tv Fast Money CNBC April 1, 2024 5:00pm-6:00pm EDT
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for the first quarter before the bell tomorrow. guys, back to you. >> well, if we get them, we know you'll bring them to us. phil, thank you. jon, we get jolts tomorrow, february factory orders, and a flurry of fed speak all week long. >> that's right. and the jobs report at the end of the week. >> all right that does it for us here at "overtime." >> "fast money" starts now. live from the nasdaq market site in the heart of new york city's times square, this is "fast money." here's what's on tap tonight. rising tides.% yi yields, oil, gold, all up, and adding to their gains for the year. how markets are reading into the moves and what it could mean for the fed this year. plus, a currency crunch. the japanese yen trading near 30-year lows against the dollar. what the move means and why one of our traders says we should be paying more attention to these swings. and digging in on djt. the latest numbers. just how much did it lose last year and what does it mean for valuations? i'm melissa lee, coming to you live from studio b at the nasdaq. on the desk tonight --
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karen finerman, dan nathan, and guy adami. powerful trio here. we start off with a big move in rates to start the second quarter. the ten-year treasury yield rising 13 basis points. a two-week high. it was below 3.9% at the start of the year. but it wasn't just yields moving higher today. gold hitting another record during the session, settling above $2,200. wti crude surging to 84 bucks a barrel, its highest level since late october. the moves copping after fed chair jerome powell suggestioned over the weekend that the economy is still on strong footing, potentially giving the central bank to weigh data before cutting interest rates. so, does this all tell investors to prepare themselves for a prolonged pause from the fed? maybe we won't get three, maybe it's more like two or one or none? as james gorman has said. >> i actually think that would be the most bullish thing that could happen, it would suggest, inflation is a problem, the economy is fine, it can
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withstand rates at these levelsn sustain rates at this level. people are wishing for rate cuts, and i've said, be careful what you wish for, the inflation genie i think is right back out of the bottle in the form of all the things you mentioned at the top of the show, and the fact that gold is rallying, with the dollar going higher, and yields moving the way they're moving is really interesting, and i think significant, melms. >> i agree with everything you said. i think it would be that he's not raising rates, because things are good, and dhint need to, i mean, it would seem like this isn't a great time to start cutting, you want that dry powder when you need that dry powder, right? we don't need it right now. so, i -- i'm surprised there's still three on the table. i -- i agree with your open. could be two, could be one, wouldn't be so shocking. three is more surprising than zero, i would think. >> right. but to delve inside the mind of the markets, so to speak, aren't we rising, aren't we doing so well because there are three on
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the table still and if you took them away tomorrow and there's a headline saying, powell says no rate cuts this year, what would the markets do, do you think? >> i mean, i don't know. i go back to the fall, i mean, i really don't. when yields and the ten-year went from 4% to 5% in september, october, to the highs in late october, right, so, the higher for longer narrative was, like, that was the consensus there. look at what the s&p 500 did. it went from, like, 4,600, down to 4,150. we're at 4,250 right now. when i tell you i don't know, i have no idea. and so, if we're going to soon price out a june rate cut, okay, and that kind of pushes it into the summer and we have two at that point -- i just don't -- i have no idea, but like, the fact of the matter is, if the fed keeps racheting up their gdp expectations, if we get through g-1 earnings season and we don't have a meaningful downgrade to at least guidance going forward, then i guess at some point, there should be a little fear put back in the stock market, because we just haven't had a 2%
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down day in the s&p 500 in 285 days. it seems like there's a lot of complacency right now. but investors are going to continue to ride this as long as they can, if they think the rally is broadening out. >> didn't we go from, i don't know, six to five to four to three? >> that's true. >> and that -- and things were all right. that didn't put people off the market. certainly some of the high flyer big multiple names, those did well anyway, so -- i don't really understand why there's such a push for him to cut. when it's not clear -- >> couldn't we say this -- >> genie is back in the bottle. >> s&p earnings consensus for 2024 is $243, we're at 21 times. that's high relative to the five and ten-year average. it was down at 19% and 18% on those averages, right? so, if we get to q-1 earnings season and we see guide down, we have two big names, apple and tesla, we're going to talk about them later, some analysts are
