Investors Eye Crude Oil’s Dip, Housing Affordability as AI Leaders Meet Trump in D.C.

84,000 695 in the VIX here pulls back 1.1% to help me set up this trading day. Kevin Henkes live at the Cboe for our pre built playbook. And as we s know thereays this diplomacy going on between the U.S. and Iran. A crude oi pulling back. We're sitting at 90. It's not 93. It's not 95. It's certainly not the highs of 120. Yields are elements that really sort of can crush stocks are behaving a bit. Your thoughts. Good morning Nicole. You're exactly right. If you to look why futures are modestly higher. To the day, look no further Now it's just over $90.5. Ifu l, it was four. It was 5.26%. Now it's.22%. And both of those are slightly higher than they were in the last hour. So I think the overall market is waiting for a ended week. A lot of financial data comingod yields that have driven this for the several weeks and months are both lower . But as you know, that could change very quickly in either direction. Nicole as we get newsoming out, we're waiting. We're waiting for more developmentsut cer right now, at least to start the day ahead of af financia that we're going to get the rest of the week. Crude oil is loields are lower. Stocks slightly higher. Nicole. Yeah. Kevin. You know, I know you're so in tune with all the economic dat that it's goin be pouring in between right now and the rest of the week. I mean, for example, Jolts data. We're expecting the consumer confidence at ten. We're going to have, you know PCE. We're goi have jobs. There's a lot coming in. Let's start with what we do have thus far. Case-Shiller home price index that just got at 9:00 eastern time. The 20y adjusted month over month up 0.3.s a 10th better than expected in terms of house price index. The 20 city unadjusted unchanged and the 20 city unadjusted year over year 2.5%. That's slightly better than the 2.1% expected. So we also got the FHFA price index. Similar numbers month over month, up 0.3 year over year 2.6%. Both those numbers slightly better than expected. So a little higher numbers from housece index numbers. A bit of a surprise if you ask me. As w rates where they are, the fact that house prices are, let's call firm here. I wouldn't call them jumping just yet, at least firm is good news for for the housing market. Ni Yeah. I mean, we saw I had Dolly and Jenny Lenz on lastk and we were t about home prices just coming down a little bit. They were r 4n home. And that was welcomed news overall. But youe still the as you noted, those mortgage rates 7% and the mortgage apps, which you cover for us each week,e've been seeing those with down arrows, whether it's for new mortgagesag picture is still very delicate. Exactly right. When when you look at interest rates and mortgage rates and housing, doesn't sto people from buying. They wait. And rememben you buy a house, you look at the price of the house, of course, but you look at your monthly payment and what's it going to be? And at the end of the day, can you afford that payment? Right. That's what I tell my family. That's what I tell my children. It's that number that you can afford each month. Now, if rates were to come down, tho num would also come down. So the overall affordability of housing is critical. It's something the Trump administration, Kevinrsh y this whole higher interest rat discussion is going to be real interesting in the next couple of months. All right, to leaders, I talked a little bit about this yesterday. Now it's really heating up. DC these tech titans. Tell us about what's going on. This big. A lot of rumors, a lot of rh about AI and what it can do to the overall society and the risks. Well how do you get a handle on this? Well, you get all the leaders in a room and you talk about it. That's what President Trump is doing today. Dario Mody from anthropic, Mark Zuckerberg from meta, Sundar Pichai from Google. Jensen Huang from Nvidia. Alex Karp from Palantir, Greg Brockman from OpenAI all meeting at the white House today to discuss AI safety and basically come together with some with their ideas and a path forward for this. This is how business gets done. You get really smart peopl room, hear tu hear their ideas, and you get a plan forward. I salute President Trump for getting peo all in one room, getting them all coming to Washington and mapping the path. They don't want to slow down AI o get behind China, but cly they want to make sure as they move along that it's safe for ever to use. Nicole. Yeah, we've had a lot of talk that, right? For example, Nvidia came up with something, a safety platform, the open agent safety platform. We talked a little bit about that. We have a few different things happening when it comes to safety overall, anthropic i their in their prospectus actually talked about the dangers of the AI agents. So they'll have a lot to discuss. Plus the the sendoff after President XI Jinping was here. h China in November. A final quick thought, Kevin watching crude oil prices, watching ten year yields that will drive the market this month. You know we're getting a ton of economic data starting withts. Remember that's our four days of labor marketata starting at 10:00 eastern with jolts. So a lot of economic data ver light on earnings. But micron tomorrow will will bemportant. But make sure watching crude oil watchinglds. Nicole. All r