All right, welcome to Yahoo! Finance is a morning brief on this Tuesday, March 24th. I am Miles Udland. That is Josh Schaefer, newsletter editor over at Barons, Julie Heimann in Houston on assignments. Let's take a look at where futures are trading here about a half hour until the open on this Tuesday and we're lower down about 6-10th of 1%. We sat here yesterday, Josh, and the last thing I asked you with the market or futures at that point up about 2%. I said, with the market clothes on Monday, green or red, and you said red.
Now the market was up about a percent and a half yesterday, but you were telling me just before we started that actually you were right. If you would like to share that with the class on why you were correct that it was a red clothes when the S&P gained 1.2%. So I was wrong, of course. But I think really what I was getting at Miles was I wouldn't have been a buyer at the open yesterday or really a buyer throughout the day. I felt like there was a good chance stocks were going to close at their lows of the day.
Which day eventually did and if you walked sort of the rally that was throughout the day. It just was kind of a casual move lower throughout most of the session. And I think you're seeing that reflected in futures right now, which is basically I would define this market right now as sort of a what do we do? What do we do market? Maybe I do nothing market. It seems like there's not a lot of trust in the headlines that we actually got yesterday morning that this escalation is fully over that the war is winding down.
And so I think when you sit back as an investor like how much did which we talked about really for almost all of 25 minutes yesterday, but how much did the story change from Friday to Monday. And I think the longer it settles in, investors are kind of deciding maybe the story hasn't changed that much yet. And that's sort of where we sit here from at least how I feel from my seat on Tuesday more. You know, I think you should have leaned into that a little bit more.
I think you could have taken more credit or spun it a little more tightly that you were right because well, you're just like, okay, it's a do nothing market. I think it's a little bit worse than that. I mean, again, when we were chatting on Friday and over the weekend about like, okay, what are we going to do Monday Tuesday? The kind of meta question was like, are we bearish enough? Yeah. And we both were like, probably not, right?
Right. And now again, the S&P is what? For seven percent off all time highs. Like we haven't taken that big of a dip. Things look a little bit more constructive than they did on Friday. We're sitting here yesterday talking with 200 day moving average. That seems like a little bit less. Well, I mean, we're still right in that ballpark. So that still kind of is the battle line. But as you mentioned, that fade all day yesterday, people did do something.
They decided to not continue following through with whatever, you know, whatever buying signals are coming in earlier in the day. And so it does feel like there's a general lack of enthusiasm for the overall market. And I'm not 100% convinced that all of that is geopolitical. I think one thing that I was looking at that, you know, it was like, okay, you know, what are the possible like triggers or things people are looking at?
We haven't discussed yet, which is a calendar. Yeah. We're a week out from the end of the first quarter. And now we can get into like real-gered blickery territory around flows and squaring up portfolios. And just like, what do you want? And when you're closing out your statements, you're an institutional investor or Q1, what do you want a couple things to look like? Returns, which you know, you can't fully control, but you can, you know, window dress or try to manage some of that.
And then two, what is actually in the portfolio at that point in time. And then three, what's, you know, what's the leverage or what's the, what's the gross, let's say, right? Are you 105% long? Are you 99% long? Do you want to go from 130 long to 110? I mean, this is sort of very like insular stuff for investment decisions. But I think that this, all these factors in what's been a pretty messy start to the year are why we see a lot of headlines and none of them feels like the answer yet.
Because there's a lot of money management problems, I guess I would say. Maybe we'll, so would you take that then? So we're going to be down for the quarter, right? That for the first. Most likely. Most likely. Most likely. You're probably going to be down. Yeah. I would want to be down. Yeah. The index is probably going to be down. So I would wonder if it's a sell your losers into the end of the quarter then is that sort of what you're getting at to some extent?
Well, you could do it a couple of ways, right? You could sell the losers. I mean, I don't want to go in all the particulars of like, you know, the tax. That's a nice name. Yeah. Or, you know, fun, let's go. I think it's just like, again, if you're going to offer an update on where you stand at the end of the quarter, what do you want to be in that? So do you want to say, like, we came in with a view that the market was going to do this in January and we were surprised by that. Do you want to send that letter out, you know, mid-April and say, well, do you upload the political events overtook our strategy? Do you want to say, actually, we doubled down on software because we're super excited about, you know, kind of the way that these companies, the way the winners in software can leverage AI going forward.
You think this is a great value. Like, those are the, like, you reverse engineering what you want to communicate to your investors. But I think a lot of that is going to lead to folks looking around today, tomorrow, through the next several days, and just trying to think like, how, if at all do I need to change the portfolio near term, and then that gets to, you know, some of the winners, the losers, and that, I think, shapes the market action as much as, you know, the next incremental headline on what's happening in Iran. Can I give you my picks for why I think stocks are going to close a week lower now? Okay, there you go. Great. Great. I won't be here on Friday. Okay. I won't be here on Friday.
So let's do the math. We're up about 1.2% yesterday or down another 6-10 today. So we're slightly positive for the week so far. So you've got four days to make this case. Yes. And essentially my point is we were talking around catalysts, right? And so like what makes this sort of... Coming up at 10 o'clock. We're feeling a little bearish. What flips that? How do you get buyers back into the market here?
And one thing we've talked about a lot over the last couple of years, and I wrote about a lot in my time here and writing in the morning brief is Michael Ketreds has this thing that he always talks about with, if there's a big catalyst that starts your correction, you need the catalyst to reverse, right? And the catalyst we've all been talking about for the past couple of weeks is oil. And so if you're going to tell me that something takes Brent from going down a little bit one day and then Brent's back up above 100 this morning, right? Or I think I've lost chest. That's right around 100 right now. Yep. And same with WTI, right? You had WTI, I talked to almost 85, I think at one point yesterday.
And I gave the right back above 90. What actually sustainably brings that down is obviously, I mean, we don't need to get into the geopolitics of it all again, right? But you need that to really come off the boil here. And does that happen in the next three days? At this point, I'm just saying no. Like I don't know what brings that down instantly. Yesterday, we had a chance at it, right? You had oil both forms of oil down 11, 12%. And it was like, okay, here we go. Maybe here's the online. It didn't happen. It caught a bit off the bottom. And it's still hovering at levels that make people uncomfortable.
And I think until you get rid of that headwind and people feel confident in that headwind, I think your direction is lower. So that brings us to the Fed. We've stories this morning from Jen Schomburger who covers the Fed. Here we go, fine. How the Fed has and hasn't reacted to oil shocks in the past. And I think it complements your point well. And now, obviously, we had the meeting last week. We're not going to get a Fed meeting until the first week of May. So there's a little bit of a lag here in terms of when the Fed could act next.
But it comes to this idea of the Fed's likely not going to be the catalyst to react aggressively against the rise in oil. And it feels like the geopolitics of what sent oil to 100. Maybe it doesn't send it to 150. But coming back to 70 bucks a barrel on WTI feels pretty far off right now. And so it feels just to add to your point that not just that catalyst, but what would be the trigger to start getting markets interested in their being a turn. In that, again, that main source of pressure in the stock market.
But she quotes Waller in that story. And one thing that Waller pointed out was he says, quote, if it's at a very high level and it stays high for months on end, then at some point it bleeds through because oil is an input, et cetera. But that's sort of the question I think we're debating here is, first of all, he is a hungered on Brent in 90 on WTI too high. I don't know. I'm not an economist. We could go talk to one and come back with a better answer. But it's certainly not 70, right? It's not 80. It's higher than it was. So if we're just continuously sitting there, that seems to be an area that has been an issue for the Fed in the past, right? If you just sit at an elevated level, they just sort of completely turn into weight and C mode. And it's like, well, we'll see what happens here, which I think is that we used at this point we were looking at for the Fed for the next six months, right?
In less of the labor market fully deteriorates. Yep. You're clearly have inflation that is going to trend higher for a couple of months here. You're not cutting in June into that. If you just have pure data that's sending inflation higher, I don't think you can cut in June and then to your point of we don't have the Fed put, the Fed's not coming to help you. It just doesn't help the markets. Well, and then let's just stay on the Fed as well because as the dust settled on last week, it's now or like, oh, Kevin Worsh might not actually be the Fed share from come June to use your point because as soon as you said they're not going to cut in June, I'm like, well, Kevin Worsh might be the Fed share. Maybe you get some consensus around that. But now as time kind of drags on and it looks like there's going to be some resolution in Congress around the shutdown, fixed TSA, right?
So there's a little bit of movement going on there, but we still don't have a hearing scheduled for Worsh. And we had Henry had a trace on yesterday talking about how the Senate for anything, and this I asked her about the funding bill for the war, but she's like, listen, they've got 90 days to do anything and then it's campaign season. So all of this to say, there's not right now, I mean, there's a clear path to Kevin Worsh becoming the Fed share, but there's a procedural challenge. It would seem sitting here today on March 24th for him getting in that seat by June, which further complicates the question for the Fed because not only may you have this, you know, might you have this inflation problem, but now you're going to have a market's challenge of the market trying to understand what does the Worsh Fed look like?
