Good morning. My name is Chad Taylor, managing partner with MDT Financial Advisors here in Houston, Texas. Today is Friday, April the 11th, 2025, and I wanted to get on and record another video because it's been another wild week in the markets and I know I recorded one on Tuesday, but things have changed since Tuesday. So when I recorded that video on Tuesday, we'd come off of Thursday and Friday of last week that were pretty rough. Monday was very volatile, if you remember that. It was down big and then ended up closing down, but not down as much. Tuesday when I recorded that video, the markets were up big on Tuesday and then I had to leave the office for a meeting and ended up closing down for the day. So we gave up all the gains and then some on Tuesday. And so that was pretty difficult to deal with.

Come into Wednesday and the markets were down again, the futures were down overnight. And then that's when, I don't remember around lunchtime I guess that all of a sudden the markets spiked up and had one of the biggest days in market history on the upside. And what happened on Wednesday was President Trump and the White House put a 90 day delay on their reciprocal tariffs that they had put in place the week before. So the 10% universal tariff baseline are still there to all countries except for China. China, they left them on. And since then have actually been increasing the tariffs on China. China's doing the same. It's kind of leading to a trade war, is what it's looking like. Unless we get some negotiating at some point here, which could happen, it's probably in the best interest of both countries, but we'll see. Now they didn't.

The tariffs on steel, aluminum and automobiles did remain at the same level. The European Union had been set to raise tariffs on the US on April 15th, but in response to President Trump and the White House delaying it for 90 days, they did the same thing. So that was on Wednesday. Markets shot up really, it was kind of a good reprieve from what had been going on overnight early on that futures were positive. We come into Thursday and they were negative by the time the market opened and basically was down big again on Thursday most of the day. And as we're recording right now on Friday morning, it's kind of toggling between positive and negative, but it's pretty volatile. And I did read something that I found interesting that was talking about some of this short term volatility has quite a bit to do with leverage on equities and the bond markets because the bond markets have been a little haywire as well here this week.

And it talked about that maybe some of this price movement isn't necessarily a reflection of what's going on with all this information coming out with the economy, with earnings coming up and more to do with just short-term trading, technical trading where when things start falling, then the computers kick in and selling goes faster. I don't know if we know that for sure, but it kind of makes sense based on what's been going on. So does all this movement, that changing of tactics a bit, does that mean we're kind of in the clear at this point? I would probably say no, not at this point. The 90 days shows that the White House is willing to look and make changes as things change in the markets because we were right at basically their market or a 20% pullback on the s and p 500 before it turned around. The bond market yields had spiked up on Tuesday evening. Bond prices had fallen fairly heavily and the economists really watched the bond market for which way things are going. And that was kind of a scary thing as far as the economy goes. So are we out of the woods? That's 90 day delay, probably just prolongs the uncertainty a bit.

Taking it the face value, lowering the tariffs in one hand, but raising 'em against China probably doesn't slightly lowers the dollar amounts that we're taking in on tariffs. But it's not changing it drastically because China's such a big trading partner. Will that be negotiated? As I mentioned, maybe that's hopefully calmer hedge will prevail and it will start to be kind of negotiated down to some level that both sides can live with. So the market uncertainty is still there, which is leading to this volatility or one of the big reasons for this volatility. I always say Wednesday when it was up so big, what the Dow Jones was up 2,900 points in one day by the time it closed. And just for calming features, usually that kind of volatility on the upside and on the downside is more of a bad market characteristic than a good market characteristic.

It was nice to be up that much. It helped especially after what we went through. And then yesterday we give some of it back. But I would rather be up 290 points for 10 days than one day of 2,900 points just because it would lead to volatility, leads to more volatility. Now what was interesting about it, it was very broad. It was a broad based rally. That's usually a good site. So that is good. But I think that when you see these big swings and volatility up and down, we might start to feel a little bit better than it goes back and retests in a few months here, going through tax day, it may be a little challenging. So we are seeing, and I say we, I'm talking about the Wells Fargo Investment Institute, we are seeing maybe some bottoming characteristics, but there could be more consolidation ahead.

There couldn't be more downside volatility ahead on the stock side. So I don't want to get too excited right now. I don't want to be too pessimistic either. These things, we've got corporate earnings starting to come out right now and the earnings probably will be okay because this hasn't filtered through yet to corporations. But what we probably won't see is they won't give a whole lot of guidance because they don't like the uncertainty either. And so the corporations will be doing a lot of giving vague guidance of what they think coming forward, going forward means, but then revising it as we go. And so you can kind of tell there's just a lot of uncertainty right now and until we have some certainty we're going to have this volatility. So what do you do about it right now? Kind of the same thing we were saying last week.

First thing is I always go back and I want to look at your investment plan. When we put those plans together, we are counting on times like this. We don't know what it will be or why it will be this volatile, but we know that it's historically speaking, always, usually every four to six years you have some type of thing like this going on Right now, unfortunately, we've had a number of 'em in the last years. We had one in 2022, we had one in 2020, we had one in 2018. So we've had our fair share of these volatile times here lately. But that's where we are and it does happen. So when we put those plans together, we count on these times happening. So go back to your plan. What is your number right now?

Usually that gives people some comfort to know, am I still on track or am I not? And with your number you can tell, are you still on track at this point? Let's look at your specific situation. The Wells Fargo Investment Institute talks about this. If you have the stomach and you can stomach and you do have a longer term time horizon, buying in right now or starting to buy in right now slowly probably will pay off over time. Now will it be good the next week, the next month, the next six months? No one knows, I don't know. But if you do have a longer time horizon, which you should, if you're putting money in stock markets or even bond markets now is probably not a bad time. But if you do need some cash coming up, if you are a little more nervous than you normally have been, sitting some on the sidelines and waiting, trying not to go a hundred percent one way or the other, may not be a bad strategy for you either. So everyone is different. I keep saying that, but everyone is different. And so let's talk about your situation. If you have questions, please don't hesitate to call in. I hope you have a great weekend. Thank you.