1. Tariff chaos.

The tariffs on Canada and Mexico are “a huge shock,” according to Deutsche Bank strategist George Saravelos, who expects a 1% US headline inflation impact if the levies are sustained.

“The market needs to structurally and significantly reprice the trade war risk premium.”

The market opened sharply lower, with all indices down over 1.5%. However, news of a one-month delay on tariffs for Mexico and Canada sparked a rally, helping to recover a significant portion of the overnight losses.

Nevertheless, analists are revising their earnings estimates (lower) to a new tariff world-order. Citi's earnings revisions index has been negative for 6 consecutive weeks.

The Citigroup Earnings Revision Index is calculated as the proportion of listed companies that have received upward EPS revisions minus the proportion of those with downward EPS revisions. When the index is above zero, it means that analysts on average are optimistic about the outlook for corporate earnings, and the probability of S&P 500 strengthening is high. Conversely, a reading below zero means analysts are relatively pessimistic, and there’s a higher probability of S&P 500 weakening.

2. 2024 was the year of the hammock investor.

In 2024, just 28% of actively managed mutual funds and exchange-traded funds that compare themselves to the S&P 500 managed to outperform it, according to Morningstar Direct.

However, correlations are at record lows.

As correlations fall, it typically becomes easier for active fund managers to outperform the broader market when the gap between the winners and losers is wide.

2025 will be the year of the snake and the comeback of active management!

3. The contact center looks to be ground zero for productivity gains from conversational AI.

The virtual agent opportunity is likely to be the fastest-growing segment of the contact center market in the coming years.

“Reason being, many of these interactions are often not complex (e.g. resetting password, where is my package, processing returns), and are often serviced by a large base of low cost, high turnover, labor.

Specifically, global contact centers today employ about ~17 million agents, representing about ~$200 billion of labor spend globally.”

4. “Agentforce"

“Agentforce (from Salesforce) is well positioned to address the market for autonomous agents in digital channels today, supporting new avenues for growth, while expanding capabilities in voice can support deeper penetration into the $12 billion AI-agent opportunity.”

Currently, the bulk of Agentforce's capability leans heavily towards chat, a smaller portion of interactions today which tend to be simple in nature relative to voice.

However, the platform's solutions will likely expand quickly, with greater voice capabilities likely on the horizon over the next year or two – which provides the opportunity to address more complex (and expensive) customer inbounds. “

Salesforce scores the highest in Gartner's CRM Magic Quadrant.

5. What if US growth is borrowed against a huge debt and a 7% deficit?

In simple terms: It took a $2.2 trillion in public debt to create $570 billion in GDP growth in 2024.

6. Move over, Musk. Here comes Alex Karp.

Palantir reported Q4 2024 revenue growth of 36% Y/Y, U.S. revenue growth of 52% Y/Y. Palantir was up 20% after hours.

The company will be worth more than 200 billion on an operating profit of 11 million. (That’s 20.000 X)

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