What does the Worsh block look like? Is Powell on the Worsh Fed? Well, Powell's almost still, well, he said until there's a full resolution to the legal challenge, he will remain on the Fed board, but to bring up Chris Waller, Fed governor, he or Fed vice chair, he did not dissent on the decision to hold. He had been dissenting. So now it looks a little bit less like there's a Worsh block, let's say, and you have, I don't want to say it's a normal Fed, but it's just a group of individuals who are making their judgments and voting based on what they think is best for the economy, a little bit different than what it felt like we were corining towards maybe three or four months ago where it's like, no, you're going to have the kind of look like Molex-Skotis, right? Where you're going to have like the block, these four governors are always going to vote everywhere.
Right. And it feels like that Fed has also changed. So all these factors on the margins are just negative for like what makes stocks go up, lower rates, what helps stocks to go up, lower oil. I'm looking around, I'm not seeing where this is going to really come into play. Yeah, well, you brought up what I think was one of my bigger takeaways from the Fed meeting. And we always sit there and debate like you're watching markets as you're listening to Powell, what commented he make that sort of sent things down. And it was really when he started, he started not answering questions and he just gave his answers because he was expecting more questions on his future in the future of the Fed. That was when markets really turned last Wednesday. And so I think there was, I mean, I wrote about this in our sub-stack.
I got, I got a bump in at least once, well, me for two days. Searching for signals on sub-stacks, check it out. But I wrote about Neil Dutters' point on good news cuts being gone, right? And maybe you're not going to get a cut just simply because of the soft landing narrative and that's trouble for stocks. And I do think that's trouble. I think the general uncertainty that you just laid out there was also the biggest trouble for investors. Like, what's going on down there? Yeah. Do I have any confidence in who's running the Fed in a couple months? What the path is going to be? It just like once you start having meetings where you come out and the press conference, one of the key… quotes is we basically could have not done a dot plot because we don't really know what's happening.
Yeah. We have a lot of confidence in that, right? So it's hard to invest around and that makes me say, man, maybe I'm good right now. Well, and I think that, you know, this gets to a meta question. I think that comes up all the time, frankly, which is like, why doesn't we care about the Fed so much? Like, who really cares? A bunch of guys sitting around and women sitting around like talking about monetary policy. What's monetary policy? But the modern market is very locked into rates as, again, as a lever for, do I want to buy on the margin? Do I want to sell on the margin? And all else equal, lower rates good for stocks, higher rates, more challenging for stocks. It doesn't have to be bad. Just more challenging.
And so the reason why investors in this market are so locked in on the Fed is because they just want to know what's the next move. And to your point, you know, this is like on the street, why do we care about the Fed? Well, markets want to know what happens next. And now, whereas we have as little certainty about the next move for the Fed as we've had in some time. Therefore, you have a major problem, I guess you would say, for the market in trying to figure out, what's my move here? What's my bid? And a final point on this, and we can pivot or we cannot. We'll move on. I think there's a recency bias aspect to this, too, right?
When you think back to 2022, when is the last time stocks really didn't work and we had a big down year, the Fed was raising rates, right? And so now that you have markets even debating that, whether that's actually going to happen or not, I think is a whole separate question. But you have market pricing starting to consider the possibility of raising interest rates. And I think if you think just from a recent experience in these markets, that was the last time being in stocks really didn't work, right? So if I'm even considering the possibility that the Fed's next move could be higher, that makes me nervous as an investor.
Yeah. All right. Speaking of markets, but not the stock market. When I came back to Yahoo Finance in 2022, you were just a young, cub reporter. You were on the sports business beat, which was really kind of the sports betting beat. Daily fantasy beat. We saw draft kings and then Flutter. Had they been public at that point? They had draft kings had been public. Flutter was public in Europe and then came to... Flutter, kind of company of Fandil. So now we have public trade, public trade company sports betting. And of course, the insertion of prediction markets has been the big thing in the last couple of years.
And the influx of cash that has gone into CalShi and Polymarket, Polymarket, Aldous Close, Yahoo Finance has a partnership with them. The influx of investor cash into those two companies in the last year has really made the prediction market. I guess you would say it's a problem for the sports betting companies. Sure. The very minimum. Robinhood is now in the space. Coinbase is kind of rushing in. It's all kind of one market at this point. And yesterday, very interesting series of developments where we saw in the morning it reported that bipartisan... There's a bipartisan push in the Senate for rules to... Or legislation to create further rules inside of trading rules essentially.
Around who can bet on CalShi and who can bet on Polymarket? Both companies really quickly came out and said we now have new rules on who can bet on our platforms. And I'm just wondering from your perspective, let's start from the business side of how you've thought about the way these two players have changed both the sports betting market and the way that we've seen, I think, Robinhood, Coinbase, a lot of others rush in to make this one big macro bet on everything all in one place trade.
Yeah. I think if you talk to the gambling companies over the last couple of years, and I remember Peter Jackson telling me this, I think it was 2024 during the election. I asked him a throwaway question at the time as a last interview question. I said, would you allow betting on the presidential election if it became legal here? He said, yeah, we're interested in that because they do it in Europe. Flutter is an international brand that has experienced in different kinds of markets. So they were always interested in it.
I think the twist here has been the prediction market companies, Calshy and Polymarkets, ability to get into sports gambling in states where sports gambling wasn't legal. And like we can call it prediction market sports betting or whatever, but like it sports gambling. Right. It's prediction market on a sporting event or whatever, whatever the exact analogy it's sports gambling, right? I'm in a legal state, so I don't know how they spread the needle.
But now they're pushing into states where it wasn't legal. And so if you think about the total tam of what the eventual pitch was for all of these sportsbooks was, well, yeah, think about how well they're doing now. They haven't even gotten in California yet. They haven't gotten in Texas yet. Maybe they eventually turned the story around in Florida. Then they have those giant states with all these people. And then you're talking about a totally different sort of overall market, right?
Well, if you have two companies that go in, one thing that's been true with sports gambling since it was legalized almost a decade ago now, the incumbents usually win. But DraftKings and Fandall in the beginning, it was like, oh no, ESPN's getting into this. MGM wants to get into this now. Penetrate. Penetrate payments going to get into it. And all these, it's fanatics is going to get into it. Well, guess what? The companies that were there first just won.
Because once you have it on your phone and you already have your money logged in and the thing works, you just stick with it. And so I think that's been the real threat for these companies is CalShane and Polymarket move first to get the CFTC approval to just do essentially sports gambling in states where it wasn't legal. And then it's like, oh no, Confandal and DraftKings really come in second here. How much would they have to spend to get someone to move off Polymarket or CalShane and then you back in that sort of promotion standpoint where they're giving away free bets?
So that was the concern. Yeah, I mean, look to that last point, you kind of never, it's kind of become clear. You never really leave that space if you're a gambling company. Like they still are aggressively promoting all kinds of new customer offers, or just constantly part of that equation. So the thing that I am trying to work out, and maybe it's not the right comparison, but like the two models I have in my head here of how the prediction market thing plays out, is does this more represent the daily fantasy arc?
So the daily fantasy arc was, you think all these companies, many of these companies, created daily fantasy games that were not sports betting, but they kind of like got around the rules. It had a sports bet cadence because it was quicker. Because the fantasy league is the whole season. So daily fantasy is like a one-time event, you know, pick a team, blah, blah. I'm going to explain the mechanics. So that arc eventually led essentially to sports betting, same platform, right, with the leaders in daily fantasy.
Or does it have a more crypto adjacent arc, which is, this is, yes, you know, there's gambling aspects, let's say, yolo aspects, still to the crypto trade, but that was like a big part of it five, seven years ago. And then it just became institutionalized as we would sit here and discuss crypto allocations in the same way we do, you know, the way we discuss fixed income inequities within investment portfolios, right?
So I'm not sure if that's quite the right comparison, but I feel like the way prediction markets came on the scene so quickly, how they ramped, how they infiltrated these user bases, I'm trying to figure out like, is it, like which one it is? But maybe this is just totally like not, not on the market. I mean, right now it's more of the daily fantasy route, right? Because in order for it to be crypto and we start talking about allocations or serious players are going to start allocating money to there, right?
I would want to hear more interests from people that I speak with, which usually ends up being an off the record or on background question, but I have asked investors and banks, like, are you guys interested in this? Yeah. Like do clients want to put money in? Like it's a more binary bet, right? Or rather, then we're going to position X, Y, and Z the other way because we think the jobs report's going to come out a certain outcome. Yeah. One could argue, if you feel strongly about your forecast, you could just go and place a binary bet on how many payrolls are going to be or a binary bet on where the unemployment rate's going to be in three months. What's the answer? And that could be, they said right now, no, they're using it to track how markets are pricing things and that's more of a volume story. If there's high volume in a market, then they feel like it is. That's a stagger market. Yeah. And it is giving you some sort of read, but they're not looking to actually allocate money in those places.