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expecting, consensus is for a year over year decline in earnings growth for tesla. if that were to about in apple, you see that deceleration in some other names, at some point, the stock market, or investors will pay attention to that. >> the other reason yields -- again, maybe the economy is great, the other reason, we've talked about this, is the fact that issuances are coming out in a major way, i think close to, somewhere between $9 trillion to $10 trillion this year. the market's going to demand a higher rate of interest to do that, and a certain extent, you're seeing it now. over the weekend, you are reading more stories about debt to gdp and at a certain level, things get on the wrong side that you can't recover from, and interest payments on this debt have reached a staggering number for this year. i think the bond market is taking that into consideration, as well. that's not particularly bullish for the market, however. >> no. that's one of the reasons why we see gold -- >> i believe so. >> driving as we do, when that
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haven has been -- when you see one haven not acting properly, that's when gold shines, and that's what we've seen over the past month or so plus. in terms, though, of the historic valuation of the s&p 500, some could argue, though, that historic valuations are not applicable to where we are now, because the composition of the s&p 500 is so different. >> i make the argument, though, if you think about where we've been getting earnings growth over the last year, why we bought this kind of earnings malaise that you've seen across lots of other sectors is because of the names that make up 30% of the s&p 500, they make up 50% of the nasdaq 100. if you didn't have the outperformance from an nvidia, it's become the third-largest market cap company in the s&p 500. if you don't have microsoft doing what it's doing, by the way, trading at 35 times, many turns over its historical average. so, right now, we've had the earnings growth, but you've had multiple expansion in a big, big way, around a fundamental narrative. if that doesn't start to play
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out the way -- or, if we pulled forward, a lot of this performance, at some point, you will have a correction in multiples, especially with yields where they are. >> why are we so -- we should be happy -- >> i'm always happy. look at me. >> that the markets are doing so well in the face of fewer rate cuts getting priced in, where are we still, 5,200 on the s&p 500, and change, so, guy, why so grim? >> well -- >> i know you're saying that somewhat tongue in cheek. >> i am. >> you're wired like i am. but two reasonreasons. when i started in this business, one of the first things is, hope for the best, prepare for the worst. that is a wall street mantra, at least when i started. the second point is, when we started this show back in '07, '08 and '09 -- i'm not suggesting we're there, but the fact that people came back, said, you never told us all the bad things were going on, you never warned us, so, i vowed from that day on, if i saw things that were, to me, at least, alarming, i was going to bring them up.
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now, the market has flown in the face of that, without question. similarity, it did that back in '06-'07, a lot of warning seing then. things aren't as great as they appear. you look at the unemployment numbers, still below 4%, but the last 10 out of 12 months, the revisions to the downside. you know, there are a lot of things to be concerned about in terms of the consumer and consumer debt now $17.5 trillion. a lot of warning sewns out there that the market right now, at least, is looking fast. >> there are still things out there, we talk about the market is not a monolith. there are definitely pockets of value out there that have sort of sat out the rally, and so, i think -- i was expecting to see actually, even on a day like today, which is the beginning of a new quarter, we'll start to see broadening out, that didn't happen. the reverse of that happened, actually. much bigger strength in, you know, google, meta of the world, than the iwm or any mid caps, so -- i don't know. i don't know why that happened
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today, but i do think that a broadening market, which we do have, is generally better. >> yeah. meantime, the ten-year treasury is trading at almost exactly its average yield over the last 12 months, and the chart master thinks it is about to take the path lower from here. carter braxton worth of worth charting joining us now. carter? >> well, yeah, i mean, here's the thing. if you were to -- we had these twists and turns, of course, and there's been -- oh, my god, it will be seven cuts, eight cuts, now we're not going to have any, there's higher for longer -- at the end of the day, rather than looking at yields from where they were 12 months ago to now, if one were to just look at the average mid-point in any given day over the past 12 months, yields are exactly where they were 12 months ago. so, let's look at this one-year chart of ten-year u.s. treasury yields. let's annotate it. on the second iteration here, and you'll see, this line, that, if you were to take every single trading day and the mid-point of
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the range, of course, on any given day, there's a high, a low, and a close, whether it's a stock, a currency, or, of course, ten-year treasury yields, but the average of all days over the past 12 months, from the end of q-120 2023 toth end of q-1 2024, is 4.4%. where you acted or didn't acted. so, looking at it this way, the great fear, and that has been the great fear, that rates are going higher and higher, they haven't. and whenever -- and history bears this out, when you hear a mantra or a turn of phrase that gets coined and embraced and considered sort of gospel, run the other way. one of the biggest phrases you can google search it was higher for longer. that was at 5.02%. we are not at 5.02%. it has not been higher for longer. >> all right, carter, thank you. carter braxton worth, 4.11.
