From Panic to Profit - 3 Big Moves

**Dave** (0:02)
Most of the new tariffs are paused for now. The stock market had a historic jump yesterday. Most exciting of all, we got to witness the art of the deal firsthand. Apparently, all along, Donald Trump's plan was to announce nonsense tariffs to the whole world, including uninhabited penguin islands, call them friendly, discounted, reciprocal tariffs, ignore real tariff data, have Chad GPT do some math based on trade deficits, then sit back and watch the stock market crash, the bond market crash, his own party and advisors publicly turn on him, wait for CEOs to speak up, wait for Bill Ackman to freak out, for countries to bail on bonds, then when a rumor on X says that he's considering a 90-day pause and that causes the market to jump, issue a statement calling that fake news only to announce two days later that he actually had been planning a 90-day pause all along. But of course, before you announce the pause, be sure you post on Trumpy Social that it's a good day to buy and give cover to insiders who might have loaded up on some zero DTE spy calls that morning. That, my friends, was the art of the deal. Today on Dumb Money, we're going to tell you how we're playing it from panic to profit, with our three big moves.

**Chris** (1:00)
This is Dumb Money Live.

**Dave** (1:05)
Hey there, Dave here along with Chris and Jordan. We are Dumb Money. Welcome to Dumb Money Live. A quick reminder to smash the like button. It really does help us out with the almighty algorithm. Chris, Jordan, good morning. We're in tariff pause mode, of course.
That does not pause the 120% new tax on stuff we buy from China, which to me sounds like more art of the deal nonsense. There's no way we're going to actually be paying 125% long term on stuff we buy from China. But what do you think?

**Chris** (1:32)
Yeah, first of all, admittedly, I did not handle the last week really well.
I made a critical error a week ago. I've been thinking about this administration for a while and how this would play out with tariffs. And my assumption was that Trump would cave a lot quicker than he did. So I had initially not really hedged my account aggressively because I thought that he would almost immediately cave. He...

**Dave** (2:07)
And you and I had a disagreement on that because I thought that he was going to let these go into effect. I didn't realize how quickly he was going to undo it after letting it go into effect. But you thought he was never going to even let that midnight tariff hit, right?

**Chris** (2:22)
I thought he was going to cave, honestly, multiple days before he did. And that was a huge error on my part. I lost a lot of money. Then I had to place my hedge late, which was really expensive, cost me a ton of money to put that hedge on late. Then, when he did cave, I sent that text to our group chat on Sunday night, saying that he can't lose this much longer, right? I said he cannot handle losing and he's going to cave, yet I didn't have enough confidence in that to take that huge hedge off. And I had such a massive hedge going into yesterday, from the evening before, as you recall, which was set to work beautifully until, it looks like Japan, China, maybe one or two other countries, crashed the bond market and forced him to cave yesterday morning. I should have listened to his tweet, like other people did.

**Dave** (3:32)
Yeah, so were you not live trading his tweets yesterday? Because when he said, be cool, I took my hedge off, because I was also hedged. I had spy puts. When he said, today's a good day to buy, I got back into my triple leveraged QQQ in my retirement account, which I had sold out as the market was falling apart, worked out beautifully.

**Chris** (4:01)
Why didn't you text me on that?

**Dave** (4:02)
Why would I need to text you? The president texted you directly.

**Chris** (4:05)
I just, I got to a point where I didn't know what to believe.

**Dave** (4:10)
That's what I've learned. My biggest learning of this is to, when the president says buy, buy. I'm going to next time put $1,000 into zero DTE options on the spy, anytime that Trumpy social account says buy.

**Chris** (4:29)
I listen, it's just a gamble.

**Dave** (4:32)
It's not an investment, it's a gamble. And I did see, I don't know if you saw this, but there were some zero DTE options that were trading for one cent, four hours before the announcement. If you had just bought those in the morning when he said to chill out and it's a good day to buy, that $1,000 trade would be worth $1.5 million. It would have basically undone all of this tariff nonsense in my account.