10 ways the 'Trump discount' is hurting the stock market

CNBC

2 days ago

We keep getting thrown off, and the lack of predictability is driving investors elsewhere. Do we really think the economies in Europe are doing that well? Is Italy on fire? Spain soaring? No. But what they do have is consistency , even if it is the consistency of mediocrity. We, on the other hand, have no stability whatsoever because of the incredible, mind-boggling power of the White House. It's so pervasive, frightening even if you care about the U.S. Constitution, that I think the rank-and-file of both parties in the House and the Senate are shocked to their core. We have never seen anything like it. To think, you have to go back to the time of Andrew Jackson's presidency to worry about what happens if the judiciary is disobeyed is a statement for the ages. So, it throws us off. We sit here, agog, as Europe goes higher when we have companies in our stock indexes that are doing much, much better than any of theirs. But it doesn't matter because ours can be taken away with a stroke of President Donald Trump's pen — and don't we know it. 1. Nvidia The fact that Club name Nvidia last Wednesday evening could blow away numbers without China is incredible. The stock showed it Thursday but gave back most of the gains Friday. That's the power of the Trump discount. 2. Retail stocks We have whole swaths of the stock landscape getting held back by the Trump discount. We all were hoping to see that retailers would try to extract discounts from suppliers and then split the tariff pain with the customer. But the president attacks Walmart , perhaps the only company besides Club name Costco , to actually do Trump's bidding. Or what we thought was the president's bidding. Makes me wonder, if something were made in America, could you jack up the price without consequences? Most likely. It's no wonder that Costco's stock shot higher last week. It's the only retailer that's not yet having to raise prices. I don't picture the president being a Costco customer. If he were a member, I bet he would crow about it. The dollar stores may be right in the crosshairs next week. The Street worships them right now. But retail is mighty hard to trust. Thank heavens for Club name TJX , the company behind T.J. Maxx, Marshalls, and HomeGoods, which really is cutting prices. The stock is still too low as far as I am concerned. 3. Drugs stocks The drug companies have a huge Trump discount. I didn't pay much attention to the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) this year because I figured that no experimental cancer drug would come to the fore. Who would want to trumpet that? We know the president is adopting a position that's been antithetical to the Republicans, who have fought for years to not allow Medicare to negotiate prices. Now we have little-to-no understanding of what awaits us with pricing — so the price to earnings (PE) multiples keep shrinking. That's the Trump discount. Oh, and heaven forbid, you make vaccines. You are experiencing the wrath of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Glaxo's managed to avoid it, but there's that European halo again. 4. Food stocks On Monday, you will see how hobbled another group has become when Campbell's reports its quarterly results. We don't know what's happening behind the scenes of the soup company, which also owns brands including Prego and Rao's pasta sauces, Goldfish snacks, and V8 drinks. We do know that other food companies have been called in — don't know the names —and told by RFK Jr. to get the coloring out of their foods. 5. Apple Of course, Nvidia isn't the only tech company that's under fire. The Trump discount is crushing fellow Club name Apple . It's bad enough that people believe that Apple has "missed" artificial intelligence even as we know AI is going to go on forever, and Apple will catch up. To be sure, though, it has been slower than everyone would like, so far. But it's the incredibly shocking switch that Apple has endured that's so painful. Did anyone believe that the only goal for the president was to make all iPhones in America? We all got confused. We thought that Trump's goal was to get manufacturing out of China to anywhere. (So many retailers thought that, too.) It turns out that getting out of China to go to another jurisdiction, say India in Apple's case, might have been as bad or worse than staying in China because at least you had a better shot at selling things in China. That's probably no longer the case given the Chinese government's subtle antipathy for those who are pulling out or trying to minimize China. 6. Software stocks So far, software has dodged a bullet, or I should say DOGE'd a bullet because it looks like the federal agencies that were supposed to cut back on vendors saw their havoc wreaked on Booz Allen and not many others. That Club name Salesforce went down, at least, had nothing to do with the Department of Government Efficiency advisory group. It's an alleged sales slowdown from "old" Salesforce that's driving things lower. 7. Google What about the internet? Can you believe how hated Google-parent Alphabet is that the Trump administration has embraced the single most leftwing case brought by the Justice Department against the search giant? The fact that a case that I thought was confiscatory and punitive is being pursued as aggressively as it was under former President Joe Biden is shocking to me. 8. Bank stocks We even have a Trump discount in banking. We've seen almost no let-up in regulation except when it comes to bitcoin , which is rapidly becoming the only entity in this market that has a Trump premium. It is true that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent makes some sense — and is, bizarrely for this administration, consistent — but he's more of a fire fighter than a deregulator. I can only imagine the role he is going to have to play if we get a weaker employment number but a spike in inflation. I don't envy him. 9. M & A I do expect more mergers and acquisitions, and I know that there have been a few already that would have been shot down by the Federal Trade Commission under Biden. But that's a low bar. How can you do deals in a world where nobody can predict cash flow because of how unpredictable the White House is? Call that a huge discount. The stocks reflect it. 10. Energy stocks It's particularly galling when there's no lift in a group that had been hated under Biden: the oil and natural gas industry. I know the Trump administration wants more pipe, but nothing is happening. Trump wants to open up federal lands to drilling, oblivious to the fact that the oil companies haven't been calling for it because it is too expensive. No energy source is getting a break. The president is permitting all sorts of nuclear power, or he says he is. But his Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is the gating factor, and I see no change there. Bottom line The takeaway from all of this is pretty sickening. Take tomorrow. We were going down pretty consistently Friday — and when we got to down 1% on the S & P 500 , the president let it be known that there could be a call soon with Chinese President Xi Jinping . Nevermind, that hours before, he accused China of violating the terms of the trade deal it made with the United States last month. Over the weekend, there was no call with Xi, so I have to figure we just resume Friday's decline from the get-go, barring something positive from the president about American business. Although it's hard to predict what that could be. The funny thing is, I feel very alone writing this stuff, given how rarely it is talked about. But that's part of the overall mystique of the White House. What will happen to you if you speak up? How long will it take to produce a level of retribution to make you the Harvard of the S & P 500? Suffice it to say, there's no let-up in the derision of business and the uncertainty of it all. Sometimes, I pine for the previous administration as Biden knew so little about business that he didn't know who to hate, so he just hated everyone. Nevertheless, unlike Trump, he had ineffectual hatred. No premium. But no discount either. (See here for a full list of the stocks in Jim Cramer's Charitable Trust.) As a subscriber to the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. Jim waits 45 minutes after sending a trade alert before buying or selling a stock in his charitable trust's portfolio. If Jim has talked about a stock on CNBC TV, he waits 72 hours after issuing the trade alert before executing the trade. THE ABOVE INVESTING CLUB INFORMATION IS SUBJECT TO OUR TERMS AND CONDITIONS AND PRIVACY POLICY , TOGETHER WITH OUR DISCLAIMER . NO FIDUCIARY OBLIGATION OR DUTY EXISTS, OR IS CREATED, BY VIRTUE OF YOUR RECEIPT OF ANY INFORMATION PROVIDED IN CONNECTION WITH THE INVESTING CLUB. NO SPECIFIC OUTCOME OR PROFIT IS GUARANTEED.