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even if we stayed at 4.11, though, it would still be higher relative to where we had been for longer, potentially, but i get what carter is saying. >> i understand what he's saying, he's -- 100%, and he's been right more than he's been wrong. i'll say this, though, if you look at the tlt, for example which is the inverse, but this has been going lower since 2020 or so. we made a series of lower highs and lower lows, and quite frankly, even with this bounce in the tlt that we've seen recently, with yields going from 5% to 3.8% or so, that is still intact, and if we were to take out this 85 level on the downside in the tlt, which i know seems light years from where we are now, we're going to have the next leg. >> it's interesting, i don't know if you guys caught it over the weekend, the manufacturing data out of china. if they had just the highest data that they had on pmis in a year, right, and suggest that they're out of contraction, if the chinese economy starts to get humming, and if you think
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you're worried about crude oil that went from 70 to 80 bucks, if you're worried about the commodities that are bottom left upper right and, again, giving the fed, i think, pause to kind of say, hey, listen, you guys got over your skis with the six expected rate cuts, because that will only embolden, you know, the inflation, kind of fears out there, what happens if we get to a point where china has a consecutive, you know, better data and we start seeing better demand and inflation readings start to pick up, the fed is going to have to start to move to think about, how do we start raising rates again? and at that point, if u.s. growth, if the -- if the long and variable lags of all this stuff finally hit and we finally get that recession, that could be a really tricky spot, i think, for risk assets. >> i love it when guests come on the set and roll their eyes at dan, because that -- >> is that what you call a good segue, mel? >> julian emanuel of evercore
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esi. he's the firm's senior managing director. julian, you -- you don't think there's any possibility the fed's going to hike? >> no. no, it's not and eye roll over what dan said -- >> just dan in general? >> no, it's -- are you kidding? he looks fabulous. >> i know, he does. >> it's the consequence of even the market thinking there's a possibility of that. and part of the narrative that's going on now is, there's a tendency to say, well, something worked this way, so, it's going to work this way again, and i -- look, frankly, the move from six expected cuts to three was something that we did not expect the market to take as well as it has taken it, but again, like this whole idea of 3% inflation back towards the 2% goal, this last mile is a little bit more difficult, and so, therefore, this idea of three cuts maybe going to two, we don't think the market's going to digest that as easily as it digested the kind
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of move from six to three, because you're 10% higher, you're on 21 times earnings, and expected growth of north of 11% for 2024, which is high by no landing scenario, so, we do think there's some volatility ahead. >> how does the inflationary sort of readings that we've had, when it comes to various commodity prices, services being stickier, how does that factor into your view of what the fed might or might not do? >> well, it made easter very expensive holiday, given that cocoa is over $10,000 a ton. it -- the fed has hinted that it's going to give us something that it has literally never given us. you've had really one cycle where there was cutting into a soft landing, being 1995, and the fact is, that happened when core pce was already close to 2%. so, it's really kind of one of those -- a belief that you're going to get that last mile, and
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we can already look ahead a week and a half from now, it makes the cpi data unbelievably important, because the narrative is now at the point where particularly given that momentum stocks have stalled out in the month of march, that's the kind of thing that's a threat to the broader market. >> so, let me ask you something, if cpi continues to run a little hotter now than we had hoped, and the fed does nothing, aren't they, in fact, decreasing real rates? >> so -- so, there's the conundrum, right? you walk this fine line between movements in real rates, and again, we have to understand that based on the last seven or eight years, real rates are high, but based on the last 20, they aren't necessarily that high. and remember, i think part of the shock of the last number of months is, like, wow, we can actually make money in stocks with interest rates north of 5%. it happened throughout the
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1990s. i would suggest the opposite thing is the problem. is that if the fed keeps indicated that it looks like two or three cuts, you get the ten-year yield moving sharply higher to discount a longer trajectory of inflation, and that's what bothers stocks more than three cuts or two cuts. >> yjulian, your target for the s&p is 4750 this year. what gets us there? >> look, the environment that we're in now, we've seen a lot of what i would call head-scratching activity on the part of the investing public. fomo, irrational exuberance, call it whatever you want. but when you're making bets in the options market that the price of a $2 trillion market cap stock is going to double over the next four days, there's something going on there. and so, from our point of view, what you really -- this is a time where, again, this is not an end of the bull market call, that was no pun intended, it's a
