Brutal Quarter Ends With a Rally — But Risks Are Rising

0:00Today's number, 15. That's the percentage drop in new reality TV shows that premiered in America last year. Competition in the space has been dwindling for a while now, as viewers flock to what has become the nation's most popular reality TV show. It's called The News. Money market matters. If money is evil, then that building is hell. The show goes on! The folks are never watching. So, so! Welcome to Prof G Markets. I'm Ed Elson. It is April 1st. Let's check in on yesterday's market vitals. The first quarter wrapped up with a bang as the major indices staged a dramatic rally on a potential end to the war.

0:44More on that in a second. Meanwhile, the dollar dropped, treasury yields fell, and finally Brent crude declined but remained above$100 per barrel. okay what else is happening wall street was on track for its worst quarter in four years until a rally tuesday softened the blow the s &p 500 was down as much as nine percent from its january peak that was its worst quarterly performance since 2022 but tuesday it surged nearly three percent meanwhile the nasdaq was down as much as 13 percent from its peak and entered correction territory that was at least until its blistering rally of nearly 4 % on Tuesday.

1:24That recovery came after Trump told aides he is open to ending the war, even if the Strait of Hormuz remains closed. Then Iranian President Pezheshkian said Tehran has the, quote, necessary will to end the conflict in exchange for security guarantees. And with that, Wall Street got the quarter-ending rally it was waiting for. So here to help us unpack the market's performance so far this year, we are joined by Kevin Gordon, head of macro research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research. So Kevin, I was going to have you on here to break down the seller for what was going to be one of the worst quarters ever.

2:02And then we get this big news. Trump says maybe the war is going to come to an end. Iran says maybe it's going to come to an end too. And then the market rallies. Let's just start with your reactions to what we saw on Tuesday. The key word is maybe. And I think today is sort of, you know, the end of the final day of the quarter is emblematic of the whiplash environment that we've been in. And that's really how we've been characterizing this market. It's not impossible to trade. But when you're really kind of starving for accurate information, you know, out of both sides in terms of what is the condition of the Strait of Hormuz?

2:39How is it, you know, what does the traffic look like? What is the potential for that to get back online? What is the knock-on effect going to be for the global economy? All of these, you know, unanswered questions. I think that just makes markets, you know, a little bit more aggressive and volatile when you get any snippet of good news. But also to the downside. You know, we've had our fair share, especially at the end of last week. You know, that was sort of a clear example of kind of all the negative news compounding. So I think that today's move, you know, doesn't really surprise me. I think that one thing to sort of look at in terms of the strength of the durability of the move, I wouldn't put a whole lot of stock into it because if you look at the kind of underlying breadth and subsurface moves of the S &P 500 at least, advancing volume wasn't that strong.

3:23It was actually a little bit, last I checked right before I joined you, so I'll have to check for the official closing stats, But last I checked, it was actually stronger last Monday than it was today in terms of advances relative to decliners. I mean, when you look at what was lifting the index significantly, it was actually tech and communication services. So yes, you still had a majority of members in the S &P that were advancing, but it was a lot of that mega cap strength reasserting itself because those have actually gotten hit. Those are some of the hardest hit markets so far this year, even if you back it out actually over the past six months.

3:56So a little bit was sort of this reversion into those names, but also just sort of this classic momentum trade going in reverse where energy had been the leader. Today it got hit the hardest, similar with tech and communication services. They had been struggling a lot, and then they had found sort of the strongest move and the strongest bid today. So I wouldn't put a whole lot of weight into just one day, but especially because some of the background conditions, whether it is the breadth underneath the market or whether it is actually the fact that oil prices continue to move higher today. I think that in and of itself is a little bit of a reason to sort of step back and not extrapolate the move that we saw for U.S.

4:33stocks. I'm so confused as to why investors appear to be either buying or selling in huge numbers based on what Trump says. But that seems to keep on happening. He says, OK, this war is going to end soon. And then markets go up. And then he says, actually, it's probably not. And then markets go down. Is it your belief that what is happening, what happened in the markets wasn't necessarily a response to what happened in Iran because it was mostly a rally in the tech sector? Or are the two still quite related? Yeah, I mean, well, when you look at the contribution to the indexes gained today from tech, I kind of lump tech and communication services in with each other because they have kind of become that big tech, that tech-like trade, lowercase t.

5:20They're clearly different sectors and they have very different makeups in terms of their membership profile. So it is important to make the distinction. But if you combine those two, you're talking about around 40 percent of the S &P 500's market cap. So if they're advancing and doing well, pretty hard for the headline index to struggle. Vice versa, a lot of what we were experiencing year to date right before the war, those sectors were struggling. They were sort of taking a step back from their leadership positions, and that was kind of giving the illusion that the headline S &P wasn't doing as well.

