Given all the information we have access to every day, one of our most important abilities is to sort the wheat from the chaff – that is to capture and analyse the information that is relevant for the portfolios and ignore the daily “noise” that sustains the many 24-hour news stations but ultimately doesn’t really impact portfolios.
In this case, we really don’t care about the steel issue in isolation. But this is relevant information for us, because of what we can infer when we look ahead to the wider context of the more substantive US trade negotiations coming soon (such as with the EU or China). We learn from this latest development that we should expect uncertainty not just before and during the negotiation of a deal, but also even after a deal has been announced. So tariff related uncertainty might last a lot longer than we currently fear.