China) and ABD (Anything but the Dollar), which is still going.

Hartnett says you can now add BIG to that: Bonds, International and Gold.

He says long BIG could be used as a barbell strategy to play the “AI bubble.”

I’ll tell you about the “I” in BIG:

International (NYSEARCA:VEU) (NYSEARCA:VSS) (NASDAQ:IXUS) (NYSEARCA:SPDW): Will benefit from a weaker dollar (DXY), end of EU/Japan deflation and end of EU/Asia fiscal excess. China tech(NYSEARCA:CQQQ) is the optimal way to barbell U.S. AI bubble.

I’ll leave a link to the article in the show notes section so that you can check out the reasoning behind the B and G.

Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) is planning to boost production at its German factory for the rest of the year even though sales in Germany are down.

The plant’s chief André Thierig told Germany’s DPA news agency that Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) is seeing “very good sales figures” so the company “revised our production plans for the third and fourth quarters upwards.”

He also noted that the plant serves more than 30 markets worldwide and is seeing growth beyond Germany.

Official data showed Tesla’s (NASDAQ:TSLA) July sales in Germany fell by more than half from a year earlier, and deliveries in the first seven months of 2025 dropped nearly 58%.

Still, the company official said trends across international markets supplied by the plant are turning positive, prompting the company to lift its output goals.

A suspected North Korean state-sponsored hacking group used AI to create a deepfake of a military ID targeting South Korea.

A Bloomberg report states that the attackers used ChatGPT to make a convincing fake draft of the identification card.

According to research published by Genians, a South Korean cybersecurity firm, the card was then used in an email that linked to malware designed to extract data from the recipients’ devices.

‘As reproduction of government IDs is illegal in South Korea, ChatGPT initially returned a refusal when asked to create an ID. However, altering the prompt allowed them to bypass the restriction’, the report added.

OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Seeking Alpha.

There have been previous instances where North Korean hackers used other AI tools, such as Anthropic’s Claude Code, to create fake identities and get remote jobs in tech companies as part of their intelligence operations.

What’s Trending on Seeking Alpha:

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Chinese chip stocks rise after Beijing launches anti-dumping probe into U.S. semiconductors

Dow, S&P and Nasdaq futures are in the green. Crude oil is up 0.5% at $62/barrel. Bitcoin is down 0.1% at $115,000. Gold is flat at $3,639.

The FTSE 100 is down 0.1% and the DAX is up 0.2%.

The biggest movers for the day premarket: Hims & Hers (NYSE:HIMS) -3% – Shares slipped after FDA Commissioner Marty Makary criticized the company’s Super Bowl ad as a “glaring” breach of U.S. rules on drug advertising. In opinion pieces, Makary flagged the spot for promoting GLP-1 weight-loss drugs without risk disclosures, underscoring broader FDA concerns over lenient oversight of pharma ads. The agency has since issued thousands of warning and cease-and-desist letters targeting misleading promotions.

Today’s economic calendar is clear.

And finally there’s a webinar happening today at noon with Seeking Alpha’s VP of Quantitative Strategy, Steven Cress. It’s entitled, “6 Stocks Poised to Benefit From a Rate Cut.” There’s a link in the show notes section to register.