Transcript

Luis Hernandez: Hi everyone. I’m Luis Hernandez, Editor-in-Chief at InvestorPlace. Since the end of World War II, the United States has led the global charge for free trade. But last week, that decades-long tradition took a sharp turn.

On Wednesday, the Trump administration’s stunned markets by announcing a sweeping new round of tariffs, striking not just adversaries, but allies as well. The severity and surprise of the move have rattled investors, reigniting fears of a trade war and injecting new uncertainty into an already fragile market.

On Thursday and Friday, major indexes sold off sharply as Wall Street tried to assess the immediate impact, higher import costs, corporate margin pressure, and perhaps most significantly, the threat of global retaliation. China responded swiftly with new tariffs of its own. Other nations have signaled that they may take a more measured approach, but the direction is clear, we’re in a new phase.

Many investors are worried. After two years with 20% plus gains, a drop like this can lead to a lot of lost sleep and concerns about meeting your financial goals. Today, we’re going to break it all down in a special Q&A with our team of elite analysts, Eric Fry, Luke Lango, and Louis Navellier.

We’ll tackle the big questions on every investor’s mind, what’s next for the markets? Is this a buying opportunity or a warning shot? And how should you position your portfolio in a world where trade tensions are rewriting the rules?

Gentlemen, thanks for being here. As we speak here on Monday morning, markets are gapping down again by at least 3%. So let’s get started. How big of a deal are the new tariffs? Is this just a temporary thing or do you think that there’s going to be weeks or months of this going forward? Let’s start with Eric.

Eric Fry: Sure. My bullish scenario is that this proposed tariff policy is so bad that it’s good. I think obviously there’s been severe trade imbalances for a long time that we need to correct as a nation. I personally don’t believe this particular policy is the best way to achieve that, and it is so ill-conceived and potentially devastating that I don’t think it’ll last long.

I think the Trump administration will probably start to score some victories country by country, and I’m hoping enough mini victories that it would be able to claim a victory over the entire thing and abandon this sweeping global tax that it has imposed on 185 countries.

And if that happens, I think the market’s reversed. I’m optimistic because I doubt that this particular iteration of the tariff policy will remain in effect for very long.

Luis Hernandez: Okay. Luke, how about your take?

Luke Lango: It’s really tough to say what happens next. There’s a significant amount of unpredictability here. So what we can do is create potential outcomes and assess the probability of us going down each one of those paths or any one of those paths.

There’s one path here where it’s disastrous. If the current tariffs stay in place as they are and things continue as they are, then yeah, it would be a restructuring of everything that the economy’s been based on for 90 years almost. So that’s a big deal. That’s a huge deal.

And even if it does bring long-term benefits, it will bring significant short-term pain. It feels like markets are in trouble right now, but we’re still “only” down 20% from the highs. The S&P is only down 20% from highs, NASDAQ’s about 24, 25, Russell’s about 30.

I think those are big drawdowns, but when you look at the type of price action that we’ve had, 10% back to back, that’s great financial crisis bad, that’s COVID bad, that’s Great Depression bad, that’s Black Monday bad. Those crashes didn’t bottom until you were 40 or 50% down or more. So if we do get the worst case outcome here or bad case outcome, then there’s a lot further to fall.

So that’s the scary part. But to Eric’s point, to bring it up on the optimistic side, which is actually where we land right now, I don’t think the current tariffs as they’re out there are going to stay in place. And if they don’t, you could get a V-shaped recovery like you saw during COVID. Not a prolonged collapse and then a prolonged recovery like the great financial crisis, but more a V-shaped thing. COVID the Fed is also a wild card here that could really help things out. So I think there’s a lot of things, a lot of dynamics that could come into favor for stocks in the next few weeks and few months. And the last thing you really want to do is sell when you’re so oversold and so beaten up and give in to the panic.

So that’s where we’re at right now, but acknowledging that there’s a lot of uncertainty out there. So much so that we’re not going to pound the table on any particular move today, Monday morning, April 7th.

Luis Hernandez: Louis [inaudible 00:05:22], what’s your take?

Louis Navellier: Well, obviously the silver lining is collapsing interest rates. I feel vindicated because I’ve been calling for four rate cuts this year, now CNBC is calling for four to five. So I got that out of the way. That’s why Scott Bessent, our Treasury Secretary seemed so happy. He can now manage the treasury debt and the auctions more effectively. So that’s your first green shoot.

