Yep. Don't forget that Trump is also scheduled to release the terms of the steel tariffs sometime this week. Cohn called a meeting for Thursday to discuss them, but Trump canceled it, so that means he's most likely going to go with whatever Ross and Lighthizer advise him to do.

To your first point, really? How far can that insane orange prick go? I think the answer is a lot farther than all the "sane" presidents who came before him.

To your second point, does he really seem to be on a course for what the majority of Americans want? I have never gotten that impression.

I think he can go really far, I think he's capable of absolutely annihilating relationships with Canada, China and others, etc...

But I just sort of assumed the market knew that. I may very well be wrong.

trump is considering replacing gary cohn with larry kudlow. let that one sink in.

I'm torn because I want a low loonie pretty badly, and Trump is without a doubt the dude to deliver it. But I take no pleasure in watching this dude run the free world.

You're wrong. If the fear buttons aren't being pressed hard by something, the market tends to assume that anything that's a bit washy isn't worth taking into account too much...particularly in this buy the dip market.

How would answer this question:

Q: What are the odds of Trump starting a major trade war that hurts the economy?

a) At the time when Cohn was still working there
b) Now that we know Cohn has resigned and the White House is saying that major broad retaliations for China's massive cheating, theft and anti-free-trade actions, are on the table?

The odds changed significantly with the information that Cohn has resigned and the next hour explicitly stating that strong relations are on the table.
Trump is possibly going to do to China what Britain should have done to Hitler in 1937 - if it wasn't run by the same kind of cucks that have run the USA for the past two decades. Short term, this will be terrible - trade wars are good for no one in such a globalized economy in the short term. Change is costly and uncertainty is bad for growth (the cost of needless change and duplication is one reason why wages have stagnated and the US economy has been so sluggish since China started stealing its wealth and massively cheating with anti-free-trade). Long term, this will be far better for the US and the world, for both economics and world peace. Clinton, Bush and Obama let the tick get dug in...getting it out isn't fun but it is necessary if the US doesn't want to end up paralyzed.

Ya I agree with you that someone had to do something about China. Guess I'm just not looking forward to low points for American-Canadian relations.

And I guess I'm in the minority that was 90% sure Trump was going to do this trade war stuff. But I recognize that I was being overly pessimistic perhaps. I just assumed the "wall" guy was going to do some of the most protectionist stuff we've ever witnessed.

Trump is an enigma to most. Even his haters never believed he was serious about much of what he said on the campaign trail, or that he was principled enough to do it and take the pain over following the status quo. He's not well understood.

I have no idea where history will ultimately settle on him. I think if there's good to come of his policies it'll take 2 terms to do it and a lot of time after to analyze the fallout.

But I do know that in my adult life, I've never seen "risk" like this before. Have any of you? Economic, political, social, race, gender....There's so much potential for drama. We had a few super calm decades there before.

I think he's like the Mike Tyson of presidents tbh.

my sense is that navarro is the favorite right now with kudlow right behind, and both choices are absolutely insane. read up on navarro if you haven't already.

We're definitely nowhere near where we were in 2008 in terms of economic risk. The imminent pre-bailout systemic risk was very real.

Social, race, gender, you're definitely right. But imo Trump is more a symptom of that than a cause.

Regardless of your view on Trump, he is creating a target rich environment to make money during his presidency. I almost feel as if I don't increase my networth massively during his tenure, then I have failed at life somehow.

Personally, I think he is basically the reincarnation of Andrew Jackson; doing the needful and willing to get into epically massive and direct fights to do it. He'll probably even get a similar presidential ranking maybe 30ish years from now.

You've been sold a fake news narrative imo, spewing drama 24/7. The last few decades have seen a great recession unlike anything since the 20s, trillions spent in needless wars, the creation of ISIS, an Islamic death cult that took over 1/3 of the Middle East in a manner not seen in 200 years and sparked ongoing terrorist attacks in the West requiring the entire army of France mobilized to protect civilians, the rise of North Korean nuclear capability, the collapse of major banks and an ensuing liquidity crisis, race riots following the Rodney King beating, Russia invading a major Eastern European country and taking some of its territory, the rise of a horrible dictatorship from a nothing country to major global power with a rapidly expanding military and large scale forced transfer of US know how and wealth, $18 trillion added to the national debt, etc.

Oh yeah, and none of this had anything at all to do with Trump. It preceded him.

Since Trump:

- Economic records have been broken (lowest unemployment, best confidence metrics)
- Stock market stability records have been broken (lowest vol periods ever)
- Mass illegal immigration has dropped right down (race risk mostly comes from large groups of very culturally different people living together and not integrating, usually due to rapid large scale movements).
- Women have started a #MeToo movement to combat sexual harassment, long overdue.