Yeah. And then, yeah, I don't know. I think the daily fantasy part of it just sort of means that we're at a nascent part of this, right? Okay, people want to bet on random things on a prediction market, kind of go for it and we'll see how real it gets. I still, I think Fandall and Draftking still survive out of this. Fandall's down 50% just to start the year or flutter. Sorry, it's down 50% to start the year. I think that's a viable dip at this point because I think they're different products. It's still a sports gambling product that works. So we'll just close the loop here on what the actual companies came out and said, probably market announcing new rules for its trading platform. So it's now got three categories of prohibited insider trades trading on stolen information. So that's basic one. Trading on illegal tips. Okay. And then the most interesting one is trading by those who can influence the outcome.
好的。那么,嗯,我也不太清楚。我觉得日常幻想竞猜(daily fantasy part)这个部分只是意味着我们处于一个刚起步的阶段,对吧?好,人们想在预测市场上对各种随机事件下注,随他们去吧,我们就看看这件事情会变得多真实。我仍然认为Fandall和Draftking可以在这个过程中存活下来。Fandall今年一开始就下跌了50%,或者说Flutter,一开始就下跌了50%。我觉得在这一点上,这算是一个有潜力的低谷,因为我认为它们的产品有所不同,它们仍然是有效的体育赌博产品。所以这里我们就闭环一下有关这些公司的实际声明,可能市场会宣布为其交易平台引入新规则。现在有三类禁止的内幕交易:利用被盗信息进行的交易,这是一种基本形式。进行非法提示的交易。最有趣的是,那些可以影响结果的人进行的交易。
Now the way that Kouchi framed this in their announcement was they're going to prohibit trading from any person who has access or is in a position to access Muto NMPI. Okay, fine. Affiliate source agency or a decision maker direct or indirect who has any influence, direct or indirect on the outcome of the underlying event. So this is really politicians, athletes, guy on the set of a movie where there's a poly market bet like these are the kinds of things that are going to go. What about the athletes simply? That person is going to be in my opinion in violation of employer affiliate of a source agency for any contract. So if you know the athlete in a personal capacity, I think you might qualify as source agency for a source of contract. If it's like something like Josh Schaeffer's total and the men's basketball league tonight. Right. Yeah. And then by the way, yeah, under, right? And that would be how you would game it too, right? You would always do the under on something like that because the person can actually control it.
Yeah. But I just don't look it's nice. That's a great idea. I'm just not buying that that actually is going to work in practice, right? And they're going to be able to do that. Oh, I think it's going to work in practice. I think it just all of a sudden these are different kind of like overnight. There's like different products, I think, than what was one of those months ago. I mean, obviously, because there's new rules. But I just feel like this is a grind of new rulemaking in this crypto kind of adjacent thing. Like, oh, we want to set the terms. We want to engage with regulators to create the right solution. It's exactly like crypto in that way, right? Where it's, we want regulation. We want it. And then that will take a hard, hard heel turn at some point because you're not actually in control of what the regulation is going to be.
Yeah. And then you're going to have to deal with it. And then you're going to have probably, I mean, this just looks like it's going to create a lot of PR nightmares, right? Your people are, sorry, you're pretty great. You're pretty great. Right. Do people want to be in that market, though? Yeah. If all the reports start coming out that they're clearly is insider trading, like, I don't know, I don't want to play if it's well, people you're asking can only be in the market if there's rules. So maybe there's, maybe there's the way in for them. Right. Futures are lower. Red or green close today, Josh. I'll take red. I'll take red. I'll take red. Okay. I'll be there every day. I'm an impartial journalist. I have no idea.
All right. Josh Shavr. Thanks for stopping by. See you next week. Yeah. And that'll do it for more brief here on Yahoo Finance. Much more ahead. Coming up. Red or through the break. All right. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you. It's Tuesday morning for the investing world. I'm Yowell Finds, executive editor Brian Sausie coming to you live from our New York City headquarters. Here's what's on my mind right now. First, city strategists are not ruling out $200 oil if the US war and Iran persist until June. Nothing like scaring the hell out of investors with this one. Thank you, city actually. No. I do not thank you for trying to scare everyone.
Second, Goldman Sachs is out calling for worldwide inflation surge because oil prices have surged on the back of the war. This makes more sense to me than a $200 oil prediction. Three, shout out Admiral James Stavreides. Now a vice chairman at Carlaw Group. Here's what the Admiral has to say this morning in his newsletter, love reading his newsletter. At the moment, there are two clocks ticking on the battlefield. The first is the growing antipathy to the war in the United States. A couple with certain gasoline prices. An initial pentagon bill for $200 billion.
Those costs and declining ammunition levels are another part of the clock ticking that Washington is hearing more clearly each day with midterms coming in November. The Trump administration is keenly aware of the political need for an off ramp soon. The second clock ticking is in Tehran where the regime's goal at this point is simple to survive. Love me some blunt analysis. And lastly, yes, Nvidia Stock is still trading below the important 200-day moving average. The only two mag seven members trading above the tour today. Google and Tesla. That's what we call news you can use.
You're on the open bid round table. Arrogant B. Riley. Well, cheap market strategist and y'all finance senior reporter. A Nez Faray and as coming to you here again, like I did yesterday, we are rinse and repeating. Give me the latest on oil because the past 24 hours have been absolutely wild. 100%. We are seeing now oil futures up more than 4% after yesterday. They had gone down around 10%. Iran saying that they have no intention of negotiating. You also have the Wall Street Journal that is saying that perhaps Saudi Arabia and the UAE could get into this conflict as well. So that would add another layer of escalation.
And then you also have attacks that are still happening a pipe in Iran, gas pipe in southwestern Iran. So these markets are really moving on the headlines. A Rebecca Babin from CIBC. She told me, look, the downside when it comes to price movements like we saw yesterday, oil plummeting, she said that is capped because really there still is so much uncertainty over the straight of Hormuz and when that will be reopened. If you take a look at polymarket, polymarket is saying a 37% chance that it would, the traffic would return back to normal by the end of April.
But as you mentioned, Saazi, you still have Wall Street that is predicting that the longer that this goes, the higher the prices for crude that could go. So city, $200 barrel, yes, through June, if this continues. All right, are you big buyer in 200 oil? I mean, if that happens, would you be peace? I mean, we're in a recession. We're in a full-blown recession if oil is toward oil is a barrel. If not a depression, let's be honest. Yeah, that's true. It's all about duration though, right? It's like how long does it spend at that elevated level?
And then every time there's an oil price shock, someone wants to be the highest estimate. Oh, they love this stuff, Art. Everybody's trying to be a hero. They always want to predict something. Why are we trying to predict $200 barrel oil? Who the hell wants to see that? It's usually Goldman Sachs. So city beat them a bunch today and they came out with a $200 price. Anybody can model that out, but it's knowing, as just said, it's knowing when we finally get more flow through the straight of Hormuz.
And if that is something that could physically happen, then you'll see a collapse very much like we saw yesterday. I'm probably retraced about a half of the move that we've already seen. So to the extent that anyone that wants to predict this is also going to have to tell you what the weather's going to be like in a month. You just don't know until we start to get some constructive conversation going on about what it's going to take to open up the straits because without that, you could predict any price you want.
It's just that it's impossible to have that come to fruition unless it until we know when we get some resolve by getting this right to open. All right. City and Goldman, of course they could predict a weather. What are you talking about? I mean, they do it all the time. I put this to my guest yesterday. I want to put it to you. The market volatility is back on the line. We've seen these wild swings, which is to be expected. How do you play this? Like, what do you do in a backdrop like this?
Yeah, three things to think about Brian. And I think the first and foremost is that you don't want to listen to the sort of daily headline driven markets and think that that's normal. I think what eventually happens is we get to a place where we have a better understanding of the duration of this conflict. And then things start to get back to a steady state, right? So there are those that will say that we have in price than enough of what this could possibly mean in the markets. And that's likely true at the index level for the S&P 500, where we're still not down 10% from from recent highs.
And at the VIX level, where we haven't closed above 30 for two consecutive days, we've, you know, we've tested it, but we haven't closed above that. So the people that watch this in terms of when we get that capitulation sell off to making a decision that we've probably bottomed out, we're very early in that stage. But I think that's all about your time frame, too. If you're a long-term investor, you shouldn't be playing geopolitical events, right? So if you did the same thing at the beginning of any war, you've actually lost money because six to nine months later.
The market is typically higher. That was true when Russia invaded Ukraine four years ago. It's likely going to be true again. This is true about the markets going all the way back to World War II. So your long-term investor, don't try to play geopolitical events and certainly don't wait for all of us to settle because of the thus and never settles. There's going to be something else after this conflict that will be concerned about.
Good stuff there are. Arnaz, let me get back to you here because this has been a morning of interesting calls, at least in my, in my email inbox. Another one that caught my attention, Bernstein on Bitcoin. Bernstein is saying that Bitcoin looks like it's bottomed. That is one big call because you're seeing Bitcoin at around 70,000, 71,000 right now. But what they're saying is that they still have 150,000 price target, by the way, on Bitcoin.