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normal correction of a market that likely goes higher, but needs some time to catch up, and that's only going to be a function of if you get disappointing data, because we really are priced for great earnings, great interest rate trajectory, and inflation not being as sticky has it's proven. >> so, julian, you're ruling your eyes at me and you have a 4750 target thing. i'm giving you one of the paths to it. let's just talk about that. that's a 10% move. we know in most every year in the s&p a 500, there's at least a 10% sort of correction. if you had that sort of move and it looked like last july to october, now, we did have yields going higher during that time period, but let's just say, it's just a reset, it's a bit of, like, taking a built of the froth out, would you get constructive if the data did not get much hotter or weaker, either way? >> 150%. >> yeah. >> basically, this is one of these times, again, and you nailed it, the average
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nonrecession year pull-back is 13%. we were spoiled last year. from our point of view, if you get what we expect to come in terms of the market pullback, without the probability of a recession becoming more ap apparent, you absolutely want to get much more positive on the market. and it's been proven, you know, for years on end that that's when you want to buy, not when you want to sell. >> all right, just quickly, april, what is it about april, do you think, that makes it traditionally or historically more volatile? >> so, if you go back to sort of 2000, you've had trading tops and trading bottoms in the march/april time frame, and what tends to happen is that whatever the momentum is coming into those kind of turns, it flips. what's more pertinent this year is the fact that we've been carried so much psychologically, if nothing else, by those momentum names. we now -- we're not the mag seven, we're the mag four, the mag one or mag two right now,
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and that's where the vulnerability lies. >> julian, thank you. julian emanuel. >> 4750 lines up, i think, right now with where the 200-day moving average is for you playing the game at home, and we are a couple standard deviations away. and typically the market is mean reversion. that march 8th, that friday, march 8th, when we saw the reversals in single stocks, that has not been violated. things have gone sideways, slightly higher, slightly lower, but go back and look at that day, the technical setup on the back of that day, and we'll come back in a month and so, ah, that was something. coming up, a manage care meltdown going on right in the afterhours. shares of united health and others plunging after the centers of medicare and me medicaid. what it means for these stocks. plus, tesla coming off a first first quarter. now investors are bracing for potential electric slide when delivery numbers cross the wires. what to expect from that data. don't go anywhere. much more "fast money" in two. this is "fast money" with
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d programs in 2025, in line with the government's initial proposal, but coming in below wall street's expectations. the decision dealing a blow to manage care stocks, which are dropping sharply in the extended hours. for more, we're joined on the fast line by jared holz. jared, great to have you with us. >> thanks, melissa. appreciate it. >> in layperson's terms what does this mean for these stocks? >> well, the street was expecting a boost from the preliminary rate of about 3.7% or so. a lot of the commentary from the industry suggested that in this final rate, which came out this evening after the close, that we were going to see 100 basis points, perhaps a little bit more, in relief, or, in addition to that 3.7%. that does not seem to be the case here, and, you know, as we discussed so many times, health care utilization is running
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extremely hot now, and these rates are probably not going to cover enough of that for the manage care companies going forward. it's more of a near-term situation, i mean, you know, the rates get reset every year, but at least as we go into fiscal year 2025, i think all these companies are going to be -- have their backs against the wall to a degree. >> it's karen, thanks for being on on short notice. so, how does this change your view of these companies? i mean, they're all down, anywhere from 4% to 8% or 9%. how do you think about them long-term? >> hey, karen. i don't think that much changes. these -- these stocks have been out of favor for the past couple of quarters now. mainly driven by the fact that the procedure volume environment has been so robust. i think what we were kind of hoping for was that a rate increase or a rate change in the
