This weekend was peppered with the will-she/won’t she silliness of the tariff war. The entire landscape is murky (or some more generously describe the situation as “fluid”), but it’s quite evident that all the he-man, tough-guy, don’t-mess-with-me nonsense from this administration is nothing more than bluster, and the bluster is worth exactly what it costs.
As such, markets are celebrating since D.C. has done everything but surrender at this point. (If you want huge laffs, just watch the Liberation Day speech again, which was offered up with the same gravitas as Operation Overlord). Equities are up about 1.5% to 2%, more or less. On in particular, Apple, has shot up by double digits, since the notion of triple-digit tariffs has vanished with the weekend.
I’ve already taken AAPL behind the woodshed and shot it dead, since it was my only complete screw-up (I’ve done the self-flagellation on this one already, so we’ll just all move on). Most of my positions are in more logical choices like Pepsi, which actually has a defensible rationale behind its include in my portfolio.
As such, unlike AAPL, pre-market PEP isn’t doing dick, which is just what I want.
Once major asset that maybe has reached the point of exhaustion is gold. Don’t get me wrong: I’m a huge gold fan. But going up 100% over a couple of years is going require a breather from time to time. I wouldn’t be surprised to see gold shave off some value this week.
More importantly, however, let’s take a good, hard look at the /ES chart. The 5-minute bar graph below shows the /ES from last Wednesday morning (before the white flag of surrender was hoisted and all countries except China were excused) until just now (which is when the one remaining country, China, was for all practical purposes let off the hook).
Here’s the point I want to drive home: even with all the excitement from bulls this weekend about the ostensible masterclass in negotiation and how this is all going to work out with China, the market hasn’t even managed to match the peak of the shock event last Wednesday. This can’t be overstressed: from a bullish perspective, the news is even BETTER than it was Wednesday, and yet we haven’t sliced right above last week as one might expect.
By no means am I saying let’s all go nuts shorting everything with a ticker symbol. Even now, we’ve got a VIX that’s in the 30s, and sentiment is in the crapper.
I do think, however, today is going to present us some choice opportunities to get into select short positions that are well-constructed. I’ll post those later today as I do some serious housekeeping in the midst of this rally.
Oh, and as for the Blue Origin “space” (really just a very high airplane flight) launch today with the glam crew below, including Lauren Sanchez, please don’t feel guilty. Just don’t. We’re all thinking the exact same thing but have the decency not to say it out loud.