But they're saying, look, Bitcoin is outperformed. It has a stronger buyer base now. It has a strategy which is like the bank blushers are for Bitcoin. It is now you have long-term holders that are holding Bitcoin and the retail hands that panic sold. Well, now you have a stronger base. That's their thesis. There are other Wall Street analysts that are saying that Bitcoin has not bottomed yet. But Bernstein is saying it's going higher from here.
Speaking of going higher, I shout out to the top of the show, or that Google is still holding above its two-and-aid-be-moving average, you like to see it. But the Residant Mag 7 is not doing so great. What's the, what's the play there, you think? Yeah, technology has been doing great since the fourth quarter of last year. There's been obviously all sorts of questions about artificial intelligence, cat-backs, the circularity of some of those contracts.
When we'll see a return on the invested capital, more importantly, of late. It's been, you know, playing this artificial intelligence whack-a-mull. What sector or what business line is going to be destroyed because of AI, and taking out software companies one at a time and taking them to the woodshed. And I think all of that's been very overblown. I think that one thing to take a step back for from is, we started this war in Iran when technology was very oversold, and it has actually held up better. Energy has been the best performing sector. Technology has been the second best performing sector. I think there's a lot of reasons for that. I think technology has proven to be a bit immune to higher energy prices, and it comes into this event in a very oversold. A load multiple of the lowest multiples we've seen in about four years.
Art real quick. You know what has also been immune? Earnings estimates for the S&P 500. Every chart that I look at, it still, it looks like this. There you go, my hands are running off the screen. I mean, that's where all these estimates are still going. What point does the street mark down as estimates? I'm not talking about 2%, 3%, I'm talking about a large markdown because of higher oil prices, that impacts the stock market. Again, all that's new with duration. For how long are we in this elevated state? So if we start hearing first quarter earnings reporting and companies start talking about the impact of higher energy prices, understanding that only one month of this quarter was impacted in the first quarter.
So I think that if this drags on into the summertime, you're certainly going to see downgrades, especially with energy-intensive industries, the industrials, the materials, etc. And we'll certainly see a continuation of the sell-off in things like consumer discretionary, especially as it pertains to travel and leisure. That makes a lot more sense to me than that $200 oil shout out. To Ardenaz, thanks so much. Good to see you both as always. For more polymarket odds, you can scan the QR code on your screen to go to the Yowel Finds prediction markets hub powered by Polymarket. I had here first thing each day to get the pulse of what could be hot or not in the markets and you should be doing that too.
Straight ahead, I am really deep into a U.S. economy. It has been shocked to its core because of surging oil prices. No need to economist, Noria Warbeanie is here at the next. The global economy has been shocked by the surging oil price at the hands of the U.S. War and Iran. Where is the disconnect here? The disconnect is that the markets are still believing that this is going to be relatively short-war. We'll end up in the next few weeks in which has the impact of the rise in all prices on inflation and on U.S. economic growth is going to be moderate.
There will be some slowdown in growth. There will be some increasing inflation for a few months. But there is not going to be a significant increase in inflation and expectation. Now, the market could be right. It could be wrong. But let's put this way. Historically, we have two extremes. One, 1970s, young people were between Israel and Arab state. Fripling of all prices, taxation, recession, high inflation, 7475. Then we had the Islamic Revolutionary Rani 79, double-deprecession, 882. That was one extreme. High inflation, severe recession.
The other extreme was June of last year. When the war lasted only 12 days, all prices went up. Then we went back again. Stock market wobbled for a few days, same thing for bond yields. But then we went back to normal. Today, it doesn't look yet like the 1970s, but it's something worse than the 12 days war of last June when Iran was either unable or are willing to block the state of arms. This time around, the states have been blocked. Some of the production facilities of the Gulf have been damaged. Therefore, the impact on all prices and potential on inflation and growth is going to be greater.
How much greater depends on how long this war is going to last. The market are still expecting is not going to last much longer. Do you think the economy will surprise folks to the downside in the first half of this year because of the war, how it's impacting consumers sentiment, and how it's also impacting their walls? I don't think we are far behind for me to say this, but I don't think we are in a recession yet, but are we in a very, very slow growth in backdrop?
Well, there have been some slowdown of growth last year because of the impact of the tariff, but actually growth was beginning to accelerate this year because yet monitoring easing, yet the fiscal stimulus still in the pipeline. Financial conditions were very, very easy, and overall business confidence was strong, and you had still tailwinds from the AI and the data center and the Capac's boom. Those were the reasons why actually growth should have become stronger this year, compared to last year, while inflation would moderate as the impact of the tariff fades out.
Compared to that baseline right now, the impact of the shock is some slowdown in economic growth, some increase in inflation. Again, if the war lasts only two months, there will be the slowdown of growth and rising inflation, but it's going to be moderate, and we could still grow faster than potential this year, and inflation is going to remain above target, but it's going to be okay. If instead the war lasts three, four months, or longer, then the impact on growth will be stronger, negative impact, and the impact on inflation and inflation on court and add like an expectation become higher.
For now, the markets and the Fed are thinking this is going to not last very long, that's why the Fed is on hold, they're not going to cut rates because there's impact on inflation, but they're not going to raise rates. But if the war were to last longer, and inflation, and inflation expectation become the anchor, then the Fed instead of cutting rates, even a war spread will be forced to increase rates. And markets right now are starting to price, not a cut by the Fed, not on hold, but actually the likelihood of increasing the Fed funds rate is increasing because people are starting to worry that this war is going to last longer than initially expected.
So markets are starting to price in a Fed hike rather than being on hold or a cut. No, I've been getting a lot of forecasts recently from Wall Street on oil prices, and everyone I see by large, they expect oil prices to stay above $100 a barrel for the next few months, at least to the end of April. What's your biggest concern from an economic standpoint if that in fact happens? Is that the tipping point that gets us into a recession? Not necessarily.
I would say that if it stays above $100 until end of April, the impact on inflation is greater, and the impact on growth is also somehow greater, but it's not enough. If then after April, we go back to oil, not like it was before, there'll be a risk premium, but 10, 15% higher, then there is, as I said, some slowdown of growth this year, there is some increase in inflation, but for now a recession is not my baseline. By the way, the US is a net oil and energy exporter.
There are still distributional effects because the winners are oil producers and the losers are consumers of oil in the industrial sector and or among the households, but the US is a strategic reserve. He can use fiscal policy to try to reduce the impact by reducing the federal tax at Don Gasoline. It could even tax the winner, it distributes to those who are left behind, could restrict exports of LNG and oil to increase the supply at home. There is a gap between what's happening to Brent and what's happening at WTI.
So compared to Europe and compared to Asia, the economic impact is going to be smaller for the United States because the terms of trade effect is positive on that for the economy. Nurell, you mentioned the Federal Reserve. How likely? Can you assign a probability to the Fed actually hiking interest rates this year? This wasn't even remotely in the cards coming into this year. Everyone expected several rate cuts.
That's been completely unwound. How likely is that by now assuming that the Kevin Worsh Fed later this year? Well, my baseline is one of the feds staying on hold and maybe towards the end of the year, doing the one rate cut that was Plenzildin in the SAP production of the dot-lot of the feds. Markets for a while thought there would be two rate cuts. Now that's out of the question.
I would say the baseline in the highest probability of the sun is being on hold and maybe a rate cut towards the latter part of the year. A rate cut earlier I think is totally how to say highly unlikely even if the economy were to weaken significantly because inflation is higher. There is no argument for the fed cutting rates. Even in the latest FMC, even the Dolves like Diane Bowman and Chris Waller did not vote for a rate cut now.
The only one was Steve Miran and even if Worsh comes to power, it is not going to have a majority for cutting rates. So it's a 10% probability of a rate cut not most, 60% probability of staying on hold to September October and maybe at this point a 30% probability that the war lasts too much and too long and all prices staying higher even beyond April in which case then the fed would high grades by the middle of the year. Whether it's a power still there and Worsh is confirmed or not, it doesn't matter. If inflation expectation gets the anchor, the fed will be forced to raise rates.
But to me it's a tail risk at 30% scenario. Do you think the fed, Noriel, just needs to get comfortable with this year being a year of a stack-flationary economy? Well, it depends on what we mean by stack-flation. When the negative aggregate supply shock growth is lower, inflation is higher. But there are three types of inflation higher. One is when you have a temper increase in the price level and it fades away. The second one is when there is a permanent increase in the price level, but inflation and inflation expectations are not the anchors.
And third one is when not, there is a rise in inflation rate and inflation expectation. In the first two cases the optimal response is to wait and see and stay on hold. Not to cut rates, not to increase them. But if instead inflation, inflation expectation becomes the anchored, a fed is forced or an insettlement is forced to raise policy rates. Otherwise you have a permanent increase in inflation expectation. So we don't know yet whether we're going to be in that third scenario. It depends on how long the world lasts and for how long all prices are going to stay well above $100 per barrel.
