Stocks near record highs, US dollar & yields: Market Takeaways

Yahoo

13-05-2025

The S&P 500 (^GSPC) has turned positive in 2025, coming off a whirlwind rally driven by tech drivers and the US-China tariff truce.
Yahoo Finance markets and data editor Jared Blikre joins the Asking for a Trend team to talk Tuesday's biggest trading themes, including the stocks nearing record highs and moves within the bond market (^TYX, ^TNX, ^FVX) and US dollar (DX=F, DX-Y.NYB).
To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Asking for a Trend here.
The S&P 500 wipes out 2025 losses as Nvidia powers the tech rally and Yahoo finances Jared Blickre joins us now with the trading day takeaways, Jared.
That's right, Josh, AI, back to AI trade, and we are nearing records. The S&P 500 not only positive for the year, but it is within 4 percentage points of a record high. And I just wanted to show you what else is really close here. So don't get worried, I'm going to show you some red, but the red is how close these are to the record highs. So XL, that's Industrials within 2%, financials within 3%, and there's that S&P 500 within four. Tech right behind, then you got utilities, communication services within five, and the list goes on. And just to show you in the Nasdaq who's really close, we got some names that are at or near those records right now. Now, these, to be fair, these are from the 52 week highs, but a lot of those are just the same thing as records. So ZScaler, Charter, Axon, booking, MercadoLibre, Palantir, Palantir hit another record high today. So it's been an impressive run, and I also have a list of stocks that are actually hitting record stocks today. And guess what? Palantir is in that list. It's the biggest one. By the way, that is a $300 billion company right now, if you believe that. Uber, another one, hitting record highs. That's up to 191 billion. And there's a Libre again. And, uh, you know, you put it all together, we're in a very nice bullish place, not to say we're out of the woods, but, uh,
We're not, because I thought I thought you pop the champagne and it's it's smooth sailing ahead.
Well, I got something to tell you about the Treasury market. Um, I did this whole spiel this morning about how bonds, how bond yields, and also the dollar were kind of moving in lock step. And that was since last Thursday, post-Fed meeting. And guess what they did today? They did the opposite thing. So they went in different directions. Nevertheless, it was a risk-on day to be fair, so this didn't disrupt the risk-on trade, but I want to show you the tenure is now hit 4.5%. It's starting to raise some eyebrows again. Let me show you the year to date for some context. And you can see it has been higher. I think that was 4.75% towards the beginning of the year, but these big, it's not quite round, but these big numbers like this do catch attention. And then we have the US dollar index, and that actually was lower on the day. Now, a lot of people, a lot of positioning on the street, and we just got this big Bank of America Global Fund Manager survey, um, the street is incredibly short dollars. My hypothesis is we're going to go back up, and that's based on a multi-year reversion to the mean. We've done this many times before. We had a little bit of an oops to the downside here, but guess what? We just had an oops to the upside. And so I think we're probably, more than not, going to head higher. I don't expect that to weigh on risk markets as long as we have yields and dollar marching in the same direction. Don't have time to get into that right now because I want to get into a clip about related CPI this morning. Joe Bruce Willis sat down with him over at RSM with for Stocks and Translation episode last week, and he was talking about the impact of tariffs taking a while to take effect, and he was even predicting that this CPI report that we got today wasn't going to be that bad, but watch out for future months. Here's what he said.
Next week we're going to get the CPI. You'll start to see little bits of it, dribs and drabs from the tariffs that were put on early in the administration.
This will be April CPI.
Yeah, April CPI, that's correct. Thank you, Jared. Um, but it will take a bit more time. Right now, it's more anecdotal, like Gene Seroka informing all of us that, hey, an event's about to happen. Um, so this time it really does feel like we've got a recession that's in train, no pun intended. We've assigned a 55% probability, and we we think that's about right. Um, you know, our baseline scenario is a recession. Our alternative baseline is slower growth.
All right, that episode coming out in the near future. Gene Seroka, by the way, head of the Port of LA, and he's saying watch out because things are not looking good there in terms of the volume of shipments coming down with this new trade tariff Dayton. We'll have to see.