Tariff resiliency, wall of worry, crypto highs: Market takeaways

00:00 Speaker A

My first takeaway is what tariffs? Uh, there was some pretty heady news in those headlines over the weekend, but I’ll tell you what, we didn’t really see that in a market’s perspective today. Here is the Dow. I’ll show you the morning chart. Uh, since the beginning of the day, we did open down, but just very slightly. And two or three months ago, as we were discussing earlier in the show, we would have been down two or three percent, but not today. We closed the day up 88 points. Uh, Nasdaq also up a quarter of a percent, S&P 500 a little bit less than that. And the Russell 2000 stole the show up two-thirds of 1% and it’s really some of those small caps that have been outperforming, but I’ll get to that in a few minutes here. Just want to show you kind of recap the day’s action. The VIX volatility index, I’m going to show you a year-to-date chart. This is hovering near the lows of the year. So even with the VIX, the volatility index, the so-called fear gauge, which Steve Sosnick says, “Don’t call it a fear gauge,” uh, that is not registering much fear right now. So, take that for what you will. ICE BofA move index, that is the fear index for the bond market. I say that with confidence. It is just up slightly off of those lows, which happened to be the lows of the year as well. And then in sector land, we saw a bunch of movements here, nothing too big. Communication services, meta alphabet leading there. Financials, we get those big bank earnings tomorrow, that was also in the lead. To the downside, energy took a little bit of a downside attack today. That was down 1.1%.

02:23 Speaker B

Always helpful to take a deep breath at moments like this. Think, you know what, what are the risks I should be thinking about as an investor? What would you say, Jared? How would you detail them?

02:41 Speaker A

It’s that wall of worry. And that’s what investors are facing right now. We have the S&P 500 near record highs, along with the Nasdaq. The Nasdaq hit an intraday record high earlier today. And, uh, I was talking about the wall of worry with Callie Cox over at Ritholtz Wealth Management. There’s a new brand brand new episode of Stocks and Translation, that’s going to be dropping tomorrow. So that’s Tuesday, July 15th. Look for that. But I just want to show you some of the stock action that we’re seeing here and kind of discuss a little bit, just so we’re going to touch a little bit on how investors are thinking about these moves. Here’s the year-to-date in the S&P 500. 6268, we have, uh, I believe RBC was raising their price target today. We’re going to see a lot of that kind of motion in the analyst community. But as Tom Hayes was pointing out earlier in the show, they follow, they don’t lead, they follow. So look at this nice uptrend that we have here. How do you get in? What are you going to do here? You have fear of missing, uh, fear of missing out, but you also have fear of jumping in. And so these are the dynamics at play. What I will tell you is you got a very, you have a much better shot at buying the all-time highs than you do at just taking stabs at wherever the market might land here. And that’s more so with individual stocks, but also with the indices that we’re here. So again, look out for that episode tomorrow. Callie Cox is on Stocks in Translation.

04:45 Speaker B

Should we do a quick check at crypto?

04:50 Speaker A

Oh, yeah. We got to do that as well. And, uh, let’s skip. Let’s get to crypto year because this is crypto week, right? But I’m saying crypto, this is a cure, the year of crypto. And we have seen Bitcoin sort of 123,000 to date. And it’s backed off of those highs a little bit, but I just want to review some of the price action because we’ve had an incredible year here and this is going to be a one-year trailing chart. Here are the old highs, the old record highs from December. And, uh, we got that off of the election of Trump. That was somewhere down in there. We saw that huge bump up. We got to record highs, then we fell off a bit. Then we just kind of played around in here, had a couple of false breakouts to the upside and to the downside. Finally able to break three, free. And what I said three weeks ago, the last time I was here and we were covering Bitcoin was in this in this chart right here, it looked like we were going to break higher, but I was not seeing participation from the altcoins. And you can throw Ethereum in there as well, but you take the top 20 coins by market cap, you want to see that breadth. And let me just show you. So I’m going to sort by performance here. I’m going to put the last 10 days price action. And you can see there’s a lot of green here. The top one, XLM, up 85%, Algo up 60%, uh, Cardano up 26%, Ripple up 30%. So we are finally seeing that breadth, which is what I want to see in a rally. You want to see that in stocks, you also want to see it in crypto.

06:55 Speaker B

It’s been a few weeks, as you know, since we had you on the show. Any big any big Jared Leec takeaways over that time?

07:07 Speaker A

I forgot how much fun this job is. I mean, we get to talk about charts on live TV with my friends here. So What more can you want? I don’t really want much more, Josh. I’m going to leave it there.

07:21 Speaker B

Great to have you back, my friend. Thank you.