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Why Trump tariffs have made it impossible to pick stocks

  • April 6, 2025

This is The Takeaway from today's Morning Brief, which you can sign up to receive in your inbox every morning along with:

"Come on, WTF."

For whatever reason, I remember jumping out of my chair to scream that out as a sub-30-year-old stock analyst literally working on Wall Street (I didn't say WTF...). Since I was known as a real intense person that most people left alone because they were fearful of interrupting, I think my outburst surprised the team.

I then proceeded to go to the bathroom, get on the elevator, pick up a Red Bull, and head to the palatial New York Sports Club (the chain has since gone bust) across from the New York Stock Exchange to pound out 100 bench presses and 100 bicep curls.

30 minutes later, I returned to my desk a little calmer but not much (but more swoll, of course).

This was early days of the Great Financial Crisis, and yours truly had coverage of hot steaming piles of you know what in Lehman Brothers (ticker: LEH) and Washington Mutual (ticker: WM). The job (pre-crisis) basically entailed digging into financial statements, plugging numbers into Excel, coming up with price targets that fit my thesis (aka convoluted view of the world), and then communicating all of this stuff to clients.

I also had coverage of 57 retailers (it was a small shop where you cut your teeth by covering a ton of companies), ranging from Walmart ( WMT ) to Target ( TGT ) to Sears Holdings (ticker: SHLD) to Coach (now Tapestry ( TPR )). The spreadsheet exercises were similar for conducting analysis on these companies too.

It was fun times, until it wasn't.

Seemingly every day the stock prices of well-known companies went down not a little, but Trump-style bigly . Every day, seas of red on my trading screen. Everything red. Everything despair. All of it breathtaking. All of it so hard to understand. And all of it a test of one's physical and mental strength. You did not go home at the peak of the crisis; at least I didn't — I just slept in our boardroom.

Some 13 years later and now a journalist and manager, I recall this after living through another full-on market meltdown this week . The circumstances are very different. I don't think President Trump has triggered a global financial crisis with bruising tariffs . But what he has caused is a reset of the investing process.

"It's impossible to pick stocks right now," one Wall Street source told me.

That person is right. Apple ( AAPL ) is a good company. Lots of recurring revenue, gazillions in hardware sales each year. CEO Tim Cook is a best-in-class operator. The stock is well off its highs amid Trump tariff worries.

OK