Monday Takeaways: The Untold Story Behind Last Week’s Panic

Shah Gilani|April 14, 2025

The S&P just took a 9.5% nosedive before bouncing back.

Bond yields spiked.

The dollar got hammered.

This isn’t a correction, people – it’s a crash opportunity.

While the talking heads debate what caused last week’s bloodbath, smart money is already positioning for the next move.

Goldman crushed earnings despite the chaos, with equity trading revenue hitting $4.19 billion.

But we’re not out of the woods yet.

With Fed Chair Powell speaking Wednesday, China’s GDP numbers dropping, and tariff uncertainty hanging over everything, this week could determine where markets head for the rest of 2025.

Strap in – things are about to get interesting.

Click on the thumbnail below to check out today’s video.

Transcript:

Hey everybody,

Shah Gilani here with your Monday Takeaways.

It is a good morning for the markets today, so far.

We’re going to have to wait and see.

There are an awful lot of takeaways from last week.

The S&P 500 ended up slightly more than 5%, notwithstanding a 9.5% jump on Wednesday.

That tells you how bad things were on Monday and Tuesday. One trader called Wednesday’s move “the mother of all short covering moves.”

Thursday morning didn’t look so good. Friday, a nice comeback.

So for the week, the S&P 500 ended up 5%.

I’m going to go right to the chart, because we’re not out of the woods.

This is a 1-year chart of the S&P 500.

This is the channel we were in.

If I roll this back to a 3-year chart, you get a picture of the bull market.

Now, I could extend these down all the way, and you could see this is the bull market we’ve been traveling higher.

This isn’t a breakdown, people. This is a crash.

Going back to the 1-year chart, the takeaway from last week is that we’re nowhere.

We are basically trying to recover from this absolute cliffhanger of a week and a half.

Where are we going to go from here?

Well, we’re up a little bit more today.

Let’s say the S&P 500 finishes the day at the highs from where we are in the futures right now. So maybe we get up 2%.

I’m going to give you a better number off of the charts.

Let’s say we end up at $5,454 – $5,455.

Let’s go with $5,500 based on the futures, right?

$5,500 people is only here.

The top of this bar, which is April 3rd, is the high there is $5,499.

We pretty much only get to the top of that bar.

We’re still below this.

This is now resistance right along here ($5,520 or so). We’re nowhere close to the 200-day moving average.

The problem markets are going to have, in my opinion, is what will bring money in from the sidelines?

Yes, it looks like there are some buying the dip.

Yes, retail is stepping in.

Yes, there are some positive inflows at the end of last week.

Yes, that money will be put to work.

Net-net, the NASDAQ was up +7% last week. So, investors are looking for bargains.

And you see down here, way down here (at the recent lows), we certainly got very oversold. But then had a quick pop back up.

Now, as far as takeaways go, things were so volatile that the bond market was in upheaval last week on Monday and Tuesday.

As stocks were sinking, bonds were sinking. They should have been a flight to quality.

So, the 10-year yield kept rising. Wednesday, when we had the rally, the 10-year yield kept rising. Bond prices kept sinking.

There’s a problem with the bond market, and it’s pretty ugly.

When you’re looking at the bond market and trying to figure out what is going on, a lot of questions remain.

What actually caused it? And believe me, I read just about everything I can get my hands on, last week, this weekend, this morning.

Here’s what happened.

This is TLT. This is the 20-year Treasury ETF.

This is just devastating. So when the 10-year loses, pops 50 basis points in yield in a week, something is really going on.

It could be hedge funds unwinding a basis trade, unwinding their swaps trades, China selling treasuries to punish the United States, or Japan.

All of these rumors. We don’t have any hard data.

I think the basis trade is a large culprit. The basis trade, in sum total, is probably close to $1 trillion.

So there’s a lot of action, a lot of unwinding there, if things go the wrong way for those traders.

That to me was the culprit.

I don’t think China is ready to sell yet. By the way, they don’t need to sell. They don’t need to sell into a down market.