You pretty much have this ass-backwards. I don't blame you when the left wing's equivalent of Fox News screeches fakes news at you 24/7 in hysterical tones about the CRISIS of Trump, but you're smarter than that. I can't think of a single thing that Trump has made riskier. The couple of potential things (nuclear issues with North Korea for example), were caused by the previous risk creators from lack of decisive action, when risk could have been diminished rather than allowed to fester.

I was thinking more on the US/North American scale when I agreed with rafiki, but obv you're right about all the stuff in your first paragraph.

As for your last paragraph... The left wing is largely the cause of the "political, social, race, gender" risk rafiki mentioned. Social media rewards and incentivizes the most absurd extreme views (on both ends but especially the left), to the point where voices with rational ideas often get labeled fascist or something equally absurd by one side or the other. Thanks to the new ease of communication the extreme ideas will continue to get bloated both in terms of absurdity and support for them, until eventually it all pops. I don't see a path that involves a gradual resurgence of rational ideas. **** is going to hit the fan in one way or another. Hopefully it's not all out civil war.

Checked the markets and was shocked to see that we were down 33 ES points on Cohn's resignation. Its only 20 now, which is roughly what the gap down for the globex open.

The action since makes me think we could easily get half a gap fill overnight and get a full gap fill and then some during the day session.

But also, if there is bad news oversees, like Italian banking or something, we could fall hard. Also if we open the cash session tomorrow down 40-60+ ES points, that could create enough of a feedback loop to force some sharp selling and shake the week hands.

Some things on my mind are BAC pinning at 32 and AAPL pinning at (end of month) at 155. The former means we go nowhere and the later means we go a long, long way in a short amount of time.

We shall see. But I think another another test of the major index lows, or more or less sideways action are both much more likely new highs for the general market.

So I like the idea of selling calls here.

Aren't some of you short TSLA, how is that going?

This is a very interesting paragraph (and certainly the Chinese will not appreciate the analogy). But I think it lives too much in the realm first level thinking. Don't forget the other side gets moves too.

Ultimately the winner will be whoever out capitalisms / free markets the other (I am talking basically China / US here, or China--Russia / US). The risk to both the big players revolves around domestic, social unrest.

The US has a very real wealth inequality problem that will continue to be exacerbated by automation. While China's social unrest revolves more around literal social issues rather than wealth (though they have no shortage of that either).

Suppression, in both cases, will only work for so long. The US needs to fix the dollar (the Fed, interest rates, etc) and the tax system. China needs, more or less, the US constitution.

Your argument seems to be for short term pain (trade wars) for the sake of mid to long term success. But the truth of the matter is, Trump's logic for the tariffs and America first is in and of itself short sighted.

To the extent that the US and China (and Russia) continue to view the world as zero / negative sum, they will pursue adversarial strategies.

But, the optimal strategy is positive sum. There should be no tariffs, or subsidies, or progressive taxation (or walls...). The US should leverage its position by continuing to lead and innovate. This is not limited to business, but includes military and economic policy as well.

Both countries are empires or aspiring to be so. And if the zero sum game continues a defacto winner will emerge because the runner up will have crumbled from within. This means that in either case, we all lose because of the symbiotic relationship and MAD economic policies of China and Russia over the past decades.

Love to hear the high level game plan. I feel pretty directionless outside of the tech side, commodities rebound, and construction and infrastructure

I'm 100% in agreement that that all happened before. My concern is him inheriting all that.

I'm curious on how all of you are even the slightest bit interested in sharing your partisan views here (or responding to others who are presenting their views). The motivation behind enacting steel and aluminum tariffs don't matter whether the motivation is because Trump secretly wants to bang Angela Merkel and he heard that she likes it rough, or he is trying to keep the focus off of his majority ownership stake in a puppy drowning factory in Bangladesh, or because he has some 3-D Chess end game in mind and he is 23 moves ahead of everyone else, or whether he is playing Chutes and Ladders and hoping to roll a 4. Literally no one has ever successfully and consistently traded on their political views.

What you are presented with as something new is that it appears that there will be some tariffs enacted. Nothing more and nothing less. Doesn't matter whether you like tariffs or not. Doesn't matter whether you think Trump is a puppet of the Martians or was sent here as the second coming. Now go out and make some money. Or at least avoid losing money betting on whether your political views are righteous.

Sermon over. Now back to your regularly scheduled program of everyone telling us about things that just happened in the markets* and yelling at each other about who sucks the most.

*we need a replacement for ASAP and Rafiki since they (thankfully) don't do that as much anymore.

