Well, US stocks closed higher to start June as investors shrug off a flare-up in US-China trade tensions, and Yahoo Finance’s Jared Blikre joins us now with the trading day takeaways. Jared.

Thank you, Josh. We gotta start with the major indices. Just a continuation from what I was talking about at the bell. The majors are in limbo, and let’s take a look at what I’m talking about here. Excuse me, because I just noticed this is a year-to-date chart, and you look at this period here. This is exactly, uh, 15 trading days, so basically three work’s worth of data, three weeks’ worth of data, uh, all sideways action, and let’s zoom in a little bit with a two-month chart. I put some candlesticks. You can see that is a whole lot of not trending action right there. So that’s the S&P 500. Here’s the Nasdaq. Broke a little bit above on those Nvidia earnings, but that was given back the next day, or by the close of that day. Here’s the Dow. Very similar story. And, by the way, here’s the MAG7, the MAGs ETF, very similar. Here’s XLK, the tech sector ETF. Here’s Nvidia itself, driving the bus. Now, this looks like it’s upwards sloping just a little bit, but, uh, the bottom line is we’re still looking for a catalyst here. And, interestingly, I just had a conversation with Cole Smead, CEO of Cole, uh, Smead Capital Management. This is for Stocks and Translation. The episode is being dropped tomorrow, and he made it… he drew an interesting comparison to history about stocks and bonds. Let’s take a listen.

At the bottom in ‘09, you could look back 40 years. Okay? And bonds had beat stocks over the prior 40 years. I mean, just fathom that for a quick second. Bonds had beat stocks over the prior 40 years.

I remember Rosenberg bringing that stat up too in 2009.

Correct. And a local New Yorker, uh, Jim O’Shaughnessy, I remember seeing his data on it, and he talked a lot about that. And I point that out because, again, everybody, you know, the old saying is do not confuse brains with a bull market. And yet… dot, dot, dot…

That’s exactly what we do. Always do.

So, markets sometimes roll over. I was… I’ve been talking about all the bullish things in the market, the seasonality plays, uh, the comeback to… how close we are to highs, but we are potentially in an area where we could roll over like 2001. I’m going to be talking about that on Catalyst tomorrow.

Is there any question to you that tariffs remain the number one risk in the market?

That… I have a… I have a chart. I’m glad you brought that up. So, my next point is VIX equals tariff uncertainty, and just check out this chart here. This green line here, right here, is the VIX volatility index. This goes back to the beginning of the year. In white, we have the Bloomberg Global Trade Policy Uncertainty Index, and these two have been in relative lockstep much of the time. And we got some divergences here, but they’re pretty small. So, tariff has been the… tariffs have been the news here, and the VIX is just kind of participating and reflecting that, and inasmuch as the stock market, the S&P 500 is the VIX upside down, stocks are just really a reflection of trade policy. Now, you take this back to prior years. It does not hold. This is a recent phenomenon, so I can… I can tell you it’s probably all Trump here, and that’s why we pay attention to these headlines from day to day. Bring it back to point one, though. Guess what? We haven’t had a major breakout in three weeks. So we’re still waiting on that ultimate catalyst.

Dollar weak today. Walk us through that, the ripple effects when you think about.

You bet. The dollar dove today near three-year lows, and the metals are surging. And so one of the consequences of having yields surge, that can happen in two ways. You can have real yields or break-evens. And I don’t have time to get into it here, but let me just show you what has been surging today. We got silver up 5.5%, and there you go. That’s the intraday. Let me just show you the year to date. Broke to a two-month high, and it looks like that’s almost might be the, uh, intraday, uh, highs of the year. Definitely on a closing basis. I don’t think we’ve seen anything higher. And then we also have copper. Copper up almost 4%, very similar. Hasn’t… hasn’t quite broken to the same level of highs, but definitely a two-month highs right there. And then gotta throw in some gold, right? Uh, we got GC equals up 2.72%. It’s just been consolidating near these highs here, and look, it is within spitting distance of that ultimate high, $3,500.

So silver, copper, gold. How is… How’s the dollar like a diamond?

Oh, that’s a good question. I threw this one to ChatGPT. It says if you cut too many corners, it loses value. There you go.

There you go. That’s what you pay for.

Yes.

Thank you. Thank you, Jared.