They will simply let their treasuries mature, get their principal back, and maybe not buy any more.

But the bond market disruptions last week were pretty ugly.

Also, what was disturbing last week and what’s been disturbing is that the dollar has been hammered.

Is this a question of US exceptionalism going downhill, maybe out for now?

I’m calling it on ice. I don’t think US exceptionalism is over by any stretch of the imagination.

But the dollar getting hit as hard as it’s been getting hit against a broad spectrum of currencies is quite problematic.

For the most part, when you’re looking at the dollar getting hit, that means commodity prices are going up because it takes more dollars to buy a commodity.

That’s why oil bounced at the end of the week. We’ll see where that goes.

So, the big takeaway is with all this unrest across the dollar market, the foreign exchange market, across the bond market, and equities is trying to get back to some semblance of, “Okay, we’re safe here.”

It’s probably going to be another tough week.

So guess what? You have to be careful out there.

A couple of things…

Goldman Sachs’ earnings today were great.

We can’t fault their traders – their fantastic equity and trading revenue achieved $4.19 billion versus an expected estimate of $3.8 billion.

Overall revenue hit $15.06 billion in the quarter against estimates of $14.76 billion. They hit it out of the park pretty much across the board.

Investment banking fees weren’t that great. Those didn’t come close to estimates, and that’s a problem.

But there’s something in between the good news, which private equity and private credit are sustaining the deal-making business, not public deal-making.

That means that this stuff is going off balance sheet.

In other words, we’re not seeing where the risks are because the deals that are being done are being done with private equity companies using private credit to finance deals.

So that’s a bit worrisome. That’s something to keep an eye on.

Last thing I’ll say about Goldman is they earmarked $40 billion for buybacks.

That should put a floor under Goldman.

So as far as Goldman goes, the stock had a nice pop earlier, but it’s given back some of that big number.

When we open, we’ll see how it goes. It’s up in the pre-market 2.5%. That’s close to the highs where we were a little earlier when earnings first came out.

But as far as Goldman goes, this is ugly.

So can Goldman recover? Can the banks recover? We got more banks coming up.

We got a lot of earnings this week.

We got LVMH later today. That’s going to be telling as far as what they say about tariffs. So that’s an interesting one.

Tuesday, we got Citibank. We got Bank of America.

We’ve got United Airlines. That’s going to be a big one on Tuesday, people. And we got Johnson & Johnson.

Also, on Wednesday, Fed Chairman Powell speaks.

Will he disrupt the markets?

Will he try to calm the markets?

What will he say?

Will he say anything of consequence?

Everyone’s going to be listening to him. He speaks at the Economic Club of Chicago.

China’s first-quarter GDP comes out on Wednesday. That’s going to be interesting.

Many people are watching that one, and you better be watching that one as well.

Wednesday, ASML, US Bancorp, Travelers, CSX, and Alcoa all report earnings.

Let’s see what Alcoa says about the tariffs on their call on Wednesday.

Thursday, we got Taiwan Semiconductor.

We’ve got American Express, Netflix, Blackstone, and Schwab among the earnings reports coming up this week.

Friday, the markets are closed.

So on that note, I’m going to close out.

Just be careful out there.

I know I’m getting boring when I say that, but we’re not out of the woods.

Generally speaking, when markets make a low, they often want to test that low.

Are we going to test that low right back here in the S&P?

A lot of that has to do with the tariffs picture, whether some of these exemptions last or whether they get a haircut.

And at this point, there are some analysts saying that maybe we’ve seen peak China tariffs.

Why?

Because the president on Friday pulled back on tariffs, a pause on consumer electronics, and some chips. And he says, “Well, no. We’re not done. We’re just going to pause.”

And that was probably from Apple pushing, and why not?

We don’t know where tariffs are going to go. It’s still a matter of uncertainty.

If we test these lows, probably time to buy more. That’s it.

Hope you guys stay safe out there.

I’ll catch you next Monday.

Cheers, everybody.