News and analysis

I told you that Google stock needs a first available rationale for another bullish reversal, and so it suddenly emerged. Oversold Google happily bounced off the pivotal levels a bit below $170 per share, a super strong technical support area of late November, as soon as its parent Alphabet company announced a launch of an experimental version of a new search engine. The feature is based on Google's AI-generated summary and already available to subscribers of Google One AI Premium, with the AI, or the artificial intelligence, clearly the main two letters now in the alphabet book of any smart investor, forgive me the alphabet pun.

Google would probably soon eliminate its classic 10 blue links, which I personally loved so much, but now we have a different time with different values and perspectives, when people rarely enjoy their own choice of information for thoughtful analysis of topics at request. I just dare to hope that old good links will remain forever, only optionally. And I am ready to see another wave of the uptrend in Google stock. I would bet on an early test of levels above $200 per share in the next couple of months, which may be delayed along the way solely due to the wider Wall Street pullbacks, which recently took place in tech stocks. By the way, the Wall Street analyst pool's 12-month target for Google is still above $218 on average, which means nearly 25% free space to the upside.

As to the details of the extra feature, it can be accessed now via the results page for any search query by simply clicking on a tab labeled "AI Mode", which is put near all other options like search among images or point to locations on maps. When using the AI mood, normal links would be replaced by a search bar for asking follow-up questions. Google-produced Gemini 2.0 model promised better equipment to handle complex queries. So, this would become a crunch for the audience to be caught by the Google One AI Premium plan which costs $19.99 per month and normally provides vast cloud storage, when Google Cloud continues to grow its market share on sales at a faster speed compared to its large competitors like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. In the last quarter, Google reported a pace spike of 30% YoY on its cloud segment and would try its best to consolidate the progress. However, search-related advertising remains the core revenue source for Google. The new AI model delivers a one-two punch to hit both search and cloudy targets. Helped with its OpenAI partners, added search functions to ChatGPT as early as last October. Now Google is at least on par with Microsoft in this offer, but Google search is much more familiar for many users.

Do you need another reason to buy Google? On the same day of March 5, Alphabet’s YouTube rolled out a $7.99 per month subscription, called the Premium Light plan, which is ad-free for all videos, except music. This is another reason to compete more directly with offerings from the fast growing Netflix and struggling Disney TV. YouTube management thinks that the service has a large number of watchers who rarely use it for music and may move here from more expensive options like YouTube’s existing $13.99 Premium plan without ads at all, including for music. A separate $10.99 plan now offers ad-free music videos but other videos with ads. According to John Harding, a vice president of engineering at YouTube, the goal was to tap into a "much larger set of people" who otherwise might not consider paying for YouTube. "We didn’t feel that we really got it matching the tier for users that don’t need the music content, and so that’s where this revision comes in," said Jack Greenberg, the product director for YouTube Premium. More choice means more fun, and potentially even more money for Alphabet from YouTube. Last year, the company began testing Premium Lite in Australia, Germany and Thailand. According to Harding, early data showed that the number of users paying for Premium Lite for the first time increased, and some later upgraded to Premium. The number of people who upgraded to normal Premium was higher than the number of users who just chose a cheaper plan.

Synthetix (SNX) is down 6.5% this week to $0.934, closely tracking the broader market, where Bitcoin (BTC) has declined by 3.5% to $90,650. The token remains highly correlated with overall market trends, making it vulnerable to external shocks.

SNX has erased all gains from the Trump-driven rally, falling to its lowest levels since June 2020. Prices have been moving sideways for over a month following a sharp 44% decline in just three days, signaling the potential for another drop toward the $0.500 support level.

Should market conditions improve, this support could provide a strong foundation for recovery.

Stock futures only ticked higher for a short time, the day after Donald Trump's cornerstone speech to the U.S. Congress. The key indexes of Wall Street remain under pressure while rolling back to their pre-election support areas of early November. The low for the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 indicator was noted 33 points above the 20,000 landmark, when the broader market's S&P 500 measure briefly dipped below 5,750 on March 4.

A sell-off sentiment dominates, but faint hopes for possible tariff relief appeared when Trump's team top official, the commerce secretary Howard Lutnick, noted that the U.S. president could later ease some tariffs he has already imposed on trade partners. To be more precise, Lutnick mentioned that some relief on import of items like cars and auto parts could be granted if that complies with the U.S.-Mexico-Canada free-trade agreement. Shares of Ford (F) and General Motors (GM) regained 1.75% and 3.75%, respectively, as a response to this comment to partially offset a much stronger weekly loss.

