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That's closing bell on Wall Street, and now it's market domination overtime. Let's start with the major averages where they ended the session here. We got it 4 in a row for the Dow. It's squeaked out at the very end of the day. They're up 10 points. It's called 13%. It's settling out even as we watch here on this Friday, very slightly to the upside. The S&P 500 up about 3/4 of 1%.And the Nasdaq up about 1.25%. I was also Lou Basany is still here with me, and I was looking at the weekly totals as well because I thought, oh, it was big up week. It's only the biggest up week in two weeks, right? We had a big up week, then we had a big down week, then we had another big up week here. Stocks are highest since Liberation Day. I don't know what we got freed from, by the way, butI got our our sanity, I don't know. Yeah, no, I mean, the good thing is ending in the green 4 days in a row. I'll take that. There's no futures markets that we have to worry about for at least 2 more days because we just don't know what's gonna happen. We talked about at the beginning of the show just volatility is the norm, right? And it's not dictated by any economic news. It's dictated by a true.Or a tweet or misinformation or just conflicting information out of China versus here so uh I think it's encouraging though we're starting to get earnings data that is supporting the price increases and I think the more that trend continues to layer in like next week as we get some of the big tech names, that's what I was gonna ask you about, you know, we got Amazon, we got Microsoft coming, we got Apple coming.Um, and you said earlier that those companies cannot continue to be the only ones working forever in terms of earnings growth specifically, but can they do that for a little bit longer? I mean, we got to make a phone call to a friend, please like, please do it just to provide some cover, but I think, look, the, the major trend if they do are more like Alphabet versus Tesla, right, good reports showing strength and resiliency, that's gonna help the overall market.But it's really about the other 493 stocks that are in the S&P 500. This was the transition year where they were going to pick up from being a laggard and that's going to happen. I, I do believe it is, but it's a question of what's the magnitude right now. We had been anticipating a pretty strong growth. I think I had mentioned it before. Last year you had about 4% earnings growth for those 493 companies. This year it's supposed to be about 8.6%. But is it really is it really gonna be 8.6% though? That seems here's the other part of that.Equation, even if it's a little bit more, it's helpful because we had this price correction that brought down valuations, right? So we got out of those nose bleed valuations where you had to have perfect results to keep the momentum. Now I think if we have good results, good valuations, you're seeing that in areas of the market. I look at sectors like energy which now I'm involved with, it's the cheapest sector in the market right now. It's the lowest weighting that it's ever been in the market, so there's stakes are lower and I guess that's obvious even.A week where we heard a lot of companies cut or or pull guidance, stocks still went up. Yeah, I mean, look at Tesla had a terrible report for like two years bad. It hasn't been this bad, and the stock rallied 6 to 8% right after the other 10% today. So that's bad news isn't bad because Elon's coming back and everything's going to be fine now. Is he though? I don't know. Yeah, anyway, that's that's a bigger discussion for another day. Joining us now, Phoebe Vaniol, president and CEO ofCap Wealth, it's an investment advisory firm with over $1.6 billion in assets under management. Phoebe, welcome. Um, I wanna start off by asking actually about how you're guiding your clients right now. You have a lot of high net worth investors who are your clients, and, um, I wonder if they are sitting on their hands at all right now if they are sort of waiting to see what's gonna happen, or are they willing and able to sort of jump in when we've seen some of these price dislocations.

Um, uh, you sure, uh, and first, thanks for, um, having me on this Friday afternoon. What an interesting, um, time to be here talking with you all after such an interesting week on the market, um.But yeah, our clients are probably the typical clients that other advisors around the country are dealing with. Um, our clients tend to be seasoned investors, so they've been through market ups and downs, but, uh, you know, the, the market, uh, you know, doesn't exactly repeat itself, but it does rhyme with history and so while this uh market correction has been a little bit like some in the past, it's not exactly, uh, the clients that are, you know,Concerned or probably the clients that have a near term event coming up if a client is near retirement, has already said they're gonna retire in June or at the end of this year, they seem to be a little bit more nervous but um uh but for the most part our clients are uh you know are are holding on to their long term plans and nobody's knee jerking out of the market that's our goal, isn't it? uh always um keep them uh connected to their long-term plans and they came.End of this year with a diversified portfolio constructed to solve for those plans. So we have not had a lot of disruption in our client base.

