You were right! Trump's tariffs were temporary (except for China)

Welcome to AI Collision 💥,

In today’s collision between AI and our world:

You must have the crystal ball
Gotta be quick!
Operation McFlurry

If that’s enough to get the stocks record rebounding, read on…

AI Collision 💥

When I asked the other day about how long Trump’s tariffs would last, and put it to a poll, the results were overwhelmingly that it was all temporary.

One option I didn’t have in place, that perhaps caught everyone by surprise was, “They’ll be gone by the end of the week.”

Then, on Wednesday Trump decided to put a 90 day “pause” on all tariffs except for China. For China, they get 125% tariffs now.

And then as you’d expect social media was ablaze with the rhetoric that Trump had been playing “4D chess” this whole time, that China walked straight into his “trap” and the number of “Art of the Deal” memes were endless.

A view that’s being heavily pushed from the White House is that Trump meant this all along, this was his plan, and that he’s the king of deals and strategic outfoxing his opponents.

But the reality is that it looks like Japan (the largest holder of US Treasuries outside of China) decided to dump US bonds, pushing yields even higher again and forcing the hand of the White House to pause the tariff war – until the dust can settle, and likely the Fed can step in to get an emergency rate cut in.

So yeah, Art of the Deal? Or perhaps Art of the Misdirect?

While one of the hardest bounces I’ve ever seen in a single session in the markets in 30-odd years of investing is grand, it’s by no means the signal this is all over.

Far from it.

I’m expecting that unless some kind of guarantee comes from Trump to the rest of the developed world that he’ll keep some stability with his decisions, then confidence in the US will only decline.

But that’s really just a continuation of the whole global dedollarisation we’ve been seeing in the last few years. In short, the US dollar is weakening on a global scale. Trump sees this, and he’s pulling on all strings to right that ship.

Frankly, that ship may have already sailed.

Now, that’s not to say that dedollarisation is the death knell for markets and massive global investment trends like AI, robotics, autonomous systems, AI infrastructure and factories. Far from it.

The US is still a massive economic powerhouse, that is the world’s biggest shopping centre. And the US consumer market is always going to be in hot demand. And they still do have the bulk of the world’s advanced AI infrastructure in place, and that doesn’t seem to be slowing down any time soon. In fact a weaker US dollar on a global scale might even accelerate that.

My expectation is that volatility continues for some time. That unexpected shocks will come (good and bad) and that you’re going to see AI stocks trade like crypto for much of the foreseeable future.

a) that’s ok, and b) it creates great opportunities in great AI focused stocks. The AI theme is not slowing down, and when Trump or anyone else decides to tank the market, you’ve got to be independent an autonomous enough to see it for yourself and act quickly.

For example, in between me sending the last AI Collision, and this one, the market rebounded in a manner that I simply couldn’t communicate to you fast enough on.

Now, if you had been reading my work for a while, and then see that great companies on a huge long term investment theme were at prices, and earnings multiples that were clearly oversold, then you have the tools and knowledge to make moves for your portfolio to take advantage of all that.

And that’s really what our aim is here at AI Collision. To arm you with the insight and tools, to make fast, smart and profitable decisions for yourself when the opportunity arises.

A saying that’s often attributed to Roman philosopher, Seneca, goes, “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”

In this market it’s exactly what happens.

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Boomers & Busters 💰

AI and AI-related stocks moving and shaking up the markets this week. (All performance data below over the rolling week).

man in black suit jacket and black pants figurine

Boom 📈

Broadcom (NASDAQ:AVGO) up 8%
Palantir (NASDAQ:PLTR) up 5%
Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) up 3%

Bust 📉

Alibaba (NYSE:BABA) down 19%
XPENG (NYSE:XPEV) down 17%
Western Digital (NASDAQ:WDC) down 13%

From the hive mind 🧠

Google is fast catching up to ChatGPT and Grok, in fact I’ve had people tell me that Gemini 2.5 is now better than them all! The latest deep research upgrade is a big contributor to that success.
Energy, energy, energy – AI needs ENERGY, lots of it and needs it now. We do have plenty to give it, but it means looking at energy that has been a bit on the nose, but is in fact critical to the development of the world’s biggest technology revolution.
It feels like there are as many AI subscription levels now as there are TV streaming services. So which AI is Netflix, which one is Apple, Amazon, Max? Anthropic? OpenAI? Google?