The pre-market picture wasn’t bad at all but some softness in the consumer spending portion of the PCE report and another weak consumer sentiment print weighed. I would suspect those were small factors though compared to worries about tariffs. No one from the White House came out to talk down auto tariffs or April 2 tariffs ahead of a critical week. I suspect we will see some of that in the days ahead but it’s a dicey moment and many are headed to the sidelines.

• S&P 500 -2.0%
• Nasdaq Comp -2.7%
• DJIA -1.7%
• Russell 2000 -2.2%
• Toronto TSX Comp -1.6%

On the week:

• S&P 500 -1.5%
• Nasdaq Comp -2.6%
• DJIA -1.0%
• Russell 2000 -1.8%
• Toronto TSX Comp -0.8%

In the quarter (with one day left)

• S&P 500 -5.2%
• Nasdaq Comp -10.3%
• Russell 2000 -1.7%
• Toronto TSX Comp +0.2%

Aside from the trade worries, the tech picture doesn’t look healthy. Nvidia was down another 1.6% today and off almost 10% this week. The first phase of any technological boom is always the ‘picks and shovels’ but we may be past that point now with people finding ways to make LLMs cheaper and more efficient. There is a trough afterwards until the second phase of a massive productivity boom starts to unfold.

All told, this will likely be the worst quarter for the S&P 500 since the third quarter of 2022.