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Wall Street’s Tariff Jackpot: A 1,000% Return and Zero Answers
- Marcus Nikos
- 1 day ago
- 7 min read
Wall Street’s Tariff Jackpot: A 1,000% Return and Zero Answers
$313 million That's how much A Minecraft Movie made in its opening weekend, the biggest video game film opening ever.
Markets whiplash as U.S. Treasury confidence collapses
Massive options bet sparks insider trading talk
Tariffs freeze U.S. businesses in their tracks
The Dollar Drops , Yields Spike, and Markets Whiplash — Investors Start to Ditch the U.S. Playbook
On Wednesday April 9, President Trump paused tariffs for most countries, setting off a euphoric rally. The S&P 500 surged nearly 10%, the Dow climbed almost 8%, and the Nasdaq was up 12%. The pause came just hours after the tariffs were first imposed. Trump framed the reversal as a show of strategic flexibility, saying people had gotten “a little bit yippy.” However, Trump singled out China and hiked its tariff to 145%, citing retaliation and a lack of cooperation. On Friday, China raised U.S. tariffs to 125%.
By Thursday afternoon, stocks fell again as investors sorted through a global economic outlook of uncertainty. The Nasdaq dropped 4.3%, the Dow fell 2.5%, and the S&P closed 3.5% lower. But by Friday, markets rallied once more on White House signals that Trump remained “optimistic” about a potential deal with China — sending the S&P up 1.8%, the Dow up 1.6%, and the Nasdaq up just over 2%.
What triggered Trump’s sudden tariff pause? Despite public denials that the bond market was the motivating factor, Trump admitted he was glued to the screen watching yields spike. The reversal followed Trump admitting he watched an interview with Jamie Dimon forecasting a recession.
Beneath the rate swings was something deeper: a global loss of confidence in the United States.
For the first time in decades, both Treasury bonds and the U.S. dollar fell sharply during a crisis. That’s not normal. Typically, both rally as global investors seek safety.
Since last Tuesday, the dollar index is down 3.4%. Since mid-January, it’s fallen 9.2% — extraordinary by currency standards.
The 10-year Treasury yield jumped from under 4% last week to over 4.57%.
What it means: Global investors are no longer treating U.S. assets as a safe haven. Bonds and dollars are selling in sync with equities. In a note to clients, Deutsche Bank strategist George Saravelos said the market is “reassessing the U.S. dollar’s structural appeal as the world’s reserve currency.”
The root cause? Erratic leadership, ballooning deficits, and rapidly eroding diplomatic ties. In short: America looks unstable.
I stand on tariffs where I’ve always stood: They’re the most elegant way to reduce prosperity… but what happened this past week was unlike anything I’ve ever seen. It was GameStop, but for the entire market. We saw $1.5 trillion added to the Magnificent Seven in one session. And the next day, a thousand-point drop. That is not a market. That is not investing. That is just chaos. It’s not a market when the president of the United States’ X feed is the Federal Reserve, the Treasury Department, and the U.S. trade representative all rolled into one.
What are the implications of our stock market becoming a meme stock? One, we’ll see a huge surge in options trading — people making and losing huge amounts of money based not on the earnings of the economy, but on the posts of the spearhead of the movement, which is the president. Two, a massive influx of young investors drawn in by short-term volatility. And three — and this is the most important — our creditworthiness is going to collapse. Meme stocks all have junk ratings. And now we are putting the entire economy in that position.
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Wall Street’s Tariff Jackpot: A 1,000% Return and Zero Answers
Within hours of Trump’s tariff pause, trading desks lit up: Someone had made an enormous, ultraspecific bet that the market would spike — buying call options expiring that day. When the S&P soared, those zero-day options returned gains of nearly 1,000% on paper.
The timing was suspiciously perfect: Positions were placed just minutes before the tariff pause posts went live.
The strategy relied on knowledge of not just direction but also timing and magnitude — unusual even for high-risk traders.
Bloomberg flagged the trades, calling them the most lucrative zero-day options play on record.
SEC officials have launched a preliminary inquiry, but neither the trader’s identity nor their connection to policymakers has been revealed.
Just looking at that one trade — billions of dollars were made and lost. And it was obvious: Someone knew what was going to happen. When you have a family barred from serving on nonprofit boards because of corruption — and a president who is a convicted felon — you have to ask: Is it really that far-fetched to think he might’ve called a few donors, friends, or insiders and said, “FYI, wink wink, the markets might go up today”?