I’ve been also tracking a lot of the media. A lot of it emanated from the United States. A lot of countries like Germany, Britain, Mexico were already in recession, so they did not respond to this positively at all. I think the fact that the only retaliatory tariffs were China is a good sign.

The other countries are trying to negotiate with the Trump administration, may drop their trade barriers. And Elon’s calling for a full free trade, which would be wonderful. However, it’s very clear that Trump administration wants to keep a 10% tariff on everybody, period. And that’s essentially the equivalent of a VAT tax.

We have a big underground economy in America. If we don’t do a VAT, we just have to do the tariff, and that’s what he’s doing, and he never explained that properly. I think right now the main thing that has to happen, other than Vietnam and other countries dropping their barriers with America to get everybody excited, I think the other thing that has to happen is we’ve probably just got to have a very good spokesman.

Scott Bessent’s okay. Kevin Hassett over the Council of Economic Advice is okay. I personally love Howard Lutnick, but he’s gone over the top. I loved his rant on the Koreans won’t buy our potatoes and the Europeans won’t buy our beef even though we’re beef’s better. And I personally know Howard, he’s a cheerleader for America.

And then of course, we got to keep Peter Navarro off the air ’cause he’s a little bit too caustic, but he did go to jail for Trump for four months, but he’s just not a positive person on TV. So it may take Trump himself to resurrect this, but the damage that’s been done, it’s feeding on itself.

This is the fourth day capitulation. Obviously, I’m expecting a reversal hit pretty fast, encourage what’s going on right now internally, but you have to have a rally in the last hour and you have to have a buying pressure. And so we’re going to get a reversal, and then it’ll fizzle, and then we have to retest and we’ll have more weeks of volatility.

So it’s unfortunate. We are lucky earnings are coming out, and I’m going to count one by one for those earnings to drop, kick, and drive my stocks higher. Now, although analysts are lowering their price targets for the indices and stocks, I do not have any actual earnings estimate cuts for my stocks. So that’s a good sign. So I’ll count on those earnings to drop, kick and drive stocks higher.

The biggest danger is the velocity of money drying up. Obviously, M2 is soaring now, as people put money in the bank and everything. Normally the stock market follows M2, but clearly we need to see the light at the end of the tunnel, and clearly we need to cause everybody to cheer up. In the meantime, Trump is going to be blamed for all the world’s problems. And well, he may not have had many friends, but he has a lot fewer right now.

Eric Fry: So Luis, can I pick up real quick-

Luis Hernandez: Yeah, sure.

Eric Fry: … with Louis mentioning both Vietnam and Navarro? So that’s an example of what’s wrong here and what needs to change quickly to restore confidence in the markets. Vietnam was the first country that we know about that came out and said, “We are going to cut our import duties to zero.” [inaudible 00:09:44] said that last Friday.

Navarro went on TV over weekend and said, “Not good enough.” So, okay, maybe it’s not, maybe there are structural ways. He actually used the word the Vietnam is cheating in other ways, so all well and good, but now you get an immediate positive response from the very first country, Vietnam, and there’s 185 other countries. And if going to zero isn’t good enough, what is good enough?

And so that implies that there would be a very, very, very, very long road to bilateral negotiations with 185 countries to get to a place where the tariff regime goes away. I think that is never going to happen, and I think it’s a ridiculous proposition and therefore, it’s not going to happen.

Your cooler heads will prevail. You’ll get members of the administration, advisors of the administration to modify this initial salvo, let’s call it, in the trade war. And I expect them to modify it in constructive ways that will bring about reduced tariffs country by country. But I don’t think anyone – no one wants to see this escalate into a full-blown trade war. It hasn’t yet. And as long as it doesn’t, the stock market, I think is going to be just fine. If by some crazy chance the administration insists on actually waging an 185 country trade war, yeah, then we’re in trouble.

Luis Hernandez: Yeah.

Luke Lango: Just to jump in there real quick.

Luis Hernandez: Yeah, please, go ahead.

