February 4, 2025 | Daily JAM, Morning Briefing |
Now that Canada and Mexico have earned a one-month delay in the 25% tariffs President Donald Trump had proposed to implement today, Tuesday, February 4, Wall Street is struggling to figure out if a similar deal with China will roll back the 10% hike in tariffs on imports from China that went into effect today. So far, Wall Street is betting on another deal to keep the global economy out of a full-scale trade war. Today the Standard & Poor’s 500 rose 0.72% and the NASDAQ Composite gained 1.35%. I can understand the optimism. I just don’t agree with it.
February 3, 2025 | Daily JAM, Morning Briefing |
Futures markets are substantially lower as U.S. stocks get ready to open. Futures on the Standard & Poor’s 500 were down 1.64% and NASDAQ futures were off 1.87%. But I still say that Wall Street is in denial about the full economic damage from President Donald Trump’s tariffs.
February 2, 2025 | Daily JAM, Morning Briefing |
I expect a two-ring (at least) circus on Capitol Hill as Congress confronts two years worth of budgets. By law, the President is required to submit a budget for the next fiscal year–in this case the 2026 fiscal year that begins on October 1 2025–by the first Monday in February. Yes, tomorrow, February 3. Maybe you remember, however, that Congress hasn’t passed a budget for fiscal 2025–the fiscal year that began on October 1, 2024. And that the government is operating under a continuing resolution (a CR) that expires on March 14.
February 2, 2025 | BUD, Daily JAM, IWM, Jubak Picks, RWM, Volatility |
Stocks moved down slightly on Friday–with the Standard & Poor’s 500 off 0.50% and the NASDAQ Composite down 0.28%–as investors started to revise their belief that President Donald Trump wasn’t really serious about raising tariffs.
Now that the White House as made it clear that the first round of tariffs–on Canada, Mexico, and China–will go into effect on Tuesday, I think we’ll see more downward movement in stocks. I don’t expect the drop to be swift or especially severe to start. That will have to wait until the economy starts to register the effects of higher prices for so much that we import. But I’d like to get ahead of this revision in sentiment with some sells now.
February 2, 2025 | Daily JAM |
Effective Tuesday at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time, American importers will pay a new 25% tax on goods from Canada and Mexico and a 10% tariff on products from China, President Donald Trump said on Saturday.
January 31, 2025 | Daily JAM, Morning Briefing |
Today’s release of the PCE (Personal Consumption Expenditure) index, the Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation measure, wasn’t good news for investors hoping that the central bank will quickly resume interest rate cuts. The PCE climbed 2.6% in December from a year earlier, faster than its 2.4% annual rate in November and above the central bank’s 2 percent target. Compared to the previous month, prices were up 0.3%.
January 31, 2025 | Daily JAM |
The great tariffs guessing game looks like it will end tomorrow. At least Round One. Today White House press secretary Karoline Levitt said reports that tariffs wouldn’t be imposed until of tariffs from 1 March. She then said that President Donald Trump plans to impose his first round of tariffs tomorrow, February 1.
January 30, 2025 | Daily JAM |
The U.S. economy grew at a solid rate in the fourth quarter but growth still slowed in the last three months of the year. Data this morning from the Bureau of Economic Analysis showed that the economy expanded at an annual rate of 2.3% in the fourth quarter, down from annualized growth of about 3% in the two previous quarters. The fourth quarter results mean that for all of 2024 the economy grew bt 2.8% The details of forth quarter growth were quite a puzzle, though.
January 29, 2025 | Daily JAM, Volatility |
When AI stocks plunged on Monday on the news out of China’s AI startup, DeepSeek, and fears that this meant the end of the AI ‘bubble,” shares of AI stocks such as Nvidia (NVDA) and Broadcom (AVGO) plunged 17% and the NASDAQ Composite tumbled. But the market as a whole was remarkably unperturbed. The CBOE S&P 500 Volatility Index (VIX), the “fear index” did climb by 20%.
TO ALMOST 18. 18? The 10-year average for the VIX is 18.26! So with the prospect of a collapse in the AI bubble–which I don’t see despite clear extremes of valuation in the sector–the AI trend is real and revolutionary. With the possibility that the Federal Reserve will dash hopes for interest rate cuts in 2025. With the possibility that a renewal of the 2017 Trump tax cuts and new tariffs will revive inflation. With the possibility that the ungovernable extremes of the Republican party will be unable to govern and will really shut down the government in a huge debt ceiling/budget fight. With all of that danger lurking out there, the VIX traded at just 18 on Monday and closed at 16.56 today, January 29? In my opinion this hedge on risk is on sale.
January 29, 2025 | Daily JAM, Morning Briefing |
The Federal Open Market Committee voted unanimously today to keep the Federal Funds rate unchanged in a range of 4.25%-4.5%, after lowering rates by a full percentage point in the final months of 2024. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said officials are not in a rush to lower interest rates, adding the central bank is pausing to see further progress on inflation following a string of rate reductions last year.
January 29, 2025 | Daily JAM |
One of the key questions for AI investors and for companies trying to decide which platform to use to build their AI apps is How accurate is DeepSeek?
Early reports put the model’s accuracy on a par with U.S. platforms from Open AI, Meta Platforms, and Alphabet. For example, DeepSeek R-1, the latest iteration, achieved a 71.0% Pass@1 accuracy on the AIME 2024 benchmark, which improved to 86.7% with majority voting. That beat results for OpenAI’s o1-0912 model. On the MATH-500 benchmark, DeepSeek R-1 scored 95.9%, outperforming o1-0912. While I still haven’t read any convincing new evidence that suggests DeepSeek’s platform isn’t as fast or as accurate on tasks such as numerical logic as those from U.S. competitors, there is a new report today from a credible expert source that suggests the accuracy of query results isn’t as good as the accuracy of a competitive query engine such as ChatGPT. The problem seems to go deeper too than censorship on topics sensitive to China’s government.
January 28, 2025 | Daily JAM, Morning Briefing |
We won’t get another update on the probable trajectory of Federal Reserve interest rate policy until the central bank updates its Dot Plot projections at its March 19 meeting. But meanwhile, we have a survey from CNBC that shows a majority of respondents–and this is a small sample of hust 25–still believe we’ll get two interest rate cuts from the Fed in 2025. But that faith in that two-cut scenario is fading.