5:50But underneath the surface, you had actually seen a lot more improvement in the average stock doing quite well, the equal-weighted S &P 500. If you want to think of that as the proxy for the average stock, that had been doing well. So yes, I do think most of the move today was kind of just that snapback and that reversion for, you know, a part of the market that didn't necessarily get a lot of love or hasn't gotten a lot of love for the past six months. And I would add to it, you know, not only was the sort of the subsurface breadth not as good as I had mentioned earlier, but the flow data actually into a sector like tech was not very strong today.

6:24So there wasn't this sort of high conviction on the part of traders, especially in the retail crowd. I was looking specifically at that cohort. there wasn't a lot of high conviction in terms of that move really bringing them back in. Certainly nothing akin to what you had seen in April of last year when we were going through those, what we were calling these, you know, rip your face off rallies after you had gotten the series of delays for imports for China. What do you make of this quarter as a whole? It feels like there have been two major market moving events. I guess the first one was AI is killing software.

6:58And I mean, some of the drawdowns we've seen, even in the companies that are technically AI companies like Microsoft, even NVIDIA has gotten pretty crushed recently. That seems to be one story which surprised people for various different reasons. And then also Iran and what that has done to oil supply and what that may do to the economy. me. I guess I'd be interested to hear your reflections on Q1. I mean, I don't think these are two things that people necessarily predicted, but how does it change your outlook for the year? And what are your reflections on what has been kind of an insane quarter?

7:40It has been an insane quarter. I mean, insanely long quarter. I feel like it's been a year, because, you know, this dates back even to Venezuela and Greenland. I mean, that was in the same quarter. So, you know, it's hard to, you know, imagine that so much has gone. You know, I've been joking that we're still in January. And so it just, you know, it just feels drawn out. But I think that, you know, for Iran in particular, yes, I think it will change the calculus of how we think about the trajectory of the economy moving forward. What's difficult is, you know, there's just so many unknowns in terms of what is the, you know, what is the strategy of the U.S.

8:18And I think that matters in the sense of trying to figure out and sort of game out a scenario analysis for where oil ultimately ends up. Because I think that, you know, going up to$120, I'm just sort of, you know, using rounded numbers out of the air. But$120 a barrel for oil, if you get up to that, that doesn't really tell me much. I want to know what is sort of the floor after that and where do you ultimately kind of plane out and find a sustained floor. because if it is around 100, that's a meaningful shock up from 60, which was the recent low. That probably keeps gasoline prices, you know, at least a little bit above$4.

8:53And gasoline prices take longer to come down than oil does. So I'm thinking about it from the mindset of the consumer. To me, this is much more of a sort of direct-to-consumer shock versus something like Liberation Day last year, which was more of a direct-to-business shock because those are the ones that sort of faced it first in terms of the import fees and the hike and rates that they had to pay. The consumer, as we've sort of learned, didn't face too much of that tariff burden throughout last year. There were bits and pieces and certainly in the goods market. There was some pass through. We've actually started to see some pass through earlier this year.

9:25But I think of this as more of that direct to consumer shock. And if you think about, you know, the two things that the average consumer in America, I would say probably the world, but in America in particular, you know, thinks about as the most important gauges of economic health, its grocery prices and its gasoline prices. So to the extent that this starts to cause a little bit of a shift in how they spend their money, that I think will ultimately lead us to sort of change how we think about the trajectory of the economy. I will say, though, there needs to be, I think, an important distinction.

9:55And so far, this has played out in the economic data that we've gotten. There does need to be a distinction between what is a consumption shock and what is a labor shock. Because if you do hit the consumer spending power or you hit the sort of consumption basket, that's one thing. But if you start to take away consumer spending power via lower income, you know, through layoffs, that's a very different story. So far, that hasn't been the case. Initial jobless claims, you know, which we get every Thursday morning at 830 Eastern, those have actually rolled over. They haven't picked up much. We haven't really gotten any, you know, sort of company notices of mass layoffs across industries.

10:30So as long as that's the case, I think that it will keep the economy sort of on track to grow. But I think it's, you know, it's probably relatively easy to say that we're going to have to take down, you know, growth estimates for this year just based on that consumer aspect alone. Well, while you're on that point, we just had this news that Oracle is laying off thousands of employees. It kind of just came out of the blue. They just sent an email and thousands of employees were dismissed. And again, it is one of those stories of this was an AI story. And we have seen more of these. We've seen it with Pinterest.

