Mission Impossible: Protect Your Portfolio

If Investors Choose to Accept It

By The Coastal Journal | April 14, 2025

“Your mission, should you choose to accept it…”

Those iconic words have echoed through every Mission: Impossible film, summoning Ethan Hunt to face his next impossible task. And today, investors find themselves cast in a similarly perilous role. The mission isn’t rescuing secret agents or defusing bombs. It’s protecting portfolios, navigating financial markets weaponized by political volatility, and outrunning the ticking clock of deteriorating fundamentals.

Unlike Tom Cruise’s super-spy, investors don’t have a parachute. There is no IMF team waiting in the wings. All they have is a series of erratic tweets from President Trump, a collapsing equity risk premium, and the ominous shadow of a death cross descending over the NASDAQ.

This is the world of finance in 2025—and the message is clear.

The fuse has been lit.

---

Act I: The Trigger – Trump’s Trade Chaos

Every Mission: Impossible needs a villain. And in the eyes of global markets, unpredictability has become the greatest threat of all.

President Trump’s on-again, off-again trade war has returned with a vengeance. One week he threatens 100% tariffs on all Chinese tech goods. The next, he suggests only some companies pay and others like Apple don’t.. But the damage is done. Supply chains are strained, multinationals are frozen in indecision, and the rules of global commerce have become as unstable as a ticking briefcase bomb.

Even more concerning? Trump’s recent tweet “delaying mass tariffs 90 days.” The markets surged briefly on the illusion of control. But like an IMF disguise, it quickly wore off—revealing the deeper structural rot beneath.

Investors are no longer sure who’s in charge of this operation, or if anyone actually has the codes to disarm it.

---

Act II: Smoke in the System – The Banks Break First

When a mission begins to unravel, it’s often the inside operatives who see it first. That’s exactly what we saw last week as bank earnings began to roll in.

Goldman Sachs may have technically “beat”—but it did so on the back of its trading desks, not the real economy. Dig deeper and the truth emerges: investment banking fees fell -8% as corporate deals dried up. IPO activity remains frozen. And Goldman’s asset and wealth management division saw revenue fall -3%, weighed down by equity and debt losses.

The most telling moment? Goldman quietly set aside $287 million in credit loss provisions—primarily tied to consumer credit. Translation: the American consumer, long seen as the last line of defense, is showing signs of financial distress. People are missing payments. Credit stress is building. The mission is being compromised as the stock continues its YTD declines.

Elsewhere, luxury brand LVMH reported its own set of problems, missing earnings. The world’s biggest luxury empire reported a 3% decline in Q1 sales, well below expectations for 2% growth. Even more alarming, U.S. sales fell 5%, missing a flat consensus. LVMH’s U.S.-listed shares plunged as much as 7.5% on the news.

Luxury is often the last domino to fall. When even the wealthy are pulling back, it’s not just a slowdown—it’s an unraveling.

---

Act III: The Death Cross – Signals from the Battlefield

As Hunt might say, the real danger often comes from what you don’t see—until it’s too late.

We reached out to the chart technicians at Golden Coast Consultants, where seasoned technical analysts are now confronting a formation that rattles even the most unshakable veterans of the market: the death cross. Long regarded as one of the most ominous signals in market lore, it doesn’t hint at a pullback—it blares a warning of deeper collapse.

(A death cross is a widely recognized technical analysis pattern on stock market charts that signals a potential shift from a bullish (rising) market to a bearish (falling) market trend. It is identified when a short-term moving average—most commonly the 50-day simple moving average (SMA)—crosses from above to below a long-term moving average, the 200-day SMA)