Here’s hoping you bought the dip.

US equities on Monday closed out Q2 with a decent advance, capping what, by the time the dust settled, counted as the best quarter for the S&P 500 since late 2023.

It was a remarkable comeback for the benchmark, punctuated by a new intraday record for Meta, where born-again right-winger Mark Zuckerberg’s busy hiring for an initiative called “Meta Superintelligence Labs.” The group will focus on developing what sounds like AGI. Zuckerberg, upon whom irony’s apparently lost these days, called it “the beginning of a new era for humanity.”

Anyway, here’s the simple S&P chart:

Not too bad for a benchmark which, at the lows on April 7, was down nearly 21.5% from its February peak.

You can thank, in part, Donald Trump for the rebound just like you could “thank” him for the mini-bear market. The tariff picture, albeit still quite cloudy, is at least less foreboding than it was in April. The average US trade levy appears set to “settle” somewhere around 15%, more than 10ppt lower than the rate implied by the “Liberation Day” tariffs.

If you’re amenable to “all’s well that ends well” thinking, you could argue that things turned out ok for Treasurys too. After all, 4.23% on 10s is nearly 30bps lower versus the beginning of 2025. Considering how much upward pressure the term premium’s exerting (20bps more today versus January 2) and, relatedly, all the hand-wringing over the deficit, that’s a pretty good result.

As discussed here on several occasions in recent days (including on Monday in “Trump’s Probably Right About Rates“), the Fed’s almost guaranteed to starting cutting again soon, if not soon enough for The White House. Goldman said late Sunday they expect rate cuts in September, October and December from the Fed. I think the odds of a move in July are under-appreciated.

Note from the chart that market pricing for 2025 cuts reflected fewer than two quarter-point moves as recently as mid-month. Now, that pricing stands at ~70bps, which is to say three quarter-point moves are almost fully priced.

That doesn’t seem like a huge deviation from the two cuts tipped by the June dot plot until you remember that the new dots showed seven participants expected no cuts for 2025. Seen in that light, market pricing’s aggressively dovish.

Bloomberg on Monday quoted CFRA’s Sam Stovall who said, of H1 2025, “No one could fault an investor if at one point during the first half they shouted, ‘Stop the world, I want to get off.'” I still feel that way about the world in general, but as I’m always keen to emphasize, I don’t let my exceedingly pessimistic view of humanity bleed over into how I manage my money. Although given gold’s outstanding performance both in 2024 and continuing into 2025, I’d be doing pretty damn well even if I did.