Wall Street plays dirty. The most influential and oft-quoted Wall Street personalities manipulate stock prices with comments that they know will get picked by headline-scraping news services and blathering financial media hosts (ahem, CNBC, ahem).
Today I’ll show you how JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon pushes stock prices around.
On Friday, April 4, he got on the horn and spouted off with reporters. The New York Times quoted him as saying that “heady financial markets are “too happy” and “the chance of bad outcomes [like recession] is higher than people think.”
One look at a chart for the S&P 500 and I bet you can easily see which day was April 4…
Yep, that big red down day. The S&P 500 tanked 110 points from high to low. It was the biggest one-day sell-off since this rally started back in November. That big Friday sell-off was the shot across the bow for the rally…
A few days later, on April 8, Dimon kept at it in his Annual letter to shareholders. There was plenty of doom and gloom, like “… we may be entering one of the most treacherous geopolitical eras since World War II.”
And: “These markets seem to be pricing in at a 70% to 80% chance of a soft landing… I believe the odds are a lot lower than that.”
Would it surprise you to learn that Jamie Dimon sold $150 million worth of his JP Morgan stock in February?
The Wall Street Playbook
The selling that started on the heels of Dimon’s comments on April 4 took Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) down from $906 to $762.
AMD (NYSE: AMD) fell from $180 to $147.
The sell-off was especially bad for AI darling SuperMicro Computer (NASDAQ: SMCI), that stock got pounded from $1,015 all the way down to $717.
Seems to me that Dimon followed the Wall Street Playbook pretty well. He took some cash off the table when he sold $150 million of JP Morgan stock…
He used the financial media and his annual letter to shareholders to raise the fear level and help get a sell-off…
All that’s left is some fawning comments from Jamie Dimon about the US economy and the stock market to help kick off a rally…
That step happened yesterday:
You really can’t make this stuff up. And right before earnings for mega-cap tech stocks, too.
We’ve seen a smattering of good earnings reports so far. Bank of America (NYSE: BAC) was solid. Texas Instruments (NYSE: TXN) is having a good day. Even Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) got a good reaction from its earnings report last night.
Earnings season really heats up starting today. Meta (NASDAQ: META) reports tonight. Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) and Google (NASDAQ: GOOG). Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) is next Tuesday…
I like Amazon to make a nice move to the upside. And AMD (NYSE: AMD) could put in a big move higher when it reports later next week.
Don’t forget the playbook: Jamie Dimon is telegraphing the next move for stocks and it is up.
Briton Ryle
Chief Investment Strategist
