Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Why the Dollar is Slipping and Navigating What’s Actually Moving Markets with Karen Finerman
Mon, 21 Apr 2025
After a whirlwind of headline whiplash over the last month, last week in the economy felt... quieter. But quieter doesn’t mean unimportant. Instead of chasing breaking news, we’re settling into the “new normal”—whatever that ends up meaning in this cycle. So what do investors need to know now that the dust has (somewhat) settled? To help answer that, Nicole is joined by Karen Finerman (CEO of Metropolitan Capital Advisors, founding panelist of CNBC’s Fast Money, and host of How She Does It). They dive into the current state of the dollar, what tariffs could mean for your money, and Karen’s best-performing stock pick of 2025 so far.
Chapter 1: Who are the hosts and guests in this episode?
Chapter 2: How is the current economic 'new normal' affecting investors?
So can you give us a sense of the VIX? We've been hearing a lot in the news lately. So when you say that the VIX is high around 50, what is it normally? And then you say that you look to cover some hedges. What do you mean by that?
So the VIX is really, it is a measurement of how likely the volatility is in the market at more than 1% on any given day, but it's really become known to be the sort of fear-greed index. So when the VIX is really low, and the kind of lowest I've ever seen it drag along for a long time is low double digits, so, you know, 11 or 12. And then in periods of high uncertainty.
So the highest I've ever seen it is during the pandemic, during the really, really dark, dark days of the pandemic, as high as about 80 intraday, maybe. So... Now the VIX has gone from mid-teens to as high as 56. I guess it was Tuesday morning. Was that when the bottom was sort of the... I can't even remember all the days. So it hit somewhere in the mid-50s. And I like when the VIX is super high.
I like when things start trading down integers at a time because that just tells me someone just wants to get out regardless of price. And if I own that, that's not fun. But if I can buy more at a price where I'm buying from someone who says, I don't care what price I'm selling it. I just need to get out. That's ultimately been a good thing to do in the past. Historically been a good thing to do.
Exactly. You know, we shop. We love to get things on sale. We do not want our stocks on sale. That feels bad.
Well, unless you're a long investor, like betting on the future, holding onto your investments for a long period of time, not trying to bet against the market. So when you say you see blood on the streets, including yours, what kind of blood have you been shedding? I hate saying that. I don't want you to shed blood.
So, well, you know, I have a lot of meta, very big position. So that, you know, that that's been a, a very difficult one. I have Netflix as well, sort of hanging in the best. Amazon, which I have, I like a lot. I like how they're positioned, particularly in tough times like this. But the stock's down, I don't know where it is today, 172 or 173, I don't know the moment, but it's down considerably.
And I still believe in the AI story. I still believe in AWS. And then they have this remarkable retailing business, gigantic retailing business. So that hasn't been fun. The banks, JP Morgan, my biggest bank position, went to 280, probably shouldn't have been at 280, and then went down to about 210. So that's a fair amount of pain. Citigroup.
I could go, I don't know how long this podcast is, but I could go on and on for a while of things that haven't worked.
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Chapter 3: What is the VIX and how does it influence investment strategies?
I actually, I don't know. I think it's really interesting to see what's happening with the Chinese companies that are trying to take the tariff news and, you know, spin it or sell their knockoffs or God knows what. Do you have any thought about what's going to happen?
Well, it's interesting to the extent that any of that is about luxury high end goods. If I were Louis Vuitton and that were one of my suppliers, I would be very, very unhappy. So unhappy that I might look for another supplier. So if that is part of their game plan, I think that part is going to end up being very problematic.
But for other things, I know these manufacturers are just carpet-bobbing TikTok. Every 40 seconds, yeah.
Are you seeing, well, so let me go back. I'm assuming you're not surprised by LVMH then tanking or the luxury sector.
No, I actually was a little surprised that American Express was good because I would have thought the correlation between the LVMH consumer and American Express was high and that Louis Vuitton in the U.S. was amiss. In Asia, it was a disaster, but it was a miss, meaning, well, they were expecting for, it was about four percentage points low on same-store sales, or comps, rather.
And so that's a miss, and I would have thought AXP would, that customer would overlap directly, and that wasn't the case.
That's interesting. I mean, what's tricky to understand is when a company is on sale or it's just not good. So if you're looking at some high quality investments, maybe on sale, we love a sale, but what about the LVMHs of the world?
That's not been a good one for me, but I look at LVMH versus Kering, for example. So you have two conglomerates, each has extraordinary brands. Kering has really struggled with Gucci. And that is the main driver of their business. And it's just been a disaster for a couple of years. So, I mean, we're talking about like revenues down 20. Revenues. That's enormous.
