Below is my weekly video for members of Macke's Retail Roundup. 

We're into earnings season. Thank the lord...

For the next few weeks, we'll hopefully learn how these retailers are preparing for a world with(or without) tariffs. Maybe it will give us something to focus on other than the soap opera out of the White House. 

These tariff shenanigans really couldn't come at a worse time for retailers—they're doing their holiday season ordering now. And without clarity on tariffs, it's awfully hard to plan ahead. 

So I'm looking forward to hearing what these execs have to say. This week we've heard from HAS, CMG, and SKX. I discussed these reports, as well as my Macke Retail Portfolio, in this week's video.

Watch the video below.

Getting our first look at consumer-facing outlooks now that we've gotten through the tedious Banks portion of earnings season.

Notable takeaways:

• Hasbro was surprisingly good but it's not really "game on" until Q3 and Q4. Gets 50% of Toys and Games from China but has a reasonably flexible supply chain. Says earnings hit from tariffs will be $60 - $180 million hit to net earnings (LY net was only $385mm). Helped by digital focus. 

• Pepsi seemed pretty resigned to consumers being too price-conscious to buy snacks. 

• Chipotle has first negative comps since COVID. Said business fell off in late February and has continued worsening since. More people eating at home (but not buying Pepsi(?)). Fired shots at the entire outlook for QSR by insisting execution is great and the company is taking share.

On Monday afternoon, with US stocks off 3% and dropping the President concluded a meeting with top executives from Walmart, Target and Home Depot. According to Axios, executives told Trump supply chains were in a state of disruption and "shelves will be empty". This wasn't a hypothetical risk of the burgeoning trade war but an actual business fact, happening today. 

Almost immediately, there were whispers of a shift in strategy on the trade war front. More importantly, to our immediate financial interests, stocks started coming off the lows.

As the White House has continued to offer more measured thoughts on trade of goods not critical to national security, the stocks hit hardest by the relentlessly negative drumbeat of news since Liberation Day started to rally. 

Dicks, Gap, Lululemon, seemingly half the stocks in the mall are up 10% since the lows Monday, with some of our favorites leading the way:

 AEO and Gap, two companies which have spent the last 5 years building supply chains all over the world only to see more or less everything shut down by Draconian fees that were constantly changing, are in the...

Enough raging against the machine. In the 2 weeks since Liberation Day we've seen the stated rate of tariffs change at least 5 times. Just last weekend we saw a seemingly tech-saving exclusion on chips first announced then denied then largely just dismissed as more noise. From a 4% gap higher in the futures to a tepid Monday morning rally which has now given in to the endless pressure we've seen on the Consumer plays we've seen all year.

We're approaching acceptance. There's no one walking through that door to save companies relying on the kindness/ sanity of this administration. Earlier this week I pointed to Best Buy and Nike as two companies that should go higher on a deal. Both are now trading below the Friday close, down ~30% YTD and unable to hold a bid for more than a moment:

Recession is just an economic term. It's most useful in studying periods of history after the fact in search of clues as to timing the natural ebbs and flows of what used to be called the Economic Cycle but for the last 15 years is more accurately thought of as occasional world-threatening catastrophes and the stimulus that follows.

Downturns Cull the Herd when it...

A "tell" is an observable, consistent, unwitting behavior in reaction to a known stimulus. Which is a fancy way of stating something you already understand intuitively. 

Examples: You try on a new, hot outfit to model for your partner. You twirl before them, asking for an opinion. The love of your life looks you over squinches up their nose almost, but not quite imperceptibly. "You look amazing, babe" they offer with what is intended to be a sincere tone but is in the same tone they use to compliment your mom. This is the love of your life. The words mean nothing compared to the signals given off by the Tells of tone and expression. You change.

Example Two (The Point): Three stocks, all dominant in their respective corners of the consumer world, all beaten down mercilessly. All three had what should have been, could have been and in a better tape would have been bullish catalysts over the weekend.

Best Buy, Dicks and Nike are all down over 20% in the last 2 months. They are companies of varying quality in terms of execution but Supply Chain positioning but they dominate consumer segments which have been beaten like Government Mules over the ever-changing...

Below is my weekly video for members of Macke's Retail Roundup. 

My universe, the land of the consumer, has taken center stage. The eye of the storm, if you will. The center of the volcano. The hottest part of the mantle. 

And every tariff headline sends the market swinging. Last week, it was down. This week...down, then up, then down. We're stuck in a tariff circle of hell. 

So what does this mean for the portfolio? And what am I doing about it? I broke it all down in this week's video.

Watch the video below.

Seven days after Liberation Day things are working out just about as expected in the equity markets. Chaos!