I think we’ll find — because in a digital world there will be receipts — that April 9 goes down as the greatest day of insider trading in U.S. history. People were trading on nonpublic, material information. That’s market manipulation. The entire point of a fair market is that there isn’t a group of connected elites operating with asymmetric advantage. Because if there is, people give up. They stop trusting the system. And when that happens, the cost of capital for everyone explodes. I believe we’ll learn the extent of this about a week after the next president is inaugurated. The SEC and forensic accountants will find that a lot of really bad stuff went down.
A call option is a financial contract that gives the buyer the right — but not the obligation — to buy a stock at a predetermined price, known as the strike price, before a set expiration date. It’s basically a bet that the stock will go up. If it does, you get to buy it cheap and pocket the gains. If it doesn’t, your only loss is the price you paid for the option — called the premium.
The strike price is the level the stock has to exceed to be “in the money.” The premium is what you pay to make that bet. Say the stock is trading at $100, and you buy a call option with a $110 strike for $5 — the stock needs to rise above $115 before you’re making a profit, since you’re covering both the strike price and the cost of the option.
Tariff Chaos Above, Economic Paralysis Below: How U.S. Business Froze Overnight
While markets rallied and crashed on tariff headlines, the underlying economy began to contract. Large companies are canceling projects, freezing spending, and laying off workers. Startups are pulling back. Hiring pipelines are drying up. A fog of uncertainty — over costs, supply chains, and regulatory direction — is leading to inaction across industries.
A few examples:
Microsoft canceled a $1 billion AI data center in Ohio and is scaling back chip investments previously championed by the White House.
Stellantis halted operations in Mexico and Canada and will temporarily lay off 900 workers in Michigan and Indiana as well as almost 4,500 hourly workers in Canada.
Amazon has begun canceling some merchandise orders from China following the new tariff hikes. CEO Andy Jassy warned consumers that prices on everyday items — including groceries and paper products — could surge, particularly for goods heavily reliant on imports and third-party sellers.
Audi halted all U.S. exports over new 25% tariffs, leaving 37,000 vehicles in inventory — enough for about 60 days of supply — while additional cars that arrived after April 2 are now stuck at ports.
Walmart issued a rare midquarter warning, citing “price volatility” linked to tariff exposure.
Hollywood is bracing after China pulled back on approving U.S. films. Last year, U.S. films earned $585 Million in China alone.
IPO market: Companies that had planned to go public in the first half of 2025, such as Klarna and StubHub, have quietly put those plans on hold.
But it's not just big corporations. Across the board, small and midsize businesses — especially those reliant on imports, logistics, or discretionary spending — are also scaling back and expressing concern.
In an open letter sent April 10 to the president and policymakers, 39 female leaders in the consumer goods space who collectively represent more than $800 million in annual revenue, asked for automatic exemptions to tariffs or a “permanent fast-track exclusion process for companies below a defined revenue or employee threshold.”
We’ve been thrust into this dynamic where the U.S. brand is now toxic uncertainty. It used to mean stability, rule of law, and predictability. Now it’s convulsion — “I like you, your tariff is zero. I don’t like you, it’s 145%.” Nobody knows how to plan their business. And when you don’t know what to do, you do nothing. That pause is a soft no. No hiring. No expanding. No bonuses.
And the cost of that isn’t just economic — it’s reputational. Foreign companies were planning to build plants here. Now they’re pressing pause. The IPO market is dead. We’ve gone from the most investable country on earth to a meme economy. This is what happens when you run trade and economic policy off vibes and vengeance instead of vision.
My brother-in-law is in business school. A professor told his class point-blank: “You’re not getting jobs next year.” That’s not a forecast. It’s a fact. The supply chain is buckling. Consumer confidence is sliding. And smaller businesses? They’ve stopped even pretending to plan for the future. They’re not hiring. They’re not producing. They’re not growing. We’ve kneecapped our own momentum — and this is just the beginning.
Trump will fold again: He plays terrible poker, and unlike China, which can endure economic pain, Americans won’t stomach $3,500 iPhones or half the number of toys under the Christmas tree. Xi sees Trump in the same way Logan Roy saw his kids: not serious people.
Yes, Trump paid for a full-page newspaper ad criticizing U.S. foreign policy in 1987
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