 Welcome back to Cheddar News, everyone. All right, I'm Kristen Scholler. That is the closing bell packed podium down here on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange for a Friday index industry association celebrating the close of trade today and American Library Association celebrating at the close up at the NASDAQ and Times Square. Let's take a look at how the markets closed to end what has been a very volatile week. We did have a mixed market today. The Dow was positive on the back of gains in bank shares. Banks are set to report earnings next week. The Dow was higher by 139 points or 4 tens of a percent. The S&P, though, ending in the red, down about 3 tens of a percent. And all of these major indexes ending off of their best levels of the session, the NASDAQ continuing to underperform as has been the case all week long. The NASDAQ down 1.3 percent. That index ending at its own session low. And of course, we see tech names selling off these past several days because of the Fed's message allowed and clear in the meeting minutes that we got on Wednesday as well as Fed officials, presidents coming forward throughout the week saying that the Fed is prepared to aggressively raise rates or borrowing costs due to combat inflation. Of course, that would have a downside impact on these richly valued technology names. Ken? All right, Kristen, thank you for that. Let's take a look at some of the stock standouts from the day. First up, we have Tesla. The EV giant showed off the first vehicles made at a Texas factory last night while publicly unveiling the assembly plant for the first time. CEO Elon Musk wrote into the event in a Tesla Roadster playing the song Still Dre, which is super gangster, that said the event marked the beginning of a new phase of Tesla's future and he teased the future Tesla products, which include the Roadster along with the Cybertruck and the semi-trailer truck production on the new Roadster and Cybertruck. It said to start next year in the Austin factory. Musk signaled that production may also start next year on Tesla's Optimus Humanoid robot, which is the robot expected to serve as a general purpose machine doing everyday tasks. Tesla shares end of the day lower down nearly 3%. Next is our stock of the day, Twitter. The social media stock has been in focus this week after Elon Musk took a 9.2% stake in the company for more than two and a half billion bucks. Musk is now the biggest shareholder of Twitter and was also appointed to the company's board of directors. Musk has had a rocky history with Twitter after that infamous tweet several years ago where he wrote that he was taking Tesla private at $420 a share, leading to scrutiny from the SEC. Musk reportedly answered questions directly from Twitter employees in a company-wide AMA or Ask Me Anything session. Twitter employees have expressed concerns about Musk's appointment that he will make it more difficult for them to do their jobs and hurt company culture. Twitter shares end of the week lower by 2.1%. And lastly, Robinhood. The company is in focus after Goldman Sachs downgraded the trading app stock to sell from neutral. Ouch. Analysts say that there are too many challenges ahead for Robinhood to turn a profit next year. They pointed to slower retail investor engagement and slower user growth. In particular, the firm also cut its price target by $2. Robinhood has tried to offset declining user growth by extending trading hours with plans to extend hours even further in the future. Robinhood shares end of the day. You can see it on your screen. Down nearly 6.9%. It's been a rough one for Robinhood. Kristen. Ken, thank you. And that's right. Still a choppy market out there. Let's run through the major indexes, how they ended the week as we round out another trading week on Wall Street. We do see the S&P 500 down 1.3% for the week. The Dow shedding 3-tenths of a percent and the Nasdaq underperforming, losing almost 4% on the week. Of course, all of this coming as the Fed is ramping up its message that it is ready to aggressively raise rates to combat inflation. And joining me now is Melissa Armo, founder and owner of the Stock Swoosh. Melissa, it's good to see you. I know the last time you were on with me, you were talking about these unresolved headwinds or challenges that exist in this market. And a weeks later, it seems like they're still here. They are definitely still here. And even though the market rallied for 11 days straight, off the March 14th lows, I do not have 100% conviction that we won't go back down there. And if we do, there's a high probability that we will break those lows. And I don't know what that means for the markets and going into the spring and summer of 2022. Even though the Fed thinks that raising rates is going to stop a recession and help inflation, I firmly disagree. And the Fed has been wrong at every end of this, going back the last 12 months. First of all, last year, they said inflation was temporary. Then they admitted at the end of the year in December that that was wrong. Now they're still trying to say that they're gonna get back to 2% inflation by the end of this year. That's just impossible. There's no way that's going to happen. Raising rates is gonna hurt consumers. One of the reasons that what we have a problem right now is there's just supply shortages. We're having still issues with getting things all over the world. And still, even though the unemployment rate is low, I think a lot of people have chosen not to work. They have exited the workforce in the last two years because of COVID and other reasons as well. How much does Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine play into your thesis, Melissa? I mean, unfortunately this week, we saw the devastating images day after day, another horrible headline that we saw this morning. 