Luke Lango: Just had an update with the news. I’m seeing reports, I’m trying to find exactly the link, I can’t find it exactly, but I’m seeing reports that Kevin Hassett is out there saying that Trump is considering a 90-day pause on the tariffs, and the Nasdaq has swung from a 5% loss to a 3% gain. The S&P 500 is up 2%, and the Dow is up 1%.

Luis Hernandez: Wow. Wow, that’s a huge move in less than an hour.

Luke Lango: So we have swung massively into the green. A huge green candle. Again, I’m trying to find the exact report. I’m seeing Bloomberg is reporting it, but in like a blog post type thing. I’m trying to see the exact source of this news. But in any event, I just wanted to update the group on that because we were just talking about how these tariffs may not remain in place, probably won’t remain in place for that long, or they’re going to change, or the dynamic or structure of them is going to change and that’s going to cause a rebound in stocks. Well, it seems like as we’re speaking about that, that may be happening in real time. That’s how quick moving the situation really is.

Luis Hernandez: So let’s talk for a minute about, okay, so let’s say all that happens, that’s great, but maybe it doesn’t. So just talking about it, nothing has happened yet. What are you guys telling your readers to not do right now? I think the sense of panic that folks have had over the last couple of days, there’s a tendency to react emotionally. So what are you telling folks not to do? Let’s go ahead and start with Luke.

Luke Lango: Not panic sell. I’m a huge buy the dip guy, optimist guy, over the long term, 10, 20, 30 years, stocks go up and to the right. So you never want to panic sell, especially, I’ve read a lot of reports over the weekend, and I think the VIX closed the week at like 45 or something. And if you just look at all weeks in the history of the stock market that the VIX closed at 45, the forward returns are phenomenal.

Eric Fry: Luke, just define your terms for the audience, the VIX.

Luke Lango: Oh, sorry, the volatility index, the fear index on Wall Street. This is widely considered the fear gauge VIX, V-I-X. So yeah, when that thing spikes, it means everyone’s afraid. It’s usually a great contrarian indicator, and history does bear that out. The data does show that. So there’s just so much data suggesting that if you do wait this out, there will be positive returns on the other side. But the other side, a lot of times, is a year or two out. That it doesn’t mean things are going to be all fine and dandy and better in a month or three months or even six months. A lot of times when you look at data like that, back-to-back 5% declines, VIX above 45, oversold RSI for the first time in the year, when you look at those historical studies, it’s very noisy, one, three and six months out, but it’s very positive 12, 24, 36 months out.

So if you have time on your side, which most people should at least have 12 months, then panic selling here does not make any sense. That’s one thing I’m telling people not to do. Yes, definitely look at trim exposure to things maybe you’re not so much in love with right now. I think this is the time to only hunker down on the things you love, but don’t panic sell the stuff you love just because the market’s collapsing. So that’s the one thing I’m telling people not to do,

Luis Hernandez: Louis, is this a time for folks maybe to consider taking a nibble at some of the stocks that they really do like?

Louis Navellier: I’ve been discouraging people from doing that because even though we’re having a reversal now, we have to see what happens in the last hour. But when we do reverse, we probably will have to go back and try to retest those lows. And that would be the time to nibble. And I would nibble just before earnings, so I get a catalyst underneath the stock. I always like to tell people that good stocks bounce like fresh tennis balls and bad stocks bounce like rocks. So you just got to make sure you have fresh tennis balls in the portfolio with predominantly A and B rankings and great fundamentals.

But the fact that I didn’t get any analyst cuts gave me staying power. And I wasn’t surprised on Friday because traders like to clean out their inventory. But the world is in a recession. And when all the dust settles, the only countries that are really growing with new household formation is US and India. Brazil was growing and they’re going to stop growing soon. So we will be the oasis. And we also will have a stronger currency because we’re slower to cut rates. And in the US, we have a lot of things going for us. We have our 50 states competing with each other.

We assimilate our immigrants no matter how they got here. And a lot of countries can’t do that as Britain and Germany and France have shown. And a lot of countries aren’t open to immigration. So in an Asian society like we’re in, the only way you can grow is productivity, and that leads you right back to AI. So Japan’s one of the few aging economies has been able to grow because they became more productive. So the US will leave the world in productivity, and I think everything will be fine in the end, but apparently there’s 7 trillion onshore in an ounce. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s more.