I must have misclicked. Thought I was in the Socially Responsible Investing thread.

No offense man, but you're a moron. Nearly everything you post is either snarky one line dad humor, or wrong. You're one of the lowest content posters on this forum. You have to be repeatedly pressed for reasoning, and, the rare times you provide it, it shows the underpinnings of your views are often hilariously flimsy (perhaps that's why you retreat into sarcastic one liners - you get crushed in a reasoned debate, and have little to offer other than the lowest-denominator orthodoxy).

You are dead wrong about this too. Why Trump is doing what he is doing, what his intentions are, what drives them, are very very relevant questions to how to trade.

I'll give you an example. The past week of trading has inversely tracked USD strength very closely, as it has almost entirely been driven the degree of fear over tariffs. The market the last two do days has wrongly bet on Trump taking a dovish view on tariffs.

Morishta System, who understands Trump very well and took bets that he would win the election at great odds, is of the view that Trump is very very likely to enact tariffs, given that he's shrewd businessman and someone who cares about America who genuinely wants to fix the completely broken system of trade deals, where others impose tariffs and costs on US goods, force the transfer of large amounts of intellectual property, and drain US wealth in the process.

Given that underlying belief (it matters whether this is something driven by a deeper conviction or merely sabre rattling and political pandering - it actually matters and there is money to be made on the right view), he took puts on Boeing, thinking it very likely that Trump would follow through. Guess who's down today (you). Guess who's up a lot today? (Morishta).

You could predicted this and made money had you had a rational view of Trump rather than whatever dickhead, lowest-common-denominator-wisdom you have of Trump.
Dude, if you were short vol as you often are, you lost money because your political views were wrong. You're probably feeling like an idiot right now, hence the post. Morishta, on the other hand, had political that views that were correct. He's stepping into a nice pile of money right now, having bought puts on Boeing.

Just because you have a dopey irrational view that politics and presidents are irrelevant (I explained to you why Trump is quite different) and hence make bad bets and feel stupid, isn't our problem.
You're in no place to be giving a sermon about anything. Improve your own posting from low content pronouncement-level, I-know-better snark, then start telling others how to post.

You don't understand what drives the market and your entire schtick is trying to find small amounts of low risk minor market-beating return (which is fine), so step out of the way while your betters make money delving into and trading this stuff. Do you even trade, bro?

Oh and the political stuff is a good antidote to the fake news view of the Trump that infects the mainstream media. We had expert pundits predicting:

a) Trump had no chance of winning
b) The market would crash if Trump won (one well-known pundit said 50%)
c) Trump is just pandering to his base and not really serious about doing any of this

Rafiki is lost from all of this fake news and seeing doom and gloom, hence not making rational decisions. I provided a bit more of a rational, alternative view to the fake news.

If you don't like hearing it then just put me on ignore. But it has a place here out of trading hours. Understanding what Trump thinks, where his morality lies, and why he's serious about a trade war and willing to take the (political, economic) pain it causes are about the most relevant thing moving the market right now.

Almost every "old guy" (age 60+) in finance who I've interacted with has said that the 1970s felt more scary comparatively, at least to other narrative-based "scares". Stagflation, high inflation, a President resigned, Russian threats, and most Americans feeling nihilistic. Aaron Brown (used to post here, now works at AQR) has written some great stuff on this perspective.

70s stagflation (15% rates and high inflation) vs 2% rates and 2% inflation?
70s major political scandals vs zero for Trump (excluding fake news)?
70s major oil and geopolitical shocks, vs very stable global commerce?
70s Russian threats of nuclear and European war, various proxy wars against the credible huge threat of communism which had half the globe in its grip, vs a few hackers having some fun on Twitter?
70s nihilistic nuclear war terror and the aftermath of the cultural revolution vs some butthurt tinfoil left wingers who are no different to the butthurt tinfoil right wingers when Obama was president (except that they comprise more of the media and academic classes)?

There's not even a comparison...we live in the least scary and risky time in history in every possible way. Perhaps the late 90s/early 2000s were slightly less scary, as there was no country rising who can destabilize global peace and democracy like China is going to do. But that's more than a decade off and I think it's offset by all the things we're better at now. Everything is more stable and reliable now as we've gotten better at doing stuff.

Not many of us were adults in the 70s.

We haven't seen ****.

Hitler (the leader of Germany!) killing 11 million people in fairly recent history is unfathomable. And I'm sure being only ~25+ years removed from that and Hiroshima/Nagasaki in the 70s made it all more terrifying than we (aged <40) can imagine.

The scariest thing in the late 90s was the Y2K bug