Let's get to the big story.
Breakdown.
US stocks are set for a higher open as we head into the final trading session of the first quarter.
At the close of yesterday's session, the Dow was off about 6.5% year to date, while the S&P 500 was off about 7.5%.
Now the US bond market does continue to stage a comeback from its deepest sell-off in 17 months, and as we just heard, Fed Chair.
Powell signaled that a talk yesterday that the central bank has little control over supply shocks, easing fears of aggressive tightening.
Now market focus is rapidly shifting from inflation fears to an economic slowdown around the globe, and this does come as we count down to Friday's US jobs report.
Well joining me this morning is Eric Criscuolo, a Market Strategist at the New York Stock Exchange.
Eric, good morning.
Thank you so much for.
Joining me.
Good morning, Remy.
Always great to be here.
Well, here we are.
Hard to believe, but the final trading session for Q1 2026 and what a quarter it has been, Eric.
So many headlines.
But now that we are here, how are you separating the signal from the noise?
That is a million dollar question and it seems like it's all noise right now.
The Diverging headlines about Iran, you know, increasing the escalating it, putting ground troops in, but also maybe pulling back and not reopening the strait.
I mean these are just diverging headlines that just make it really hard to figure out what the next move is going to be as far as the US policy goes.
But if you just kind of take a step back and say, OK, like what's going on.
Putting Iran aside, as hard as that is, you look at what's coming up, you have the earnings season about to hit.
You have, and you have all the commentary that's going to be coming out of that.
So that's going to hopefully kind of refocus markets a little bit onto what is actually going on inside these corporate balance sheets and income statements and say.
You know how is corporate America functioning right now?
You're going to hear CEOs and CFOs actually talk about what they're doing, what they're seeing, what they're not seeing.
So I think that there's a lot of crazy stuff going on right now.
But at least with earnings season coming up, hopefully you get maybe a little more back to the basics, the fundamentals of, OK, what is, what is really the signal and what is the noise?
Yes, I'm sure Eric, you will be.
Listening to those earnings calls once earnings season kicks off because we are looking for clear indicators of what's really happening in the US economy.
And speaking of which, oil prices do remain elevated, and for the first time since August 2022 we saw the price of a regular gallon of gasoline spike above $4 a gallon.
So we know that with these rising.
Oil costs, there are reverberations throughout global markets and supply chains.
So how concerned are you here?
And do you think we should be focusing more on the global economy or inflation?
What is your take?
Yes, so you know the US is definitely in a better position than we were 1015, 20 years ago as far as oil, energy dependence or independence now.
Europe, but especially Asia, they are much more impacted by rising oil prices.
They import regionally.
They import much more oil for their economy than we do or that we need to do.
So those countries in Europe, those countries in Asia, they're going to feel it much more than us.
But to your point, oil does kind of feed into daily life.
It's not just how we drive, but it's also the plastics and all the other kind of downstream.
Commodities or products that we use on a daily basis, so it will affect the consumer the longer this goes.
That's why the earnings season is going to be really important to see, to hear these retail consumer focused companies talk about what they're seeing in their customer base, what they're doing, how they're being impacted.
Again, I've said it before, but we have gone through years of inflation starting coming out of COVID, and it's just everything is additive and it gets harder and harder and harder for consumers, especially at the bottom end, to.
Counteract all these price hikes. $4 a gallon of gas, that's a lot.
Add on to everything else that they have to pay more for, you know, just taking their kids out to lunch or dinner, you know, it feels like it's doubled over the past year.
So it it's just more strain on the consumer.
But having said that, we still see a relatively resilient economy that's just it's holding, so we're not seeing really big strains yet or any big emerging cracks.
So that's a good sign.
Yes, and speaking of which, another area of the US economy we're paying attention to is jobs, and US markets will be closed on Friday in observance of Good Friday, but the Labor Department will be releasing that jobs report.
So what are your expectations for the headline figure as well as unemployment?
Yes, I really have no idea what the headline figure is going to be, but if you, you know, it's moved around, right?
You get some months where it's low, below consensus, declining, you know, down.
You get some months where it's way above, so it's kind of bouncing back and forth, really hard to put a bead on it.
But you know, as Powell said yesterday, you know, the labor market, he's not terribly concerned about.
Unemployment is about 44.3% to 4.4%.
It's kind of been in.
Range for a while we might get a weak print.
We might get a strong print, but you just you can't take these one month prints and say, OK, this is the state of the jobs market.
It's just it's this rolling average or this constant influx of data that you keep having to adjust and kind of you know reorient reorient yourself as far as where you think things are going.
But right now things are kind of stable, but we'll see.
Yeah and speaking of stable, I do want to get your take on levels as we wrap up the first quarter of this year.
So I do want to ask you about the S&P 500 as well as the 10 year yield just because we've been seeing so much action in the bond market.
So what are you keeping your eyes on for both the S&P 500 and the 10 years?
I mean we we've we've broken through several technical levels as far as the S&P.
On the downside, we started to after we broke the 50, 100 and the 200 day moving averages, then we started to kind of tackle the lows in October and November and we kind of traded below those.
So you know, making a move back to those levels at least to get above those lows, then maybe challenge some of those major moving averages that would be positive for.
We are going to have the quarter end today, which means a lot of the hedges, a lot of the rebalancing, that's all going to kind of flip and move so you could see some expansion as far as the price ranges go.
You know we've been in this bleed lower, so you know to kind of stabilize and maybe move higher, we could see that.
But again, so much is going to depend on what earnings season is like.
We haven't really Changed earnings estimates or the street hasn't changed earnings estimates throughout all of this.
Now that could be because The street is pretty happy or they think things are actually going to be OK, which is possible, or they just don't know where to reset earnings and so they're just waiting for the results to come out before they reset them lower potentially.
So there's a lot of kind of things that we have to pay attention to as far as where the stocks are going to move in the next 123 weeks, months.
Yields as well, we've kind of come off the highs and we're kind of seeing this kind of are we going to cut, are we going to We're back to maybe a cut for for this year.
We'll see how long that stays, but you know, it looks like every time we hit a level, you know, on the 10 year and the 30 year gets too high.
People are happy to buy that level, lock in that yield, and that kind of brings everything back down again.
But we're going to see if that dynamic continues.
Well, Eric, a lot of moving parts as we wrap up Q1 and head into Q2.
So I appreciate your time and thank you so much for sharing all of your insights.
Always a pleasure, Remy.
Thank you.
Thank you, Eric.