The 25% auto tariffs are really destabilizing. Not only the plants in Mexico and Canada, some of them are even closed, but you can take that BMW facility in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and a lot of the parts are from Germany. So they got to start making those parts in America because even BMW is going to start getting hit hard. So Bosch and all the other suppliers are going to have to really beef up their American production. So this is what Trump’s trying to do. Obviously, the rollout was unfortunate, and he just pushed a lot of countries over the edge, and I’m sure they will be perpetually pissed at us for a long time.

Luis Hernandez: Yeah. Let’s talk about AI because that really is the mega trend that has pushed this market over the last couple of years. It seems like it’s unstoppable. Does something like this change your assessment of that in any way? Let’s start with Eric.

Eric Fry: It changes mine a little bit only from the standpoint that an underlying economic trend or macroeconomic trend and a stock market trend are not identical. So even if, and it is, even if AI is making exponential leaps and bounds across thousands of industries and thousands of companies are benefiting from it, that does not necessarily mean that those are going to be the best stocks for the next 12 months or 24 months or whatever. It could very well be, I’ve been suggesting that another category of AI is actually companies that have nothing to do with AI. Really, companies that grow agriculture products or produce natural resources of some kind, those could be better investments on a 12-month view. And that’s exactly what happened in the early two thousands, when the .com bubble burst, you had fantastic companies like Microsoft and others, Apple, that continued to innovate and thrive and become the fantastic companies they are today.

But their stocks were miserable for several years. And so you couldn’t just say, “Well, okay, the technology is great, so the stocks automatically great.” No. So I think we’re in a different spot where a lot of, let’s call it non-tech names, not technologically sophisticated countries stock markets are going to be doing relatively well, and finding the pure AI gems is going to be tougher. So they’re still out there, still a great opportunity. And I’m really just talking about a 12, 24 month view. I think it’s going to be a little bit trickier.

Luis Hernandez: How about you, Louis?

Louis Navellier: I’m not worried about the AI bets we have at all. I would note that ever since the DeepSeek news, the unscrupulous, nasty, horrible short sellers on Wall Street like to keep manufacturing bogus articles to try to hit data centers and AI-related stocks. But they’re going to lose that war. And the best way to bury them is just keep pumping out great earnings and squeezing the shorts. But it’s funny, what the short sellers do is they take a narrative, and even if it was bogus from the start, they just keep making up new versions of it. And so the latest is, Microsoft doesn’t need to expand, its Azure cloud computing centers and all, it’s just not happening. I’m out here in Reno and the cloud computing capital, they’re busy. In fact, I hadn’t been to the southern part of town, I was just shocked by all the building and underway. And you see these buildings without any windows, and they’re the cloud centers of course.

Luis Hernandez: Yeah. So Luke, I want you to talk about the AI trend too, but also, I want you to talk about Bitcoin after that.

Luke Lango: Okay, sure. So AI is unstoppable. The development of AI globally is unstoppable. What this trade war could do is change who wins the race. Before the trade war, I would say it was a foregone conclusion, indisputable that the Mag-Seven companies were going to win the race. They had all the power, they had all the resources, they had all the talent, they had the supply chain – they had all the power. They had all the resources. They had all the talent. They had the supply chains built to help them. If they now all of a sudden have to go and spend billions upon billions of dollars reconfiguring their supply chains, wait for others to reconfigure their supply chains, et cetera, et cetera, then that’s going to delay their efforts. That’s going to delay their AI progress.

And who’s not going to be delayed? It is China. It is Alibaba. They had their ChatGPT moment with DeepSeek earlier this year. Since then, those stocks have been high. Alibaba is up 35, 40% this year. That’s pretty crazy to say when we’re looking at the Mag down in a bear market or even worse, right?

The market is kind of speaking a little bit. It’s not shouting, but it’s definitely whispering that, if this trade war does persist and escalate and disrupts US supply chains but not Chinese supply chains, then the Chinese tech companies will be the huge winners here. They’re the only ones that can compete with America in terms of AI development, in terms of the actual software. We saw that with DeepSeek. If now their competitors, our US companies, have to spend all this money and all this time and all these resources reconfiguring supply chains and worrying about tariffs, et cetera, et cetera, then the race becomes a lot closer and maybe even China comes out ahead.

