SOTS 2nd Hour: Trump Tariff Talk, Tepper’s New China Bets, and NFL Superagent Drew Rosenhaus 2/10/25

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Carl Quintanilla (0:44)

Market Moving Insight and Analysis join Jim Cramer, David Faber and me, Carl Quintanilla, on the opening bell hour of CNBC Squawk on the Street. Good Monday morning, welcome to another hour of Squawk on the Street. I'm Carl Quintanilla, along Scott Wapner, Leslie Picker here at Post Night of the New York Stock Exchange. David and Sarah have the morning off. Market weighing more tariff headlines. They continued solid earnings cycle and the fairly subdued yields this morning with the 10 years still south of four and a half. Energies carrying some water, oil's up a full dollar, but tech is also up 1%.

Leslie Picker (1:20)

We're 30 minutes into the trading session. Here's the movers we are watching at this hour. Steel and aluminum related stocks jumping on fresh tariff talk from President Trump. The details and the fallout in a moment. And shares of T-Mobile are rallying. The company's saying it started wide skill testing of its satellite to cell service powered by SpaceX's Starlink. Those shares up about 2.4% right now. And we're keeping an eye on meta shares. The company expected to begin job cuts as soon as today and coming off 15 straight days of gains. Currently up about a quarter of a percent. We'll see if they can hold on. More on this story ahead.

Carl Quintanilla (1:56)

Meantime, as far as markets go, tariff headlines do dominate the weekend as investors work through an increasingly murky outlook for inflation and rates. Ahead, Morgan Stanley writing, they now expect just one cut from the Fed this year. Our senior markets commentator Michael Santoli is here to break things down. I think B of A also said the window for cuts is basically shut, in their words.

Michael Santoli (2:16)

For the foreseeable. And that's one of the things the market is, I think, contending with in this stuck period, where we've basically been in this narrow range. The S&P 500 has traded plus or minus 3% since the November 6th close. That's it. So you've got one way or the other. If you look at things like the equal weighted S&P, if you look at the industrials, you look at the small caps, it's completely unwound, whatever expected kind of growth acceleration impulse you might have gotten policy-wise. But the market's held in there because it's okay if the Fed's on hold, if the here and now economy is all right.

No real alarm evident in credit markets in the volatility trade. Any of that's not showing any stress. But I do think it's fascinating that it's become a much more selective market. And the stuff that's working is having to do a little bit more to keep the indexes supported. Only about 60% of S&P 500 stocks are really in a technical uptrend right now. A lot of the cyclical groups outside of consumer are kind of flagging just a little bit. I don't know that it's just tariffs. I think it's just that almost everything we're seeing that's frontloaded in terms of policy is growth neutral or slightly negative. Whereas, you know, that kind of bedrock idea that it's going to be a growth-friendly policy mix and we're going to get some forms of tax relief down the road is kind of deferred at this point.

Leslie Picker (3:37)

Yeah, which seems to be counterintuitive relative to what happened during President Trump's first term, where we saw tax cuts kind of right off the bat and tariffs followed that later. What does that mean for some of the Trump trades that had been operating on that same playbook that then had to kind of reassess when they realized that the front-loaded policies were the ones that were, as you say, grew from the neutral or negative?

Michael Santoli (3:58)

Yeah, they mostly fizzled. So if you thought it was small caps, I mean, sell treasuries, maybe it was a Trump trade and the yields have gone higher, but they're well off their highs at this point. The market seems a little more sensitive to this idea that we might see more evidence of housing market being pretty paralyzed right now, a little bit more of the lagged effect of the higher rates that we saw in the fourth quarter for the broader economy. That's part of it. I mostly just look at the way the market behaves day to day. The last three Fridays, the S&P touched 6,100, didn't hold it, ended up down on the day. In fact, each high was lower than the previous one. You don't want to slice it too thin, but the market's kind of saying it's going to take an extra bit of oomph to get us to the next phase higher if in fact that's what's waiting for us.