Market Report for Thursday, April 24, 2025
Wall Street rallied again Wednesday, catching its breath between presidential pronouncements. Trump offered trade optimism and Fed restraint—enough for two green days—but markets remain trapped in the White House Whiplash Waltz: speak, splat, retract, rebound.
Level Change 4/23/25 (%)
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
+1.1 Dow
+2.5 Nasdaq
+2.3 Nasdaq 100
+1.7 S&P 500
+1.3 S&P 400
+1.3 S&P 600
Stocks have lately been more driven by the Orange jawbone than hard numbers, a stance as solid as a Jell-O diving board.
In just two days, the S&P 500 climbed 4.2% and the Nasdaq 5.3% on the strength of two presidential promises: Fed Chair Powell keeps his job (this week), and tariffs on China may come down. Apparently, the White House is considering slashing China tariffs by more than 50% even without a deal, so the tariff-talk two-step looks set to keep twirling long after the music should have stopped.
To what end remains anyone’s guess—and evidently, a distant one. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent clarified that China tariffs won’t come down unilaterally and, just casually, added that a full trade deal might take two to three years. Investors, mid-prance across the hot coals of volatility, blinked. Years?
Meanwhile, outside the dance hall of jawboning and policy feints, actual commerce is still suiting up and showing up.
America’s manufacturers are gripping the bar of this tilt-a-whirl economy. S&P’s April flash composite PMI missed expectations, and year-ahead outlooks are skimming pandemic-era lows, but there’s still a faint pulse of growth. What passed for good news is that we may not be so much barreling toward recession as we are trading in the sports car for a golf cart. It’s looking like a slow-growth summer ahead.
But at least home buyers decided, the heck with it, let’s live indoors.
March new home sales hit a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 724,000, well above the 685,000 expected and higher than February’s 676,000. A blip down in mortgage rates from “Are you kidding me?” at 7% to “The kids’ll be fine on two meals a day” at 6.6% was apparently enough to get folks off the dime.
Vertiv Holdings (VRT +8.6%), purveyor of data center chillers, posted strong Q1 earnings and raised its full-year sales forecast, proof the AI trade ain’t dead yet. It also showed that companies can, in fact, tiptoe through the tariff minefield. CEO Giordano Albertazzi called the trade backdrop complicated, but said they’re managing with “a detailed tariff playbook” of if-this-then-that scenarios for presidential postings and rate roulette.
German software giant SAP (SAP +7.6%) beat earnings estimates and reiterated its full-year forecast, brushing off economic uncertainty like lint from a tailored blazer. CFO Dominik Asam told Barron’s the company is quite pleased with its strong start, especially “in light of the macroeconomic backdrop, which is anything but easy.” For a German CFO, that’s just short of popping champagne.
Investors expected a lousy report from Tesla (TSLA +5.4%), and they got it, with earnings down 71% in Q1.
But the bad news was good news, because it suggested CEO Elon Musk had finally received the message that his Washington extracurriculars were unbuttering his bread. He opened the dunk-tank earnings call by saying that, starting in May, his time spent with Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency—DOGE, naturally—“will drop significantly.”
Investors liked the sound of that, along with Tesla confirming it will launch its long-teased robotaxi service in Austin this June, with “maybe 10 to 20 vehicles,” Musk offered, as offhandedly as if he were guessing how many hot dogs to bring to a picnic. Once it’s rolling, operations should “scale up rapidly after that.” He’s confident in Tesla’s edge, swiping at rival Waymo by saying their cars cost “‘way mo’ money,” and declaring he sees no serious competition in the space.
And speaking of cost, Tesla promises cheaper models are on the way this quarter. Its localized supply chains give it a tariff-war advantage. Parting ways with his political pals, Musk said he supports “predictable tariff structures” and is “generally… pro-trade and lower tariffs.”
No wonder he’s clearing out his Beltway condo.
— Jason Kelly
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