Weekend reading: are bonds discounting a robot revolution?

The first Weekend Reading every month can be read by anyone on the Monevator website. Subscribe for free to our email newsletter or become a member to get the rest. Also note: this is a bit of a speculative ramble this week. Please do skip down to the bond links at the bottom if sci-fi-economics isn’t your bag! For an example of just how wild owning individual stocks can be, here’s a one-year price chart of US-listed Snowflake (NYSE: SNOW): Shares in the cloud-based data-wrangler entered 2026 above $200. War in Iran and a rout in the software sector took them down to $121 by the Spring. Then a rally in most of those same software stocks – and Snowflake’s own strong earnings report, which hinted at real traction from AI spending – fuelled a recovery back to near its all-time high from 2021. Talk about a trader’s paradise. What active investor can’t get rich when you can triple your money in a liquid, multi-billion-dollar stock in just a few months? Well, me it seems! I watched this and…