Stocks Reverse On Tariff Updates… And Billionaire Investor Stays Plugged Into Tesla 3/11/25

0:01Live from the Nasdaq market site in the heart of New York City's Times Square this is fast money. Here's what's on tap tonight. A roller coaster ride on Wall Street today. The S &P briefly falling more than 10 percent from its closing record, rallying on potential tariff relief and progress on a Ukraine-Russia ceasefire, and then selling again into the close. Where do we go from here? We'll debate that. And is Apple the most interesting chart in the market? The iPhone maker officially erasing all of its post-election gains. Why, the move has one of our traders intensely watching this name. Plus, Novo Nordisk hits levels not seen in more than a year.

0:32Two airline stocks move in very different directions and how market volatility is impacting retirement planning. I'm Melissa Lee coming to you live from Studio B at the NASDAQ on the desk tonight. Bono and Eisen, Dan Nathan, Guy Adami and Mike Coe. We start off with that wild ride for the market stock staging a mid-afternoon comeback after Canadian officials temporarily suspended a 25 percent surcharge on electricity put on in response to U.S. steel and aluminum tariffs. News that Ukraine agreed to a U.S.-led ceasefire if Russia accepts bolster the rebound as well. But the major averages couldn't hold their gains into the close, the Nasdaq, S &P and Dow all ending in the red, the Dow finishing down nearly 480 points.

1:10We are expecting more comments from the president this hour on tariffs and potentially the markets when President Trump speaks at the business roundtable's quarterly meeting in just a few minutes. In the meantime, let's get to Megan Cassella live at the White House to wrap up all today's news. Megan. LISA DESJARDINS, The President, Melissa, a day of remarkable back and forth. But at least on the trade front here at the White House, we are ending up pretty much where we started, despite all the turmoil throughout the day. So this started early in the day when President Trump threatened to raise those steel and aluminum tariffs on Canadian imports up to 50 percent, from 25 percent, where they had already been slated to take effect starting tomorrow.

1:44He said he was doing this in response to Ontario's move to charge a 25 percent surtax on electricity imports to three U.S. states. There was then sort of a stalemate between the two sides, but then a deal struck between Commerce Secretary Lutnik and Ontario saying they would suspend that electricity surtax in exchange for the threat going back down to 25%. But I will say a White House spokesman clarified just a few minutes ago in a statement to me that according to the executive order that had already been signed a few weeks ago, all of these tariffs, 25 % on all steel imports and 25 % on all aluminum imports, will still take effect tomorrow.

2:19So could help explain some of this market reaction, a little bit of a tepid reaction here that, yes, the 50 percent threat is off the table. But this is still a vast escalation of those metal tariffs from the first term and a lot more to come there. On the Ukraine front, this was a big source of optimism as well. Marco Rubio, after a day of talks in Saudi Arabia, along with National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, announcing that the Ukrainians are open to this ceasefire, saying that they expressed readiness to accept an immediate 30-day ceasefire. He also announced the U.S. will immediately lift the pause on intelligence sharing and resume its security assistance to Ukraine.

2:55They also say that the two sides are looking to conclude that deal on critical minerals last week. So a major step forward there, although crucially, they still do have to bring this to the Russians, which the president suggested would happen either later today or sometime tomorrow. And they say the ball now is in Russia's court. And finally, Melissa, as you mentioned, we are waiting for the president to depart from the South Lawn. They say they're waiting now. reporters are in the motorcade waiting now for him to depart for that meeting with CEOs. We don't know yet quite how much we're going to see on camera.

3:24Some of that will be open to reporters. Some of it will be closed press. But I was told the president is just looking here to have an open conversation with American executives, obviously coming amid a major tumultuous time for the markets. Melissa? Yep. Megan, thank you. Megan Casella. And what an interesting conversation that should be just after we've heard CEOs speak to their own investors about the change on a dime, basically, in consumer confidence, in terms of corporate confidence, etc., Guy? You see how quickly consumer confidence can turn. And the last reading we got was really miserable, and we have one this Friday, which is important.

