The Treasury Department will oversee Iranian funds when they are released under President Donald Trump‘s interim Iran agreement, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Wednesday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

“A very large percentage of it will go to buy U.S. foodstuffs and medicines,” Bessent said.

Bessent said the funds would be overseen by Treasury in the Middle East, suggesting the administration is trying to place guardrails around one of the most politically sensitive pieces of the agreement: Iran’s access to frozen assets.

The comments come as the White House faces backlash from some congressional Republicans over whether Trump’s deal gives Iran too much, including sanctions relief and access to frozen funds, in exchange for a temporary negotiating window.

The arrangement described by Bessent would also create a potential domestic economic argument for the deal: Some of the released funds could flow back to U.S. farmers, food producers and pharmaceutical companies if Iran is required or encouraged to use the money to buy U.S. goods.

But the mechanics remain unclear.

Bessent did not immediately specify how much money would be released, where the funds would be held, what role Iran would play in directing purchases or what enforcement tools Treasury would use to ensure the money is not diverted.

Administration officials have argued the interim deal is designed to stop hostilities and create a 60-day window for a broader agreement. Critics say the White House is offering too much up front while leaving major security questions unresolved.

Vice President JD Vance defended the agreement last week, insisting the U.S. is not sending taxpayer money to Iran and that Tehran would receive economic benefits only if it complies with the deal.

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The surge in oil prices and ongoing volatility have netted major gains in a corner of the market that rarely captures headlines: quantitative trend-following hedge funds.

Quantitative trend-followers — also known as commodity trading advisors (CTAs) or managed futures funds — use complex machine-learning algorithms, statistical analysis and factor-based modelling to identify price trends across futures markets, including equities, bonds, commodities and currencies.

The spike in commodity prices caused by the war in the Middle East has handed them one of their richest trading environments in years.

By trading on both rising and falling markets, with investment decisions made by computer-based systems driven by data and signals rather than human judgment or emotion, CTAs can often provide uncorrelated returns and so-called “crisis alpha” to investment portfolios during market turbulence.

Societe Generale’s main SG CTA Index — the sector’s main benchmark and the key barometer for trend-following strategies’ overall performance —  is up more than 12.2% year-to-date to June 3. The SG Trend Index, a daily performance tracker of the 10 biggest trend-following hedge funds, has risen 12.3% over the same period.

Energy commodities have been a standout contributor to CTAs’ gains since the start of the Middle East conflict on Feb. 28.

But the splintering narrative around the conflict and the increasingly uncertain direction of U.S.-Iran peace negotiations are now pushing such strategies to scale back their oil bets.

Helen Doody, head of Abbey Capital U.S., said many funds established long energy positions early in the first quarter as the price of crude oil rose.

“They were positioned to capture the sharp rally that occurred in late February and early March due to events in Iran,” Doody told CNBC via email. “CTA strategies also typically participated in the up moves in distillate contracts like gasoline and diesel.”

Nicolas Gaussel, CEO and CIO of Paris-based CTA Metori Capital Management, which trades both commodities and financial contracts, said roughly a third of his firm’s performance this year has come from energy trades.

DAVOS, Switzerland — I spent the week talking to tech executives at the World Economic Forum in Davos about their priorities for the year ahead and the big themes they see shaping investor sentiment.

Like last year, AI dominated the conference. But this year, the discussions went beyond AI models or which chatbot is better, shifting instead to how enterprises will adopt the technology and what future developments are on the horizon.

All of these could be key to revenue and share prices of the world’s biggest technology firms.

Then, businesses were adopting AI, such as chatbots provided by Microsoft, OpenAI and others. There was a fear of missing out or FOMO, Dowson Tong, CEO of Tencent‘s cloud group, told CNBC in an interview this week.

Instead, businesses will be more selective with the type of AI they’re adopting.

“This year, when we talk to customers, I think they’re being a lot more pragmatic. I think they’ve gone past the phase of FOMO,” Tong said. “And today, I think many of our customers are a lot more specific.”

Raj Sharma, global managing partner for growth and innovation at EY, said businesses will need to reimagine whole processes that can be done with AI. “That’s when you will start seeing the value,” Sharma told CNBC in an interview.

