Retail Sales Slump, The Trump Trade, Gamestop’s Crypto Ambitions 02/14/25

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Jim Cramer (0:44)

It's Jim Cramer here. You're listening to the opening bell of CNBC's Squawk on the Street. Don't miss a minute of the action.

Carl Quintanilla (0:56)

Good Friday morning. Welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Carl Quintanilla with Leslie Picker, Mike Santoli, a Post 9 of the New York Stock Exchange. Cramer and Faber have the morning off. Pre-market pretty steady. S&P on track for a positive week, but yields a bit lower here, as we get the worst drop in monthly retail sales in nearly two years. 10 years back below four and a half ahead of that long holiday weekend. Our road map this morning goes with the trade trade. Investors continuing to digest delayed tariff plans from the president as we close out this third week of the new administration.

Leslie Picker (1:26)

Plus shares of Airbnb and Roku surging after earnings beats, Moderna, Palo Alto and AMAC heading in the opposite direction will break down all the movers of the morning, including GameStop, which is considering investing in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, shares moving higher ahead of the open.

Carl Quintanilla (1:46)

Let's get right to the markets. S&P is coming off the best performance in about a month, Mike. We had a couple of losing weeks. We're going to try to repair some of that, although we had a discussion yesterday about seasonals and what the rest of February is going to look like.

Mike Santoli (1:59)

Yes. It turns a little bit less favorable. I think the way I would characterize that is with such a strong start to the year. By the way, the S&P is up just about 4% year to date already. We're six weeks into it or so. It's got a pretty good head start is if you do see some choppiness, if you have some give back in the latter part of February thereafter, you shouldn't consider it abnormal. In other words, just take it in stride because we're due for something like that. Doesn't mean it's going to come. I do think the action yesterday was interesting in the sense of the market constantly reveals its preference when it comes to these policy choices. And the market says the better time for tariffs is later if we have to have them and lower if they're going to happen. Never preferably I think is probably where they would net out. But it just seemed as if this deferral of this idea of reciprocal tariffs was enough to get a lift in the overall indexes. Look, earnings have been good enough.

They've moved the chains in terms of annual earnings growth. I think that the general equilibrium of growth and inflation is still acceptable. Bad retail sales today, I still think the market could be sensitive to growth scare inputs in the latter part of this quarter. But all that put together and you revisit the old highs. That's basically what we did in the S&P. It's doing it the hard way. Like only 60% of stocks are really in an uptrend right now. And yeah, the broader market's doing better than the mega caps over a multi-month period, but it doesn't mean that everything's working.

Leslie Picker (3:23)

Yeah, and to your point, the lack of clarity seen as a positive for stocks, at least in the short term. My question to you, Mike, is whether or not, because it seems like the broader read is essentially you've got 200 countries that you're gonna be talking about dealing with with reciprocal tariffs, which each have their own tariff schedule. They each have their own regulations. They each have their own tax implications that you have to look at. So this is a humongous project. And then the other idea is that perhaps he's leaving the door open for further negotiations as we saw with Columbia, as we saw with Canada and Mexico. So if you get to April 1st, and none of that has really happened, and they were able to kind of come up with these reciprocal tariffs, is that a net negative for these markets? Or-