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positive direction for manage care was going to make the stocks more ownable, and i think what this does in terms of, like, changing my view and how i think a lot of investors are going to look at it, is that the lack of a rate change makes t the -- these stocks less ownable, less interesting, especially versus other companies in the sector, with more momentum to start with. so, now these are -- these are kind of anti-momentum, or counter-consensus stocks coming into tonight. they are probably going to remain so. and so, you're just not going to see, i don't think you're going to see a major bounce tomorrow. >> guidance on utilization rates for first quarter and 2024 remain high. there was a certain assumption that the utilization rates seen in the last reported quarter would remain that high. could that be sort of the potential upside for the stocks? is there any evidence that perhaps utilization rates aren't as high? >> yeah, i mean, that is the question. i mean, we're all trying to
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gather data points from the industry to kind of give us a better sense of whether utilization rates are going to stay at current rates, whether they're going to drop, whether they're going to get stronger from here. you know, there have been a lot of medical meetings, a lot of broker conferences over the past couple of months, and a lot of those data points kind of suggest that we're going to stay at these elevated volumes for awhile, so, maybe that's the first quarter of this year, the second quarter, into the second half of the year. i mean, at some point, i would think that we kind of normalize, just because we have not seen this level of strength in a long time, but it's so difficult to predict. a lot of it is based on just behavioral, some of it is based on the economy and the job market, and obviously, all of those variables are tough to predict in isolation. i would just think that based on what we think we know, we're going to see this utilization environment continue at least through the early sum e-. >> all right, jared, thank you so much for joining us by phone, appreciate your analysis last
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minute. jared holz of mizuho. karen, you own elevance? >> i do, yeah. and i take some comfort, which i should take none, in that it's down the least, but -- 4% -- not delighted with that, and, you know, everything he's saying about, do you want to own these, actually probably not, and just a mistake i made, you know, owned it much lower, which is an irrelevant piece of information. i should probably sell it. >> humana, that's been the leader to the downside, so, real quick, melms, if we can go back to september of 2018, at the time, the stock was making an all-time high around 330 or so. then we cascaded lower. the levels we're at right now, actually lower now, but this is huge support level, so, it's got to hold. and quickly, for unh, the double top now is firmly in place, 452, which was the low, i want to say in june or so of 2022, pretty critical it holds that level. there's a lot more "fast money" to come. here's what's coming up next. the abcs of dividends.
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why one top analyst says alphabet could be ready to start paying back shareholders. and what it could mean for the stock. next. plus, yakking on the yen. japan's currency at a pivotal juncture, and centralen bankers are eyeing the moves. could there and an intervention ahead? you're watching "fast money." live from the nasdaqart te mkesi in times square. in times square. we're back right after this. uh, this lets me adjust the base, add more guitar, maybe some drums. -wow. so many choices. -yeah. like schwab. i can get full service wealth management, advice, invest on my own, and trade on thinkorswim. you know carl is the only front man you need. (phone rings) oh, i gotta take this, carl. it's schwab. schwab. (feedback rings) have a choice in how you invest with schwab.
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welcome back to "fast money." tesla continuing its rocky start to the year, dropping as much as 3% at its lows of the day. this as investors await the ev maker's q-1 delivery numbers. phil lebeau is here to dive into the estimates. phil? >> the question now, melissa, will tesla post a year over year decline in deliveries? we haven't seen that in quite some time, at least four, five years since we've seen that from tesla. here's the latest consensus. 457,000. i have to be clear here, that was the consensus last updated on friday. since then, a slew of reports have come out, people are now saying, look, 415 to 420 is what we think. in fact, when you look at the
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analyst notes, web bush is at 425, then you've got morgan stanley at 425. adam jonas there. and emanuel rosner at deutsche bank, he's coming in at 414. bottom line, the analysts have all been bringing down their estimates, not just for the first quarter, and we'll talk about why that's the case, but also for the full year. it's more than common now that you will see analysts saying, when it comes to full year deliveries, we don't think they're going to get to 2 million. they were at 1.81 million last year. i've seen a couple of analysts say, if they get to 1.91 million, we think that's what we can expect for the rest of this year. so, as you take a look at shares of tesla, the bottom line is this. the competition in china has been brutal. that has hurt deliveries there. there have been problems with the giga factory in europe, as well as demand in europe. and then here in the u.s., it's a softer ev market. just look at what they're doing when it comes to full self-driving. they're now offering tesla owners a one-month free trial.
