Why the 'sell America' trade is picking up & what's at risk

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US stock futures (ES=F, NQ=F, YM=F) are under pressure Monday morning as markets react to rising political instability, including renewed talk of President Trump potentially firing Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell.

Yahoo Finance Senior Reporter Josh Schafer joins Morning Brief to break down what’s driving the "Sell America" trade.

To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Morning Brief here.

00:00 Speaker A

US stock futures are falling this morning alongside the dollar and treasuries. Experts warning the trade war and President Trump's threats, threats to fire Fed chair J. Powell are scaring foreign investors boosting the quote sell America trade. Our very own Josh Schafer joins us now just to break down what's at risk with the sell America trade and how it's really being.

00:27 Josh Schafer

Yeah, Brad. So what we've seen basically over the past month is whenever there's been increased signs of instability, I would call it, overall here in the US, you've seen a flight from a lot of US assets. So this morning, it seems to be a lot of folks talking about President Trump potentially being serious about firing Fed share Jerome Powell. Again, another sign of perhaps instability in things happening here. So what that trade has really looked like is the US dollar index has gone lower. See now the US dollar index at about a three-year low. It's been, it's been selling of US treasuries, right? So you see the 10 years higher this morning, 30-year higher. That's been again the move that you've seen over the last month, and then you've seen just a move out of US equities. So if you zoom out and really look year to date, stocks outside of the US have performed better than US stocks, right? The S&P 500 down this year, you look at rest of the world ETF, that's actually up on the year. So overall, it's just been this move away from US assets into some other assets. Right now, I think perhaps strategists are more calling it a temporary move and maybe not a long-term investment strategy, an overall shift of what's going on.

02:03 Speaker A

And it's important to note obviously that legally there are protections for the Federal Reserve chair. The administration has been looking into ways to fire the Fed chair since 2018. They still haven't found a way to do that, but that won't stop them from looking. But Josh, that does make me think that this morning's trade is maybe a little bit much ado about nothing. We had a shortened week last week, sure America sell, whatever, but it doesn't seem like there's this conviction in the long-term loss of America.

02:39 Josh Schafer

No, and if there was conviction in the fact that President Trump could fire Fed chair J. Powell, I think I think markets would look a lot worse, right? If we were really starting to price in that reality, I think that would be you would see a lot more chaos in markets this morning. But yes, Maddie, to your point, I think strategists have started to argue when you zoom out and sort of look at this quote-unquote sell America trade, people are starting to wonder if we've gone perhaps too far at this point, and maybe when is the rotation back into US equities again, going into the year, you sort of just had this positioning imbalance. Everyone was expecting the US to outperform again, and that was the consensus call. So when that doesn't start happening and you have shifting of expectations, makes sense that you get big out performance for rest of world stocks. Now that we're three, four months into that, consensus has been it's a mess over here. Oh boy, everything's so bad. Is there a snapback the other way, right? So Morgan Stanley's Mike Wilson was making a little bit of that point in his research over the weekend. He was pointing to earnings revisions saying that you're starting to see earnings revisions perhaps maybe bottom in the US, while they're continuing to get worse in other countries. So maybe that's one thing that you can sort of argue that could help there.

04:36 Speaker A

Well, it's really what we're going to see over the rest of this earnings season as well. Do we see companies come out like a United and say, we're going to give you two ranges. We'll give you two areas of guidance.

04:51 Josh Schafer

I mean nice if everyone did that, right? I mean, it would show that they certainly do not have great in their own finances and own modeling as well going forward for a range of scenarios versus companies that say, okay, we have no clarity beyond 60 to 90 days and we're not really sure exactly how the consumer is going to react or on the business to business side, how our core client bases are going to continue to spend, even if we do have multi-year contracts with them, who's going to re-up those contracts and that's the larger.

05:35 Josh Schafer

And and I think with earnings too, specifically, I think you're going to get a great example tomorrow night with Tesla, right? That stock is down 40% this year. The stock already sold off on bad deliveries for the first quarter. The bad news is pretty much out there. They're not expected to have a great quarter when they report, right? Does the stock sell down more? Or have we done enough selling? Is Tesla down 40% enough for investors to listen to a call where Elon talks about robots in 2035 and people get excited again. I think that's the interesting earnings question this week as we start to get into big tech. Is have these companies sold off enough and have we priced in some of the bad news at this point and perhaps bad news doesn't just send another stock selling off again. That's going to be interesting to watch.

06:39 Speaker A

And how high is the bar this earnings cycle as well for some of that storytelling that tends to happen on calls. Josh, thank you so much. Really appreciate it.