It’s Friday the 11th of April and global markets are in turmoil amid Donald Trump's tariff backdown, the opposition unveils plans for $20 billion for the bush and Virgin customers could get a refund. Plus warnings from the national cybersecurity boss and a Meta whistleblower unloads on the tech giant.

Listen to today's episode 🎧 

News in brief

• Uncertainty reigns across global markets with the biggest one-day bounce in equity markets in five years unable to hide the total chaos facing investors. Wall Street yesterday jumped 10pc and the local market rose 4.5pc. The moves reflect US President Donald Trump's decision to delay the imposition of tariffs for 90-days (with the exception of China where he increased the rate to 125pc). The Aussie dollar jumped on the news, as did Bitcoin, but uncertainty remains the dominant sentiment in markets. 

   

• The federal coalition yesterday unveiled plans to establish two new regional investment funds, totalling $20 billion, seeded by windfall gains from commodity prices. Eighty per cent of positive windfall commodity receipts each year - that's the amount from commodity sales above forecasts - will go to a Future Generation Fund and a Regional Australia Future Fund.
  
  

• Thousands of Virgin Australia customers are eligible for a refund after being overcharged for itinerary changes, dating as far back as April 2020. 61,000 people have been identified as being overcharged due to a coding issue within Virgin Australia’s online booking system.
  
  

• Australia’s national cybersecurity coordinator Lieutenant General Michelle McGuinness has urged people to be vigilant about their passwords, saying Australians need to use password managers and different complex phrases to gain access to every single account.
  
  

• A Meta whistleblower told US senators that the company undermined national security in order to build a $US18 billion business in China. Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former global public policy director at Facebook, said she watched as executives decided to provide the Chinese Communist Party with access to the data of Meta users, including that of Americans. Meta disputes the claims.

Fear-o-meter

Given the market turmoil on the back of Donald Trump's tariffs, and the challenge of knowing exactly what to write amid all the uncertainty, today's insight takes the form of a limerick.

There once was a man named Trump,

Whose tariffs gave markets a bump.

Stocks soared and then dipped,

As traders' minds flipped

In a wild, unpredictable jump.

The point today is that what's going on is almost comical. It would be comical if it wasn't people's real money being trashed and made. More than ever, investors need a plan and they need to stick to it. Investing is a long term game.

Who's talking today?

On investor behaviour, buying the dip, and whether the volatility on markets is going to settle:

 

I think it's rarely the case that these episodes are over in a couple of days ...

 

The administration has been very clear and Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary, has been very clear recently that part of his role is to be what he says the US number one bond salesman. Ultimately, the US has a lot of debt and it needs to be able to sell bonds into the market at reasonable rates. You saw US bond rates actually going up quite quickly, which was counter to their aspirations. And so I think what you will see is that the narrative coming out of the US administration will moderate significantly because ultimately if bond rates go up much more then they're not achieving what they want to achieve. So I would suspect volatility does probably slow down a little bit. 

Greed-o-meter

It was a big trading day yesterday, as the ASX had its best day in five years, and Wall Street recorded its best since the GFC recovery. These are the five most-traded ASX stocks/ETFs by Australian investors on trading platform Stake yesterday:

And Australians were actively trading these five on Wall Street too:

Source: Stake

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