50 people killed, civilians trying to evacuate the country due to a missile strike at an evacuation hub. Putin is not showing signs of backing down. How does that impact the market? Along with the Fed and rising rates and inflation and scares and worries of recession, that is another backdrop that is ongoing into pretty much the rest of 2022. This has been going on for weeks and weeks. Don't look for this conflict to stop or halt anytime soon. It could escalate, it could get worse and that could be one of the reasons that we sell off again because again, all of the things that they've tried to do at NATO in reference to just putting all of these things off of pulling back oil from Russia, it's caused the higher prices in oil. And doing all the things that they've been doing really hasn't stopped Russia from invading Ukraine. So look for this to continue and continue when really, I don't know when it ends or how it ends and I think that's gonna be worrisome for the market. So what would you recommend, Melissa, that investors, Americans do? Should they be keeping cash on the sidelines? Should they be taking profits if they have them here? Or should they be trying to buy the dips? I definitely don't think buying the dip is a good idea. I'm not a big believer in that no matter what. If we have a massive, this is, here's a scenario that would be best for health of the markets. Go down, drop, sell off really, really hard and then rally back quick and then go straight back up to the highs into the latter part of 2022. That would be better for the health of the markets. In this range, we've been in this range for weeks and weeks. We haven't made a new high at all in the QQQs this year. We did it at the beginning of the year in the spy and then we dropped off. This is the longest the market has gone without making new highs since I can't even remember. So if we stay in this range, that's bad for markets. It's bad for markets and it's bad for people making investment decisions because of the volatility. They go long and they kill it and that scares people. And again, people are actually bought that dip back from March 14th and there's no guarantee that's gonna hold. If you are in retirement age, then you probably should have taken profits last year, actually in 2021 because the market had such a huge run up from 2016 all the way up in 2021 and 2021 was a very bullish year for markets. If you did not take profits and you're actually in retirement you should talk to someone about the possibility of doing that. But again, long-term, the market for the most life of the market does hold the uptrend. So even if we sell off, if you're young, if you're nowhere near retirement age I don't see any problem with holding long-term investments. But again, short-term, it's been choppy for traders unless you pick a side. So I said pick a side, either go long or go short. You can't have conviction the market's both long and short and it's been a choppy time to trade unless you look for very, very specific things. So there's a lot of them out there and we're getting into earning season in a couple of days. So that'll be good for markets and very interesting too because if you don't see some of the major, major stocks, the market stocks, Apple, Amazon, Google all of those things that you don't see them report well then I don't know where we go. What about cryptocurrency, Melissa? We keep hearing to some extent it's a hedge against inflation. It acts like gold these days but of course crypto has been range bound as well and nowhere near its recent high that we saw toward the end of last year. Is crypto a market that you play and that you would recommend investors look at? I personally do not own any crypto currencies. I think the time to do that was a long time ago. If they're very expensive right now and we were just talking about volatility, they're very volatile. So I mean, if you wanna have that as something in your portfolio, that's fine. Again, I think having some amount of money and cash is good and spread it out but I wouldn't be heavily invested in any one particular thing right now. Having cash is good. Having stocks is good. Having a long term retirement is good. If you wanna actually own gold or silver, that's good too. And cryptocurrencies is fine. I personally think it's too volatile to trade into expensive and I didn't get in early. Now what about real estate? Because we see rates starting to rise quickly of course as the Fed ups the Fed funds rate and making the price of homes much more expensive. We had a guest on yesterday saying just in the first quarter the average price of a home jumping 17% due to rising rates. Knowing that these rates are going to more aggressively increase, does real estate look attractive to you at these levels? Well, here's the problem with real estate. It's not just rising rates which will affect people's ability to be able to borrow because again, they're going to get approved for a mortgage you're gonna be able to afford less because the rates are higher. That will affect lending. Remember how did banks make money? Banks make money charging fees and lending. So again, banks have taken a hit this year and I don't know how they report next week but that's a concern for banks with rising rates because they make money on lending. They want to lend as much as they can as much as people can qualify for and they'll qualify for a lot less. The problem with home builders is that they're contractually obligated to some of these things now when costs have gone up so much more. And again, they've contracted into, I'm talking about home builders where they've contracted with supplies and things are also delayed and there's no end in sight to that. And this is where I think the Fed is missing the vote as far as what's trying to find the dichotomy between stopping and curbing inflation and stopping the recession. It's we're having supply chain issues and there's COVID is in parts of the world now where they're still shutting down. This is a huge issue for these home builders and forgetting things, just getting materials that you need and then the cost going up. So it's not just interest rates, it's the cost going up. And one of those costs again is what? It's oil. Everything you buy, everything you get, I go to the grocery store, you go to the store and buy anything at all. How does it get there? It gets there from a truck. It gets driven there. And again, rising costs with gasoline increases food prices. It's not just people driving around the cars to get back and forth from work every day. It's everything we buy and everything we use. It's a tough time. That's for sure. Investments aside, even of course prices on basic needs like rent, groceries and gas absolutely through the roof. Melissa, we appreciate you taking the time on this Friday. That's Melissa Armo, founder and owner of the Stock Swoosh. Okay, well coming up, Ukraine's officials are accusing the Russian military of targeting train stations to block off escape routes for evacuees. We're gonna give you a report live from Ukraine to tell you the latest on the other side.