Tariff whiplash, oil prices, Tesla turmoil: Market takeaways

Yahoo

21 hours ago

US stocks (^GSPC, ^IXIC, ^DJI) slipped on Monday after recent highs, with renewed trade tensions reminding investors that tariff uncertainty is far from over.
Yahoo Finance Senior Reporter Allie Canal joins Asking for a Trend to go over the top takeaways from the trading day: the return of tariff tensions, how OPEC+'s oil supply increase could affect oil (CL=F, BZ=F) prices, and turbulence for Tesla (TSLA) stock.
To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Asking for a Trend here.
US stocks retreat as President Trump reignites trade tensions with a flurry of letters. Yahoo finances Alec now joins us now with the trading day takeaways, Ali.
Yeah, Josh. Today was a reminder that we are not over a lot of that chaos when it comes to some of these trade developments here. Now, could have been some profit taking why stocks fell today. We did see those record highs last week, but still, it it is a reminder that we still have a lot of unknowns, a lot of TBDs, as you'll see on your screen. So this is where things stand with our top trading partners here. We have those flurry of letters that were sent out earlier today to countries like South Korea, South Africa, Japan. To that point, you'll see Japan now has a tariff rate of 25% in April. Trump announced 24% tariffs on Japan. So a slight uptick there, but pretty much identical. Uh, you'll see here that we have Vietnam at 20%. Taiwan is still TBD. If I go back, you'll see that, uh, European Union, that's a biggie. That's one that Trump is continuing to have conversation with. That is still unknown here. So it's just a good reminder that we don't know where things are ultimately going to land here with tariffs. But we have seen markets largely look through a lot of this noise. There's been the Taco trade, Trump always chickens out. A lot of folks out there are saying that this is the art of the deal, that we are not actually going to see these levels, but we did see stocks sell off a bit on this news. So there is some fear out there that maybe we could, and what could that mean for?
We did have the great Adam Johnson on the show today, portfolio manager. I know Adam's take on this was, you know what this was? These letters today, it's a tactic. The Trump tactic, it's the art of the deal, it's part of the grand, the bigger negotiation, right, the put and take, we shall see.
Right. And I think earning season coming up, we're going to hear a lot from companies, and maybe they say it's, you know, less than feared, which would be a positive for equities. Another big story today was oil. So we had that surprise announcement from OPEC Plus that in August they are planning to boost their oil output to 540,000 barrels a day. That's up from 411 a day in May, June, July. So this was more than expected. It was a bit of a surprise there. We did see oil move to the upside today, which was interesting. Uh, perhaps a nod to the solid demand that we're seeing there. But on Wall Street, they think that oil is going to drop further from here. So these are forecasts from Goldman Sachs. This is for Brent crude. Right now, Brent is trading just below 70 bucks a barrel, right around 79. Uh, Goldman sees it going to 59 bucks at the end of the fourth quarter, and then 56 bucks in 2026. So as we talk about oil, as we think about the inflation outlook, what we've seen with energy prices so far, and just sort of this whiplash that we've seen since those Middle East tensions cooled as well, uh, this stuck out to me today.
Yeah, as we think about, you know, to the extent we're worried about tariff inflation down the road, you think as investors about potential offsets, oil, lower energy costs could be one.
Yeah, and if you look at the CPI print, oil, energy, gas prices, that's led the declines that we've seen. So this could be a relief on the consumer front. And then finally, we have to talk about Tesla, all the Tesla turmoil, because if we look under the hood of the Nasdaq 100, it was a clear underperformer today, down around 7% year to date. We are off around 30%. And this comes as Elon Musk has gotten himself in a bit of hot water on the political side. He said that he's dead serious about starting another political party, and I know you were just talking to Rick Newman about this as well. And this is something that Tesla investors don't want to see. They don't want Elon Musk to be distracted. They want them to want him to be focused on the business, on the fundamentals, and he's just been pulled in so many different directions here. And even some of the biggest Tesla bulls came out today and said that this isn't a good thing down the line. Now, that being said, there's still 29 buys on the street, 19 holds, and 13 sells according to the analysts tracked by Bloomberg here. And a lot of those buys, a lot of this bullish optimism stems from what could happen beyond EVs when we talk about autonomous driving, when you talk about robo taxis. That seems to be the focus here, not so much on the EV side, which is good because we saw the removal of those EV tax credits from the Trump tax bill and other headwinds as we look out for competitors and what they're doing on the EV side too. So, you know, Tesla is an interesting story, but it certainly has struggled this year.
Yeah, I mean, today I just said Tesla investors, to your point, I think they were just thinking through where is Musk's focus, where's his attention. Um, Trump was clearly not happy about it, right? And all else being equal, you'd rather not be on the wrong side of Trump in this White House. Being your Tesla and really the whole constellation of Musk companies, they intersect so much with a lot of different regulators, a lot of different agencies. Um
And investors are used to that, right? They're used to this stock being so closely tied to Elon Musk. For some investors, that's probably why they bought into it. But because the share price is so susceptible to the moods and decisions from Musk, you have to have the patience for it. And it seemed like today investors that patience, the patience ran out.
No, you're I saw even bulls on the street saying, and they remained bull, it wasn't like they were changing their rating, but they were kind of talking about how maybe some investors are just getting, I think they use the word exhausted by a lot of this. We'll see what happens. All right, thank you, Ali.