Global markets predictably reacted painfully on risks that Donald Trump would follow his threats to additionally impose "reciprocal" country-specific tariffs on April 2, if countries like Mexico, Canada and China will persist with their retaliate measures against the first portion of U.S. tariffs. These could add more barriers on all imports from Europe, as well as product-specific tariffs on not only metals, but also pharmaceuticals, semiconductors and the agricultural segment. Among other tariff precedents, Trump reiterated his thoughts of the "very unfair" tariffs imposed by India, which "charges us auto tariffs higher than 100 per cent". Thus, he announced the same sizes of "reciprocal" tariff rates on nations that impose their tariffs on U.S. exports, if foreign countries will keep their tariff regulations valid within one month more. "Other countries have used tariffs against us for decades, and now it's our turn to start using them against those other countries," Trump declared in his yesterday's address to a Joint Session of Congress.

Regarding how the prospect of further trade battles may negatively affect the incomes of American sellers in the confrontation between the U.S. and Canada, some Canadian provinces have already made non-tariff decisions to stop selling bourbon and other classic American goods, while the premier of the Canadian province of Ontario terminated a $100 million contract with Elon Musk's Starlink company and banned those U.S. companies "who contribute to economic attacks" from participating in public procurement. Worsening trade relations can negatively affect the purchasing power of ordinary Americans, among other things, when data shows consumer sentiment's decline.

Morgan Stanley survey polled nearly 2,000 consumers to reveal also a stark divide in sentiment along political lines, with "liberals displaying a more pessimistic view than conservatives", but this "does not immediately signal a reduction in consumer spending". Morgan Stanley economists foresees rather "a slowdown in spending growth due to the effects of immigration and tariffs" while "spending intentions remain robust". It seems that consumers may become more nervous in advance because of the hype about tariffs in the media, even if they cannot feel the effect yet in their wallets.

It is worth mentioning that Trump’s commitment to extend his 2017 tax cuts is welcomed. This could offset most of the potential negative impact from tariffs issue as the same combination of agenda already buoyed an extremely bullish market sentiment during Trump's first presidential term. And Trump has reiterated all of his tax cut plans. Again, many of outdated legal requirements would be massively abolished, with new presidential decrees being adopted for faster economic growth. There is encouraging news about an unprecedented investment of $500 billion from Apple Co in new production facilities in the U.S. over the next 4 years. Thanks to this news, shares of Apple remained calm and rather high on the sidelines of the south route during the broad bloodbath of tech giants, when flagship companies such as NVIDIA, Broadcom, Meta, Amazon, Google and many others are subjected to a fundamentally undeserved sale.

We consider this sell-off to be detached from actual fundamentals, expecting excellent entry points for buying opportunities to come soon. The reason behind this logic is that tariffs can dominate people's consciousness, but they do not determine the basics of big tech business, because all technology giants have a global nature of their growing revenue collection, not too much dependent on cross-border trade affairs. They won't be affected by whether Canadians go on vacation to Florida or somewhere else. Their manufacturing capabilities are also dispersed across different continents, and NVIDIA happily avoided restrictions on the supply of chips to China, which looked worse than Trump's tariffs. Again, investors don't like the fact that Trump's tariffs are delaying a reduction in the cost of borrowing from the Federal Reserve. Federal Reserve Bank of New York's head John Williams clearly said that tariffs "drive up inflation risks to some degree", while current rate policy is in good place right at the moment. Tariffs that "hit consumer goods could flow through quickly to inflation" while other parts of the economy might see a slower moving impact, he added. This is important in terms of market's expectations from what the U.S. central bank could do, but interest rates are surely not the most important driver under the global AI and, generally, tech boom.

The tech rally will survive the current pullback and resume, as it has gone beyond the similar agenda in 2017-2018. The world will "get by" and investors should "buy the dip", Blackrock CEO Larry Fink said at the 2025 RBC Capital Markets Global Financial Institutions Conference a day ago. His point of view was that companies and governments would "recalibrate" with possible near-term volatility, but accompanied by mid- and long-term "opportunities to own stocks". “The world is fine. There is a lot of noise, but the world and the U.S. will get by", Fink said at the event, and we fully agree with this concept. The Nasdaq index may well slip to, say, between 17,000 and 18,500 due to rising crowd fears, but it will reach at least 25,000 during this year.

ApeCoin (APE) is down 16.2% this week to $0.569, underperforming Bitcoin (BTC), which declined by 4.5% to $89,789. APE faced heavy selling pressure on Tuesday, plunging 26% to $0.498—the lowest level since August 5, 2024.

The sharp drop appears unusual, given that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) recently dropped its probe into Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) creators Yuga Labs. Despite this positive development, APE has shown little reaction, suggesting further downside potential.

If the current weakness persists, APE could test support at $0.250 before staging a recovery toward the $1.000 mark.