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you never saw that in the past. that's not only for tesla owners currently, because full self-driving, as far as a subscription service, is crucial to the bottom line when they report their quarterly results, but it is also one way to sweeten the pot to say to people, do the other guys have full self-driving? we think we have the superior product, come with us if you are considering buying an electric vehicle. so, we think we'll get the numbers before the bell tomorrow, melissa. that's what history tells us. if we do, we'll have them for you on "squawk box." >> phil, thank you. phil lebeau. three days after the quarter ends, the sort of -- the tesla rule here. it would be the first year on year decline, by the way, since the second quarter of 2020, which would be remarkable. >> real quick. so, i think it was -- i think it was the october quarter of last year, the market thought peak -- excuse me, trough margins, came in at 17 1/2 handle. that was it. that's the low we're going to see. and the stock acted in kind, it went from 195, close to 300 or so. obviously lower now.
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what's proved to be the case is, that wasn't trough margins. margins have sort of flatlined. so, if you have price wars, continue to cut prices and demand's not there, margins are going to continue to contract. and that was one of the sort of the pillars of the bull case, you know, the margin expansion. it's not happening. >> it's interesting. again, when we're in this a.i. moment last year, before people really knew, like, where to kind of place their bets, i think tesla was benefiting from that. elon musk was early in openai this is something we talked a lot about. if you think about full self-driving being such an important part of this story. it's not just about evs, right? about that recurring revenue and getting people hooked on their platform, if you will. it's just not there, right? so, that's part of the story. and i think it's interesting right now, we're spending so much time on two things. margins and deliveries. the same sort of thing that you would focus on gm and ford and other automakers. and that's where this stock is right now. but unfortunately, i think for the longs, if you do have two consecutive negative quarters of
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deliveries, which i think some analysts are expecting right now, this stock goes lower, because then it really, unless there's some big fsd break through or something like that, because the demand picture, and the competitive picture, in my opinion, doesn't change a lot for the next couple of months. and we haven't even had a recession. when you talk about that period, the last two times they had, you know, no demand, well, that was in 2020 during a pandemic. >> and we haven't talked about the dynamic in china. byd -- >> we've actually -- >> we have. >> for you like a year we've been talking about this. >> the litany of reasons why -- >> want to be clear on that. >> that comes on the show, like, every other day, i would say, in terms of the china dynamic. of them cutting prices, the local home grown brands. while tesla is raising prices in china. >> yeah, we were talking about that before, what was that about, sort of confusing to me. so, i think the question, dan brings it up if we look at an auto company what is the right multiple? is it the gm multiple, which is
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five or something like that? well, then, there's still a lot of multiple that needs some explaining. and if it's fsd, they don't seem to be far enough along. they've been saying this for three years, just mathematically, we have to be closer, but i don't know how front and center that is. coming up, land of the rising sun, but falling yen. more on japan's currency issues and how centralen baingers could be getting involved. plus, what can alphabet do with all its cash? one top analyst says a dividend might be in its future. what does it mean for the stock and the sector? "fast money" is back in two.
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welcome back to "fast money." stocks with mixed action. the dow falling 240 points. the s&p down by 0.2%. some of the casino stocks getting a boost. gaming revenue in macao surging in march. and shares of pvh plunging after its earnings report. reportingweaker than expected outlook. and we're watching shares of disney. it has voted in favor of the company's board of directors, a blow to the activist bid. t. rowe owes 9 million shares of disney. they hold their shareholder
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meeting on wednesday. the japanese yen trading close to a 34-year low. the country's finance minister defending the currency, saying that, quote, there are some speculative moves that do not reflect fundamentals when taking into account domestic overseas and economic as well as price developments. still with the yen down 7% just this year, our next guest says the best move for the bank of japan is to raise rates rather than intervene in the currency market. jens, great to see you. your name is so fitting for this conversation -- i'm sure you get that all the time. but in terms of raising rates, that's sort of a tricky thing for the boj, even if it seems like the easiest thing to do, to put that squeeze on the economy one so many of its mortgages are tied to floating rates, that could really hurt. >> yeah, it's -- it's a tricky situation they're facing, right, because they're saying that the yen is not in line with fundamentals, but actually, you can see what's going on in the rest of the world, the dollar's
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strong, and now they manage to hold it for a week or two at this level. so, i would actually argue that it's getting out of whack, because of this intervention. so, they have to decide if they put money on the table. in 2022, it cost them $60 billion to intervene for a couple of days, right? so, it's not cheap to intervene, but if they don't, you think we're going to break high on dollar/yen, it's going to follow the global dollar trend that we're seeing, and the better option would be to say, okay, finally, the japanese economy is emerging from deflation, right, and they can move rates. they move rates from slightly negative to zero in march, but really the big step is to go into positive. and that probably would be the right move in the next couple of months, rather thanspending lots of billions of dollars on intervention. >> jens, i'm not suggesting we're on the precipice of, but the weaker this gets, the more you're going to hear about currency crisis.