Until this afternoon's 90 day delay announcement every rally met supply. Rumors were quickly squashed and the White House vowed to hold the line on anything other than full victory. And just like that, there was a 90 day delay. Would it have been easier to just delay the tariffs 90 days in the first place? Stop overthinking it.

We have 90 days and have undone a lot of the damage done over the last week. It's a welcome piece of new news and one of the items on the 3-step Wish List I shared with Spencer earlier this week. But it doesn't change much. If you were over-levered this morning it might be time to take a little off the table and give thanks. Uncertainty will be back but for now it certainly is nice for stocks to be irrational in the other direction. 

Long-term, China, Vietnam and Indonesia are something of the Big Three in shoes and apparel. I believe but am not sure China and the US are still pushing a combined 200% tariff level. Let's just say a lot of merchants and vendors doing business in the mall are rooting for the Vietnam...

Stocks are getting destroyed all over the entire world. Things could turn on a dime but, for the moment and for good reasons investors are selling risk assets.  The selling is global, the Volatility Index has spiked. Over the weekend social media was dominated by talk of the crash, the tariffs and the need to get off this path as fast as possible before we do more permanent damage.

As I discussed in real time last week ("Sound the Alarm") there was a single flash point for this crash: the ridiculous, clumsy, catastrophic moment the POTUS held up his chart.

Why was the placard so bad. Well, I wrote about it here and my friend @The-Real-Fly on Twitter rather neatly sums up the point here:

The Rules of the Casino

That about covers it. Trump changed the rules of the international finance casino. In markets of all kinds participants value "stable" over "fair". Meaning they'll deal with slightly...

Below is my weekly video for members of Macke's Retail Roundup. 

Fear has entered the market.

Not panic just yet, but Wednesday afternoon in the Rose Garden, POTUS unleashed the Kraken on the market, the global economy, and just about any retailer selling clothing or making shoes.

We knew the tariffs were coming. We realized the cost of doing business was going up, and it was going to somehow be passed along to consumers. But until the President held up his Reciprocal Tariff tag board, it wasn’t clear just how much of a blood sport this was going to be.

I discussed the implications and reaction in this week's Retail Roundup Video.

Watch the video below.

Are we having fun yet?

No. No, we are not.

Stocks are getting hammered after President Trump's Reciprocal Tariffs were larger and broader than economists anticipated. Retailers and tech are leading the way lower early, which has been the case since this sell-off started to pick up steam in late January.

The immediate impact will hammer the margins of companies importing and/or manufacturing which, in the market consumer world is almost anything you can think of, to one degree or another. The declines in the pre-market tends to reflect worse-case back of the envelope calculations for how hard companies will be hit based on the announced tariffs which, it should be noted repeatedly, are "immediate", "permanent" and "open to negotiation". Three words not typically used to describe the same action, yet here we are.

Take Nike. Please. Nike produces 50% of its shoes in Vietnam, 18% in China and 27% in Indonesia. 

Going into the news conference Nike had probably been planning to shift some production around to whichever countries got the best terms. If so, this was a very bad moment in Beaverton:

Is it worth it for Nike to move...

I was busily preparing for the post-close rantings of a polarizing lunatic (by which I mean the RH earnings report and conference call) when it came across the wire that Amazon could be in the running to buy TikTok.

Amazon spiked on the news, as well it should have. As mentioned almost too often, Amazon is exceptional at deploying capital. Amazon convinced America to put what amounts to spyware-capable microphones in bad speakers, call it Alexa and sell about a billion of them. Amazon started selling Prime memberships in exchange for 2 day delivery on select items. Now Prime generates $50b in membership sales per year.

The company started as a bookstore. 

If Amazon buys TikTok and hotlinks weirdly specific targeted advertising to America's preferred hub for impulse shopping chains like Target might as well stop trying to build out online retail and focus on going viral. I'm only half kidding. 

Merging social media and retail seamlessly has been a dream since the first pop-up ad. In September of 2020 Walmart and Oracle announced a "Tentative" deal to...

If you're not scared of what's happening in your stock portfolio you probably aren't paying attention. 

The first quarter was the worst for US stocks since Q3 of 2022 and the first negative quarter of any sort since 2023. The damage didn't really spare anyone, but Consumer Discretionary was the hardest hit, falling over 11% for the period and bouncing off the over-hyped 20% decline required to qualify as an official "Bear Market".

It's time to revisit and expand upon our Bear Market Rules.

I've seen a bear market or two in the last 25 years. This is what they feel like. Relentless. Capricious. Mean. 

Need an example? How about the Worst Stock of the Quarter, the until recently widely beloved Deckers Outdoor:

DECK closed the quarter down 50% (nearly to the penny) from where it was trading before beating and raising last January 31st. And, as is generally the case with stocks, shares went down much faster than they went higher, falling 22% in one day and scarcely bouncing higher since.

Deckers was a wildly successful...