And so to me, that would fall in the, oh, we might have a material change here in that a couple of things. Something happened about two years ago that I really didn't like and made me sell my stock in Caring, which was the CEO, who's married to Salma Hayek, the actress, bought CAA, took control of Creative Artists Agency. And I hate acquisitions like that that are a huge distraction.
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Chapter 4: Which stocks has Karen Finerman been holding and why?
Although we did see that crazy trade of somebody with zero day SPY.
Yeah. With probably very, very good information. Yeah. Yeah. So there's that going on. That's not luck. No. Would you want to step into that? I mean, would you follow it? Maybe. That might not be so dumb. Right? That could be like, look, I don't know what's going on, but I know that that guy does. That's... It's not an even playing field right now. It is not.
And so this isn't the time if you don't if you don't use options, this isn't the time to start trying them out. But I do. I think it's a good tool to have sort of in your, you know, your toolbox to be able to express. You can a long bet. Right. You want to know the name. But let's say there's a lot of risk. You feel like other business could be terribly damaged in a tariff war that's protracted.
Then you can buy calls instead of the stock and know, all right, here's the most I could lose. You know, with certainty, you know what they call how much you can lose. You don't know how much you can make on the upside. And, you know, really is a lot. That's great. But you know what you can lose. So certainty, again, is important.
good thing to have yeah it's insurance you know buy it yeah insurance insurance the fire right how much how much is fire insurance now it's not even available probably right yeah right exactly so same thing with hedging lock in your protection before the chaos right chaos it's very expensive and usually doesn't work out well when you buy protection in chaos
Let's talk about the value of the dollar. I think this is not getting as much attention. It's fallen by about 8% this year, recently trading near three-year lows. Can you help us understand why this is happening?
I can sort of, but honestly, I'm not sure. I can tell you sort of what's happening. So we're seeing normally when there is a crisis such as this, there is this, what's called a flight to quality. And money around the world goes to the United States because it is the safest, the biggest, the rule of law, all of the things that make the US market great.
And so people buy US dollars and they buy treasuries. They might buy short term, they might buy the 10 year, for example, and That's usually what happens in a crisis. That did not happen in this crisis. In fact, the reverse happened. So there was selling in treasuries. We saw the 10-year yield. When people sell the bonds, yields go up.
They need to, you know, if you want to entice more people to buy those bonds, you have to pay more interest. So that worked the opposite way that we would have seen. And so when you have people from around the world, let's just use the example of Chinese sellers. I don't know how much of the selling was Chinese sellers, but they own hundreds of billions of dollars of bonds, $750 billion of bonds.
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Chapter 5: What are Karen Finerman’s views on her 2025 stock picks like Alibaba and Dell?
Not too much deregulation, though.
Right.
We don't want to go through 2008. Right. So things, you know, it's a pendulum, right? We always go from one excess past what probably is the right amount to the other that is the wrong amount is too much. So there's a lot of room to come back and still have guardrails that we need. Absolutely.
Hold on to your wallets. Money Rehab will be right back. And now for some more Money Rehab. We thought that this would be like the go-go days again of fundraising and IPOs, but we've seen a big dry up there.
Right. And we thought there would be a lot of mergers and investment banking activity. Not happening. One thing that is happening is the amount of trading revenue. So if you're the Goldman Sachs desk or JP Morgan's desk, the amount of volume we're doing trading is extraordinary, right? We've had several of the highest volume days ever just in the last two weeks. So they'll make money on that.
They'll make sort of extra money. But I don't want to pay a big multiple of earnings on what I think is extra short-term money that isn't going to be, a long-term trend of giant trading day, you know, commissions. I'm not, but in the short, very short term, it helps.
In your picks and your carved city was for the, it stood, the C stood for city. That's been down 10% though. Yeah. How are the financials?
The financials started off really well and then really got hurt in this tariff, whatever you want to call it. I don't know. Do you have a word for it? Fuck, we can bleep it out.
I don't know.
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Chapter 6: How do tariffs and the de minimis exemption impact Chinese companies and investments?
So true.
Money Rehab is a production of Money News Network. I'm your host, Nicole Lappin. Money Rehab's executive producer is Morgan Levoy. Our researcher is Emily Holmes. Do you need some money rehab? And let's be honest, we all do. So email us your money questions, moneyrehab at moneynewsnetwork.com to potentially have your questions answered on the show or even have a one-on-one intervention with me.
And follow us on Instagram at Money News and TikTok at Money News Network for exclusive video content. And lastly, thank you. No, seriously, thank you. Thank you for listening and for investing in yourself, which is the most important investment you can make.