So Phoebe, I'm curious, you haven't had disruption in the client base, but we've we've all had disruption in the market. How has that impacted the advice you're giving your clients? Have you made some tactical suggestions to change their allocation or adjustments that may be best suited to this volatile environment or is it more of just long term stay the course?

No, um, absolutely, um, you know, if their long-term plan was really constructed to solve for those long-term goals and nothing's changed in their long-term goals, their asset allocation isn't gonna change. But we certainly have been taking advantage of what the market has been providing us, uh, to make opportunistic changes in the allocation inside of equities. Uh, we came into this year with a pretty high allocation to T bills and to cash.Because of our concern about inflation, uh, government, fiscal health of our country, we've been very, very concerned about the debt level of our country and the interest burden that we're carrying at this point and the rapid growth of that interest cost, but, um, we have been moving around inside our equity allocations as opportunities present themselves. So for example, we've seen.Um, you know, price opportunities, uh, this last week or maybe the week before we bought Constellation, Energy. It was a great opportunity before the valuation was just too high for us to, uh, initiate a position, but we saw it come down from basically $350. We bought in at around $185. We think that was a great entry point to initiate a position in a company that we had wanted.To own for quite a while and we'll continue to make those changes as these bouts of high volatility continue and I don't see any slowdown on that as we still have no certainty around where the tariffs are going to end up. The headlines continue to say recession, stagflation, inflation. As those headlines continue, we'll expect more and more weeks like we saw this week. Monday was a great a great.Example of that we saw almost every asset class sell off on on Monday as there was sort of a a sell America theme and tone to the market and we are taking advantage of that of that volatility to reposition inside of our equity allocations.

That's really interesting, Phoebe and, and are, are you still holding steady on that long as well the T bills and cash at the same time because obviously the debt picture has not changed.

Not changed at all. um, so we have used a little bit of that cash that's on the sidelines for some of this opportunistic purchasing, but we continue to believe that even in our conservative equity models we need to have, uh, some dry powder in there, um, a hedge against down markets.in our conservative equity models, we have about 15% in T bills uh that we do not consider part of the client's fixed income allocation, um, and, uh, you know, yeah, we're, we're holding on with our cash. We, we don't think we're through this yet and it sounds like you all don't either.

No, I think, I think it's safe to say that we're not through yet. I'm encouraged that I'm not the only crazy contrarian that's not panicking. You're not telling clients to panic. You're being opportunistic, going where bargains are. That's usually a sign of something we can get to the other side of without too much craziness, not the impending doom that some are making it out to be, hopefully, yeah, is that would you agree with that, Phoebe?

I would absolutely agree with that. Um no impending doom. Uh, you know, we all know that Trump's going to say one thing today and something else tomorrow. I don't think that anyone should be surprised by what's going on. We were a little taken aback earlier this week with the comments that Trump was making about Powell, but that got resolved. We were really glad to see that get resolved. That was very disruptive to the bond market.It's uh it's a little bit easier to navigate when the stock market is giving us this kind of volatility. The bond market's a little trickier, uh, so we were glad to see that get calmed down. Uh, there's some, you know, we, we're seeing good news from the companies that are reporting, uh, of course, Google reported last night 12% year over year revenue. They beat on the top and the bottom. I think most importantly they uh reaffirmed their.Commitment to spend their capex budget for this year we've seen so many companies afraid to talk about their capX just like uh consumers don't want to spend. We're seeing consumers uh pull in. Our government is pulling in on spending and companies are pulling in on spending. This uncertainty is really impacting everyone across the board, um, but it's, it's, it's, um, it's just.Be expected until we get through these negotiations that Trump is making on tariffs and people can have some clarity on what it's going to look like, where the impacts will be, where the where the impacts won't be felt and until we get through that, we just expect that this volatility is going to continue. So

nosurprise. Phoebe, thanks so much appreciate it. Have a good weekend.

Thank you. You all as well. Appreciate you having me.

