NFCU's Frick: Tariffs' market impacts will linger with investors

Robert Frick, corporate economist at Navy Federal Credit Union, says that investors should allow the market to settle down and they regain solid footing with their investments, but should use current nervousness and anxiety as a guide on how to remake their portfolio to be more stable regardless of conditions. Frick says he felt that the market was getting scary at the beginning of the year, so he reduced his exposure to stocks and started to prepare against sequence-of-returns risk because he is nearing retirement, and he says investors need to be much more focused on their internal risk-tolerance measures than anything that the market is doing to get through current conditions and plot for a future that is different economically, and that may not come back to the norms of recent years until there is more clarity on policies. Michael Kahn, senior market analyst at Lowry Research Corp., says the stock market had gotten "extremely oversold" before the government's tariff announcements were made, which made for a perfect set-up for a big market decline. While the cause of the downturn is unusual, Kahn says that the technicals are not, and that investors should be looking for confirmation that the tide is turning; even then, however, he warned that investors should be cautious buyers, at least until tariff plans are more clear and certain. Plus John Cole Scott, president of Closed-End Fund Advisors — the chairman of the Active Investment Company Alliance — checks in on how closed-end funds have performed since the tariff announcement, particularly bond funds that have seen yields changing as part of the fixed-income market's response to the news; he discusses discount levels, strategies that closed-end fund investors might use now, and how the current situation compares in closed-end funds to the market decline around the Covid pandemic.