So I think the development of AI is going to continue at a blistering pace, but who wins the war? Who wins the race is going to be at least somewhat dependent on how this trade war evolves, which is it’s a bit ironic because I know one of the purposes of it is to make the US a technology and innovation and tech capital of the world. But every dollar spent on reconfiguring a supply chain is a dollar not spent on software for AI, on getting us towards AGI. If we don’t have to worry about all the reconfiguring and reshoring and all that stuff, then we can go all in with just AGI development, but resources are finite wherever you are in the world. So I think that’s one of my concerns about this is a reconfiguration of the leaders of the AI race, but above all else, that race will continue.

Luis Hernandez: Okay, and what about Bitcoin?

Luke Lango: And then, on the Bitcoin front, it was very resilient until this weekend, right? I mean, it hung in there last week. It was really shocking. One of the most shocking things to me last week was that Bitcoin was hanging in there 84, 85, while the S&P was down 5% back-to-back days. I was like, “Wow, that’s pretty impressive.” And then, Sunday, I was like, “You know what? Just kidding. The joke’s on you guys,” and, boom, it nosedived down to 73, 74. Now it’s recovered up to 78. And that’s a really critical level for me to watch. The 50-week moving averages is the make-or-break line. That’s right around 77, so I want to hold that. The fact that they fell below it and they’re bouncing back above it is somewhat nice, so I do like that.

It’s a sentiment. It’s a sentiment driven asset. So if sentiment continues to collapse, then cryptos will fall. They will not prove resilient. But if sentiment can improve, then this will be the one that leads to the rebound. This was the one that will lead the V rally. I mean, right now, we’re back down across all the major indices. But when we were up, Bitcoin went all the way up to like 83, 84, when there is the rebound rally, it’s going to lead. But until that rebound rally comes, it’s going to lag and it’s going to remain weak because it’s all sentiment. That’s how I’m looking at Bitcoin right now, and that’s why I’m telling folks on the crypto side of things the same things I’m saying on the stock side of things.

Like Louis is saying, this is not really the time to get in there and nibble. It’s the time to kind of just wait and see, sit on the sidelines, wait for clarity and then, if positive clarity emerges, you want to really get in there, and you really want to get in with cryptos, I think, if positive clarity emerges.

Eric Fry: I just want to jump on something really quick, Luis, that Luke touched on. It’s an important point. The reconfiguring of supply chains is a gigantic deal. Obviously, it takes years, sometimes decades to structure a supply chain. And, obviously, the goal here, we don’t win as a nation if we become a dominant sneaker manufacturer in Nevada, but trail far behind in the AI race. And so what we’re doing here is we’re putting a tax on production essentially. And no country has ever taxed its way to prosperity. Right? We have to incentivize, invest, enable capitalism to work its magic.

And so, if you look at the first or second day of the Trump administration, $500 billion into domestic incentives, into domestic AI production is the right kind of policy. This is its opposite. This is its evil twin in my opinion. We need to watch as investors, well, what does this do to capital, right? Where will capital now flow?

We Americans tend to look at the world from our perspective and we say, “Well, we want a fair deal with this person and that person,” but the rest of the world might say, “Hey, you know what? You guys have become a pain in the neck, you Americans. We’re going to… We’re going to ring-fence you. We’re going to start dealing with other countries unilaterally or bilaterally and go around you to the extent that we can.” We’re far, far, far away from that. Nobody wants a weak American economy, but, again, it’s the sort of thing where you want to be looking down the road and saying, “Well, is it possible that some countries, some companies will begin to prosper because of trade that does not involve the United States?”

I’m not seeing it yet, but I am seeing some stocks that are behaving that way. There are stocks in foreign markets that have popped the last couple of days specifically because they’ve become the winners of a world in which America becomes less powerful.

Luis Hernandez: … is your sort of global macro view there, and you’ve been investing in some stocks and funds in other countries. I mean what do you see there that’s going on?

Eric Fry:

Well, just the quick-and-dirty is that most markets have gone down, most foreign markets, most industries, most sectors have fallen the last three or four days, right? There are a handful that have not, and there are a handful of foreign stocks that have not. And, in most cases, well, if you look at a year-to-date, there are many foreign markets that are still showing positive gains year-to-date including the Chinese market, so, yeah, it’s looking like there’s a shift in capital flows at least at the moment. And the tariff war is exacerbating that trend that already started early in the year where capital is flowing to foreign markets more than it is flowing here. That can turn on a dime, but it’s just something to watch.

