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...

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

It's another down week for consumer stocks. There was hope for a bounce earlier in the week, but now we're more or less back to where we ended last week. 

Call it a crisis of confidence. Several stocks on my watchlist have gotten crushed this week (one of which I love from the short side). Other than that, I'm laser-focused on the key buy levels for the rest of my favorite names.

I reviewed these levels in my weekly video for Macke's Retail Roundup members.

Watch the video below.

Lululemon is getting boot-stomped early Friday after the company.... wait for it... beat earnings estimates and guided lower than Wall Street's official estimate for the first quarter and all of 2025. 

There are a few reasons investors shouldn't have been shocked by LULU's soft guide. "Beat and Guide Lower" has been the theme of retail earnings for over a month, as featured in this article called "Beat and Guide Lower' is 2025's Hottest Trend". Lulu flagged weakness in North America a year ago, way before it was hip and the stock has been a murder-pit ever since. Which is also not a secret and something I discussed earlier this week.

Lulu is who we thought they were but that's not proving to be a good enough reason for buyers to step in as the stock probes the bottom of a multi-year range in between $300 and $400 (save for a few spikes):

A few thoughts:

LULU's Growth Problem Is Real

Since 2021 LULU has grown revenues at a CAGR of 19%, expanded margins 170bps and increased EPS from ~$4.50p/s to over $14p/s. In 10yrs Lulu grew its men's business from a...

As the first quarter slogs to a close with stocks down for the year and the outlook for the rest of the year "murky" at best ("horrifying") at worse it's time to start taking inventory, as they say in the retail industry. There are trades to be had but the real money is going to be made investing at a good price and letting the investment work. It's sort of a waste of time to call Generational Bottoms, there just enough of them. Consumer facing stocks have just been beaten senseless for 3 months; it's time to start looking for opportunities. 

Current Situation: The Pain is Real

I don't need to beat it to death again but the pain has been real. Despite decent trailing earnings there's been a lot of caution from the merchants, mostly based on the impact of uncertainty from tariffs and trade wars. We still don't have details on tariffs, and won't until next week if then, but we're already paying for it in sentiment. Consumer Confidence as measured by outlook for next 6 months just hit 12 year lows. Americans are mad and afraid; typically not times when we spend a lot of money.

Walmart kicked off earning's season by warning of a cautious...

Bottoming is best thought of as a process rather than a moment. The all look different but when you see a correction it usually hits these stages:

• A negative catalyst appears, usually when stocks are expensive. Expensive stocks get sold. Investors "rotate" with growing speed.
• The threat seems larger. Inevitable. The rush to the exit picks up pace in stocks. Everyone's running the same playbook and "sell" is the only defensible call as every group sells-off.
• The tide turns, slowly then all-at-once. The risk becomes quantifiable. Bad news becomes more company specific. Selling slowly dries up as (dirty truth of investing here): The Optimists Always Win.

That was the case to a much greater degree the greatest bottom in the history of consumer discretionary stocks in March of 2020. The group was down 35% in just over a month. Stores were shutting down day after day, leading to pretty much the entire economy being shutdown for the foreseeable future. 

It was a really hard time to start buying consumer discretionary stocks. Like a Trade...

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

This week, I'm hunting for bottoms. There are 5 stocks that have my attention. I'm under no qualms about the fact that we could be in for more downside, but I'm officially in "tactical buy" mode. Any time you get a washout like we've gotten, you have to be willing to put money to work in strongly-held convictions. 

I've got a few on my list, and I discussed them in my weekly video.

Watch the video below.

Ending a correction is a process. Hoping for a capitulation Crash is natural but a bit of a sucker's game and sort of misses the point. Getting into a crash is the same process only bigger. It's like ranking tornados; some are big, some less so but the sequence is always the same.

An Unquantifiably large negative confluence of negative catalysts starts to form. Uncertainty is bad but most people buy the dip. But then the news gets worse. And relentless. The selling builds steam as consumers and businesses start missing/ guiding lower. Indices fall (>10% or it doesn't count) but the damage is way, way worse under the surface. There is no place to hide.

[Emotionally the short version is 1. "Buying the dip, thanks for the free money, Market". 2. "I'm still up huge and can ride this out" 3. "I should have taken some profits" 4. "It's that idiot's fault I'm losing money and I hate Bankers/ Traders / Shorts and this is all a scam" 5. "Capitalism has failed. I'm selling and living in an RV"]

Then we bottom.

We've checked a lot of the required boxes for a bottom to at least get started at this point. The market is still wobbly but the brutal, indiscriminate...