The Greed And Fear Tango: The Markets In April 2025

2025-05-04 10:10:00 ET

Summary

• The journey that the indices went through during the course of April 2025 has been extraordinary.
• As equities careened through April 2025 between panic and delirium, the other asset classes were surprisingly staid, at least on the surface, starting with the US treasuries.
• In the coming months, we will see whether the last three weeks of April were an aberration or the start of something bigger.

I started the month on a trip to Latin America, just as the tariff story hit my newsfeed and the market reacted with a sell-off that knocked more than $9 trillion in market cap for global equities in the next two days. The month was off to a bad start, and tariffs remained the lead story for much of the month, contributing to both its biggest down days (with stories of trade war escalation) and to the biggest up days (with news of relief from the fight). To add to the volatility, there was talk midway through the month of replacing Jerome Powell as the Fed Chair, and assorted news adding to uncertainty about the direction of the economy. An observer reading just the news stories and asked to guess what the market did during the month would probably have bet on stocks falling steeply, but he or she would have lost that bet because markets managed to surprise us all again, ending the month almost where they began.

Equities: Storm Clouds gather (and dissipate)!

It would be an understatement to describe equity markets in April 2025 as volatile, with the equity indices going through stomach wrenching up and down movements intraday and across days, as investors struggled to price in a world of tariffs , trade wars and policy uncertainty....

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