Happy Friday! 

Every week, we dive deep into macro trends, analyze asset movements, and uncover the best value plays in the world of macro. These insights are shared with hedge funds and institutional clients, and each Friday, we bring them directly to you.

While the macro landscape can be complex, we believe it doesn’t have to be intimidating. In this recurring series, we break down the key takeaways from the week, explain what we’ve told hedge funds, and outline how we’re trading these ideas — all in a straightforward and actionable way.

As always, let’s have a look at the current portfolio setup before we jump into the macro stories

The portfolio has posted another decent week and has more or less shielded the implied volatility from the back-and-forth talks on tariffs from the Trump administration. However, it’s admittedly funny how scheduled Trump’s messages on the topic are, with yet another headline on his plans for reciprocal tariffs—targeting basically every single country on earth in theory—emerging on a Friday. It’s apparently always during Friday or the weekend that this kind of news comes out, making it incredibly hard to trade.

As we have stressed numerous times before, this tariff environment is all about finding trades where:

1. The underlying macro/fundamentals look great, and
2. The trade has some sort of embedded tariff protection.

At the moment, our conclusion is that if you want to be shielded from tariffs, gold, copper, and short USDJPY are the way to go.

We are pretty comfortable with the current lean in our portfolio, but Emerging Markets appear to be the most exposed to reciprocal tariffs once they go live next week.