Alphabet, the latest of the big tech names reporting 1st quarter results this earnings season. The company showing resiliency as it surpasses Wall Street's earnings expectations. But with many more of the magnificent 7 tech names set to report in the coming days, we're looking at ways for investors to get in on the action.Options play senior options strategist Brian Overby is joining us now to discuss in the options playbook sponsored by TC Trade. Brian, it's good to see you. Um, let's dive right in and talk about a couple of these names and then maybe we'll zoom out afterwards and talk about the VIXs here. Um, let's get straight to Microsoft, which is one of the stocks that you're looking at with a way to play it here, um, and I'll let you, um, describe it because it's got a couple of legs here. So, so talk us through it.

It does. It's actually known as a bull call spread, implying that we do want to get bullish on Microsoft. One of the biggest things out of the mag 7 is Microsoft doesn't have as much exposure to the trade war and the tariff news, and because of that, what we're kind of hoping is that, uh, writing into.Earnings because they've been fairly decent so far. We'll get some good news and we're going to try to set up a trade where we have a little bit more upside than we do downside and we can do that with options. So we're looking to go to the May 16th expiration, which is 21 days away. Microsoft is going to announce onUh, next week early and then we, uh, I apologize, and we're looking to buy a little bit in the money. So Microsoft we saw was up to date. It's trading at 391 at this point in time. We're gonna look to buy the 385 strike call and then at the same time sell the 400 strike call, which is obviously.A big brown number, which is a little hard for markets usually to try to break through. We're going to do this entire trade for $6.85 or that would be $685 per one by one spread that we put on. That would be our max risk on the trade. Our max upside on the trade would be $8.15.Or $815 per one by one bold call spread that we established. So we get a little bit more upside than we have downside and we're just looking for a medium move to the upside and Microsoft is showing a little bit as far as the chart is concerned, we're showing a little bit of upside momentum like a lot of the other Meg 7 stocks at this point in time.

So I just had a follow-up question. Why Microsoft ahead of some of the other ones? It's not necessarily been one of the more volatile ones around earnings. I mean, is there another reason that compels you to play Microsoft versus a meta, uh, an Apple? I'm just curious from that. Are you doing all of them.

Well, yeah, well, well, I always like to look at what we think is bullish or bearish more based off of the news in this day and age. And so as far as the trade war is concerned, they're a little bit less exposure. They all of the Magse7 stocks have some exposures to tariffs and uh the news headlines, but with Microsoft, you know, Azure, uh and uh the cloud is one of their biggest, um.Uh, revenue sources and that doesn't have a ton of exposure in the space and also not a lot of people are talking about it relative to the rest of the mag 7 so we're kind of hoping that they, you know, kind of fly under the radar and the strong earnings or the strong momentum and the strong earnings can propel them to an upside to another level.

Um, you do though, also have a suggested trade on Amazon, you know, so we're not leaving, we're not leaving all of the, the Mag 7 out besides Microsoft. So what, what's your thought on Amazon and where we could see it go?

Well, on Amazon, I'm looking to sell a little bit more of the volatility premium. Now once again, Amazon Web Services and and cloud-based services are a big part of Amazon, and on top of it, they're kind of a low cost leader. So if across the board, if we do see some weakness in the economy and the customer, Amazon still has some strength in their pricing power. So in Amazon, we're looking to do something a little less speculative. We're gonna actually do what's.Called a short call spread or short put spread, I'm sorry, which is still bearish on the marketplace, but we're gonna bring in a net credit as opposed to paying a net debit for that trade. So in this instance on Amazon, what we're looking to do here is we're going to sell something right about where the stock closed at today, and we're gonna use that same expiration. We're gonna do the the May 16th exploration. So I, Amazon, I, I.He closed at 18899 today, almost 189 exactly, and we're going to be selling the 185 strike put and then at the same time we're going to be buying the 175 strike put. And what's great about this marketplace is you're getting a real nice risk reward ratio because of the increased implied volatility. So this trade is OK if Amazon stays where it's.Or drifts a little bit lower, it just can't drift a lot lower. So we're bullish on the market. We'd like the market to go up, but there are 3 different scenarios where this trade can pay out. Now based off of those those those strike prices and where the market was at, we could get this done for a net credit of $3.43 and that's going to put our risk at $6.57. SoYou have more scenarios that you make money when you look at the Amazon trade, but you have a little bit more risk if you are incorrect on your forecasts and Amazon does actually come down. But the implied volatility and the levels that they are in the marketplace right now make this trade more interesting, I guess, than than in normal cases. And on top of it, we're throwing in an earnings report.

