The Rundown - Trump Tweaks Tariff Playbook, Retail Traders Pour $67B Into U.S. Stocks

Episode Date: March 25, 2025

Stock market update for March 25, 2025.

Public.com presents the rundown. Your daily market update in five minutes. My name is Zaid Admani, and today is Tuesday, March 25th. In today's episode, we discussed the latest tariff plans from the White House that as investors breathing a sigh of relief. We also tell you about the shake-up happening at Apple as a scramble to figure out AI. Then stick around to the end of the show to find out why Warren Buffett gave one of his employees a million dollars because he knew ball.

We got a great show for you today. Let's go. Markets got off to a great start this week. The S&P 500 jumped 1.8%. The NASDAQ was up 2.3%. The vibes were good on Monday. And all it took were reports that Trump is planning to scale back his tariff plans.

The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg reported that the Trump administration would hold off on doing wide-ranging tariffs, which is what the markets feared, it could lead to a trade war or higher inflation. Trump has been talking a big game for weeks now about reciprocal tariffs that are set to go into effect on April 2nd. He's called that day Liberation Day.

Well, now it looks like those tariffs are going to be much more narrower in scope. So the markets are breathing aside relief that the tariffs might not be so bad. One of the biggest winners on Monday was Tesla. The stock jumped over 11%, which was the best day since November 6th. That was the day after the election. Now, personally, I don't think that this is the end of the tariff drama just yet, because there still seems to be confusion on what the tariff plan will be going forward. Like on Monday, Trump said that he would have tariffs on specific industries like autos, pharma, lumber, and semiconductors. But then a couple hours later, the White House walked back those comments.

And then this morning, the Financial Times reported the administration still hasn't settled on a tariff approach. You know, there's still a lot of confusion, and I still have my guard up. The markets are sending a pretty clear signal to the president. They don't like tariffs. Anytime there's a report of tariffs being enacted, markets go down. And then when there's reports of tariffs not being so bad, markets go back up. But for now, I guess I'm going to enjoy the market rally. Let's run through some headlines.

Apple is having a bit of an internal crisis about AI. And they're shaking things up. The rollout of Apple intelligence has been pretty terrible. A lot of the features they showed off, been released yet, they keep delaying new features, and honestly, Apple Intelligence has become a punchline at this point. So Apple is putting a new person in charge. Mike Rockwell, he's taking over Siri and Apple Intelligence. Now, what's interesting is that Mike Rockwell was the dude who created the Vision Pro. I mean, I don't know if I'd call that a success either. I guess for the Vision Pro,

at least it shipped and it works, even though, you know, nobody really bought it. So they're hoping that Mike Rockwell can bring some of his innovations and ideas to, to Siri and Apple Intelligence. As an Apple fan, boy, I hope they can pull this off, but I'm also pretty skeptical because Apple has never been good with software. Siri has been bad for a decade. So I hope Apple starts taking AI seriously. Now, there was a report last night from Loop Capital

that Apple was in the process of buying $1 billion worth of Nvidia GPUs to accelerate their AI development. I guess that's a good start. Probably should have put that order in two years ago, but a better late than never. Now, despite all the drama around AI, it hasn't really hurt the stock too much. Yes, Apple stock is down around 10% this year, but every tech stock has had a sell off this year. And Apple currently is the most valuable company in the world.

In fact, it's the only company right now with a market cap of over $3 trillion. But yeah, I mean, if Apple can figure out AI, that is going to be huge. But right now, they seem to be too busy making useless buttons on the iPhone. I think I've used the camera control button four times in total, and three of those times it was by accident. Let's shift gears and talk about retail traders. People like you and me, we have been buying the dip over the last few weeks. Net inflows from individual investors into the U.S. stocks and ETFs reach $67 billion in 2025 so far. This is despite pros on Wall Street dumping their stocks.

There's been a lot of volatility throughout the first quarter of the year. We had the deep seek sell off in January, which wrecked the tech stocks. And then in February and March, there's been all the drama and uncertainty around tariffs. and all of that has spooked some institutional investors, which Bank of America says made their biggest cut ever to their U.S. equity allocations in March. So Wall Street seems to be dumping stocks. But retail investors, they are showing off their diamond hands.

A Goldman Sachs analysis showed that retail investors have been net sellers of U.S. stocks in just seven trading sessions, even though the S&P 500 has fallen 25 times so far this year. So retail investors, we are buying up the dip, and two of the biggest targets have been, Tesla and Invidio. J.P. Morgan said that retail investors bought $3.2 billion worth of Tesla stock last week and

$1.9 billion in Nvidia. So yeah, anyone that bought the Tesla dip last week is probably feeling pretty good right now. The stock has bounced back over 20%. And this dip buying isn't just coming from American investors. South Korean retail traders have invested a record $10.2 billion in U.S. equities through March 20th. And their favorite stocks have been Tesla, Nvidia, and Ballantir. You know, me personally, I've been doing some dip buying.

myself. I maxed out my Roth IRA and took advantage of the dip. If you haven't maxed out your Roth IRA for last year yet, you have until April 15th to do it. And if you don't have a Roth IRA set up, check out the public app. You can set one up pretty easily. We'll leave a link in the description so you can learn more. Let's talk about some stocks making moves today. Shares of Trump media, the parent company of Truth Social, are up big this morning after the company announced a partnership with crypto.com to launch a series of ETFs. Sounds like a Madlib's headline. Now, according to the press release, these ETFs will include a mix of cryptocurrencies and stocks with a Made in America focus. The ETFs are expected to launch

this year pending regulatory approval, and I got a feeling that's not going to be a problem for them. Now, I do think that an ETF that has a mix of crypto and stocks is interesting, so we'll see if this catches on. Shares of Trump media, ticker symbol, DJT, is up over 10% this morning in reaction to this news. But zooming out a bit, despite Donald Trump being the president, shares of DJT have lost 30% in value this year. No, Trump media doesn't make a lot of revenue, but this next company, ACHLO, makes zero dollars in revenue and their shares are falling this morning after the nuclear energy company posted a steeper annual loss compared to a year ago. The company reported a net loss of 72 cents per share in 2024, which was a lot more than the

47 cents a share of loss. reported in 2023. So this earnings report soured the mood for investors and shares of Aklo are down more than 5% this morning in reaction to these earnings. The company still has a market cap of over $3.5 billion, despite making $0 in revenue. That is very interesting. Let's wrap the show with a fun fact. Warren Buffett just gave one of his employees a million dollar prize because of March Madness. See, Warren Buffett runs an annual March Madness pool for all employees. of Berkshire Hathaway. And he gives out a million dollar prize

if any one of the employees' brackets meets a certain criteria. Now, previously that criteria was they would have to guess all 16 teams correctly that made it to the Sweet 16. But then nobody was able to do that for 10 years, so they changed the rules a little bit. This year, the requirement to win the million dollars

was to correctly guess 30 of the 32 games in the first round. And one of the employees pulled it off. This employee works at flight safety. It's a flight school owned by Berkshire Hathaway. I know it's super annoying hearing about other people's brackets, but if I ever pulled off something like that, I would never stop talking about it.

I would be insufferable. So shout out to this guy for winning the million bucks. He should just invest that money into Berkshire stock. Well, all right, guys, that's the rundown for today. Hope you guys enjoyed today's episode. If you did and you have like eight extra seconds, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple or Spotify. Vote in today's Spotify poll.

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