The WAR Is OVER??? To The Moon

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
Welcome to the Money Tree Investing Podcast. Stock market, wealth, personal finance, value stocks. Invest in your life.

**Kirk Chisholm** (0:12)
Hello, Smart Money Tree Podcast listeners. Welcome to this week's show. My name's Kirk Chisholm. I'll be your host, and today I'm joined with Doug Heagren. Hey, Doug.

**Douglas Heagren** (0:18)
How you doing, Kirk? Are you feeling good again? Everything's good, everything's behind us. It was all, matter of fact, it was all just a simulation.
There was a flip in the matrix. I don't know if you saw a black cat repeat itself. You remember that if you see a black cat flip twice, it means they reprogrammed the matrix.

**Kirk Chisholm** (0:37)
I did see that. I saw a war in the Middle East twice.

**Douglas Heagren** (0:40)
There you go. Obviously somebody was reprogramming the matrix, so you're gonna have to find a new exit.

**Kirk Chisholm** (0:45)
Yeah, I mean, we bombed the nuclear plant and tried to get rid of it, and everything was great. A few weeks later, we went to war. So yeah, that's the matrix. For all those of you tuning in live, this is done Friday. Apparently, the war is over, which for all intents and purposes, I'm not sure if it is, but the Strait of Hormuz is open, as far as we know, which means that global traffic will be coming in and out of Strait of Hormuz now, we think. But given the fact that the propaganda and the news coming out of the Middle East has been sketchy at best, I'm gonna reserve my thoughts till we're a little bit further down the line. However, the markets seem to agree and seem to like it, so most likely it's the case. But we've been hearing a lot of things up till now that have not necessarily been true, which we've talked about on the show, as to how that the fog of war is typically inaccurate. So the way the market is treating it, it seems like everything's fine, all clear. Strait of Hormuz is open, which is great. It's great for the rest of the world. It doesn't really impact us very much because the things that flow through there, mostly we don't need. Some things we do, but most of it we don't need. The rest of the world needs it. LNG and oil and things like that are really important. There's a lot of countries that have been having issues. Just to put things in context, I was listening to a great podcast earlier this week, and they were getting into more of the nitty-gritty detail of this, which I didn't know. The interesting part is, it takes about six weeks for the tankers to get to where they're going.
This week or next is when the oil shock really actually hits.
We're still going to have six weeks of this. For a lot of countries, and a lot of countries have actually struggled. And I think we talked about this last time, but there are a bunch of countries from the Philippines to India, to South Korea, and Egypt, to Malaysia. And they've all taken different tax as to how to handle the fuel crisis. Some are doing subsidies, some are rationing. Some have price caps or controls, demand reduction. There's a whole bunch of things. I'll share a chart here. This kind of shares some of the countries and what they've done. But a lot of the emerging market countries have struggled.
I think the challenge is when you're working with the global economy, many of which rely on the Strait of Hormuz, it becomes a problem. Now, I hope that this is wrapping up and that they're in true negotiations, not just the BS that we keep hearing. But we don't know.
We're not going to know until it's over. At this point, it seems like the market is going up.
I've been watching the market and everyone's really excited. Yet, the fundamentals haven't gotten any better.
And even before the war, things were going in a certain direction. And if you look at before the war, things were doing well were materials, industrials, financials, energy. And none of those are doing well now.
Has the economy fundamentally changed to cause those to not do well? Not really. Really, nothing's changed. I mean, the war has certainly changed things.
You know, if I look here today, the best-performing stocks, I mean, industrials are up 2%, consumer discretionary is up 3%, technology is up 1.5%, healthcare, actually, healthcare is up doing okay. Utilities are down quite a bit. The staples were down today, actually, now they're up. Materials are less than 1%.
So, if you're looking at this, at the start of today, it looked like the worst performers were industrials, energy, materials, utilities and staples, which is the exact opposite of what was happening before the war. So, I'm very curious to see what happens here. I'm curious to see if the dollar continues to drop, if the trends before the war continue, or if we have new trends where technology is leading again. I don't know why it would, but that may be the case. People might just say, whatever, tech or bust and just throw all their money in tech, which is where it seems like things are going. I think that's a very simplistic response. I don't think that will necessarily be the trend going forward, but it is now. So when you're looking at these markets, you really have to be nimble. And we talked about last week was patience and caution. This is exciting, but the markets are really overstretched. So when the market bottomed recently, a few weeks ago, it was overstretched to the downside. Now it's overstretched to the upside. And it doesn't mean it can't keep going up, but it does mean you should use caution. Don't just necessarily jump in willy-nilly and put it all in black and say, let it ride. Certainly sentiments out of Washington could change anytime. The market could wake up and say, okay, that's a little too much too fast. A lot of traders I know got out yesterday and just said, all right, took our profits and we're done. So there's a lot of people chasing this because they were offside, they were short the market, and now they need to cover their shorts and they need to go long. And that doesn't happen necessarily overnight. It can take a week or two and it's been about that. So I think at some point, we'll see some consolidation and we'll see either a slight pullback or we'll see it going sideways, both of which would be healthy. But the market always tends to do things that the least amount of people suspect, which means it's probably just going to keep going higher and people are going to be chasing it, which is part of the problem. But it's going to be a crazy year. So as I look through the charts and look through a lot of different areas in the markets, I can tell you one thing is that things are very messy. Things are very messy. The charts are a mess. There are very few clear charts. There's some, some of which we were in before the crisis, and we may have to get back in because they've started to go into the direction. But most of them got messed up because of the war, and it's going to be really hard to chart that. But some of them are still clean. Ideally, you want to focus on the clean ones, the messy ones, you're guessing. But we had earnings this week.