(Bloomberg) -- Traders have long known Donald Trump intended to use tariffs as a tool for economic policy. Citigroup Inc., a year ago, even offered up a handy framework for trading potential levies on China.
Lean into a group of companies like Target Corp. and Lowe’s Cos. that derive much of their sales in the US, and stay away from firms like Becton Dickinson and Co. and Starbucks Corp. with a high portion of sales or manufacturing in China.
Turns out, both have been dogs. The long basket is down 16%, since the S&P 500 hit a record in February. That’s just a tad better than the short basket. Each has done worse than the S&P 500 in that time. In fact, there’s little to discern any difference in their performance. They tend to rise and fall in tandem.
It’s hard to fault the composition of the baskets, though. Citi’s researchers expected tariffs to be around 50%, not the actual 145%. And few on Wall Street foresaw Trump slapping 10% tariffs on virtually all trading partners, more on some of the most important - punitive enough that calls for a global economic slowdown are rising.
The upshot has been that the expected tariff trade has now become an all-or-nothing bet on whether the US can avoid a recession.
“I don’t think that many people at all expected the degree of confrontation — both ways, between China and the US — anywhere close to what we’ve gotten,” said Mark Hackett, chief market strategist at Nationwide. “If the tariffs cause some sort of catastrophic pullback in consumer spending, everything that we had modeled for doesn’t work anymore.”
The near-uniform performance of Citi’s tariff baskets underscores just how lockstep moves have become on US equity markets, where a gauge of one-month realized correlation in the benchmark index has risen to the highest level since July 2020.
Take this week. More than 70% of the benchmark was higher Wednesday, while 98% of the gauge ended the day in the green Tuesday. Monday’s selloff, meanwhile, saw about 92% of stocks close lower.
For stock traders, the monolithic swings have made life difficult. Tariff threats go up, recession odds go up, stocks go down — and vice versa.
“There’s clearly a fear out there,” said Jay Hatfield, chief executive officer of Infrastructure Capital Advisors. “Clearly when we were hitting 5,000, that was the notion, that we were going to have a recession, and an earnings recession as well. Maybe the recession’s not that deep, but earnings get hammered by tariffs.”
The S&P 500 tumbled to within a whisker of a bear market earlier this month and remains down more than 12% from its last record. Only 116 of its members are higher since the day it hit the record, leaving equity investors with virtually nowhere to ride out the turmoil.
Citi created the two baskets in February 2024, highlighting them to clients as “pairing ideas” in the event Trump returned to the White House and fulfilled his long-standing promise to take on China through trade policy.
Target was identified as one of the potential winners, since it gets more revenue from discretionary items than from food. Yet it is the worst-performing stock in the S&P 500’s consumer staples sector this year.
Trucking, home-improvement stores and other companies expected to be relative winners in a trade spat with China have also suffered as investors fret over the economy’s resilience. Shares of Lowe’s and Old Dominion Freight Line Inc. are down double digits this year.
Even staffing companies that have virtually no exposure to imports from China have been swept up in the market selloff. Robert Half and its competitors face their own headwinds from “macroeconomic uncertainty and dour private company feedback,” Truist analyst Tobey Sommer wrote in a note last week.
Sommer slashed the price target on Robert Half’s stock to $60, from $90. It closed Tuesday at $46.23.
“When you’re getting major macroeconomic news, you don’t necessarily have the luxury of focusing on companies at the micro level,” said Steve Sosnick, chief strategist at Interactive Brokers. “The tides are moving the ships up and down. It’s a little harder to navigate against those tides.”
--With assistance from Matt Turner and Alexandra Semenova.