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they're clearly in a pickle here. raise rates hurting the economy, the weakening yen hurts their citizenry and the things they export in, it becomes more expensive. speak to that. at what point are people going to say, you know what, this weaker yen is a problem? >> on raising rates being a huge problem for the economy, like, we can debate that. interest rates at zero, right? bank lending is growing very strongly, better than most economies around the world. so, we've seen economies around the world stomach higher rates better than people thought. we have 5.5 in the u.s. and the economy is still kind of growing. so, maybe the japanese company will be okay with half a percent, 1%, so, i think there's a fear of raising rates, because they've obviously been in zero rate or lower environment for several decades now, but i think they need to break out of that, and the right move would be to
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get off zero in the next couple of months, instead of spending, like, billions of dollars intervening for just a short-term effect. >> if they did intervene, jens, what would the line in the sand be for them? 155? 154? >> they've been trying to hold it here, just below 152 for two weeks. they've had some success talking about and getting it to stick there, but eventually, they have to pick it up. and i think -- we will see volatility one way or the other. as they come and intervene, we have the big down-up we see, or they let it go through 152 and that's going to generate some follow-through, including probably the chinese currency, where they are watching it closely. so, important time right here. >> jens, thank you. last time boj intervened was october 2022. >> yeah. i mean, the interventions -- they work for a couple of days. raising rates, though, they raised rates, the yen weakened.
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they can raise rates some more. the market's going to call them. i'm one of these few people that believe the yen will continue to weaken, which, theoretically, like a lot of people say, that's a risk-on thing. it's going to be a huge risk-off thing at a certain level and i think we're close to it. >> yeah. coming up, alphabet shares are back at all-time highs. how much more gas do they have left in the tank? plus, trouble for trump. the truth social parent reported a huge loss for 2023. n t cath maintain the valuation? that's right after this.
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welcome back to "fast money." shares of alphabet soaring on optimistic analyst calls. bank of america naming them a top pick. and the stock is preferred to meta, and seeing a potential for a dividend. >> what i'm struck by with google is that, you know, there's a couple of things that i think are very fixable on their part in terms of their cost structure, paying a dividend, wouldn't be hard for them to do that with $100 billion in cash. and i think it's underappreciated as an a.i. asset. >> so, are the stars finally arriving for gemini and google? karen, you are sure hoping. >> i am. however, i hope that doesn't mean something bad for meta, because that actually is my larger position, but i ean, as mark talked about, this is really actually ridiculously
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cheap for a company like this that generates the kind of cash that they do, and loses the kind of cash they do on other things, if you ever got that back, that would be great, but the dividend thing, that would sort of be interesting. i was surprised how much meta went up on that, when they did, so, i guess that would be good. big buy-back would also -- would also be good and they -- i hope they're through the just disastrous rollout and then the disastrous image-gate, whatever that was, and, you know, i said this today on market share, search market share, and all calls of it being completely decimated, have yet to happen. so hopefully it will start getting a little bit more credit. it's the cheapest of the bunch, by a fair amount. >> i guess the big news would be, if it comes -- it was rumored a couple weeks ago, if they did a deal with apple, licensing gemini and basically processing a lot of those sort of, like, language model searches in their cloud, that would be massive. if think about the 2 billion
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install base, if that's going to happen. if it's going to happen, it's likely to be announced before early june. when you get this technical setup, the valuation support, the sentiment, which has been really bad in this name, if all that stuff can line up with a big announcement with apple, this thing is off to the races. coming up, another big swing for trump's media stock. the company reveals more troubling losses. the going concern notice, and what it could mean for the former president's pou re "fast money" in two. looku can make this work. we can make this work. and the feeling of confidence that comes from our advice... i can make this work. that seems to be universal. i can make this work. i can make this work. no wonder more than 9 out of 10 clients are likely to recommend us. because advice worth listening to is advice worth talking about. ameriprise financial.