Luis Hernandez: Okay. Luke, growth investors are especially vulnerable right now, and we have some things that might be coming up. The Fed’s meeting at about a month. That might, if they end up cutting rates, that could be a spark or something like that. I mean, how do you think investors should take this macro noise versus long-term innovation potential? How are they supposed to weigh those things out?

Luke Lango: Yeah, that’s the biggest balancing act right now is the short-term pain versus the long-term gain. And our strategy has been hunker down. Yeah, but hunker down doesn’t just mean hunker down in everything. It means trim what you do not love and hunker down in what you do love. I think a lot of us got very risk on ’23, ’24, back-to-back 20%-plus-up years, trump got elected in November, everybody was expecting massive political tailwinds, deregulation, tax cuts. Coming into the year, every Wall Street Bank had massive price targets for the S&P 500 and 25.

Everybody was very risk-on, or at least a lot of people were very risk-on, which means you probably had a lot of bets out there, you had a lot of positions, you had a lot of exposure. I think this is a wake-up call that we need to trim some of that exposure, reduce, get narrow, get slim, trim the sails, right-size the crew, but stay on the ship. So that means trim what you don’t love, hunker down in what you love, wait for positive clarity to emerge, because it will eventually. I don’t know if it’s going to emerge today or tomorrow or next week and next month. It will and, when it does, then you re-expand, but you want to save your cash resources while you can until that positive clarity emerges because, if you just keep buying the dip, some people have income coming in all the time so they can keep on buying the dip like that. Others do not.

And so, just speaking universally in a world where cash is finite, you don’t just want to keep deploying capital, deploying, deploying, deploying, deploying because, when the real buying opportunity comes, you might not have enough dry powder to actually act on it. So I think you definitely want to trim down, save some cash on the sidelines, build that cash position up, and get ready to jump in hand over fist once positive clarity emerges.

I think the Fed is going to be a big deal around that. When you look at the big sell-offs like this, the reversals happen with liquidity injections. Right? We can talk about fundamental reversals and all this stuff, but really it’s liquidity injections that drive massive market rebounds after sharp crashes like we’re in today. The Fed can control that. We’re in a unique position because they have a lot of acorns saved up for this winter. They spent all of ’22 into ’23 hiking rates. They have a lot of rate cuts they have in their back pocket to deploy if stuff does get really ugly.

Right now, stuff is pained, but not really, really ugly. We saw that on Friday. That’s why we lagged lower on Friday after Powell spoke, because Powell… Some people were hoping Powell to come out and be like, “Oh, my gosh, market is freaking out. I got your back. Don’t worry. We’re going to cut. We’re going to help you out.” Instead, he was more like, “Yeah, I don’t really know what’s going on. I don’t really know where this is going to go. We’ll help if things get ugly, but, right now, we want to wait and see.”

So it’s clearly not ugly enough for them to jump in yet either, and so I think you have to watch the Fed very closely because they’re the ones with the bazooka, or I guess Trump has a bazooka, too. But the bazooka that could really supercharge the markets is in the Fed’s hands, and so you want to wait and see what they do. Once they give you the green light, once they fire that bazooka, that liquidity bazooka, that’s probably the positive clarity.

Luke Lango: If they fire that bazooka, that liquidity bazooka, that’s probably the positive clarity you’re going to need to move higher.

Luis Hernandez: Okay. So-

Louis Navellier: Luis, I’m sorry to say Jerome Powell is increasingly becoming a lame duck and he’s having a hard time managing the consensus. The good news is we have multiple presidents out and about speaking this week. Usually when they dispatch so many Fed presidents to go out and talk, they’re setting the stage that they will be cutting rates in May. Obviously an emergency cut would be nice, but that might ensue more panic. So it looks like we’ll have a cut in May and we’ll see what those Fed presidents say, but no one can ever fight market rates.