3:57CPI tomorrow, which I think is going to be vitally important. But, you know, people are sitting around probably saying, is it over yet? And as much as I like to say it is over the selling, I don't think it is. You still have a VIX at 27, and I'll give you an example of what you were looking for. Today at 1.30, the market went from about 55.29, 55.30 in the S &P and rallied 100 handles. You would have wanted to see continuation. And by the way, we've seen things like that before. You obviously didn't see it today. In the last hour of the day, we sold off again like we did in the middle of last week.

4:27So we're still in the midst of, I think, a market that wants to sell rallies more than it wants to buy dips. And the headlines this week, I guess, for the last couple of weeks, when you think about CPI, PPI and consumer confidence, Yeah, they're all backward looking. But when you think about what's going on here, it's not going to help those going forward, even if we keep going back and forth, 25 or 50, if we keep leaning into our biggest trading partners and our biggest allies, that sort of thing. So, again, you have the potential for weakening just in the back and forth and the volleys here.

4:56And the other thing I'll just say is, like, look at American Express and then look at Capital One. And you think about these two different consumers that are customers of these two companies. They are pricing in a recession right now. Look at what led to the downside in the bank. In terms of their stock moves. Yes. You know, American Express was trading 327. This was just a month ago. And right now it closed at 255. I mean, it literally is for sale. Capital One is the same thing. JP Morgan leading to the downside today. It was acting much worse relative to the other money center banks. So, you know, I'm really focused on that group.

5:29And I'm not telling you just because those stocks are selling off, it means we're going into a recession. But investors are pricing them for a recession. Yeah, it was Stuart Kaiser we had on just yesterday from Citi saying, you know, the bank trade is really an institutional trade. So you can see the money coming out of the MAG-7, for instance. Money will go back to the MAG-7 just because of who wants to hold it. Everybody wants to hold it. But the bank trade is really an institutional trade. So when you see the likes of a J.P. Morgan go down and feel the pressure and continue to feel the pressure, that's probably institutions voting with their feet at this point.

5:57I definitely agree. I will say equity exposure amongst institutions still has not rolled over. And I think that will go hand in hand. And not only us being probably 10 handles higher on the high print of the VIX today, but it's probably coming back down to that 35, 37 type of level. We still haven't really seen those intraday spikes that really, to me, would suggest like utter and relentless capitulation. You know, and I think, you know, a lot of the stuff, you know, we focus a lot on the max seven and the growth area because clearly there's higher beta and we have seen those exacerbated moves.

6:31But to Dan's point, you look at the banks, you look at Kohl's, you look across the spectrum. We're starting to see these type of moves and names that suggest that they are lower beta, that they are more value or economically oriented. And so while I do think recession fears are a bit overblown, I do think it's a bit of a misconception to assume that being out of growth, a rotation out of growth necessarily saves you from the volatility that we're seeing in the market. Yeah. Mike, what's your take on where we are in the sell off? Yeah, I mean, to Bonwin's point, if you take a look at the VIX and we're trying to determine, are we in a period of fear or are we in a period of panic?

7:08And I don't think we've quite entered that area of panic yet. The top decile for VIX readings going back to January of 1990 is probably a close on the high side of 29. And that's usually when you start to see that kind of capitulation that you might be looking for. And look, the S &P isn't exactly cheap here. If we figure a slower growth, which I think is a very reasonable expectation, what are we looking at? 265, 270 maybe-ish on EPS and throw a reasonable turn on that. And that gets you in somewhere the 4850 to 5250 range. So to me, it's not like the market is cheap yet either. Yeah, not cheap yet.

7:48And you want to see, we talked to so many different people, Mandy Shue, for instance. You want to see correlation across asset classes. And that includes stocks around the world. If the U.S. is in a deep, deep sell-off and there are true recession fears, that's going to be, there's going to be a spillover to other parts of the world. That's just the way it is. You're not going to see Europe at highs. I agree with that, no question about it. And you also want to see, you know, what does capitulation mean? To me, it means huge volume day to the downside where you flush everybody out four or five times normal volume in individual stocks or a huge day in the Qs or the S &P.

8:22We just haven't seen it yet. And again, I think this was somewhat telegraphed. If you look, I mean, semiconductors, again, if you want to look at the SMH, which was a leader for so long, they made their all-time highs in July of last year. We're coming up almost to a year where these things made their highs. Microsoft, which I think everybody would agree, is one of the most important stocks and companies in the world. Look at that stock, how poorly it's traded since that same time frame. So there have been signs that are warning signs. Now the broader market is finally rolling. Well, it's funny.