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welcome back to "fast money." the parent company of former president donald trump's social media platform truth social lost more than $58 million last year, while bringing in just over $4 million in revenue, according to new s.e.c. filings today. shares of trump media and technology sliding today. this comes as the board debates whether to grant trump a waiver on a six-month lockup period. for more, let's bring in the business editor over at axios. great to have you with us. i was sort of surprised at this decline, because i didn't know that the metrics were all that surprising that we learned about today. what was your reaction? >> yeah, i agree, it's almost like there were people who woke up and thought, oh, wow, it's a bad business. of course it's a bad business. we knew it was a bad business through the first three quarters. maybe there were certain people that thought there was going to be some q-4 momentum. and that was maybe part of it. it wasn't just the business isn't good, it somehow got worst
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in the fourth quarter than it was in the third quarter. it only brought in $750,000 in q-4 last year top line, which is just an extraordinarily low amount, given that they do have a few million users. >> yeah, it's karen, so, what do you think -- what happened today, as melissa said, it seems odd that people would wake up and go, oh, my god, the financials are terrible, do you think it was that language, going concern, that is dated, since the merger actually closed, post the time that auditor made that statement. >> yeah, it may have been -- there were a couple news reports that pointed that out, but as you say, those were old. those were -- it would have problems with going concern if the merger isn't completed. these were auditors year-end last year. there is cash there, you know, from the spac merger, there is cash there, so, going concern for awhile shouldn't be an issue. part of this is, this is make the meme-y of all meme stocks ever. the idea that it's going to have
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a big up or down shouldn't surprise it. >> it's still a $5 billion market cap company. let's just say, round, they'll do $5 million of revenue ish. what is the right price to sales multiple, given some of the comps out there, and then, you know, back of the envelope this thing. >> are you saying you don't think 1,000 to 1 is a proper -- is a proper ratio? i think that's where we're at right now. i don't -- i don't think you can judge this by comps, in fact, to be honest, truth social -- trump media in its own disclosures today, it pointed out it is not going to release user data, in terms of average revenue per user, daus, maus, any of this thing, downloads. i don't think there are comps here. this is -- if you want to buy donald trump and help him, or don't you? >> dan, when i look at the holders of this company, as we often do, right, we look at publicly traded companies, i see that the former president owns 58% of this thing.
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and we know that they're trying to get this lockup kind of, you know, abbreviated, he owns the board, that sort of thing. i have to assume there are some real institution al holders her that have a responsibility. they might not have any voting rights on this sort of thing, but i have to assume that this is going to end like a lot of other trump dealings, in a lot of lawsuits. >> i would agree. just on that first point, i don't know, at least my reporting hasn't shown that they are trying to get the lockup reduced. the assumption is they are. devin nunes was on a show the other day, said there's been no conversations like that. people do have a duty. if i was a client of some of the bigger holdings, i'd be making a phone call, and saying, why? what is it about that you think is going to appreciate, particularly for folks that bought in last week when it started trading as djt. >> yeah. so many questions. dan, thank you. fascinating sty.
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time for the final trade. let's go around the horn. karen? >> yes, so, we've had this meaningfully big move in rates, i think it's time to cover some tlt, maybe get a chance later to put it back out again. >> dan? >> yeah, i like that google conversation. what you think about it, if you were to get a dividend, that would be something, but i wouldn't love to see a buy-back. but that looks like it could be off to the races with any good news. >> guy? >> big sports night, mel, as you know. we talked about. the rangers are playing. >> we got basketball -- >> that's exact -- karen knows.
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>> of course i know. >> the lsu tigers are taking on the hawkeyes of iowa tonight. that's must watch tv. i'll be watching. exxonmobil. everybody loves it now. >> thank you for watching "fast." see you back here tomorrow at 5:00 for more "mad money" with jim cramer starts right now. my mission is simple, to make you money. i'm here to level the playing field for all investors. there's always a bull market somewhere, and i promise to help you find it. "mad money" starts now. hey, i'm cramer. welcome to mad money. welcome to cramerica. other people make friends. i'm just trying to make you a little money. my job not just to entertain, but to educate, teach. call me at 1-800-743-cnbc newsom. or tweet me at tumad money. that was the
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