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A couple of weeks ago, I bought Kraft Heinz (KHC), and caught the early-May run-up. And if I were buying a stock today, I’d go straight to Adobe Systems (ADBE) because it appears ready to climb, just like KHC did.

A difficult stretch causes us to sell two underperformers this week but we move forward today with a high-quality Japanese company at the heart of an unstoppable trend and a high-quality stock on sale.

WHAT TO DO NOW: The growth stock environment remains challenging, with lots of selling on strength and, this week, more than a few air pockets showing up, and this morning is showing ugly action. We’ve been holding plenty of cash for weeks and probing small new buys here and there without much luck, while paring back or kicking out names that break. Today we’re going to pare back further based on the action of individual stocks: First, we’ll sell one-third of our remaining Palantir (PLTR), while also ditching our half-sized stake in Reddit (RDDT). That will leave us with around 58% in cash—as always, we could redeploy some of that soon, but we want to see institutions step up.

Today, gold hovers around $1,268—about midway between its lows and highs for the year.

Action in the small-cap indices continues to be very encouraging.

Since the beginning of June, both the S&P 600 SmallCap Index and Russell 2000 have outperformed the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq.

Small caps have underperformed since last Thursday with yesterday’s selloff pushing the index to the lowest level since mid-January.

The main culprits are yesterday’s slightly hotter-than-expected CPI report, concerns about tariffs (carveouts expected) and an uptick in bond yields. Yesterday the 10-year yield jumped back to 4.64%, a three-week high.

While the broad market has stabilized a little over the last couple of days, we are still very much in a risk-off environment. As we all know, the market hates uncertainty. And we’re getting plenty of it these days

On-again, off-again tariff threats are the big story this week with Trump’s latest comments reiterating March 4 as the date for Mexico and Canada tariffs and April 2 as the date for reciprocal tariffs (tariffs that match those levied by other countries on U.S. exports), and an additional 10% tariff on China as of that date.

The market’s pullback went over the falls late last week and on Monday, with panicky trading leading to a huge gap down--and possibly a short-term low. Overall, the evidence tells us the intermediate-term trend is down and that, even if we have bottomed, plenty of repair work will be needed. That said, the longer-term evidence is still positive and, frankly, we’re not having trouble filling up our watch list for potential fresh leaders. Long story short, we remain cautious here and hold lots of cash, but we’re not sticking our head in the sand, either, and could have a couple of small moves if the market continues to stabilize.

The stock market is still showing a lot of strength, despite an approximate 4% run-up since a breakout in mid-January. It’s perfectly normal for stock markets to rise and to have pullbacks. However, I don’t see the stock charts signaling an imminent pullback so be prepared for more near-term capital gains.

The last couple of years haven’t exactly been kind on food, beverage and restaurant stocks. Generally speaking, the companies in the food and drinks category underperformed the S&P 500 last year, while in the case of restaurants, 2025 was a particularly bad one.

While the Russia-Ukraine conflict continues to add a huge amount of uncertainty in global markets we now have a little more clarity on the interest rate environment here in the U.S. after the Fed hiked rates by a quarter point yesterday.

Here are four traps for your retirement account and two ways which will help you avoid them.

It’s a new era, a changing of the guard. This week a Fed easing cycle starts as the Fed will begin to lower the Federal Funds rate after the steepest hiking cycle in decades. The easing cycle is expected to last for years.

In recent days, several portfolio companies reported quarterly and/or full-year 2015 results. General Motors (GM), Robert Half (RHI), Royal Caribbean Cruises (RCL) and Vulcan Materials (VMC) all surpassed market earnings per share (EPS) expectations.

We think the odds favor the market has found a short-term low (last Monday) amid lots of panic selling, and it’s probably starting to repair the damage from the prior few weeks … but that process is likely to take some time, as the market deals with the tariff and economic uncertainty and as new potential leaders try to round out launching pads. Of course, how the market acts from here will be key, so we’re remaining flexible, but we always advise going with what’s in front of us, and right now the odds favor more patience will likely be needed before a sustained advance can develop. We’ll leave our Market Monitor at a level 3.

As the correction has gone on, it’s become easier to spot the names that are resisting the decline. Our Top Pick is a newer name to most and it’s shown accelerating accumulation the past three weeks.