Noriel, I was thinking back to a conversation you and I had probably two years ago at Davos. It feels like yesterday. We were talking about AI at the time. I think we expressed some concern how AI will impact the economy. But since then, I mean the AI rollout and development, it has gained serious speed. A lot of leaders that I talk to are now literally replacing thousands of human beings with AI agents. How concerned are you about the impact of the economy and the white collar workforce?
Well, I become an optimist in terms of potential growth. My view is that US and China are ahead in these 15 different sectors and technologies of the future. It's not just they hide the whole other industries that are related to AI that are separate verticals. All of them are going to be benefiting from this productivity growth. So in my view, US potential growth by the end of the decade is going to be about 4 percent, the double of what it's right now. Because of that, the inflation is going to be lower. So that's the fundamental that's going to occur over the next few years.
So from that point of view, I'm optimistic. Now initially, the demand for labor is going to increase actually rather than reduce because you need to build all the data centers and all the jobs that are related to AI and new AI firms and startups and you name it. In the long run, of course, you get a massive increase in productivity and you start to see job shedding. Something we're already seeing right now among some of the more advanced big tech and max 7 firms. But we're not seeing it yet at the, how to say aggregate level.
The weakness in the labor market has been driven more in the last year by supply of labor because we have aging of population and we have restriction of migration rather than really falling demand driven by AI. And in the short term, AI is going to increase the demand for labor. But over the medium-long term, of course, there'll be massive amount of labor shedding. But we already have a mint tested UBI system of progressive taxation, redistribute those left behind. And if growth goes from 2 to 4 and 10 years from now to 6 or 10 percent by 2050, that's a good problem to have because with 10 percent growth and say 80 percent unemployment, you can essentially tax the winter and redistribute and make everybody else better off, even if socially and politically that's going to be problematic.
So long term and I'm an optimist. But in the short term, some of the staccatulation resources we worry about, including geopolitical conflict, globalization and other things, may slow down growth and increase inflation rather than the opposite coming from technology. The disadvantage is a positive aggregate supply shock, increasing growth and reducing inflation. So it's a tug of war between short term staccatulation resources and a long term secular boom driven by technology.
No, it's always so good to see you. Safe travels wherever you're headed. I appreciate you coming on. Great seeing you. Thank you. Pleasure. Opening bid is known for big moments with Top execs and this week is no different. Tomorrow, I should say the CEO of Zillow stops by as his company holds a closely watched New York City investor day with a 30-year mortgage rate back on the rise as Kabul comes an important moment for the U.S. housing market. Meanwhile, I have a special new podcast dropping on Thursday at ADM Mercedes Bencio. You will not want to miss this one, especially if you own Mercedes inspired to own one or just love cars. Stick around. Much more ahead on your old fun.
All right. Welcome to Market Catalyst on Yahu Finance. We'll cut that part out. I'm I was on the 30 minutes into the trading day here. Let's take a look at the major averages on this Tuesday morning. We got lower across the board yesterday. We saw stocks open up about 2% and fade through the session, really closing right near session lows, continuing that grind lower, let's say, from the pop we saw to start the week, really 7 o'clock yesterday morning. We got that post from President Trump about the five-day cessation in hostilities in the Middle East, really coming in from those levels.
Dow Jones, industrial average, down about 6.10. It's kind of uniform performance here among the majors. S&P 500, a slight outperformer, down 5.10 of 1%. Prestandard market, let's say, lower, nothing super notable right now. We'll see how things shake out through the session. But again, it feels to me at this point like we've got a two-day extended move here. I've just slowly fading some of those headlines that we saw come into the market to begin the week. Let's stay on the markets. Talk a little bit more about everything going on. Joining me now, Dave Mazza, he is the CEO at Round Hill Investments. He's here in studio and Brent shooting joins us. He is from Northwestern Mutual Wealth Management, CIO over there.
道琼斯工业平均指数下跌约6.10点。在主要股指中表现基本一致。标普500稍微表现较好,下跌0.51%。目前市场预开盘阶段较低,没有特别显著的变化。我们将看看交易时段内的情况如何变化。但此时我的感觉是市场已经持续两天的波动,慢慢消化周初的一些市场新闻。让我们继续关注市场,稍微多谈一些当前的行情。现在加入我们的是Round Hill Investments的CEO戴夫·马扎(Dave Mazza),他在演播室和我们一起。布伦特·舒廷(Brent Schutting)也加入了我们,他来自西北互助财富管理公司担任首席投资官。
Gentlemen, thanks for stopping by. Brent, I want to start with you and just kind of get your read on maybe like one number, one data point, one market that you and your team are looking at right now. To kind of just ground yourself, to get a sense of what's the trend, what's the vibe out there, what's one thing that you can kind of point to and say, all right, let's stay focused here and we'll get a sense of what the next week month looks like if we just watch this number. I think it's all about interest rates. So people are fixated on oil, which certainly is kind of the catalyst for rates moving higher. But where rates go in the future is going to determine how the economy shapes up and determine where the markets go.
And that's where the real risk is because the economy the past few years has been narrow. You've had the rate sensitive parts harmed versus the AI parts that weren't harmed. And that's where if you think about it now, AI needs more debt to be brought to life. And that's where rising rates and tightening credit spreads potentially up in the economy overall. You know, David's interesting that Brent goes to rates because the first question I wanted to ask you was about something you flagged we discussed yesterday, which is P.E. multiple for the stock market has really compressed.
And we're really seeing an interesting dynamic now where the underlying fundamentals of a lot of the biggest companies remain positive. But what investors want to pay for that has really come in over the course of this year. Yeah, no, I think Brent's point on interest rates is certainly incredibly valid in a big big driver of the moves we've seen in the last week. But if you take a step back and try to look at the signal through all of the headline noise that we're seeing today is actually valuation multiples across the market, particularly for some of the mega cap, mega cap names, the magnifs and seven names are much more attractive today than they were six months ago coupled with the fact that actually since this conflict started, we've actually seen earnings estimates across the market increase.
So fundamentally, for now, the picture actually looks quite strong. So for investors kind of with a longer term outlook, even with all the uncertainty out there, it's certainly a more attractive entry point from my point of view than it was a few months ago. Well, I guess to follow up on that quickly, so do you feel like an environment where we saw what the S&P got, 24, 26 kind of forward multiple? If we're down a couple turns today, do you still feel like investors are comfortable paying in that mid-20s, which is historically high, but had become historically normalized really over the last five or 10 years?
Well, that's the thing. If you look at longer term valuation multiples, we know this is not a cheap market, and I'd be hard pressed to try to convince everyone listening today that it is. But if you look at sort of recent history, it's certainly not on the higher end of where those multiples have traded. And one of the reasons why the market has traded at higher multiples today than it has historically is simply the fact that companies are more profitable and generating more revenue. Now, it's been incredibly bifurcated of where that revenue is coming from. It's been coming from a concentrated portion of the market, the market general, so many of since seven, less so in kind of the real economy stocks.
And so when investors end kind of trying to parse all that through together, especially looking at sort of an incredible amount of uncertainty and question marks compared to the rhetoric and what's actually happening potentially on the ground in the Middle East. I think that's one of the reasons why investors are probably not necessarily buying the dip as we've seen every other time before. And, you know, Brent, another factor around why investors aren't buying the dip is what we're seeing or not seeing or can't really count on when it comes to the Federal Reserve. Now last week we heard from Jay Powell. I think his comments were a little bit of a surprise to market.
How sanguine in my view, at least, he seemed as it relates to inflation. It also just feels their brand like structurally, there's a lot of uncertainty about what this Fed even looks like in three or six months time. Yeah, I agree. There's a lot of uncertainty about what the Fed does and what they may not do. I think they're missing on both sides of their mandate. And that's the big risk right now. Inflation hasn't been at their 2% target for five years now. And we have made no progress the last two years. Inflation is the same today as it was at the end of 2023, based upon PC on a year of your basis.
And it's probably going higher this month. On the other side, the labor market is weak. I think Jay Powell called it an uncomfortable balance. And that's where I just think right now you have a lot of uncertainty about which way monetary policy goes. I've called the economy a delicate balance. I think monetary policy is a delicate balance. And this is where I encourage people back to what the other guest said to think about valuation. I don't think the S&P 500 is cheap. This is where if you're thinking longer term small and mid cap stocks traded the same valuation discount they did a large cap back in 1999.
A very similar time period. And I encourage people to think outside of that S&P 500 which is everyone's favorite because it's done well the past few years. This is where we saw broadening before the conflict. And even today as a conflict kind of still continues small mid cap stocks have not deviated or gone down much more than their large cap counterparts. I think this continues in the future and that's where I would encourage people to think about investing. So then Brent I guess coming into this year you know something we discussed a lot on this program.
We had a lot of investors come through and say geographic diversification really was a reminder 2025 was a reminder this needs to be part of portfolio as you're talking a little bit there about kind of size diversification. Does it feel to you like the conflict has in some ways merely accelerated trends that we were already seeing on where investors want to be positioned? I don't know I mean I guess to me I think about geographic diversification as being more international I think that's what you're referencing. And certainly the past year the dollar has been a tailwind because the dollar faltered so US dollar based investors had their returns accentuated.