8:51We're spending a lot of time talking about the potential for a recession. It reminds me a little bit of 2022, right? And we were so focused on that. And the stock market started to price it in. The S &P was down 26 % at one point from its 2021 all-time highs. And NASDAQ sold off about 37%. And we never had the economic recession. We had an earnings recession. And I think that's kind of to Mike's point. So the longer a trade war, whether it happens or not, it goes back and forth. I mean, if you're the C-level suite in corporate America, you're just kind of sitting on your hands a little bit right now.

9:21And you're going to these meetings like with Trump today and you're really kind of pleading with him a little bit. You know what I mean? And saying, listen, this is not going to be good for hiring. It's not going to be good for CapEx. It's not going to be good for R &D. It's not good for them to kind of strain the relationships that they have with really important trading partners. It's not just the government that worries about these trade imbalances. But a lot of our companies, the Fortune 500, I mean, they rely like a great deal on all of this kind of trade. So to me, I just think if you want to splinter supply chains right now at a very difficult time for the global economy, it just doesn't make a whole heck of a lot of sense.

9:56Okay. All this being said, was there anything that you put on as a trade? Anything that looked interesting in your view, Bonoan? Tempting? That I have put on or that I would look to put on? Yeah, or you look to put on, have put on? I have. I dabbled a slight bit yesterday from a trading standpoint. I added to some names. I'm also looking at Google. around that 165 level, 162 level. But that's been a name just for you to kind of get a high-quality type of – high-quality growth stock that has been at a suppressed valuation. Also, believe it or not, you know, it pains me to say it, but it's like, do I vote with my brain?

10:35Do I vote with my heart? I think Tesla starts to look interesting only because there is just so much momentum in that stock. Now, I'm not going to focus on forward earnings. I'm not going to focus on deliveries. None of that stuff matters to that core cohort that is going to live and die by Tesla. And I do think when you start seeing 40%, 50 % retracement, there is going to be somewhat of an urge for people to buy that as a trading vehicle. There is an interesting name in the semi-spirit. Look at what Broadcom has done. I mean, remember back in December, that guy, the stock went up 40%, retraced the entire thing, just traded down to the 200-day moving average.

11:09Actually was up today. Had a decent day. I mean, I think Broadcom, and we talked about this the other day, is giving you something to trade against on the long side. Do you have one more? Yeah. I mean, I like the idea of going back to the MAG-7 and how do you do that without idiosyncratic risk. You do it through the QQQ, those top 10 names. And I just think that's the one that you want to dollar cost average if we're going to go from down 13 % in the NASDAQ 100 possibly to down 20%, 25%. If you kind of average into that over the course of whatever that period is, if it's a bear market that lasts a year, two years from now, you're going to be pretty happy with the pricing that you did dollar cost averaging.

11:45Let's get more on the markets and volatility and what to expect from tomorrow's CPI print from Wells Fargo Securities. Mike Schumacher joins us. He's the firm's head of macro strategy. Mike, always good to see you. You've been meeting, no doubt, with a lot of big clients. What are they doing, if anything? Ducking and covering at this point. To the point many people have made here, the rules aren't clear. The volatility is extraordinary. So it's hard to make a big business decision, big investment decision. It's just not the right time to be a hero today. What are they waiting for? Because one can argue this will go on and on for months and months and months.

12:18I think the passage of a little more time and also perhaps a little more of a concrete idea from President Trump. What exactly does he want to see on tariffs? Is it generating revenue? Is it targeting particular objectives like fentanyl? Is it something else people don't know? Maybe we get some of that in a few minutes today, perhaps. But I think a little more clarity from him will go a long way to boosting confidence in terms of the CPI print It's it's gonna be an interesting print because not a lot had was in effect for the month of February At the same what do markets want to see out of that number?

