Matt Tuttle on Inflation's Ebbs & Flows for Interest Rates, Stock Market

possible acquisition for PayPal. That was Alex Coffey senior equities contributor here on the network. Do you want to broaden out our conversation though. Welcome in our next guest. Joining me now, Matthew Tuttle, CEO and CIO at Tuttle Capital Management. Matthew, great to have you on. Always love to see that picture of your dog every time we chat. But you sent over an interesting note. And I want to start with your first point. You said that yesterday's CPI was a potential game changer. So take me through how that's affected your outlook and why this one softer than expected print matters here. Yeah. And it hasn't changed my outlook yet. But coming into that print everybody was assuming it was going to be a hot number. You had fed people positioning hawkishly. And we were thinking, you know, we were going to have a series of rate hikes. That number gives Warsh some cover. If he wants to not do anything. And theoretically, if he wants to lower rates. Now, the caveat and why that hasn't changed my thinking yet is, you know, it was a softer number because oil prices have come down a lot because the war is over for the 50th time, which, you know, it's not. And oil is ticking back up. You know, if oil gets back up, starts hanging out in the 80s and the 90s again, then we get hot CPI all over and you know, we're back to hawkish fed. But if we can end this thing and get oil back down, you know, staying around the 60s, then we may be looking at an interest rate cut and not a hike. And I'm just refreshing the fed watch tool to take a look because it was fluctuating a bit yesterday. And yes, it definitely pushed the expectations of a hike, at least for the July meeting down the pipe here. But I mean December still standing at 72.6. We were at about 80. So not a hugely significant move. Matthew. I had a conversation with someone yesterday after the data came out, and he continued to point out to me that one print does not make a trend. And then he went on to argue that the gas prices, even if they increase with our lack of peace that we've continued to price in, as you pointed out at least 50 times at this point, that unless they went up significantly beyond levels we've seen into triple digits or so, he also didn't view that as having a meaningful impact on inflation overall. So what's your response to something like that? Yeah, no, I think that gas prices oil prices are going to have a significant impact. And, you know, so that's why we are laser focused on on what oil prices are doing. And, you know, they're down a little bit today, but they've been they've been ticking up. And, you know, we're going to be watching that really more than anything as far as inflation, you know, the AI, you know, you're seeing the memory cost. We're seeing that cause inflation as well. I don't know that there's anything at least short term you can do with that. So really, to me, the only kind of moving variable is the oil prices. And as far as your outlook for oil, I mean we've priced in peace. I think we have to keep having this conversation so many times that I just stopped counting. And as we look at the prices, the fluctuations seem to be smaller each time that we realize we don't in fact, have peace. And we've had a full collapse of this cease fire, and yet we're still under $80 a barrel here. I mean, we're not anywhere near triple digits. Is the market just finding the whole situation more palatable? Do you think they're underestimating the situation? I think the market's just sick of this. You know it every day the war is over. The war is not over. The war is over. I think everyone assumes it's going to be over. You know, this is not a long term you know, four year World War two or, you know, multi-year Vietnam scenario. It's going to be over. It's going to be over this year, you know, sooner rather than later. And so they're looking at this much more as a short term phenomenon. I do think they're underestimating a lot of the damage that's been done. So I do worry that there are going to be some more permanent or longer lasting impacts to the strait being closed in mind and, you know, infrastructure being attacked. But, you know, we'll see. I didn't think we'd see oil back into the 60s. And we had that a couple of weeks ago. So, you know, the oil market may be discounting all of that. So then let's look at equities then, because earnings season is arguably the catalyst. Then if we've basically just shrug our shoulders at the geopolitical risk at this point, which is a lot of what it looks like right now. What are you what are your takeaways so far of the earnings that we've gotten? And also with all of these upward revisions and the bar being set so high for Q2, what is the the market have to get to keep this rally going? Yeah, the market has to get more of what it got from a MSL you know, that was that was a big kind of referendum on AI. It's got to get, you know, hyperscalers spending increases, you know, just more of the same when it comes to all of the spending on AI to keep this thing going. So, you know, not only are we going to, we, we going to be laser focused on oil, but we're also going to be laser focused on some of these big earnings reports. Like what I saw last night, didn't like what I saw from IBM. But I don't I don't think that's got broader implications for the AI trade. But we'll be looking for more of the same to continue this momentum. And Matthew, as you're looking at making selections here in this environment, are there any names that you're keeping a close eye on or you think have a lot of opportunity in them? Yeah, I mean, there's always going to be opportunity. What I am less interested in right now is kind of playing the back and forth on memory. You know, that's getting as annoying as the war headlines one day. Memory stocks up 10% the next day down. I'll wait for that to settle down. You know, there are some memory stocks we have that are some of the smaller names, but I like names like a Cleveland Cliffs, you know, that's an AI picks and shovels play. It went up a lot and then retraced it all after SpaceX looks like it's bottoming here and looks like it might be setting up for another move up. So that's one I like a lot. I like Alibaba Chinese name. Great thing about Chinese stocks is the time to usually buy them is when nobody wants them. So we were buying Alibaba you know started buying that a couple of days ago. So far so good there. And I like gold. You know Kinross is my favorite gold miner at the moment. Gold I look at like China is time to buy gold is when nobody else wants it. And right now nobody's talking about gold. Yeah. I'm looking at a theme across your picks today. You've got all with performances over the last six months down double digits. So finding some opportunity to the upside here. Matthew really appreciate you taking the time to be with