5 days ago
The End of the Easy US Stock Bet Has Been Good to Contrarians
On Wall Street, it's been years since anyone had to think very hard to make money. Buy the largest US stocks, ignore everything else and watch your portfolio soar. Investing was reduced to one-click simplicity.
Then life got more complicated. President Donald Trump's sudden tariff escalation in April offered a glimpse of what a world without that certainty might look like. Confidence wavered—not just in megacap resilience, but in American economic exceptionalism and Trump's market-friendly reputation. But after a sharp market decline, some of the panic subsided. The president backed away from some of his most dramatic tariff plans, and major US equity indexes bounced back. On May 28, a US trade court said many of Trump's tariffs were illegal, with the administration appealing the decision. Yet for many, the market and political mayhem highlighted the increasing fragility of the one-way buy-America trade. You can still see the shadows of all that doubt in the lower value of the dollar, in Moody's Ratings' recent decision to downgrade America's debt, and in the steady drumbeat of money finding its way to anything that isn't just another bet on US stocks.