Gotcha.All right, lots of action to look forward to. Thanks, Brian. I appreciate it.

Till next time,

next time. President Trump's shifting trade policies have created a mountain of uncertainty for both consumers and businesses. That ongoing uncertainty around trade and inflation worries sending US consumer sentiment falling to one of the lowest readings on record. Businesses shedding light on the impact from this deteriorating consumer confidence, as well as drawbacks from the unpredictability of tariffs. Here's some of what executives had to share so far this earnings season.

Consumer confidence has dropped and the discretionary side of demand has dropped quite a bit. So what we do see is that right now is strong replacement demand that has kept up very strong since COVID. But the discretionary side, yeah, it took its toll and right now we don't see it even in Q2 so far recovering. All of our initiatives are on track, so the company is doing great, but no, we were highly impacted on the demand side.By the tariffs and then just the, the consumer confidence erosion, the first quarter fell off about 3 full points and the second quarter has fallen off about 6 full points, uh, compared to what we thought in January. So that gives you a good indication of the of the level of impact on demand and just how rapidly uh the the decrease in demand fell. So we are.I think the least uh company, the least affected car company with with respect to tariffs, uh, at least in most respects, I mean it remains to be seen now now tariffs are still.

Yeah,

tough on a company when margins

arestill low. We are seeing is the frequency drop. Uh, so consumers are still spending, they're still getting their favorite sides, or add-ons, whether that's lock or delicious queso. We're not seeing attachment slip. We're just seeing frequency of our customer again, we don't have a customer issue, we have a frequency challenge. We are off to a relatively strong start, um.But what we are anticipating and what's built into our guidance that you know, the macro is going to start to catch up to the implications of the tariffs and so June is likely to be softer than our strong start to the quarter. Tariffs are unpredictable at this point. Obviously we're watching closely. If they come in and they're significant in some way.You know that's going to have to be borne by the customer. I mean, our model isn't prepared for something like that, and I think what would happen is prices will rise for smartphones and then people will slow down their purchases of smartphones and upgrade rates will slow.

We've chosen not to blink, not to flinch.But instead commit ourselves to investment, continued investment in innovation and demand creation for our brands. We modestly reduce guidance to 2% on the fiscal year for the top line. Our fiscal year ends in a couple of months and 2 to 4% on the bottom line to reflect that approach and that choice, as well as to reflect this fiscal year's uh impact of tariffs.