12:52I mean you I feel like you can make a case for a hotter number or a cooler number They want something low so you think about the last six CPI's Melissa five are bad and the last one is just awful So right now the Fed's in the penalty box. The Fed can't do anything. So if the S &P is down 5 % tomorrow, is the Fed more likely to come in? Probably not much. So I suspect people will be a lot more comfortable if that number were just a little bit weaker. It doesn't have to be an amazing number, just something benign. And Jay Powell would breathe a huge sigh of relief. So, Michael, you just said they're kind of backed into a corner-ish.

13:26You know, going back to September when they did that 50 basis point cut, they were worried about the employment situation, right? And now they just don't want to see inflation kind of reaccelerate. So Mel's point is like, you know, hot, cold. It's just like I don't know what the Fed can do right now because are they likely to get more dovish if we start to have weaker data after what you just said, five kind of hot prints? I think it's going to be a while, frankly. So from my perspective, the Fed needs to see at least a couple months of relatively decent inflation data before it can do much of anything.

13:59So that puts us probably into July, best case for a Fed cut. Markets pricing a cut before then. I think that's incorrect. So the market's probably ahead of itself. Markets pricing about two cuts for the second half of this year. That seems a little bit light to me. So most importantly, though, the market seems to think the Fed is just about ready to go. And I would disagree. Needs to have better data. The last couple of years, volatility has been a one or maybe a two-day event. Now we're into probably the third week of a vol north of 20. I think people got to get used to it. But, you know, what's your take on that, this elevated vol for a prolonged period of time?

14:32Yeah, we've been talking about the main idea guy for the last month or so has been that risk premium should go up. And we're seeing it day by day. So elevated volatility in equities. VIX is very high. Fixed income volatility is high. FX volatility is struggling but rising a little bit. Corporate spreads are out. Equities, we don't have to talk about those. We know what the story is. So I suspect this does continue for a while as people come to grips with the idea that, hey, maybe it actually is a sustained trade war. We haven't seen one of those in a long time. Usually don't go so well. And that's going to drive equities to a pretty dizzying state, I think, in terms of up and down.

15:05And the same thing for bonds. Lots of all. You mentioned that we do spend a lot of time on equities, which is really the main focus of the show. But I'm curious about the fixed income market. What do you believe the implications are for there? And what might be the better trades that emerge out of this whole situation? Yeah, for fixed income in the U.S., for us, we'd say, look, if the Fed is on hold for a while, You probably don't want to be long, short securities, like one, two year kind of boring, but stay out of trouble typically. I think going. I'm sorry to interrupt, Mike. Thank you, Michael Schumacher, Wells Fargo.

15:32President Trump is speaking at the Business Roundtable right now. Let's listen in. It's very good. And then this the people in this room, we're going to tie us back together. The people in this room obviously are very interested in all the conversations going on around trade and tariffs that are important here. And then you've also had a large scale effort to root out wasteful spending in the federal government. and I believe there's a thread that kind of ties all that together, and I'm just curious if you could share with us what that is. Well, it's basically Make America Great Again. We have a bloated, very dishonest, in many cases, federal government and bureaucracy that's been a long time coming.

16:10Somebody should have done this many years ago, and we're cutting numbers that nobody's ever seen before. Doge, as we call it, affectionately. You've been all hearing that term a lot. Elon's been doing really a fantastic job. He suffers a little bit because of it. People go after him. But actually, I think in the end, it'll maybe reverse itself and be just the opposite. That's happened before. There's people that they tend to go after one group or another, but basically it's the other. They go after conservatives, and when somebody stands up and fights, it ends up their business ends up doubling.

16:51You can see that. Just a little example, Goya Foods, he was just a wonderful man, the owner and family, and largely Hispanic foods. And they went after him because he supported me, and this was the end of the first term. and he fought back and it ended up that he ended up tripling his business. And it's today a much bigger business than it was before. And there are many examples of that. And maybe it's going to be that way with Elon. When I saw what was happening with this, you know, the concerted effort by paid, I think they're paid agitators. And when I saw what was happening, I said, I want to buy a Tesla.

17:33And we just went to the front. He had four beautiful cars there. and I bought one in front of the press. It was a very public purchase and they're beautiful and do a great job. Very good competitors with Mary and everybody else. You know, he's done a great job and he shouldn't be sacrificed or have to suffer because he wants to help government. It's not that he's a Republican, which he's, you know, not the strong. I mean, I don't, sometimes I'm not even sure what he is in terms of his philosophies, But he's a great guy. He's a patriot. He wants to see the country straightened out. And he's done a fantastic job with us.