The fact that market rates have gone down is very bullish. Now, just so everybody understands, China’s rates are below Japan’s. China is the new Japan. Their rates will be at or near zero for 20 plus years, and they have deflation there. We saw it in the February CPI. We’ll see if it continues to spread. We also have had a lot of interesting things. We’ve got falling oil prices, falling egg prices. We will see if there is going to be inflation. I personally think the 10% tariffs can be offset by a strong dollar. That’s what happened last time he was slapping 10% on everything. So we shall see. But this is a very, very bullish phenomena. The fact that the housing market can probably finally get going with these lower yields will help a lot because we create a lot of durable goods as people buy more homes and stuff. So there’s a lot of green shoots shooting up here.

Luis Hernandez: Well, I wanted to ask you about that because I know that you spend the weekend going over your stock grader system. Is there anything that’s popping up there that you think is particularly notable?

Louis Navellier: Just be in the top five percent if you can. So that would be something like a Sprouts Farmers Market. Obviously I’ve got five gold stocks I recommend, they’ve been an oasis. Carpenter Technology, CRS, is another extremely strong stock, but mainly it’s just load up on the best stocks fundamentally. So if you take accelerated profits, the top 10 stocks there are the most explosive. There’s no doubt about that. We sort accelerated profits in order of attractiveness. Not worried about Nvidia long-term and not worried about Supermicro long-term. Those are all lock and load companies. And it’s hard to explain, but I’m so obsessed with fundamentals, that’s why I don’t get derailed. Obviously, somebody tried to derail me on Supermicro with a bogus short selling report, and that company’s now out of business. And as all the attacks came on Supermicro, none of the analysts were cutting their estimates. There’s 40 analysts and the poor stock even gets bumped from a major index and they had to get a new auditor. And of course, they blame their old auditor for being a weenie and causing part of the problems.

But yeah, so as long as you stick to the fundamentals, you’ll be fine. And there’s nothing better than squeezing the shorts when earnings come out and earnings are going to be a double-digit here. So hopefully the Trump administration will be able to get control of this narrative, but right now they’ve been out drowned by the foreign press. I’m happy that Hastert is one of the spokesmen. He might be better than Scott Bassett, but yeah, you got to keep Howard Lutnick and you got to keep those guys out of the picture right now because they’re just too gung-ho on tariffs and Peter Navarro, of course.

Luis Hernandez: Yeah, there are some catalysts coming up, so we’ll have to see how all this turns out. I mean, there is the Fed meeting at about a month where now odds are that we will get a cut, whereas before even just a week ago, it didn’t look that way. They are working on a tax cut bill in Congress that they’re hoping to push through by Memorial Day. We have Project Stargate, which is all built around this idea of accelerating AI, so AI development in the United States. So there’s still going to be a lot of news over the summer as we listen to how the market responds to all these various developments.

Louis Navellier: The tax cut bill is very interesting because they have to reconcile that. And there’s already gossip that they might have to increase taxes on the upper income earners. You might wonder why would that happen under Trump? The main reason is he loves taking the opposition narrative and then making it his own and rubbing it in their face. You have to realize if you’re a Democratic strategist, well, you got a lot of ammunition lately. If you’re a Democratic strategist, that Liberation Day thing was devastating because he had the 25 UAW workers there. The gentleman from Macomb County was all excited. Sean Fain, the head of the UAW fiercely opposed Trump is now praising him. He stole their constituency and he just loves to mess with the other side. So it will be interesting if he does temporarily have to have a higher tax bracket to get his tax cut through to the masses. And that will be fine because you want to put money in people’s pockets and you want the loss of money to go up. So I would be in favor of that as long as it goes to the middle class.

Luke Lango: Just want to update everybody. The White House came out and said that report of Trump pausing tariffs for 90 days is fake news, and all the indices are down more than one percent again.

Luis Hernandez: Well, there you go.

Luke Lango: Just there you go. That’s the wild swings.

Luis Hernandez: Yeah, we’re looking at that kind of environment for a while, guys. Thanks for your time. We’ll stay in touch as the volatile market situation continues to develop.

Folks, for decades, investors could rely on certain rules of the road, open markets, predictable policy and gradual change, and that playbook doesn’t seem to apply right now. We’re in a new market era, one divide by disruption at the highest levels. And in a world like that the edge belongs to those who stay informed and think independently. That’s what our team is here to deliver. If you’re looking for clarity in the chaos, you’ve come to the right place. Thanks again for your attention.