It appears DoorDash is sinking its teeth into its UK competition. British-based Deliveroo says it received a proposal earlier this month from DoorDash to buy all of its shares for $3.6 billion. DoorDash, the top restaurant delivery service in the US, it has said it wants to strengthen its position abroad. The two companies have talked before but never arrived at an agreement. Now, uh, DoorDash would need to make a firm offer to deliver.By May 23rd, DoorDash shares did erase their earlier gains to trade, uh, about 0.6% lower, 6% lower than the news, but they closed lower by not even that much. Um, but you know, it's interesting when you talk about that, the food delivery market here and that we have seen strength from some of the other food delivery companies like an Uber, you know, from sort of expanding internationally.For me I think there's necessary consolidation so if you look historically on this group of companies, it's the frictionless economy, the convenience economy there's not enough margin there for this many players I mean.We're here in New York. You go by any restaurant, you can see 6 or 7 different types of delivery services, right? So I think this is a natural consolidation that has to happen. I look at valuations for DoorDash seems stretch. You gotta buy the growth and the earnings somehow you're not gonna get it organically, and, and we've seen that with Uber too. It's a tough, it's a tough business to be in. Here's a couple of fun things about DoorDash. It's up this year. I know it's up 12% this year, which I didn't realize it's up almost 50% over the past, um, 12 months. And remember this company came public in 2020.It came public at what, just over $100 a share and it's trading at $10 it came public at $102 and it's at $187. Not bad, not bad, and it's all those outrageous fees, right? I think this is what from the consumer side, when you use it, it was never this expensive. Same by Lyft and Uber. It's just, it's, you're seeing the inflation creep up, which is conveying benefits to the company but not to the consumers's why I frequently still go and pick stuff up actually. I'm with you, yeah, all right.It was another choppy week for stocks with President Trump taking a more measured tone on economic policy. For more, we'll bring in senior reporter Alexander Canal with our weekly Yahoo Finance playbook. Was it more measured? I don't know. Comparatively, I guess, uh, but you know, it's been a wild week in the stock market. Remember on Monday we were deep in the red. We had that major sell off and then we had this big rally on Wednesdaysputtered out a bit from those midweek highs today, but still logging in some significant weekly gains.The benchmark S&P 500 rose for the 4th straight trading session. This is actually the longest winning streak since January. Wall Street strategists have described the past week as a possible turning point for stocks, and a lot of that had to do with this shift in tone from the White House, especially as it relates to trade, monetary policy. Earlier this week, President Trump pivoted from his threats to fire Fed Chair Jerome Powell. He now says he has no plans to remove the central bank leader. He.Also suggested that those 145% tariffs on Chinese imports, those will likely come down, although there continues to be back and forth headlines about the exact status of those negotiations with China. Still though, that softer tone meant investors were able to finally breathe this collective sigh of relief, and it's a further sign that the Trump puts, or the Trump pivot as some have called it, is alive and well. Here's what some of our favorite strategists had to say about the Trump pivot this past week.

This week is a big boost of confidence I think towards saying that, you know, even though we might not go back to new lows, it could be choppy, but we've seen some, some decent progress in absence of, of really any sort of negotiation just knowing there's a pivot in place.The administration is willing to pull back, I think is a positive. We're selling the market on one thing and then we're moving the market back on the same news in reverse. I think there's aThere's a put on on how far or how high Trump will feel comfortable with with the 10 year Treasury yield as well. So yeah, I do think that at least saying that there's some focus.

We are seeing that every time positive news comes out on trade, the markets will react positively because they know that's what needs to be resolved.

Now the problem with this is eventually markets are going to see through these comments and they're going to want and demand.Actual deals, not just updates on these negotiations. You did start to see that in the back half of this week with the sputtering out of the rally. So given that there are still these unknowns, still a lot of this volatility, we will likely continue to trade in choppy territory. We could possibly retest the lows that we had earlier this month. But in the meantime, Trump is clearly in the driver's seat when it comes to sentiment. I love this analogy from Mike Kantrowitz from Piper Sandler. He compared the macro forces like Trump's rhetoric to a pendul.I'm going back and forth and fun fact the top of the pendulum is called the pivot so the irony there bringing it full circle. But what a week I'm sure next week will be chock full of news and updates from this administration, but clearly the market is just so anxious right now and is any anything that Trump says they are latching onto. Yes, and I don't disagree with anything you said, which is what I hate because it just means more volatility more volatility in the I appreciate it.Well, President Trump says tariff is the most beautiful word. He knows. Well, many Americans wish it were banned from the language. Here with this week's rendition of Trumponomics is Yahoo Finance's Rick Newman, or maybe people didn't hate tariffs so much, but if they didn't before, they sure seem to now, Rick. Uh, we saw those latest consumer sentiment numbers and they continue to be not great.

Right. And the thing that's really striking is, uh, people's expectation for inflation one year from now. Uh, consumers in this Michigan survey say they expect inflation to get all the way up to 6.5% a year from now. It's only 2.4% right now. And just to put that in context, first of all, that's the, that's the worst outlook since 1981 when inflation really did go into double digits.Um, and it's actually considerably worse than in the middle of Biden inflation, which was in June and July of 22. Back then they thought they had a lower expectation for 12 month inflation than they do have now. So what that tells you is that consumers actually expect higher inflation under Trump than they expected under Biden.I mean, go figure, and Trump knows this. Trump, the whole reason Trump won in large part last year was Americans were sick of inflation. He told Americans he was going to get prices down in just 3 or 4 months into his presidency. Americans are very concerned that his tariffs are going to push prices back up, so.Who knows where it's going to end up, where it'll actually end up a year from now, but I will note that in the Time, Time Magazine interview out recently, the reporter asked, how would you feel if if a year from now tariff rate, the average tariff rate was 30% or 50%, and Trump said, I would consider that a total victory.So I think it makes sense that consumers are worried.

