This stock market is a trap.

This stock market is shaping up to be a trap. You need to pay attention. This is where a lot of people lose a lot of money and some very wise investors make a boatload. As expected, we received word from Trump right before the deadline on August 1st about the new tariffs. It looks like the new tariffs are set to begin August 7th and this is gonna make the stock market go crazy in the next couple weeks and already started Friday morning with a nice drop of around 2%. I told my Patreon group that this wasn't the dip we're all waiting for so be patient and the more info that surfaced, the more I know I'm right. Big things are coming for the stock market this week. In this chart here, you can see where the tariffs were in 2022. Then the far left shows what tariffs were proposed in April and then the middle column is where the tariffs are now and where they're set to be starting August 7th. As you can see, most have changed notably but they all stay pretty close to that 15% tariff across the board now. A couple go as low as 10% and some are much higher than 15% but it's important to see that these are the proposed tariffs starting up later this week. Along with this negative sentiment in the market, we also saw a lot of positivity this week with crazy earnings reports. SoFi's stock soars as earnings bring surging loan growth and a number of records. The financial technology company saw a record number of new members and booked loan originations at a record amount. I've been talking about SoFi for a while now and this is one that I'm holding for a very long time. I easily see this stock getting over 100 in the next five years. One of my largest holdings, Microsoft, jumped like crazy this week after earnings. Microsoft crossed that $4 trillion market cap. They hit the milestone Thursday morning following its strong Q4 earnings report in which it also said its Azure business brought in $75 billion over the prior year. The company's stock prices climbed more than 110% since the debut of OpenAI's chat GPT in November of 2022. Meta was stellar as well. Shares of the social media company jumped more than 10% after the company reported second quarter earnings on Wednesday that beat on revenue. APLD is another one that I've talked about recently and that one went crazy. Up over 33% on Thursday morning after the huge earnings beat. You can see how substantial the news was with how high this chart goes. S&P 500 and the NASDAQ 100 and a bunch of other indexes were up huge going into Friday. We need to be careful though because the effects of these tariffs and some other big things have not yet been felt by companies and thus not felt by us as consumers. So these spikes in the market are causing major FOMO and people are scared of missing out and so they're jumping in at literal all-time highs but the dips are coming and they may be substantial. Many companies have been holding off on price increases because they wanted to see what was actually gonna happen with the tariffs. Well, that ends soon. Like this week, major consumer brands like Procter & Gamble and Hershey warn the tariffs will drive up costs on everyday products from popular snacks to common household items. This has an even bigger impact for us as investors. So let me explain that but first, I wanna thank and introduce the sponsor of this video, Delete.me. Did you know that your personal data is sold online by data brokers? You have the right to stay private and protect your personal data. Delete.me is a hands-free subscription service that will remove your personal information that's being sold online. Right now, it's becoming all too common of this trend of data breaches resulting in the loss of personal data control. One third of the US population's background info is now public. Delete.me's privacy experts remove your personal information such as phone number, address, and other important information from hundreds of data brokers all year long. I really enjoy that customers can make custom removal requests. They all do a lot online, especially with investing. So it's just a smart move to have an extra layer of protection. Get 20% off Delete.me US consumer plans when you go down to the link in my description, which is join delete.me.com slash professor and use code professor at checkout. So I'm gonna hit a couple more highlights here of news that affected the stock market. And then I'm gonna tell you exactly how I would be investing over this next week. So back to the tariffs because that's the biggest news. Trump has promised that his tax increases on the nearly $3 trillion in goods imported to the United States will usher in newfound wealth, launch a bunch of new factory jobs, reduce the budget, and get other countries to treat America with more respect. Although the tariffs were originally scheduled for August 1st, they've now been briefed to start August 7th to allow customs to update classifications and to permit further potential negotiations. Something to point out is that yes, these tariffs do look clear and they do look like something that's gonna stand and be implemented on August 7th, but there's also much verbiage that suggests that these can also be subject to negotiation. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick referred to August 1st as a hard deadline. The new tariff rates will come in, Lutnick told CNBC, while also acknowledging the possibility of continued negotiations. Nothing stops countries from talking to us after August 1st. The ultimate goal isn't just necessarily to tariff a country as much as possible, but more so to get a bit more fairness because in this arena, other countries are tariffing the United States much higher than we have been. Remember that the tariff doesn't tax that other country. It taxes the U.S. company that's using the other country's parts and pulling them in from a different place because they can get it cheaper. So in essence, by tariffing goods from another country, it persuades that U.S. company to use more U.S.-related companies or to build more infrastructure in-house, which should help a couple of things, like our GDP for the country and also bring down the national debt, possibly. These types of things are positive, especially in the long run, but there are a bunch of negatives that could happen as a result. Price hikes could hit coffee, shoes, appliances, and a range of other products if additional tariffs take effect. Importers typically pass along a share of the tariff-related tax burden onto consumers in the form of price hikes. Tariffs put forward so far by Trump are expected to cost an average household an additional $2,400 this year. Trump's proposed 50% tariffs on copper could raise prices for an array of goods, ranging from home fixtures to electric vehicles. In the stock market, this is going to affect our investing big time. Here's a couple of other big things that happened over the week, and then I'll tell you how I'm going to invest. Weak jobs report raises rate-cut expectations. The July U.S. nonfarm payrolls report severely missed projections. Only 73,000 jobs added, and downward revisions subtracting 258,000 jobs from May and June. Unemployment rose to 4.2%, prompting renewed speculation that the Federal Reserve may cut rates as early as September, especially amid criticism from Trump toward Fed Chair Powell. Healthcare stocks recoil on drug price pressure. Pharmaceutical and healthcare companies, including Eli Lilly, UnitedHealth, and Bristol-Myers, declined following White House demands for price reductions within 60 days. The sector's weakness added to broader market unease. So how to invest with all of this craziness? In a state of pure uncertainty, and with some massive changes coming, I would proceed with caution. Right now, the stock market has just been so high, and it's been propped up pretty much on this AI boom, on hype, on hope, and there's just a lot of valuations that are super overvaluated. In a time like this, I continue to dollar-cost average into the tried-and-true three-fund portfolio that I always talk about. The data suggests that if you just stay at a constant interval, and you just dollar-cost average like normal into these broad, solid-style ETFs for 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, you're gonna see some amazing results. I'm investing for 20 years from now, not for tomorrow. So if you're investing as a very short-term investor, I would be very, very cautious. I would be very, very much watching for these crazy spikes and these crazy dips. I personally would not even be touching the market in the short term. And as far as single stocks, I'd be very, very cautious with those as well. We need to see what's gonna happen as of August 7th. There's gonna be certain companies that are gonna be hit way harder than others, like Amazon, which has a lot of imports from all around the world. It's gonna have a tough time. That's why that one's down the most on Friday. By August 7th, my guess is that the market is gonna show fear. A lot of people are going to take money out of the market, kind of just waiting and seeing, and what that's gonna do is bring down the market overall. That could be some good dip buying opportunity. We also very much need to understand that these tariffs will cause something to be disrupted. There will be companies and possibly even markets overall that have a tough time in the third quarter and in the fourth quarter of 2025. I'd expect to see some pretty bad earnings reports in the coming times. And at that point, that should bring the market down even more. And so we'll see some opportunities for some dip buying. The best thing you can do is control what you can control and make sure that you have a healthy emergency fund all funded up, and make sure that you keep your expenses low. A couple of things to watch out for in the next couple of weeks would be the final implementation of tariffs on August 7th, obviously, the Federal Reserve commentary, including next FOMC decision, which we very much might see that first rate cut that we have seen in a long time. I'm thinking September looks pretty juicy. Upcoming economic data like CPI, PPI, and continuing jobs reports, and then continued Q2 earnings updates, particularly from mega cap tech and consumer sectors. As always, I'll be here every Saturday to keep you informed, but for now, watch either of these two videos to keep you going strong in investing, and remember to keep investing simplified.