Stocks were brutalized Friday in a way we haven’t seen in ages. Everything except some downtrodden consumer packaged goods stocks, led by the resurgent PepsiCo , was slaughtered. The headwinds were enormous and came from disparate places. Bond yields came down huge, something that equity markets normally greet with tremendous relief and price-to-earning multiple expansion. Instead, we got multiple contraction and a flight from pretty much everything, including crypto, into Treasurys. Gold hung in, but these days nothing seems to correlate with gold — except the sun coming up. The cadence of Friday’s session was downright disastrous and incredibly depressing: an eerily up opening for most stocks, led by the data center group — the new safe and sounds? — only to be hit by an 18-wheeler of a post by President Donald Trump on Truth Social. The note rambled, it shocked, and, most importantly, it blew up what we thought was a U.S.-China detente that had simply been tested earlier in the week by Beijing’s tightening of export rules for rare earth minerals . There have been so many tests that we just presumed this is another needless sticking point that the Chinese might be willing to give up on when the trade talks start in earnest. But because of it, and its belligerent timing, coinciding with what looks to be a successful ending to the Israel-Hamas war orchestrated by the president, Trump had had enough. Time to walk away. This weekend, the Chinese urged more negotiation, but we don’t know if the China hawks in the Trump administration — led by the lately unseen Peter Navarro — are in ascendance, or whether the pragmatists — led by a very busy Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and a momentarily obscured Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick — are still in control. I can’t tell if Beijing’s mineral restrictions got Trump so steamed that he threatened to cancel a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping planned for later this month in a fit of pique, or if he senses that, at last, he has the cards, as he likes to say. The Chinese, he believes, need our market now more than ever. There’s been no improvement in their real economy despite a stock market that seems manipulated higher, a la 2016. Their winning stocks are out of sync with what makes the Chinese economy tick, which is exports to the U.S. and Europe, both of which are slowing down, although the former much more than the latter. But judging from the slowdown in German car sales in China that we saw last week , you have to wonder whether Europe will start saying no to Chinese auto imports. If they have any preservation instincts, the Chinese could be even more stymied. Given that there’s been no fix of the myriad real estate issues that are at the heart of China’s $8 trillion problem , they are more vulnerable than we think. Sure, they have an ascendant semiconductor industry, but the president himself buys into the theme that everything should be built on Nvidia’s “chassis,” as CEO Jensen Huang told us our special October Monthly Meeting. Trump’s pledge to implement an additional 100% tariff on Chinese imports , starting Nov. 1, could truly do damage to China. That’s true, even if Trump said in a Truth Social post that he does not want to hurt China . At the same time, the president believes the timing of a non-negotiable tariff, always a possibility, is right for our American companies. Remember, he believes he made it clear in his first term it was time for U.S. firms to start moving their supply chains out of China. Those who haven’t moved will just have to take the hit. Fewer and fewer of our companies still make things or take things from there, except companies like the dollar stores and Wayfair , though the furniture retailer has reduced its exposure to China versus 2019 levels during Trump’s first trade war. Dollar Tree has an investor day Wednesday. The stocks of all the dollar stores and Wayfair have been rolling over because of a margin squeeze, which seems to matter more, at last, than their status as a place where the struggling “have-nots” shop. To me, Club name Costco is the better bet if you’re looking for a stock that benefits from shoppers hunting for value. Costco finally started rallying after those better-than-expected September sales numbers last week. The market turned on Costco after a perceived miss last quarter . I say perceived because the quarter was fine versus every other retailer, but it is in the high-multiple dog house for the moment. The rare earth minerals do matter. The president has tried to find rare mineral substitutes outside of China and when he does , like with MP Materials , the stocks act like rockets. Last week, we saw it with Trilogy Metals . We don’t have much of an option yet to make up for Chinese supply because the Chinese had, brilliantly, held the prices for the minerals below the cost of production in our country. So, the potential U.S.