This is The Takeaway from today’s Morning Brief, which you can sign up to receive in your inbox every morning along with:
Everyone wants to believe pain and anguish won’t show up at their doorsteps.
Bad things happen to everyone else, right?
Well, that is the WRONG way to be thinking right now when putting money to work in the markets! If you believe Trump tariffs are bluffs that won’t happen (or if they do to any extent, won’t be a big deal), you need to wake up and smell the sauce cooking on the wide-open gas flame.
Expect pain! Model for pain in corporate cash-flow estimates and valuations. Do downside scenario valuation analysis. Don’t look at the beat-up chart of Nvidia (NVDA) on Yahoo Finance and think an imaginary support level holds in this choppy market. Anticipate Nvidia’s chart getting uglier until it doesn’t anymore.
Watch: Trump tariffs may drill retailers
You are getting burned because you aren’t taking Trump news seriously enough and still expect an amazing year of making easy money. Regulations are going to be cut by the administration. We are getting a bitcoin reserve. Here come tax cuts. Food prices are going to suddenly tank.
None of this grandiose stuff has happened yet, and it may not at all.
The market action is telling you this will not be the case, at least in the near term.
The week began with 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico. The week ended with these tariffs being put on pause until Apr. 2, likely as the stock market came under siege. New 10% tariffs on China still went into effect on top of the 10% one already in place. Trading partners are retaliating.
“This is f*cking chaos,” one source told me by text midweek. Yep.
Corporate America is also telling you this is all chaos — the same Corporate America that powers S&P 500 (^GSPC) earnings and the stock market.
Profit warnings have mounted as cautious consumers pulled back on spending after the holidays. And execs have issued below-consensus 2025 outlooks as they plan for a barrage of costly tariffs.
Walmart’s (WMT) outlook was poorly received by investors in mid-February. Rival Target (TGT) didn’t have much good to say either this week when it reported fourth quarter results and guidance.
Abercrombie & Fitch’s (ANF) outlook was shy of estimates; ditto Best Buy (BBY) and Macy’s (M).
“I think for the toy category it’s probably months,” Hasbro (HAS) CEO Chris Cocks told me on Yahoo Finance’s Opening Bid podcast (video above). Cocks — in NYC for the 2025 Toy Fair, where Hasbro showed off the latest for Monopoly, Play-Doh, and Nerf — was referencing when toy prices would go up as a result of fresh tariffs.
Nearly 80% of US toys are manufactured in China, according to industry trade group the Toy Association.
Cocks said toy prices would go up 50% in some cases if more production is brought back to the US. The cost increases reflect the intricate nature of making many toys and the difficulty of finding skilled labor.
If there is any savings grace, Wall Street is waking up to the short-term reality of living in Trump 2.0 — and that may make earnings warnings less shocking should they continue.
Listen: Trump tariffs may trigger stagflationary shock
During the months of January and February, analysts lowered EPS estimates by a larger margin than average. The first quarter bottom-up EPS estimate for the S&P 500 decreased by 3.5% from December 31 to February 27, according to data from FactSet.
FactSet said the drop in the bottom-up EPS estimate recorded during the first two months of the first quarter was larger than the five-year average, the 10-year average, the 15-year average, and the 20-year average.
“We remain wary of committing significant funds to the market until the wishy-washy tariff policy of the United States has a clear path forward. And even then, a trade war is not good for the economy, earnings or stock prices,” said Birinyi Associates strategist Jeffrey Rubin.
Brian Sozzi is Yahoo Finance’s Executive Editor. Follow Sozzi on X @BrianSozzi, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Tips on stories? Email brian.sozzi@yahoofinance.com.
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