After sowing confusion with remarks at Wednesday’s cabinet meeting that seemed to postpone new, higher tariffs on goods from Canada, Mexico, and China to April, today President Donald Trump said 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico are on track to go into place on March 4, and said he would impose an additional 10% tax on Chinese imports.
President Donald Trump has ordered an investigation of copper imports in what is a first step toward potential tariffs on the metal. The move launches a process that Trump previously used to put tariffs on steel and aluminium, opening a new front in his trade war. We’re at the early stages in this effort but I think a copper tariff play is a reasonable buy right now–especially since coopper demand and copper prices are forecast to climb tariffs or no tariffs. The biggest winner would be Freeport-McMoRan (FCX), the largest producer of copper in the United States. I’ll adding shares of Freeport my Jubak Picks portfolio tomorrow, Thursday, February 27.
Compounding pharmacies aren’t giving up their ability to create cheaper knockoff versions of Eli Lilly (LLY) and Novo Nordisk’s (NVO) GLP-1 weight loss drugs without a fight. On Friday the u.s. food and Drug Administration found that the shortage for Novo’s blockbuster GLP-1 treatments Ozempic, approved for diabetes, and Wegovy, approved for obesity, was over and that compounders would have to stop producing them in the next 60 to 90 days. Today,the Outsourcing Facilities Association (OFA) and Texas-based FarmaKeio Superior Custom Compounding filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Fort Worth, Texas
The Invesco QQQ ETF (QQQ), which tracks the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 index (NDX), closed below its 50-day moving average on Monday for the first time in just over three weeks. The ETF was down another 0.83% as of 3:30 p.m. New York time on Tuesday.
The Conference Board’s measure of consumer confidence fell this month by the most since August 2021. The Conference Board’s index fell 7 points in February to 98.3, marking the third straight decline, data released Tuesday showed. The figure was below all estimates in a Bloomberg survey of economists. A measure of expectations for the next six months also fell by the most in three-and-a-half years, while a gauge of present conditions declined more modestly.
In a week when Nvidia’s upcoming earnings report has all eyes on AI stocks, Microsoft (MSFT) has canceled some leases for U.S. data center capacity, according to TD Cowen.
OpenAI’s biggest backer has voided leases in the US totaling “a couple of hundred megawatts” of capacity—the equivalent of roughly two data centers.
President Donald Trump said tariffs scheduled to hit Canada and Mexico next month were “on time” and “moving along very rapidly” following an initial delay. But following the remarks, a U.S. official, who spoke to Bloomberg on the condition of anonymity, said the fate of the special 25% levy on Canada and Mexico was still to be determined.
In the first Trump Administration Apple (AAPL) avoided tariffs on its smartphones and on its Apple Watch made in China. This time around Apple may avoid the administration’s tariffs again, but the cost is a promise to spend $500 billion and hire 20,000 people in the United States over the next four years, and open a factory in Texas to make the machines that power the company’s push into artificial intelligence.
I have to add Robert F Kennedy Jr’s confirmation to the growing evidence that this Congress will act to rubber-stamp anything coming out of the White House. And now I’m trying to decide exactly how much chaos the new Secretary of Health and Human Services will unleash on healthcare stocks. My preliminary answer is A LOT. and that the effects of Kennedy’s tenure as head of the Department–added to the capricious decision-making of President Donald Trump and “break-things” czar Elon Musk–are just about impossible to predict. Which leaves investors with a nearly impossible challenge of assessing how much risk there is in any stock or ETF position in the sector. When you are unable to quantify risk, selling–at least some selling–is the best strategic choice for an investor. And that’s why in this post I’m going to give you my run down on what I would sell in the sector now and what I would hold onto until we see exactly how chaotic the chaos will be.
Crypto exchange Bybit has said it has lost almost $1.5 billion worth of tokens. A hacker took control of one of Bybit’s offline Ethereum wallets, Chief Executive Officer Ben Zhou announced in a social media post Friday, and an estimated $1.46 billion in assets flowed out to, well, somewhere else.
The Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation metric–due Friday–is expected to cool to the slowest pace since June. But while I think markets will cheer, it’s too soon to look for any change from the Federal Reserve on interest rate cuts. That will have to wait until April at least the the central bank will get a better idea of exactly what tariffs President Donald Trump will increase and by how much.
I expect the earnings report of the week will be Nvidia’s (NVDA) report after the close on Wednesday, February 26. For the fiscal quarter ending January 2025, the consensus EPS forecast is $0.79. The reported EPS for the same quarter last year was $0.49. Analysts expect NVIDIA’s earnings to grow 43.68% next year from $2.77 to $3.98 per share.