This year certainly the conflict impacts overseas much more than it does the US given their dependence on oil that moves to the straight and the dollars moved higher. I do think longer term the dollar's direction is still lower and that's why I would encourage people despite the conflicts and the risks that are out there to think about international diversification because I do think if the dollar falters just a bit not a comment that it won't be the reserve currency that's where I think you'll continue to get some of those accentuated returns in the future.
And then Dave last one to you just thinking about some of the dynamics we've seen specifically as it relates to the AI trade this year you know you referenced the mag seven those were the winners of the first let's say phase phase and a half of the AI trade and we've seen I mean companies like a sand disc right Western digital micron these stocks they feel like they kind of go up every day you've also seen losers on the software side how are you thinking about the way that this trade plays out now against a pretty dynamic you know geopolitical background which maybe you say is essential to the AI trade but certainly it weighs on sentiment. Do you feel like it's an accelerant is it not matter and how do you see you know AI over the balance of 26.
What's interesting I think to your point sort of in phase one of the AI trade it was it was quite easy you you buy a video and you actually did quite well then maybe phase one and a half to use your term was then brought out to the hyper scaler so is it worth. I met a yeah exactly those that were investing in data centers and sort of building the framework for AI now it's changed where investors are now parsing through to what I kind of call the invisible winners although based off of their stock performance they become much more visible those are memory and storage stocks so companies like micron aging companies like sand disc s j high next and now some of these storage names that have been around for some time but have been forgotten about sand disc is I think the prime example of that let alone western digital and others but actually there's a reason why they're they're they're doing quite well is in order for all all this spending to actually work you can't just have a GPU as powerful as it is or many of them unless you have the memory chips to sort of make them work and then the storage chips chips to actually store all that data at the back end so we think the AI trade is still we're very bullish on it longer term structurally but investors do need to be comfortable with the fact that actually it's evolving quite rapidly it's not necessarily going to be an either or anymore all right appreciate the time Dave Mazza friend Shirley thanks to stop and buy on this Tuesday morning.
I come up here on Yahoo Finance we'll have all the latest from Sarah week down in Houston you're watching market catalyst welcome back I'm Julie Hymon here at the Sarah week by S&P Global Conference in Houston Texas where as you might imagine the Ron war is top of mind for almost everyone here in the effect on global prices oil prices and the global economies I'm here with Paul Groenwald he is S&P Global ratings global chief economist so obviously you're paying a lot of attention right to this also Paul we got S&P PMI's this morning which is a measure a survey of what's going on how people are feeling about the economy we saw that at the lowest in almost a year right how are you thinking what you're late is thinking about the effect that all of this is going to have on on the economy right.
Well first of all this is a supply shock not a demand shock right in a demand shock activity drives the prices in a supply shock the high prices drive down activity so we're looking for evidence that activity is slowing the PMIs are a great example of the soft data we expect the soft data to weaken and then we're going to get the official hard data later but we had weaker US this morning we weaker Europe overnight so we're starting to see the first evidence of that but I think the direction of travel is pretty clear and until we get all of this sorted out okay so you're looking at what's going on in sort of phases so you talked about the supply shock there's the sort of you talked about a flow shock a supply shock and then the market shock and then the market okay so yeah our energy guys who are sponsoring this conference they've got a three kind of phase model the first phase is the flow shock that's the shutting of the straight we know the chips are trapped on both sides those oil deliveries are kind of reaching their ports now and you can kind of manage that through inventories if we were to end this now we were get a temporary bump in prices and maybe a little bit of weakness and growth but it would sort itself out.
We're now going to the supply shock where you know some countries won't be able to get the oil they need except it very expensive prices if you're a producer like the US you're probably reasonably insulated a lot of stocks like China and Japan Korea you're reasonably insulated but now we're focusing on which countries are not producers they don't have the stocks the focus seems to be on South Asia and some of the global South those Brent and WTI indices or benchmarks you know they're showing global sort of benchmark prices some of the spot prices locally are much higher than that but that's the next that's the next stress point well and there's been a lot of talk about my worth of chevron. talked about this yesterday on stage here the difference between those physical spot prices what people are actually paying to get the oil itself and what's going on in the futures market and out the curve which is showing some optimism going forward and he said maybe that's going to change and that's a theme I've been hearing repeatedly here from you from your colleagues from other folks the conference that maybe the markets are a little too optimistic about this ending quickly.
Yeah that's definitely a narrative I think there's a tension this conference is mostly engineers and if you go to like the IMF World Bank those are mostly finance people and as our oil guys like to say oil is not like a faucet you can't just turn it on and off back on so there's lags of bringing production back on and you know I think there's a lot more caution on the physical side of bringing this back up quickly even if we get a resolution and we're going to try to reflect that in some of my team's forecasts that are coming out this week but that's definitely a risk we need to take into account even if we can manage to resolve this it's going to take weeks of not months to get the production back up and sort out getting the production up getting the ships in the right places etc so this is not just flipping the switch and we're back to you know pre-arranged conflict macro.
So how dire or how high is the risk of recession that we would need the final phase we talked about those two phases the flow phase is supply says then there's the market phase so again if we go back to what we just discussed we've got the engineers and the supply guys the industry guy saying one thing the market says the other thing one of those views is wrong right and if the market reprices this whole scenario right you get a sell-off market prices drops spreads blow out you know capital stops flowing to emerging markets we get the flight to quality people stop spending being and then we get into sort of a global recession scenario that's the hard downside that's kind of a narrative scenario right now but if we don't resolve this and this goes on for months that is going to become a more likely scenario.
Okay so so how are you sort of gaming it out are you are you and your team saying okay if this last one month here's what it looks like if it last two more months here's what it you know is that I'm roughly I mean I think you know that's not an ex that sequence is not an exact linear order but I think that's roughly where where we are and the narrative so for right now we've got a sort of conservative baseline it's probably close to financial consensus but we are definitely flagging that if this goes on and we go into this supply phase and then into the market phase things to get worth so we're on a we're on a sort of a scenario now where the baseline probability shrinking a bit it we're putting more weight in the downside and you know if we need to go there we will we will change if that's where the market goes.
So the other question that is now really bubbling into the market is what the Fed is going to do what is going to be the prolonged effect on inflation if there is going to be any and is there a chance that the Fed will actually have to raise rates right so we're putting on a forecast tomorrow so I will give you some directional guidance and some narrative but I think the you know sort of the rate cutting narrative is pretty much off the table for two reasons one although energy is not a core part of the the price index it will seep into the core through airline prices restaurant prices transport prices etc so inflation is going to go up at the headline level and the core level we want to make sure inflation expectations are anchored we know that central banks were a bit late to get going in 23 and 24 so you know we're dialing back the the Fed the Fed you know narrative.
The ECB has been pretty clear Christine Lagarde's already saying that you know we're very cognizant that last time we were late to go so now the market's got the ECB's next move is up the feds are much closer call but I think this whole narrative that we were late in the cut we were sort of toward the mature part of the cutting cycle a few more to go I think central banks are very much on wait and see whole wait and see mode right now and you know a lot of cuts we had you know put into the forecast or not being taken off.
I also got to ask you a question that's a little more personal to us I guess an immediate task and that's our travel plans yes to get out of Houston because as you know with the TSA not being funded a lot of people are out and the Houston the main Houston airport is viewed as one of the worst airports for wait times in the country so I'm curious if there's any sort of economic impact from all of this that you're thinking about there's sort of the hassle element now but I think some people decide they're not going to travel right if flights are more expensive and the fuel gets passed on to airport prices and then you can't get to the airport.
I mean that's a decent chunk of the U.S. economy maybe it's more of a sectoral story so if you're a sectoral airline analyst your fuel is more expensive your passengers aren't showing up at the airport that could be a downside risk to those guys but yeah this is showing up in all kinds of places that we haven't seen and you know it's our job and others job this sort of you know makes sense of all of it track it out and look at where we're going and flight the risks and that's kind of where we are what day are you going home I'm going to visit my mom and Oklahoma on Friday so I've got a short trip and then I'll go back to New York.
Okay well maybe things will you're leaving tomorrow my friend you might be in a little bit more risky situation than I am yeah yeah I'm building in a lot of time we'll see a good luck thank you thank you thank you so much well I'll expect to you all right Julie maybe I will see you tomorrow maybe well you let me know as the day goes on all right coming up we're going to take a look at some of today's trending ticker stay tuned we're watching market counts.
All right time out for some of today's trending tickers we are watching jeffries esth a lotter and tesla first up jeffries stock trading higher after a report from the financial times said that japan's smfg was weighing a buyout of the investment bank now a later report from bloomberg said smfg japan's second largest lender has no immediate plans to take over jeffries and cmbc setting sources later reported that jeffries has no interest in selling the firm company is set to report its quarterly results on wednesday march 25th.
