- It was soup to nuts on Tuesday: U.S. stock indexes rose then tumbled as investors swallowed down a mix of news on tariffs, parsed carve outs for technology, and tracked corporate earnings and moves from China. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, S&P 500, and the Nasdaq all slid following gains early in the day.
The markets were a lumpy mixed bag on Tax Day as the major U.S. indexes processed jarring headlines about China targeting aircraft manufacturer Boeing amid the appearance of positive signals from Bank of America, Citigroup, and Netflix.
Markets have been on a rollercoaster ride since President Trump announced a slew of tariffs on April 2, before ultimately issuing a 90-day pause just one week later. Since then, investors have poured into safe-haven assets and gold prices have hit all-time-highs. Meanwhile, the U.S. Dollar Index is up roughly 0.5% after it plunged to a three-year-low on Monday.
Bank of America stock rose more than 3% after beating Wall Street estimates related to earnings-per-share and revenue. Citigroup was up 1.8%. Netflix, meanwhile, was up nearly 5% and was one of the notable movers of the day. But Boeing dropped more than 2% after news broke that China would halt deliveries of Boeing-manufactured airplanes.
Bank of America analyst Ronald Epstein described the move as “unsustainable” in a note to investors on Tuesday.
“When considering balances of trade, we think the Trump Administration can’t ignore Boeing,” Epstein wrote.
The day-to-day fluctuations in the stock market during the past few weeks have shown that trade policy has a significant impact on the macro economy, inflation expectations, and expectations for economic growth, Shelly Antoniewicz, chief economist at the Investment Company Institute, told Fortune.
“You can tell every time there’s been a change or a major new announcement on tariff policies that that very information very quickly feeds into the stock market,” Antoniewicz said. Investors are looking to interpret all the new information rolling out as to how it will impact corporate profits, employment, the macro economy and inflation, she said.
For instance, tech stocks showed mixed performance on Tuesday as investors sifted through the tariff pause and the tariffs still in place. Apple and Nvidia ended the day in the green even as Amazon dropped 1.6%.
Eric Compton, director of equity research for the technology sector at Morningstar, told Fortune he expects the current tariff reprieve to be short-lived.
“Over the longer term, our view is that it is likely a goal of the administration to target industries viewed as important to national security with tariffs, and likely other measures, to try and move those supply chains away from China,” Compton said. “Key items such as servers, computers, and smartphones would fit squarely within that broad category that is likely to be targeted.”
“Therefore, we would expect the current tariff reprieve to be temporary,” he added.
