Burrito Thursday

As much as I love tacos, I would have gotten nauseous yesterday afternoon if I had to eat one each time someone asked me a question with that word.  To be fair, I had already received a few questions of that nature in the morning, something we addressed in yesterday’s piece, but they ratcheted up after the President’s Truth Social post announcing that he would not be imposing the tariffs he had announced just a few days prior.  I’ll leave it to others to decide whether he indeed “chickened out,” as the “TACO” acronym implies, but markets certainly welcomed the news regardless of motivation.  In the meantime, I’d like to offer a rubric for determining whether geopolitical events might affect stock prices.

Remember, geopolitics only truly affect stock prices when they have direct effects on the factors that truly influence equity valuations.  My rule of thumb for considering their market impact is to ask the question, “What does this mean for Microsoft (MSFT)?”  You can substitute other key companies here (Nvidia (NVDA) and Apple (AAPL) work well too, among others), but my point is this: unless one can draw a straight line between the global event and the revenues, earnings, or cash flows of a particular company or sector – the items that directly affect the value of a company – then geopolitics can be considered background noise from a market viewpoint, no matter how newsworthy the events.

In the case of Greenland, there had been on-and-off rhetoric about US activities concerning the Arctic island for months.  It took center stage after the recent events in Venezuela, but stock markets had largely, and understandably, ignored it.  Bear in mind that Greenland is an autonomous territory of Denmark with a population of about 56,000, and a nominal GDP of $3.33 billion.  Despite its size and location, it has an insignificant role in the global economy.  It wasn’t until the rhetoric turned into something that could indeed have a tangible economic impact on corporate earnings – tariffs on key European trading partners – that it became a factor for markets. 

Frankly, markets largely ignored the events in Venezuela for similar reasons.  Only one major US company, Chevron (CVX), has significant operations in that country, and despite its role in the global oil industry, global crude oil prices barely moved, especially after other major oil companies displayed a lack of enthusiasm for investing there.  If there was no impact on earnings and revenues at key companies like CVX, Exxon Mobil (XOM), or ConocoPhillips (COP), let alone MSFT or NVDA, it meant that equity investors could shrug off those events.  Thus, while some of the conversation about Greenland reached the point of threatening the NATO alliance, something that could indeed have led to its own serious economic consequences, markets properly understood it as a risk factor, but not one worth a preemptive reaction.

Another key component of the trading during the week so far is the tenacious tendency for active traders to view every dip as a buying opportunity.  We’ve referred to this as “Death, Taxes, Dip Buying”.  Many of you seem to have taken advantage of Tuesday’s drop to accumulate positions as markets swooned, and that presumably worked out well for those who held on until late afternoon yesterday or this morning.  The impulse is eminently rational – we should endeavor to buy things when they are on sale – and it appears that traders have gotten a bit more discriminating in what they perceive as a tradeable dip.  At various times last year, the “half-life” of dips shrank to the point where it seemed as though the dips were being bought almost preemptively, but in the past few months, it appears that traders are not quite as quick on the trigger.  Dip buying remains quite popular, though a bit more judicious.

As for the President’s tariff reversal, I believe that his visit to Davos was a key factor.  Rather than being in the White House or Mar-a-Lago, where he is unlikely to receive much negative feedback from those surrounding him, he was in a situation where other political and business leaders could offer respectful pushback to his policies.  You can decide whether the tariff reversal was “chickening out” or a prudent, face-saving change to a tax that annoyed investors.  It’s time for lunch, and I’m off to the taqueria.