11:02We saw it with Amazon. We saw it with Block. Block was another big one. Um, are those AI layoff stories significant enough to you to make, to pose real problems in the labor market going forward? Like, is that just more of a, this happens to a handful of tech companies and, you know, it might be very, uh, shocking for that industry itself, but not necessarily going to have a massive implication for the larger economy. where do you land on these AI layoffs in terms of their impact going forward? I lean that way just because in just sort of simple math terms, I mean, the information sector, it's hard because the BLS, you know, they don't have tech specifically carved out as a name of an industry.

11:51But information is essentially that's the name that we can sort of associate with tech. That's pretty low single digits in terms of the percentage share of overall payrolls. So So number one, that's a pretty small sort of impact directly, at least for overall payrolls. But number two, that share has actually been rolling over for a couple of years, almost a couple of years now. So we've started to actually, we've continued to see, we started to see it a couple of years ago. But we've continued to see this move away from, you know, tech dominance in terms of that share of employment growing. Because it had been growing for a while, but now that's actually started to reverse lower.

12:27And it's been in favor of areas like health and education, private health services. So we've seen that handoff. In that timeframe, of course, the economy has continued to grow. The labor market has continued to grow, not in a strong way, not as strong as we've been used to, but we've still continued to see economic growth. So I think that it keeps that, you know, a little bit more idiosyncratic. But at the same time, it is emblematic, I think, of what's happening to the broader tech industry. And I think actually brings up an interesting point about tech for this sort of next earnings season. What I found interesting so far year to date is that tech earnings revisions within the S &P 500, that sector has actually seen the most aggressive upward revision.

13:06So analysts have continued to get more optimistic on what EPS is going to look like for this year. I'm going to be very sort of Hawkeye focused on in the next earnings season, whether that is driven by sort of this profit margin protection of, you know, laying more people off or whether they're actually continuing to see strong organic, you know, revenue and strong demand. I think those are two very different things. And that to me will determine a lot of the sort of the fate of where tech goes for the rest of the year. And it's striking because it's gotten so crushed this quarter. I mean, it's just one of those sectors where they keep on posting great earnings, keep on beating estimates by and large, and then they still get punished either way.

13:48Just as we wrap up here, it seems as though, as it stands, end of Q1, 2026, I don't know if you agree with this, but it seems as though this might be one of the most uncertain times in market history. It seems as though investors are incredibly unanchored from what is actually happening on the ground because they're asking so many questions about what the future might look like. And they're not really willing or very interested in looking at the previous backward-looking data because everyone's view is kind of like, well, the future is completely uncertain. We don't know what's going to happen in Iran.

14:30We don't know what's going to happen at the price of war. We don't know what AI is going to do to the job market, what it's going to do to software. to tech, etc. So it's kind of like a free for all is the way I feel right now. I'd be interested to hear if you agree, like, do you agree that this is the most uncertain time we've seen, at least in the past, I don't know, 10 years? The U word I would use is actually unstable. And unstable and uncertain to me are different. That was actually a key theme that we had coming into 2026. Not that we in any way predicted, you know, the war that we're in right now.

15:00But, you know, instability is a little bit more, it's definitely less comfortable in terms of you can see these things that are shifting. You just don't necessarily know how to respond as an investor. So not that we think you need to respond to all of these events. I would actually argue against that and say that, you know, you should be lengthening time horizons and really reassessing what your risk tolerance and your emotional risk tolerance is in these environments. But I think to your point, you know, something I've been thinking about lately and going through all of these things that are happening right now, it's sort of a monster mashup of prior crises or it's sort of the ghost of prior crises, you know, past that are coming to haunt us all at once.

15:36Because you have the AI story. A lot of people, you know, liken it to the late 90s with the internet bubble. You have an energy crisis going on right now that people liken to 1990 or the mid to late 1970s. But then you also have this, you know, tariff regime that we're still in, which harkens back to 17 and 18 or, you know, even, you know, even last year. So it's all of this sort of happening at once and mashed up. And I think that's what's causing a lot of the, you know, the stress and the anxiety around how can the market continue to do well or not sell off as, you know, as much as we'd expect with all of this going on.

16:13But to me, it gets back to, I guess, a framework that I've been using for these moments, which is what is the front page risk? What is the bottom line risk? We've gone through a lot of front page risks and faced a lot of that this year, whether it was Venezuela, whether it was Greenland, whether it was everything with the Fed. But the bottom line risk wasn't as acute or as sharp because it wasn't filtering down to how is this going to affect S &P 500 earnings? Because at the end of the day, it's probably what the market, that is what the market cares about the most. This more recent conflict, you know, I think is kind of narrowing the gap between those two.