Next up esth a lotter in talks to merge with spanish beauty company pouges pouges is a family controlled and as a family controlled company and owns popular brands like biorado and charlotte tilbury the merger would create a cosmetics giant with a combined market cap of about 40 billion dollars the talks are continuing and there is no guarantee that the companies will reach a deal and finally tesla seeing a sales rebound in europe the evey-makers European sales rising nearly 12% year.
over year in february it marks the first time the company's european sales have risen on an annual basis since late twenty twenty four gold prices now below forty five hundred dollars per ounce despite the uncertainty around the conflict in iran yahu finances josh lipton spoke spoke to max baker american heart for gold president about the latest moves you point out here max gold we broke below this key support and the fifty day what do we i guess what do we make of this max how do we explain it what why isn't gold acting more like your classic safe haven right now a great question everyone you know expected gold to rise with the the war kicking off and obviously it's it's fallen quite a bit about a thousand dollars off the all-time high here and you know it's really has to has to do with the oil you see oil go up above a hundred dollars of barrel that really gets some people's head that now the fed singing about pausing or maybe been raising interest rates.
to fight future inflation so it's really an oil story right now and you know until we can get oil prices uh to come down those interest rate cuts are going to be off the table and that dollar is going to continue to rise you put it like this on the gold market max you're so tactically nervous but still structurally long-term bullish why why still structurally long-term bullish on the metal yeah this is kind of a short short-term move but all the fundamentals are in place that you know caused a 70% rally in gold last year you still have central banks buying up gold at record pace you have record debt record money printing and there are still many that expect interest rate cuts at the end of this year with worse taking over and may or suspected to take over and may so all the fundamentals are still very much in place for a healthy healthy gold price.
what would you need to see max to say okay maybe that maybe that structural long-term thesis is at risk here what would be on your radar to watch yeah i think you'd need to see inflation really uh rise you know four five six percent i think you need to see the government get money printing under control our debt situation under control and uh those are some things that uh i just don't see happening max in terms of levels you're watching here closely say 4900 to 5000 that range why why that range max what about those levels yeah i think you know that's that's kind of where we need to be right now uh to show you know that gold has staying power you know got a lot of major banks out there that are predicting gold to be at 6200 you got UBS saying 6200 JP Morgan Wells Fargo saying 6300 so you know if we can get above the the 5,000 dollar level i think that will kind of ease some investors and nerves here going into the summer.
so max let's kind of bottom line this for a viewer let's have watching this i'm a long-term investor do you say hey right now i would take kind of cautious or no do you argue this is a good moment to step in you know i think this is a great buying opportunity obviously you know i'm in the gold business but you know if you had a lot of clients that have been waiting for a pullback in opportunity to get into metals obviously we had silver up 140 percent last year gold up 70 percent last year and needed uh to kind of cool off a little bit i think this is a great entry point with with fundamentals still very much in place so you're in the gold business you said they're max what is the price where we are right now max what does that imply about you know potential gold miners profitability over the next few quarters yeah it's a great question you know every gold miner's a little different every company basically has a price that it costs them to get the the metal out of the ground and you know it varies based on each operation but you know that's that can be anywhere from uh 1700 to three thousand dollars an ounce but you know each company has has that set price that it costs them to get it out of the ground and obviously the higher the gold price the more profitable they are the higher margin they have final question Matthew we've been talking about silver i'm just curious get your thoughts on silver both now and ahead what do you see yeah we were uh we're about fifty dollars off the all-time high which is just a few months ago so you know if you're looking for an entry point or looking for something that's that's cheap you know relatively speaking where we're a few months ago i do think silver is wildly undervalued obviously you know we had the big rise 140 percent last year a lot had a lot to do with China saying they're no longer going to sell their silver they produce 70 percent of the world silver so i i think silver is a great value by right now max great to have you on the show today appreciate it yeah thank you so much i come up we're going to talk to caterpillar's head of power and how a i demand is fueling that business you're watching market catalyst here on Yahoo Finance you Welcome back.
I'm Julie Heim in here at the Sarah Week by S&P Global Conference. And as we've been talking a lot about this week, we're sort of focused on two main factors. One, the Iran War and the reshaping of the global energy markets. And two, the vast need for power right now, particularly because of AI and data centers, but also just a general need for increasing power. I'm joined by Jason Kaiser, he's a caterpillar group president of power in energy. So a lot to say about these various topics. And really appreciate you joining us. Yeah, great to be here. Thank you.
So I do want to start with the war because there are a lot of ripple effects on a lot of different kinds of businesses. And I'm wondering, you guys do have some business in the Middle East, in the oil and gas sphere and elsewhere. What have you been seeing there? Have you had to move your people around to ask us through that effect? Yeah, I mean our priority has been on our employees safety top to this point.
So lots of efforts there to keep people safe. We have people throughout the region. From a customer standpoint, business and oil and gas as well. It's a little bit of a wait and see with the customers. So we're not sure. They're not sure how it's all going to play out. We want to be there to help serve them as we understand as it becomes more clear. And what about like the servicing that you would do in that region is that it's still going on. I imagine those are long-term contracts. They're not necessarily affected by the short-term what's going on.
But what are you seeing there? Yeah, I mean we do service the equipment. We're there to take care of it, keep it up, running and reliable. We're putting safety first as we make those decisions and making them with our customers. But there's definitely a priority there on helping the customers continue to be successful as they make the decisions on whether they run or not as well. On the flip side, I've been hearing a little bit of talk here that what's happening in the straight-offermuse and the choking off of oil supplies and energy supplies there is sort of reinforcing the need for energy security.
And I wonder if you're hearing that from clients. If they were considering a project that is not going to be reliant on those types of fuel inputs, if now they're sort of doubly convinced or if that's helping you as you make your pitch to clients. Yeah, I think it's a little bit early to know how that's all going to play out over time. We play a key role across the value stream. So we serve oil and gas customers all the way from bringing the product up through the ground, moving it through pipelines and then burning it to make power.
So we're getting a lot of inputs right now. We think ultimately that's going to be a very important part of it. How do we have not only more power but reliable power over time? It's a big part of what we do is ensuring that happens with our customers. Speaking of it being early, I'm also curious if you're hearing anything from your clients domestically in the US about increasing their production and increasing orders from you in order to make that oil and gas production happen.
Yeah, we were in a very good market when it comes to oil and gas even before the war in the situation. So we see that can trim, trim continuing gas compressions have been a real highlight for us. Our customers are pulling for product, more product to help move the gas. It's going to be needed for LNGs, going to be needed to create more electricity with the moving and electricity market that we're seeing.
I'm also curious on the cost side for you guys. You're already facing increased cost from tariffs, right? $800 million. I believe is the total cost from tariffs in the first quarter. Are you now seeing increasing costs as well because of some of the supply constraints that are happening with the with the straight?
Yeah, we're working to understand the cost in the supply chain kind of a daily activity right now. No huge impacts that we're talking about so far, but we'll continue to to understand, continue to look at it closely. Okay, let's talk more about the data center picture for you guys. We were just talking in the break about a panel that you were on yesterday with the CEO Duke Energy and talking about some of your partnerships there.
Energy really seems to power, really seems to be the bottleneck when it comes to these AI data centers. So where do you see us on that spectrum of breaking up that bottleneck and making it happen? Yeah, we it absolutely is. I mean, as we talked to data and I've worked with data center customers for a number of years. Our business historically was a lot of backup power for the data centers.
We've seen that change in the last year or so where they're asking us for different kinds of primary power because they can't hook up to the utility. And in that case, sometimes it's a bridge. So help us for a short period of time to bridge the power until the utility can be ready and we have products on wheels we can we can bring up quickly and make that a solution.
Other times it's more of a midterm solution. They want us to deliver and sometimes now they're asking us just to build a power plant with them at the side of the data center and be the primary power source for the foreseeable future. So we're excited about that. It's been great for us and we have a lot of great solutions to serve that no matter which of those solutions they're looking for.
And you guys have been booking a lot of orders on this front. I think it's four orders of at least a gigawatt each if I if I have that right. And so you guys are doubling your turbine capacity in order to meet that. So we talked about what the bottleneck is for them. I'm curious what where the constraints are for you because if you're doubling capacity, you know, is it, are you finding the labor they need? Are you finding the materials you need? Talk me through that process.
Yeah, we so we're we are doubling our large engine capacity and we're more than doubling our turbine capacity between now and the end of the decade. So lots of work there. We're heavy in execution mode. You know, some of its within our own facilities, upgrading equipment, adding new equipment within our facilities to be able to build more. But a lot of it's in the supply base.
So we're out with suppliers, understanding what their bottlenecks are, working with them to invest to get the parts and the components that we need to build more product. So working it on multiple fronts, but having a lot of success so far, it's going really well. And you know, yours is the fastest growing part. It's now the largest part of catapultage business.
You know, people who think of catapillars as sort of earth moving company, right? You guys are really now a power and energy equipment company. That's the biggest part of the business, the fastest growing part of the business. So how do you see, you know, further leveraging that growth up over the next couple years? Is it just that the demand is out there and it's just a matter of meeting in that demand?
