This is The Takeaway from today’s Morning Brief, which you can sign up to receive in your inbox every morning along with:
The end of the first quarter is nearing, and President Trump just passed the 50-day mark in his second tour at the White House.
It’s safe to say this will be a face-ripping year for investors.
More volatility in markets. More earnings misses and warnings. More negative economic surprises. More stock rating downgrades. And trades that have worked amazingly well in the past few years (looking at you, Nvidia (NVDA)) not working so amazingly anymore.
Watch: Why Lego’s CEO is worried about tariffs
And when it seems like these things are over and the coast is clear, all the negativity is rinsed and repeated — causing more face-ripping moments at your trading screen or in chats with a financial adviser.
“We’ve had a couple of pretty sanguine years and years where we didn’t see the usual two or three pullbacks of 5% to 15%,” Edward Jones CEO Penny Pennington told me on Yahoo Finance’s Opening Bid podcast (see video above or listen below). “That’s a very typical thing to happen. And so, in a moment where we’ve got uncertainty from policy and tariffs and things like that, the markets are reacting. It was to be expected. And so investors are reacting.”
Boy are they reacting!
As it stands, the S&P 500 (^GSPC) has pulled back 10% from its Feb. 19 high.
Nvidia is down 14% year to date, and Tesla (TSLA) is down 40%. So much for money-minting momentum names!
The S&P 500 fell 1.4% on Thursday, the 10th daily decline this year with a loss above 1%, according to data from Creative Planning chief markets strategist Charlie Bilello. At this point last year, the S&P 500 had only three big down days, which Bilello said was “abnormally” low.
“The market is growing increasingly concerned about an economic slowdown,” Truist co-chief investment officer Keith Lerner told me.
Listen: Rubbermaid CEO says tariffs are bad for business
Yet despite a lot of the bad news being known by investors, what is there to be excited about in the markets at this precise time?
Sure, if you want to buy and hold a dividend-paying company (or even an Nvidia) for the next 25 years you will probably be wealthier than you are today. But from a near-term perspective, the tape stinks and there looks to be a wave of bad economic and corporate news coming (see the first quarter earnings season start, if the latest warnings from Delta (DAL), Southwest (LUV), and American Airlines (AAL) are any sign as to what’s ahead).
