Apple is currently in tariff limbo, having been exempted from reciprocal tariffs and not yet having been assigned sector tariffs. Presumably, the new tariffs won’t be as bad as the previous 125% levies Apple was facing on China imports, so the hit to Apple’s earnings will likely be much less. Investors consider that pretty good news, with the stock closing up over 2% today — enough to bring Apple back into the $3 trillion club, which it had exited 10 days ago. It’s a lonely spot, though, since it no longer shares the space with Microsoft or Nvidia.

Just how important are the recent tariff exemptions for Apple’s financial outlook?

Here’s Bank of America analyst Wamsi Mohan to crunch the numbers in light of the revised messaging surrounding trade levies:

“In a scenario where Apple does not raise prices in the US, we see a negative $0.41 impact (-4.9%) to EPS in calendar year 2026. If Apple raises prices by ~10% in the US, we estimate the earnings impact would be $0.11 (-1.2%) in C26 (we assume 5% fewer units sold). We assume that 15 million iPhones will be manufactured in India for export to the US (no tariff, with remaining India production satisfying local demand) and the remaining ~35 million projected iPhones as well as all iPad and Mac units sold in the US will face the 20% tariff imposed on Chinese imports. At the previous 145% and 26% tariff rates for China and India, AAPL would face a $3.13 headwind to EPS (-36.9%) in C26 without any pricing. At 20% pricing and 5% demand destruction, this lessens to a negative $2.37 (-28.0%) impact to C26 EPS.”

Obviously, as the analyst outlines, there’s a variety of factors that the iPhone maker can pull to try to mitigate the impact of tariffs, like raising prices. As such, he’s more bullish on the outlook for profits than the above estimates indicate, seeing Apple’s 2026 earnings coming in at $8.47 (versus the consensus estimate of $8.02).

Mohan also thinks the stock can trade at a 30x multiple to those prospective profits, leaving him with a price target of $250. Near the depths of pain for Apple shareholders last week, he deemed this a “particularly enhanced buying opportunity” for the stock. In the short term, that view has been vindicated: shares are up double digits since that call.

Mohan has previously suggested that iPhone prices could rise by 90% if the smartphones were assembled in the United States.

“I’m half the man I used to be,” lamented Scott Weiland of the Stone Temple Pilots in the band’s 1992 song “Creep.”

Well, in one way, Goldman Sachs is nearly half the bank it used to be. The bank is up nearly 2% midday after reporting blockbuster earnings of $14.12 for the first quarter (estimates were for $12.26). What’s more, management announced a multiyear plan to buy back up to $40 billion of its own shares.

In an interview on Bloomberg following the release of earnings, RBC analyst Gerard Cassidy flagged just how much the bank has shrunk its share count over the past 15 years.

“If you go back to the peak level of shares outstanding for Goldman Sachs, which was back in the first quarter of 2010 — so this is post financial crisis, banks had to issue equities to get through the crisis — their share count has fallen over 45% since that time,” he said. “This is one of their active strategies and they do it very well.”

Cassidy has a sector perform rating and $610 price target on the stock.

As Bloomberg TV’s Jon Ferro observed, a $40 billion buyback plan into a market cap of about $161 billion is a truly colossal figure.

Speaking to reporters on Monday, President Trump suggested that some form of tariff relief could be coming for car companies, which have already been responding to the levies with a combination of price hikes, layoffs, and production shifts.

“I’m looking at something to help some of the car companies... They’re switching to parts that were made in Canada, Mexico, and other places. And they need a little bit of time, because they’re gonna make them here,” Trump said.

Shares of automakers like GM, Ford, and Stellantis spiked on the announcement. Additional tariffs on auto parts are set to take effect on May 3.

Apple just had its best first quarter ever in terms of iPhone shipments, according to new data from IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, having moved 57.9 million units. But that growth doesn’t necessarily mean Apple is selling more iPhones. Apple has been stockpiling its flagship product in the US — recently shipping 1.5 million iPhones to the US from India — in order to avoid incoming tariffs, so it’s likely that behavior is showing up in its shipment data.

To get an approximate idea of how many of those phones were part of the stockpiling effort, one could look toward IDC’s January forecasts, which were made long before the news or reciprocal tariffs rattled Apple. The market intelligence firm had previously estimated that Apple would ship 52.6 million units in Q1 — the same as last year, which is also in line with Morgan Stanley estimates for the year — so it’s possible that about 5 million of the shipments were due to tariffs.

“Faced with heightened geopolitical uncertainty and the looming threat of substantial US tariff hikes on goods imported from China, vendors strategically accelerated production schedules and pulled forward significant shipment volumes, particularly into the critical US market, during Q1 2025,” Francisco Jeronimo, VP of client devices at IDC, said. “This supply-side surge, aimed at mitigating potential cost increases and disruptions, effectively inflated Q1 shipment figures beyond levels anticipated based on underlying consumer demand trends alone.”

One hope of the Trump administration is that over the long term, tariffs will encourage companies to reshore production back to the US. One reality of the near term is that tariffs are encouraging companies to reroute production and exports to try to game the reciprocal tariff system, which has been materially watered down for most countries besides China.

This tidbit from Ryan Petersen, CEO of shipping logistics firm Flexport, sheds light on the emergent corporate strategy:

It likely isn’t a coincidence that China and Vietnam signed 45 deals on Monday during President Xi’s visit to China’s largest bilateral trading partner.

The likes of Nike and Lululemon have operations spread throughout Southeast Asia, for instance, and likely have some flexibility in tweaking operations or where their products are shipped from prior to arrival in the US.

Big Tech companies say they are still going full speed ahead on plans to build out $315 billion worth of data centers to power the AI boom. (Well, maybe not Microsoft.)

But what effect will the on-again-off-again tariffs have on these plans?

A new report from analysts at Morgan Stanley says perhaps very little. The main reason is that semiconductors and GPUs are excluded from the steepest tariffs (for now, at least). The analysts wrote:

“We view the Powering AI theme as relatively insulated from tariffs and economic weakness, given the benefits of AI adoption and commitment among LLM developers to continued innovation and cost reduction.”

According to the report, there are enough crucial GPUs in the channel (most of which are likely Nvidia chips), consumer demand for AI services is growing, and American AI companies like Meta, Amazon, and Google are still in the lead and will continue to improve efficiency, benefiting from their early big investments in AI infrastructure.

But the analysts still see some potential risks to these grand data center plans, like “power bottlenecks,” where aging energy grids can’t keep up with the massive electricity requirements of data centers, and potential inflation of the other materials needed to build this infrastructure.