VoSI Focus List Review for the Week Ended April 25, 2025

On Friday, President Trump boasted of having over 200 deals on the table as he traveled to Rome to attend the morbid Papal festivities where he claimed he would meet with other global leaders who would be there as well. So far, on Sunday mid-day, there is no word of any trade deals, so it is not clear whether the market rally can sustain unless there is a further walk-back of the current aggressive tariff tone where the U.S. is slapping 145% tariffs on China which is in turn slapping 125% tariffs on the U.S. As this worm continues to turn, expect volatility to complicate the market action.
What makes this market so curious is the very tight correlation seen between market indexes, sector ETFs, and individual stocks. The chart patterns all look the same as the market starts to hope for a tariff walk-back as, hopefully, sanity again takes hold. Whether the President has created a very strong incentive for other countries to seek to develop their own consumer markets, whether by country or region, as they stop loaning money to the U.S. to finance its ability to consumer more than it producers is uncertain. As such, it is certainly something that will be quite interesting to watch for as a potentially unintended consequence of his aggressive, at times vulgar and insulting, tariff posture. Overall, a game of brinksmanship for the ages!
Gold posted more new highs this past week, with the Gold Continuous Futures Contract ($GOLD) hitting an all-time high at $3500.00 on the nose while COMEX Gold Futures peaked at $3509.90 an ounce and spot gold posted a new all-time high at $3500.05. As the move has gone parabolic, a pullback was to be expected, and Gold essentially ended the week at $3319.90, roughly where it started as it closed tight with the prior week. A test of the 10-week moving average would not be unexpected, but as we have noted before, with Central Banks accumulating gold hand over fist, the move in gold has been less about technicals and more about fundamentals.
Bitcoin ($BTCUSD) peaked with the stock market in late Friday after printing an all-time high of $109,340.21. It then declined in synchrony with stocks before bottoming at $74,426.93 on the exact same day, April 7th, that the major market indexes did. Since then it has rallied with stocks off the early April lows and is now testing axis-line resistance where it may need to do some consolidating.

Overall, while the S&P 500 corrected 21.34% from the late February peak to the early April trough while the NASDAQ Composite corrected 26.74%. This occurred in synchrony with a peak-to-trough decline of 31.93%. As it tends to be more volatile than the major market indexes, this is to be expected, just as $BTCUSD is rising up off its early April lows faster than stocks are. Bottom line is that it tends to follow the market, such that any continued rally would likely see $BTCUSD continue to rally while any market breakdown would likely have a negative effect.