18:13We've found massive fraud, abuse, waste. And we had many, many jobs where there was nobody working but getting a check. We had contracts that expired years ago, but they were continuously being paid. probably, I'll bet you it's$500 billion perhaps if you add it up so far. And we're trying to get to a trillion dollars. That's a big number. And he did have an ability to do something that a lot of people didn't think of. He'd come in with bigger ideas. We'd say, we want you to cut down the size of your agency by 2%. And we thought that was good. he came in, he said, 80%. I said, what the hell's going on?

18:5880%. And largely, I mean, we had to do it carefully, and we had some little hiccups, not big hiccups. But we saved a tremendous amount of money for the future. This is going into the future. And in some cases it would be 80, and in some cases it would be 5 % or 2 % or 3%, you know, depending on the agency. And you can almost, you're all great professionals is the top. And you can almost look at some of the agencies and see which ones had to be cut and which ones didn't. Also, in terms of their importance and in terms of being current. So we saved a tremendous amount of money. And I think, you know, I don't know if it's going to reach a trillion, but it's going to reach a lot.

19:40And it was an honor to have Michael there yesterday. You got to see a little bit of it. We had a conference and a lot of investment coming into our country, much more than I've ever seen. Apple is investing$500 billion. IBM was with us yesterday, and they're investing a lot, just companies all over. I could name them. You've read most of them, many of them. But hundreds of billions of dollars is being invested. That wouldn't have happened if I didn't win the election, number one. And I think, number two, the tariffs are having a tremendously positive impact. They will have, and they are having.

20:15We have car companies that are not building in Mexico now. They're building in the United States. Some of them, the plants were already started and they stopped construction. Now they're going to build in the United States. It was very unfair that they'd build in Mexico and sell them across the border with no tax, no nothing. They'd take away our jobs. They'd close up places in Michigan and all over the country. And they'd build them in Mexico. In many cases, they were owned by China, built in Mexico, owned by China. And that's all stopped now. They're all coming. They're all coming here. Honda is building a massive plant and different places, Indiana, South Carolina, but also in Michigan, a lot in Michigan.

20:58A lot of activity is happening. They're looking all over the place for the places. And that's because there is a good spirit. There's a renewed spirit. And also, very importantly, the tariffs are they don't want to pay 25 percent or whatever it may be. It may go up higher. It may go up higher. Look, the higher it goes, the more likely it is they're going to build. And ultimately, the biggest win is not the tariff. That's a big win. That's a lot of money. But the biggest win is if they move into our country and produce jobs. That's a bigger win than the tariffs themselves. But the tariffs are going to be throwing off a lot of money to this country.

21:34And we've been ripped off for years by other countries, many, many decades. And they were doing the same thing. But I think we'll do it better. And I think we have a bigger advantage because we really are the piggy bank. They weren't. Thank you, Mr. President. You've also mentioned rebuilding the American economy. I guess what's your strategy to lower the overall cost of living and make everyday expenses more?

22:04We're obviously losing the camera shot. That was President Trump speaking at the Business Roundtable. Asked a question by Chuck Robbins there. President Trump spending a lot of time talking about the work that Doge has accomplished, most notably saying that Doge has achieved$500 billion in efficiencies, which is halfway to that$1 trillion goal that they had had. And also the impact of tariffs has been investment more than he's ever seen, he said, into this country from the likes of Honda, a lot of car manufacturers coming in, building plants in various places, Apple building plants here, et cetera.

22:40What we do know, though, is that the impact of all of this has been volatility in the market. So let's continue our conversation with Michael Schumacher of Wells Fargo. Thanks for sticking around. You have glimpses of this. Nothing seems to get resolved. The expectation for volatility tomorrow is just as high as before he started speaking. So what are you finding in terms of how your clients are positioning if they don't want to do anything right now? Presumably, a lot of them have to be in the markets, that that is their mandate. So what do they do? Yeah, on the investor side, Melissa, what we're telling people to do, and what I think a lot of people have done, is to buy bonds that are a little bit longer than the Fed can really control.