Fresh off a bumper 2025, retail investors are rushing back into the market with a focus on energy stocks.

Everyday traders bought at the second-highest level in almost eight months at the start of 2026’s trading year, according to a JPMorgan report released Wednesday. Oil-related stocks were a particularly hot pick for mom-and-pop investors following the U.S.’s weekend strike on Venezuela, data shows.

“Retail investors favored some of the companies that can immediately profit from the potential return of Venezuelan heavy crude to the [U.S.] or those needed to rebuild the country’s decaying oil infrastructure,” Arun Jain, JPMorgan’s quant analyst, told clients.

Net daily retail inflows into Halliburton spiked to the highest level since early 2022, according to market research firm VandaTrack. Flows into Chevron — which Wall Street quickly crowned a key beneficiary of the military intervention — hit highs going back to summer, the firm found.

Beyond those stocks, JPMorgan found surging retail inflows into fellow oil industry stalwarts such as Baker Hughes and SLB as investors wondered what was next for the global industry.

Venezuela sits on the largest proven crude oil reserves in the world, but output has dropped significantly from its peak in the late 1990s. President Donald Trump said the South American country would ship up to 50 million barrels of oil to the U.S. following the strike. American forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife and brought them to the U.S. on drug trafficking charges.

Specifically, Chevron surged in popularity on retail investor discussion platforms like Reddit’s WallStreetBets forum over the weekend following the strike, according to Breakout Point. But the crowd had largely moved onto other names by Tuesday, which isn’t surprising given it wasn’t previously an attention-grabbing stock for this group, said Ivan Ćosović, managing director at Breakout Point.

Said another way: The “Chevr-on” trade became “Chevr-off,” according to Ćosović.

To be sure, it’s not yet clear if these big bets from average Joe traders in the wake of the Venezuela action will pay off long term. Halliburton, SLB and Baker Hughes shares have jumped this week, while Chevron has whipsawed following a big Monday rally.

But pullbacks don’t necessarily mean retail traders will abandon the theme, according to Viraj Patel, deputy head of research at Vanda. If oil plays out for these investors like the popular artificial intelligence trade, they will likely hang around for the ride.

“Once retail gets its teeth into a theme, they don’t let go — like a dog with a bone,” Patel said. “AI showed us that if retail believes in something, they’ll keep buying even on bad days.”

This interest in energy can also signal a shift away from high-growth names to those with…

LISBON, Portugal — Top tech executives told CNBC they’re concerned about a bubble forming in the artificial intelligence sector, underscoring growing unease within the industry over soaring valuation.

In recent weeks, markets have been reckoning with the notion that too much capital is pouring into the AI boom, clouding the outlook on revenue and actual profit and putting high valuations into question.

Up to now, warnings around overstretched valuations have mostly come from investors and leaders in the world of finance. Goldman Sachs’ David Solomon and Morgan Stanley’s Ted Pick have warned of potential corrections as valuations of some major tech firms reached historic highs.

The concerns have been crystallized by famed ‘Big Short’ investor Michael Burry, who this week accused major AI infrastructure and cloud providers, or ‘hyperscalers’ of understating depreciation expenses on chips. Burry warned that profits at the likes of Oracle and Meta may be vastly overstated. He recently disclosed put options that bet against Nvidia and Palantir.

However, CEOs of companies who are themselves developing AI, expressed their concerns this week during interviews with CNBC at the Web Summit tech conference in Lisbon.

“I think the evaluations are pretty exaggerated here and there, and I think there is signs of a bubble on the horizon,” Jarek Kutylowski, CEO of German AI firm DeepL, told CNBC on Tuesday.

The sentiment was echoed by Picsart CEO Hovhannes Avoyan.

“We see lots of AI companies raising … tremendous valuations … without any revenue,” Avoyan told CNBC on Tuesday, adding that it is a “concern.”

The market values smaller startups with “just some noise and vibe revenue,” he said, referring to companies being backed even though they have minimal sales.

Vibe revenue is a play on “vibe coding,” a term that refers to using AI to code without needing deep technical expertise.