So Rick, do you see any other way out of this besides resolution on the tariff front? Is there a way where consumers anticipating higher inflation change spending habits, and that brings us a different solution to the problem versus just waiting for the impact that everyone fears seeing a lot more higher prices, higher, higher tariff rates.

I mean, here's the real head scratcher. We learned a lesson in 202023 and 2024 that we forgot, which is that inflation wrecks consumer confidence and it really puts it, puts Americans in a foul mood. And we saw that in, let's say in 2024 as the inflation rate was coming down and it actually got pretty close to normal levels.But Americans remained really pissed off about inflation, and we learned about this kind of a phenomenon known as inflation fatigue or price shock fatigue, and people rightly pointed out, well, the rate of inflation might be down, but those initial price hikes are still there. I'm still paying more, and Trump is now, you know, we, we almost, we almost got through that. And here Trump is basically pushing us right back.In that phenomenon while Americans still have inflation fatigue, it's not like they ever got over inflation. Maybe that's one of the reasons they're so sensitized to it now, but I mean, the only way out is for Trump to back down on his tariffs, and I think he's made pretty clear he's not going to do that. He is a true believer in this fallacy that higher taxes on imports somehow revive the US economy.

Rick, thanks as always. Have a great weekend. Bye guys. Bye.Time now for what to watch next week. Starting off on earnings, it's gonna be a big week with 4 of the Magnificent 7 companies reporting earnings. That's Microsoft, Meta, Apple, and Amazon. Apple will announce results for the 2nd quarter on Thursday. It's been a rocky quarter for Apple as the company navigates the tariff landscape, although it did of course receive some relief from President Trump.Tariffs from the exclusion of smartphones, computers, and other electronics. Analysts are still expecting Apple's supply chain to dominate the earnings call. Moving over to the economy, we'll get some fresh inflation data on Wednesday with personal consumption expenditures, or PCE. Economists forecast the Fed's preferred inflation gauge will slow in March.To 0% for total PCE and 0.1% for core PCE on a month over month basis. And finally, April's full jobs report coming out on Friday, 130,000 non-farm payrolls. That's expected to be added, while unemployment and hourly wages could hold steady at 4.2% and 0.3% respectively.Well, before we go, we wanna talk to Lou one more time just to get some final thoughts as we leave you. I mean, listen.I think the theme of the past hour and a half is that there is still a lot more volatility to come, but there are potentially still ways to ride it out. So Brian was talking about options plays. I think there's undervalued plays. We talked to a few guests in the wealth management industry, uh, Phoebe and David. I think there's areas of opportunity in this market in the volatility. So for me, I hate to sound like a broken record like for the last 3 years. It's all about big tech next week in that though, there should be opportunities for investors to pick up names and semi.Conductors. There's NXPI which I personally own as trading. It's a foreign company trading at about 14 times earnings, 15 times earnings. Energy sector is underweighted. We heard Phoebe getting into, you know, power generation and constellation. There's pockets there, right? There's not an overarching risk to everything. And then even companies that are not exposed to tariffs before today, I didn't know that that thing existed, right, a Paris-based company that could be an opportunity. So I think you have to be disciplined, but I'd anchor it with have cash ready on the sidelines because there's gonna be a lot more volatility.Um, don't go all in or all out. Be selective, right? That's something Phoebe reminded us about as well. All right, Lou, thanks so much. Great to spend the Friday afternoon with you. Relax. You deserved it. Thanks so much for doing it. Thanks for having me again. All right, don't go anywhere. On the other side of the break, it's asking for a trend where I got you covered with the latest and greatest market moving stories so you can get ahead of the themes affecting your money. Stay tuned.