-China talks might still be on depending upon the severity of the dependence. I am well aware that, without further negotiations, it is not a terrific setup for Club holdings with meaningful China exposure. That group primarily consists of Apple , Boeing , Nike and Starbucks . They were all particularly painful in Friday’s trading. I think the selling already is overdone, especially because the Chinese said this weekend that they want the talks to continue. Each of the four has an escape hatch from the bears. Apple always faces trouble, but does Beijing want all manufacturing to go to India? Boeing also could be hurt, but Airbus isn’t building more than expected. Nike said this summer that 16% of the footwear it imports into the U.S. is from China, and perhaps some of that could be redirected to serve the Chinese market. Meanwhile, Starbucks is fielding bids for half of its Chinese business. As for Nvidia, whose market-leading AI chips remain a geopolitical football, Jensen reiterated during the Club meeting that China sales aren’t baked into its guidance, and the stock is cheap even without them. We didn’t set out to be a China fund, and we aren’t. But we do have too much exposure to China and a good manager has to admit when he is on the wrong side of the trade — for now. We are not a hedge fund. We are not trading in and out of stocks of companies we like. We are also not wishful thinkers. We know not all stocks work out over time. But consider this: There are two outcomes here. One is that we “lose” China as a market to sell things in retaliation for the 100% tariffs. The other is that China blinks and gives in. The decline Friday built in a lot of the first and none of the second. Again, to focus on our portfolio, when you think about China targeting Apple, you have to remember that they would be truly cutting off their noses to spite their faces because Apple is a valued employer in the country. They know that if they push too hard, India with its younger population beckons. Sure, India is as mercantile as China. They do go hand and hand — until they don’t, because they are much more transactional than ideologically based. The more Apple moves production to India, the lower the overall tariff rate that Apple has to eat, as it still makes some goods in China destined for us. Aside from Nike’s efforts to diversify its supply chain, the Chinese market is a problem for the company, as CEO Elliott Hill told CNBC the other day . Starbucks is going to sell a piece of its China business, and there are multiple interested buyers, according to media reports . The Chinese can’t wean themselves off of Boeing airplanes even if they tried, and they keep trying with minimal success. Where do I net out? I like these stocks here and want to buy more of all of them if they go lower and our trading restrictions let us. I sense emotional selling, and I want to take the other side of that. Concerns about supply But let’s be very clear: I don’t want to take the other side of the decline in the speculative stocks. We have to spend some time here because I support owning speculative stocks, in general, but not at this moment. In my new book, “How to Make Money in Any Market,” I offer a program of owning five individual stocks, with one — or two, if you are younger — being of the speculative variety. The reason for that suggestion is because of the long history of good individual stocks clobbering the S & P 500 . But the speculation gets very difficult when the buzzy companies with red-hot shares wise up and start offering stock in institutional-sized pieces when they have been bid up by retail buying. We have a lot of chatty billionaires who have been telling us that this move has been like 2000, the year the dot-com bubble burst. The move has been more reminiscent of a sped-up version of the 1998-99 period, sped up because retail just never quit. But last week we dipped our toe in 2000 territory with the $2 billion equity offering from IonQ , the quantum computing firm. Here’s company with a small revenue ramp that is losing hundreds of millions of dollars. It had an ample cash position, but management is not a bunch of dummies. It knows that retail enthusiasm for the stock has given it an opportunity of a lifetime — shares have more than tripled since Trump paused his “reciprocal” tariffs in April. Interestingly, management issued a statement on Friday that included this: “We believe this is the largest common stock single institutional investment in the history of the quantum industry.” The company, led by the affable and able Niccolo de Masi, says it is five years ahead of all the others in the industry. De Masi was also ahead of everyone else in raising capital and he did so in a clever way. Rather than just issuing easily shortable common stock, you got a lot of warrants with it. That makes the stock harder to understand, an anathema to the shorts. The deal seems to have been bought by an outfit called Heights Capital Management. They are a PIPE dealer, meaning that they buy stock at a big discount to the last sale, sometimes shorting the stock ahead of time. PIPE is short for private investment in public equity. We do not know the circumstances behind the IonQ sale here. What matters is that the company is issuing a ton of shares and we don’t know what Heights Capital, an entity managed by Susquehanna, will do with them. No matter what they do, though, the point is that secondary stock has been issued like the profitless companies of 2000. Now, IonQ is one of the better ones I was expecting to offer stock. I have had them on “Mad Money,” and they seem very legitimate. But it was up more than 70% this year when it announced the deal. Therein lies the problem. If a stock is up a lot, and its move was on the back of retail traders, then it is too dangerous to own going forward because of the potential for underwriting. Moreover, if we get a huge mount of deals, it is going to hurt a market that has done well because there hasn’t been much new supply. I often talk about how important the basic laws of supply and demand are for the market. When there’s not a lot of new supply being created, that creates upward pressure on prices. In other words, we could recreate what happened beginning in 2000, if this keeps up. It is the most dangerous part of the market. I am calling the group the “Denizens of Sherwood Forest,” and we need to watch this list because if there are many more IonQs, they will bleed into the other part of the stock market. The real part. Think about these stocks as favorites of the Robinhood crowd. (As the folklore goes, the legendary Robin Hood character lived in England’s Sherwood Forest.) To become a Denizen of the Sherwood Forest, the stock has to be up a great deal; be losing gobs of money; and have a market cap above $1 billon. These are the dot-com stocks of this era. They are worth ringing the register on now because of the “success” of the IonQ deal. They are all candidates for secondary offerings, and if that happens, shareholders will be inundated with new stock. Going industry by industry, here is a breakdown (year-to-date performance as of Friday’s close): Quantum Rigettii Computing : 188% D-Wave Quantum : 293% Crypto mining data center IREN : 509% Cipher Mining : 266% CleanSpark : 109% Crypto treasury companies Eightco Holdings : 349% BitMine Immersion : 573% Brera Holdings : 106% (last month, it announced plans to change its name to Solmate) Alternative energy Plug Power : only 60% (its cash on hand has declined dangerously in recent years) Bloom Energy : 291% (slightly profitable on an adjusted basis last quarter, and it could use cash) EOS Energy : 184% SES AI : only 38% (but it generates tiny amounts of revenue and is losing a colossal amount) Rare Earths USA Rare Earth : 184% Critical Metals : 121% NioCorp Developments : 570% United States Antimony Corp : 590% Biotechs uniQure : 248% (the gene-therapy firm already completed a secondary offering in late September) Mineralys Therapeutics : 243% (there was sizable insider buying last month) Intellia Therapeutics : 118% Grail : 271% Immatics : 46% Space Planet Labs : 264% Ambiguous AI Diginex : 4,582% (completed an 8-for-1 forward split last month) Mercurity Fintech Holding : 238% Innodata : 111% Churchill Capital Corp : 114% (this is a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC) Nuclear OKLO : 593% Nuscale Power : 119% Energy Fuels : 297% Neocloud data center Nebius : 368% Now there are others. This is not exhaustive. And there are smaller ones. But these are the companies that should do gigantic secondary stock sales. If they do, and if they flood the market, then we will be deluged with stock and I don’t know if it can be contained to the Sherwood Forest. I would tell you this: One of the untold stores of 2000 is a radical shift to the Coca-Colas and Bristol Myers of the world. Of course, this time those stocks have powerful forces against them in GLP-1s and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s top health official. So, keep track of these. Know that these are the real enemy — not the data center plays with real businesses; not the “Magnificent Seven” constituents, no matter how poorly Club name Amazon trades; or the resilient banks. It’s third-quarter earnings season starting this week. That will become front and center, but new supply is what I worry about because demand is soft and supply could be very large. (See here for a full list of the stocks in Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust.) As a subscriber to the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. Jim waits 45 minutes after sending a trade alert before buying or selling a stock in his charitable trust’s portfolio. If Jim has talked about a stock on CNBC TV, he waits 72 hours after issuing the trade alert before executing the trade. THE ABOVE INVESTING CLUB INFORMATION IS SUBJECT TO OUR TERMS AND CONDITIONS AND PRIVACY POLICY , TOGETHER WITH OUR DISCLAIMER . NO FIDUCIARY OBLIGATION OR DUTY EXISTS, OR IS CREATED, BY VIRTUE OF YOUR RECEIPT OF ANY INFORMATION PROVIDED IN CONNECTION WITH THE INVESTING CLUB. NO SPECIFIC OUTCOME OR PROFIT IS GUARANTEED.
There’s a brewing risk to the stock market rally — and it’s not the flare-up in China trade tensions
You may also like
About the author
