Daily JAM
April 21, 2025 | Daily JAM, Morning Briefing |
The Standard & Poor’s 500 closed down 2.36% today and the Nasdaq Composite ended 2.55% lower. The consensus read–and mine too–is that the selling was driven by fears that President Donald Trump would move to oust Jerome Powell as head of the Federal Reserve before his term at the top of the Fed ends in 2026.. Today President Trump again called on the Fed to cut interest rates. On Truth Social Trump posted that he favors “preemptive cuts” to interest rates and called the Fed chairman a “loser.” An attempt to remove Powell before the end of his term would end up atbthe Supreme Court and would probably be ruled illegal. Probably. “The market doesn’t like the Fed’s independence being challenged,” Joe Saluzzi, co-manager of trading at Themis Trading told Bloomberg. “The market can at least make an attempt at predicting what an independent Fed will do. If their independence is challenged, then more erratic (unpredictable) decisions could be made. And the market does not like unpredictability.”
April 20, 2025 | Daily JAM |
I expect more opinions and some additional data on when the Trump tariffs will hit U.S. and global economic growth. And how big the hit will be.
April 20, 2025 | Daily JAM |
UnitedHealth (UNH) fell 23.04% on Thursday after missing Wall Street estimates on both revenue and earnings. The company also revised downward its 2025 earnings per share guidance to a range of $26-$26.50 from an earlier projection of between $29.50-$30. The problem is the fast and extreme growth in Medicare Advantage, the version of Medicare run by private insurers that contract with Medicare. The federal government pays these insurers a fixed amount per enrollee to provide Medicare-covered benefits. More than half of eligible Medicare enrollees are now on an Advantage plan. In 2024, UnitedHealthcare boasted 9.4 million enrollees, or 29% of the total eligible population. By comparison, Humana (HUM) came in a distant second with 6 million, or about 18% of the population. CVS (CVS) reported 4.1 million, or 12%.
Last year was a bad one for the Medicare Advantage business.
April 17, 2025 | Daily JAM |
Now we’ve got other data showing the leveraged buyout market is under stress. The U.S. leveraged-loan market is on the cusp of its longest run without a deal launch since at least 2013, Bloomberg reports.
April 17, 2025 | Daily JAM, Morning Briefing, Short Term |
One day after Fed Chair Jerome Powell warned that the administration’s trade war was “highly likely” to spur a temporary rise in inflation with the potential for longer-lasting effects President Donald Trump blasted the Federal Reserve for not lowering interest rates and said its chair’s “termination cannot come fast enough.” “Jerome Powell of the Fed, who is always TOO LATE AND WRONG, yesterday issued a report which was another, and typical, complete ‘mess!’” Trump wrote on Truth Social. Referring to interest rates, he added: “He should certainly lower them now. Powell’s termination cannot come fast enough!”
April 16, 2025 | AMZN, Daily JAM, Top 50 Stocks, Videos |
Today’s Quick Pick is Amazon.com (AMZN)–despite the current tariff panic. While the stock is down due to the broad market sell-off and concerns over tariffs impacting its supply chain, I believe Amazon’s size and logistical power will help it mitigate these challenges. The company can pressure suppliers, adjust pricing algorithms, and shift sourcing to keep costs lower than competitors, potentially gaining an edge as inflation rises. Though these advantages may not be evident in the upcoming April earnings report, I expect Amazon to emerge stronger in the long term, making it a compelling buy once the market shifts from indiscriminate selling to evaluating winners and losers.
April 16, 2025 | AMD, AVGO, Daily JAM, Morning Briefing, MRVL, NVDA, QCOM |
Just days after Nvidia and otherrchip stocks rallied on news that thee Trump Administration would pause tariffs on chips and electronic goods, the White House has informed the company it would require a special license for exports of its H20 chips. The H20 chips were designed especially for the Chinese market in an effort to comply with U.S. restrictions on chip exports to China. No licenses for shipments into China have ever been granted, given the US government’s concern that the chips could be used to build AI supercomputers in the country, so the new rules are effectively a ban.
Shares of Nvidia closed down 6.87% today, April 16
April 14, 2025 | Daily JAM, Special Reports |
Is it time to get in, to snap up bargains, before stock prices recover. To which I say, Not yet. Bear markets, and remember that we’re now in a Bear market, are notorious for setting bear traps for investors who get carried away at the prospect of heady profits from buying on the dip. Bear market traps dangle just enough of a juicy bounce in front of hungry investors to get them to put cash into stocks–and then spring the trap of eating that cash all up in a renewed downturn. So when should you think about getting in? Almost no one ever gets a bottom absolutely right. But you do want to be relatively correct on finding the bottom and to avoid, to the degree you can, the losses from a Bear trap. I’m really reluctant to use past drops and Bear markets as a pattern for this moment. John Auther had a good post on Bloomberg on April 8 on how the drop and then the bounce resembled the market meltdown of 2008. The massive selling and then recovery reminds him of big selling in after the Lehman debacle in October 2008 that marked what calls hevthe end of the beginning in that bear. The actual bottom, he notes, came five months later. The difference this time, I’d say, is that we still haven’t seen the end of the potential stream of bad news. We still have to hear about recession/no recession, more Trump tariffs, spike in inflation/no spike, trade war retaliation, and more. We could get bad news, even really surprising bad news, on any of these fronts that would lead to another leg down in the financial markets. In other words, real world evnts that have yet to be decided could mean we’re closer to or further away from a bottom to this Bear market.
April 14, 2025 | Daily JAM |
President Donald Trump is pressing ahead with plans to impose tariffs on semiconductor and pharmaceutical imports. Notices Monday in the Federal Register said the Commerce Department would investigate the impact on U.S. national security of “imports of semiconductors and semiconductor manufacturing equipment” as well as “pharmaceuticals and pharmaceutical ingredients, including finished drug products.”
April 14, 2025 | Daily JAM |
Goldman Sachs has taken a look at how difficult it would be for U.S. companies to find alternatives to Chinese sources of supply in a global trade/tariff war. And the picture isn’t very pretty.
April 14, 2025 | Daily JAM |
When the House and Senate convene again on April 28, Republicans will test whether the extremely precarious deals they sort of hammered out before leaving town will hold up so that they can deliver President Donald Trump’s big beautiful spending bill (for the 2025 fiscal year that started in October 2024) with its $5.5 trillion or so in tax cuts, its money for border and immigration crackdowns, and an increase in the debt ceiling. How shaky are those deals? The Washington Post this morning put together a detailed list of examples that show how little actual agreement there is between the House and the Senate.
April 14, 2025 | Daily JAM, Short Term |
Morgan Stanley (MS) and Citigroup (C) have cut their estimates for 2025 earnings with a warning that tariffs will curb profit growth.
