 Stock futures are flat this morning in the pre-market trading hours. Sustaining the rally from yesterday, all three major indexes have been fluctuating within less than a tenth of a percentage point this morning. And this comes as major data on the services sector and job market is expected to be released later on today. Crude oil prices have dropped to their lowest point since May, thanks in part to lowering demand and recession fears. West Texas Intermediate Crude, which is an American oil benchmark, closed below $100 for the first time in months. Natural gas prices in Europe are nearing a four-month high, however. Production in Norway is being slowed by labor strikes at oil fields in the area. Workers are staging major walkouts over wage disputes. Those strikes are anticipated to escalate at the end of this week, potentially reducing Norwegian gas exports by over 50%. Meanwhile, there is growing speculation that the U.S. will lift tariffs against China. White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre says that there is no timeline in place now, but that President Biden is looking at options. U.S. Secretary of Treasury Janet Yellen met with her Chinese counterpart this week, and the markets rallied briefly in anticipation of any news. That follows a dip Friday as the second quarter ended as the worst first half of the year in over 50 years. So Melissa Armo, founder and owner of the Stocksmoosh, is here to discuss more. So glad that you are here. So I presume lifting tariffs is so that we can at least pay less for some of these Chinese goods. Would lifting tariffs make much of a difference? It would be like putting a bandaid on a much larger problem, just like the idea of getting rid of the federal gas tax. It's such a small percentage. So the problem is that, again, inflation is almost at 9%, 8.6%. Who knows what it's going to be by the next month? It's just too much. Lifting tariffs is just a bandaid. It will give some relief. But again, it's only on certain items. It's not going to be on everything. And the whole idea of putting the tariffs on in the first place was because we're competing with China. As a world power, China charges tariffs. We're not talking about lifting their tariffs on U.S. goods, to be honest with you. And actually, again, Trump, the reason that he put the tariffs on, when President Trump did it, was because he was trying to get people in America to work and buy Americans. So that's the problem. And again, I think it's going to be a small, small fixed pennies, pennies on the dollar for what people are really paying for most of the things that they're buying right now, which is, again, almost 9%. So Vlad always says to me, right, if you liked a stock at $100, you should love it at $50, right? That this could be a buying opportunity. But I got to tell you, I was one of those people that thought it would be fun to play around in the stock market at the beginning of the pandemic because prices of stocks went down. And now that I look at sort of the length of my investment, which has only been like a couple of years now, I see that many of the stocks that I bought are actually lower than they were during the height of the pandemic. And that is freaking me out a little. I don't want to spend more. I don't want to buy more of them. I just want to sort of, you know, conserve. Are there opportunities here? And do you have any sort of advice for people who want to take advantage of what we're seeing right now happening in the stock market? Well, first of all, don't freak out. You're going to be fine. You're very young. And if you're looking to buy stocks, then you're looking to buy them for the long term, especially if it's an investment opportunity where you're looking to buy and hold something for many, many years or something like your retirement account. As far as opportunities, you have to focus on stocks that are strong right now. There are a lot of things that have fallen off and many of them are the tech stocks like Netflix and Facebook and even Apple has fallen. But the good news is that earnings season starts next week. The banks are the first to report. And they will be the precursor to what really happens in the upcoming month with earnings season. What probably is going to happen is stocks companies are going to report and say that things were good maybe last quarter, but they're predicting maybe a negative return in the last part of the year. Because again, we're having so much problems with inflation where people are not buying as many things. I would wait until the earnings season. I would probably wait until closer to the end of this year because at this point there's so much going on right now. It's not just inflation. It's the war in Ukraine that is also causing some of the inflation and it's very difficult to predict the bottom. It's very difficult to predict the top. Don't even try to do it and don't feel bad if you can't. The long and short of it is if you love a company and you love what they do, for example, Apple, you buy their iPhones, you love them, buy the stocks that you love that are strong, that are going to hold through any downturn in the market because eventually the market's going to come back. But to be honest with you, it may not be before the end of this calendar year. We may have another six months of selling off. So that's what's going to be my next question. What's your prediction for the next six months if the first half of the year was so dismal? Well, I think the next six months are going to be challenging for the market and I don't think the market's going to make it brand new all-time high at all this year in 2022, which it hasn't done for several years. I also think that if the market's going to recover, it's going to be the late part of this calendar year. Like I said, people talk about a Christmas rally and maybe not this starting season, but the latter part of the year. And again, we just have to stop selling off. Like you were discussing the fact that we rallied yesterday. Guess what? In the last five minutes now, this morning, we are down again. We're selling off. Every single time the market rallies, it can hold it even from more than 20 to 48 hours. And that's problematic. It says that people are scared. They're panicking and they don't really want to hold on to the long positions for too long. Just like you said, you're panicking. Why? Because you're worried that things are going to get worse and therefore then you don't want to lose money. So you sell, you take a small loss or a small gain rather than taking a large loss. All right. Melissa Armo, I won't panic. Deep breaths. Thank you very much. Thank you.