16:45So that's kind of what I'm on watch for is to see how much of this direct-to-consumer hit really manifests and how much of it grows. And that's where I could see this translating from, you know, just the front page stuff to an actual bottom line risk. All right. Kevin Gordon, head of macro research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research. Kevin, always love having you. Thank you for joining us. Thanks, Ed. After the break, an update on the chips market. And if you're enjoying the show, please follow our new Prof G Markets YouTube channel. Starting next week, that is where you will find all of our new content on YouTube.

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19:08Doug O'Laughlin:K-pop Demon Hunters, Haja Boys Breakfast Meal, and Huntrix Meal have just dropped at McDonald's. They're calling this a battle for the fans. What do you say to that, Rumi? It's not a battle. So glad the Saja boys could take breakfast and give our meal the rest of the day. It is an honor to share. No, it's our honor. It is our larger honor. No, really. Stop. You can really feel the respect in this battle. Pick a meal to pick a side. Ba-da-ba-ba-ba. And participate in McDonald's while supplies last.

19:44We're back with Prof G Markets. The relentless rise of chip stocks has hit a roadblock. Last week, US memory chip stocks shed$100 billion in market value after Google revealed an algorithm called TurboQuant that could reduce demand for the chips. Stocks rallied yesterday, though, as investors bought the dip, but they are still down for the past week. Meanwhile, the Iran war is stoking fears of a supply crunch in helium, a critical material in chip manufacturing. Despite yesterday's broad market rally, NVIDIA is still trading at a forward PE below the S &P 500 for the first time in 13 years. So lots going on in the chips market right now.

20:26Here to break down what's happening, we're speaking with Doug O 'Loughlin, president of Semi-Analysis. Doug, great to see you. This movement in the chip market that we're seeing is a little bit confusing. I mean, first, Google comes out with this algorithm, TurboQuant, which supposedly is going to kill memory stocks. And people were calling it Google's or memory's deep seek moment. But then the memory chip stocks rise yesterday. So did all the other semiconductor stocks. What is going on here?

21:00Doug O'Laughlin:OK, so I think what we're actually seeing is a lot of leverage under the surface, right? Memory has been a really popular trade year to date, and it's become very crowded, right? That's the most simplistic way to think about it. And I think SK Hynix, which is a cheaper alter, like the stock is cheaper on fundamental metrics, but it trades in Korea, has recently been talking about leasing an ADR. And because of that, that's going to kind of move some of the supply of rather some of the demand for Micron away from Micron shares into SK Hynix shares. That's one simplistic way to think about it. The other side of it, I think, is just a lot of momentum unwinding.

21:36Doug O'Laughlin:A lot of the moves were very, like, multiple standard deviations out of the normal, specifically for negative chip stocks and positive software stocks. That's effectively been the most popular trade year to date. And so what I think what you're witnessing in terms of the confusing moves is more a function of degrossing than fundamental information. And I definitely want to talk about TurboQuant because, like, TurboQuant's fake. I mean, I have no other way to put this. there's okay and I can even give some like insider baseball I feel like that will really help one almost always what happens is in a closed lab if they're willing to publish a paper about it publicly that means that there's some kind of breakdown that means it can't scale at a larger amount because if it you know if it did work at a larger amount you just keep it inside and you would essentially increase your margin versus your competitors it's so much so that I know that closed labs have a political movement so pretty much like if you want to screw someone's career as you publish the finding that they worked on.

22:33Doug O'Laughlin:I really don't think TurboQuant is a big deal as people think. And if you scale it up, pretty much what happens is that there's an immediate throughput disadvantage. Partially, a big part of it too was comparing the quantization schemes. So it's like a 32-bit versus like, I think it was like a 4-bit. That difference alone accounts for a meaningful uplift in the KV cache compression. But last and not least is the most important portion of this whole thing is if you get more context and via KVCache, essentially users will just use more context. So I think it really is a nothing burger. Like I really cannot express this enough.

23:08Doug O'Laughlin:I know that if it was really, really special and secret and good, it wouldn't have been released. There are optimization techniques for KVCache that happen at every of the leading labs. And this is just one of them that was published to the public. Yeah, it's interesting how the market reacted to that TurboQuant release, which was, again, I mean, Google comes out with this algorithm that the idea is that it's going to reduce the amount of memory that is needed to run these large language models. And everyone freaks out. But it appears that now markets are kind of re-understanding what's happening because memory stocks are now rising again.

23:47And what I read is that Bernstein had put out some research saying, we're not so worried about this. Everyone decides to buy again. The point being, it seems that investors are kind of don't know what's going on here, just on a technical basis. Like they're waiting for someone else to tell them, this is the deal. This is what this means for you. Would you agree with that? And if so, what does that mean for this market?