The Final Tally: The Apprentice: Bear Market Edition… Worst Crash Since 2020 “All Part of The Plan”

When I rolled out of bed this morning, scarfed down my oatmeal, and checked the markets, I expected the usual… maybe a little red, maybe a little green (and every single headline to include either “Trump” or “tariff” in it. What I didn’t expect was to be yanked back to 2020 PTSD levels. But surprise! The market just had its worst day since the COVID crash.

Thanks to Trump’s surprise "Liberation Day" tariffs, every institution, bank, and hedge fund decided in the group chat that cash is king. What happened next, surprised even the most bearish doomsdayer around. The dividend-heavy collapsed 1,600 points (-3.7%), the S&P 500 dropped 5%, and the Nasdaq decided it didn’t want to live anymore and fell 6%.

Of course, all of this is thanks to the new tariff plan… a 10% blanket tax on everyone starting April 5… and if you’re a “bad actor” (hi, China), enjoy your new 54% rate. At this point, can we all just agree that if Trump says he’s gonna do something, he’s probably gonna do it? Sidenote: I saw one report say that tariffs are the highest they’ve been in 100 years (Alexander Hamilton and President William Mckinley, the original tariff cheerleaders, would be so proud).

Let’s just say that tech stocks presented an amazing buying opportunity today (if we’re being positive). Apple plunged over 9%, erasing $300 billion in value in the blink of an eye. The rest of the “Magnificent Seven” followed the richest company in the world’s lead (Nvidia, Tesla, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta) poof, $800 billion gone.

And you know how it works, if dividends and tech stocks got destroyed… small caps evaporated. The Russell 2000 dropped 5.6% and officially entered bear market territory… welcome to the club. And retail was also a bloodbath. Nike lost 13%, Target 12%, and Five Below fell 26%, which ironically is now its new share price (not really, but you know it’s funny).

Even the big banks got smoked… Western Alliance tanked 14%, while Citi and BofA dropped over 10% (their worst single-day drops in over a year).

And Trump? Oh, he’s feeling great. As the markets lost nearly $2 trillion, he calmly compared it to “an operation,” saying this is all part of the plan. "It’s going very well," he said, as if he was talking about a brisk walk through Central Park and not setting global markets on fire with a tariff flamethrower. He even promised “the markets are going to boom,” which is certainly quite the optimistic thing to say while everything is actively exploding.

At this point, tomorrow's jobs report better come with anesthesia.

If you read all of this, congrats for having a 10 second attention span (better than me). As always, here’s our heatmap for today.