Yeah, I think it speaks really well to catapillar and the diversity of catapillar and all the things that we're able to do across the machine business and now our power and energy business that we have. A lot of it's execution in our space. So we've set the targets with capacity. We've set some bold growth goals in our investor day last fall and we're head down and executing.
We see the demand there, not just power generation, but also strong and oil and gas and gas compression and so serving customers, having the right products, having the right solutions, taking care of them through the full lifecycle with them is what we're focused on. You know, I'm curious, as I've talked to people at this conference, there has been the sentiment among the oil and gas folks that maybe the market is underpricing the potential duration of this conflict at this point and then just was talking to economists if that if it does last longer than you talk about more economic concerns and the slow down potentially.
Do you think that things like AI contracts are somewhat recession proof or how do you think about that sort of economic sensitivity in your business? It's one of the great reasons to be here at the conference because you get so many different viewpoints on that. I was on a panel group around AI this morning, definitely positivity in that space and the AI space that doesn't seem to be waning as I am out talking with customers or talking to colleagues here this week. So you remain positive there.
All right, Jason, thank you so much. Really appreciate your time here. Appreciate it. Thank you. Miles, send it back to you. All right, Julie, I'm in live from Sarah Weekdown in Houston. Appreciate that interview coming up. We're going to talk about how ad supported streaming platform Tubby plans to survive the AI age and the argument for why it's one of the most innovative companies of the year.
All right, Fast Company out with its picks for the most innovative companies of the year tech giants like Nvidia, Google and Theropic topping list. So included culture makers like Tubby, Nintendo and Reddit joining me now to break down what went into putting this issue together. We're joined by Brendan Bond. He is Fast Company's editor in chief also joined by Angelic Sood, Tubby's CEO.
Friends, I want to start with you just on some of the top names here. We'll maybe go through the top five and kind of how your team thought about putting this list together over the balance of 2025. I guess it was. Yeah, so Miles, thanks for having me. The most innovative companies are biggest thing we do all year. It is our franchise program. It is a year round reporting project. Crunch time is in the fall, you know, into the early winter when we publish this, but we're working on this all the time.
Innovation is our editorial north star at Fast Company and we have five covers this year. They're not the top five, but the covers are Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Angelic Sood who's here with us today, CEO of Tubby, Alex Cooper from the Call Her Daddy podcast, Steve Huffman from Reddit, and Ryan Coogler, director of "Black Panther" and the CEO of Proximity Media.
创新是《Fast Company》的编辑方向,今年我们有五个封面故事。虽然不是排名前五,但封面人物有:谷歌首席执行官桑达尔·皮查伊、今天在场的Tubby首席执行官安吉丽克·苏德、《Call Her Daddy》播客的Alex Cooper、Reddit的Steve Huffman,以及《黑豹》导演兼Proximity Media首席执行官瑞恩·库格勒。
So it's diverse. That's the whole point. It's diverse across industry. It is our sort of core idea at Fast Company is that when you come to read us, you are getting ideas from across the entire innovation ecosystem, not just your own industry and very often those ideas apply to your work even if you don't, even if you wouldn't necessarily encounter those ideas in the course of your normal sort of industry media diet or in the course of your work.
Yeah, we were chatting before and it's like, I love a good list and I love a list that goes AMD, Redwood Materials, Tubby and then it goes to BID. And the Onion is in there as well. I want to talk a little bit about Tubby and in this medium moment where we have seen, I think in my opinion, a lot of what Tubby's strategy kind of, it's kind of come to you guys. If I look at the way all these different media companies have hacked up their production, their rights, how they want to charge people for it, I feel like Tubby's value there as willing to take lots of content, willing to be ad supported has met the consumer in a place a lot of companies have moved out of.
Yeah, I mean, look, I think it was a contrarian bet at one point to say that the future of entertainment is free and on demand and is personalized and driven by choice. But yeah, I think in the last couple of years, we just see audiences more and more like this is what they want. By giving them what they want, you can build a really thriving business. And I think being recognized by Fast Company is a great validation that it's resonating with consumers.
So when you look at your catalog, what are the things that consumers are? Is it movies mostly, is it old TV shows, how is it breaking down in terms of those viewership trends? Well, I think what's interesting is it's everything. We have some of the best Hollywood movies. We have hundreds of Tubby originals. We have creator content. Some of the world's most popular creators are now putting their content on Tubby.
We just announced a partnership with TikTok to help short form creators. At Longform, we have video podcasters. We have live sports. And I think it really does come down to this bet that if you think... about entertainment, we no longer define that as just kind of Hollywood or television or movies, it's anything we choose to spend our time on. And that means for this next generation, we're competing with any other form of entertainment. So we have to make it as easy for them to access it. Yes, I like to think that, you know, we do this show linearly, we write stories linearly, but this will be consumed in kind of like interstitial time. Like it exists like in a vacuum and filling the vacuum right now is mostly AI around text and content. And I'm curious how you and your team have started to think about AI content creation. Are you scared of it? Are you okay with it? And what are creators telling you about how they want to incorporate it?
我们刚刚宣布与 TikTok 建立合作关系,以帮助短视频创作者。在 Longform,我们有视频播客,我们有现场体育节目。我觉得这实际上是一个赌注,如果你考虑娱乐,定义已不再局限于好莱坞、电视或电影,而是我们选择花费时间的任何内容。对下一代来说,这意味着我们的竞争对手可以是任何形式的娱乐。所以,我们必须让他们更容易获取我们的内容。是的,我喜欢认为我们以线性的方式制作节目,编写故事,但这些内容将被以一种片段化的方式消费。就像存在于某种真空中,而现在主要由围绕文本和内容的 AI 填补这些真空。我很好奇你和你的团队开始如何思考 AI 内容创作。对此你们是惧怕还是接受?创作者们向你们反馈了他们希望如何将 AI 融入创作吗?
I mean, I think for us, we believe in Longform storytelling. That's the content we put out. And actually what we hear from, you know, Gen Z Gen Alpha, they want cinematic long form storytelling. They also want the short stuff. But, but story telling isn't going away. And so, I think for us, what we are seeing from creators is many are experimenting with AI tools to help them make content faster, increase the quality and the production value of that content. And so, I think we hope that this will be a tailwind. And if you just think about it, if there's a lot more content that's going to be made, every single one of those stories needs to find its audience and its fans. And that's the role I think to be hopes to play.
One of the things that I really found insightful and interesting about our interview, Anjali, I interviewed Anjali for the issue was what you said about not following the herd kind of, you know, and it speaks to miles what you sort of said in your intro about the world was going, everything feels like it's hitting your credit card and there's a subscription fee, right? That's right. To be, and I forgot about it. It's pretty, right? Exactly. And you forget about there's apps to actually get that under control for people. Was just how much noise there is about like, oh, we're doing this cool thing. We're doing that cool thing. Oh, we better do that now, right? We have to keep up. Whereas the way that 2B has been run under Anjali's leadership is, no, we're going to do what we think is right for our audience. We're going to follow that signal and we're going to make something that is kind of this cross between sort of a TikTok style for you page, you know, interface and a traditional fast network and then throw in a little bit of traditional page streamer in there too with all the premium content that you guys have.
Yeah, I'm curious like in that context, Anjali, how you think about, you know, the old re-hastings like we're competing with sleep and Netflix now has that they have that or Nielsen has the circle chart and Netflix does it as well of time spent on all these different services and 2Bs really started to show up in some of those places. Like when you think about form factor, I'm always surprised by how much YouTube is now being watched on televisions and 2B certainly to me feels like it lives on televisions but is this now like a cross platform? Like I, I mean, I'm on the commute, I'm on the, and it's just people watching shows on their phone. I guess it all kind of feels like it's merging to one screen in a way and that to me feels appetized to do. I don't know how you think about that.
Yeah, I mean, look, our job is to meet the audience wherever they are and that definitely includes not just the living room where we are predominantly but it includes mobile, it includes any surface and we are doing a lot. We did introduce a TikTok like feed in our mobile app for example because we know that people discover differently when they're on their commute and we do think we can offer a really great experience throughout that and you know, if you think about just what's happening in the entertainment industry, it is, there is a lot of a tendency towards gatekeeping and walls gardens and the more we can just provide that ubiquitous access and just make it easy.
Yeah. Just make it easy. How many of us have had a frustrating experience with binding what to watch or finding that the sports show, you know, game you want. We just got to make it easier and it sounds like a radically simple idea but it would appear it's innovative in today's world. Yes, exactly. I want to turn my TV on. I don't want to load the TV and then do the software all this up.
Quickly before we go, what are you watching right now? Oh, well, we have a very exciting TV original that dropped called Kissing is the Easy Part. I'm a romcom girl so I'm a big fan and actually we've had a lot of success with finding some of these sort of young adult stories and will cast, you know, TikTok influencers and digitally native talents in these movies and I will say I'm not just saying it because I'm the CEO. It is really good. Check it out.
That's great. All right. I'm really Brendan. Thank you guys so much. Thank you. Stop and buy. All right, that's it for Market Catalyst. I'm Miles Oden. Thanks for watching. We'll have more on Yahoo Finance coming up after this.