The biggest argument for some rally/relief is that it's kind of hard to short at these levels and scary with this volatility (400 ES points in minutes), particularly for large players. Ridiculously expensive to buy puts here too. But in a few days, if we bounce some, volatility stabilizes... imho, we're going down hard again. As Mervyn pointed out, China is going to retaliate pronto. EU is way more slow, but more tariffs are coming up as well.
rarely read from nyt wrote about china correctly, bloomberg and wsj are still on the real estate bust page just because of few debts problems. ‘The Tsunami Is Coming’: China’s Global Exports Are Just Getting Started https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/business/china-manufacturing-exports-trump-tariffs.html Five years ago, before a housing bubble burst, cranes putting up apartment towers dotted practically every city in China. Today, many of those cranes are gone and the ones that are left seldom move. China is using more factory robots than the rest of the world combined, and most of them are made in China by Chinese companies, although some components are still imported. After several years of rapid growth, overall installations of new factory equipment have already jumped another 18 percent this year. As new factories come online, China’s exports are rapidly accelerating. They rose 13.3 percent in 2023 and then another 17.3 percent last year. Lending by state banks is also financing a boom in corporate research and development. Huawei, a conglomerate making items as varied as smartphones and auto parts, has just opened in Shanghai a research center for 35,000 engineers that has 10 times as much space for offices and labs as Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. China’s factory output is bigger than the combined manufacturing of the United States, Germany, Japan, South Korea and Britain.
Well, those whale algos are in the business to print cash. If we get high enough, they'll flip them the other way, and that will probably happen when like you said, the vix drops and folks think we're somewhat out of the woods. Raking the table is what they do best. For now however, we've seen the bottom. Imo at least.