To The Moon

Investor sentiment was little changed last week, but the broader trend remains lower than a month ago. The sharpest move came from US investors, where sentiment fell from bullish to negative. Global Developed ex-US sentiment also declined, moving from bullish to neutral and confirming a wider downswing across developed markets. Across the ten markets we follow, sentiment now enters the summer months on the backfoot, with investors less confident, more reactive, and more exposed to emotion-driven swings. Elevated retail participation in leveraged ETFs and other directional instruments only amplifies that risk. The old saying that markets climb a wall of worry is simply the Stoic injunction to wear the world like a loose garment, translated into the language of finance. The lesson is to ackn

Investor sentiment continued to drift lower across all markets we track after peaking in early June on the signing of an MOU between the US and Iran. Since then, three factors are weighing on sentiment: doubts over whether Iran’s concluding chapter is final or merely another draft in circulation, recurring AI worries, and the Fed’s hawkish turn. The war in Iran began in the air, moved to the sea, and has now entered the arithmetic of endurance. In a war between a superpower and almost anyone else, common wisdom says control belongs to the former. And it does — until the weaker side survives long enough that you are suddenly making concessions you never intended to put on the table, later reclassified as the cost of doing peace business. That’s when, as with most things in this world, it is

Investor sentiment weakened slightly this week, suggesting Friday’s MOU between the US and Iran landed less as a fresh catalyst than as a case of sell-on-the-news. Investors know memoranda are easier to sign than wars are to end, and an MOU between just two of the four parties involved is not a peace deal. Washington has only just learned that in this war, Israel’s leadership was not in love with America, it was in love with “we”; since the April ceasefire, investors have watched a nasty Trump-Bibi break-up unfold, expletive-laden phone calls included. And as JD Vance indicated, exes can’t be friends – they know things about each other that friends never could. You can be friendly with an ex, but exes can’t be friends—not when one needs peace and the other needs a clear win. So unless nego

Investor sentiment is set to rise this week on the diplomatic breakthrough between the US and Iran on reopening Hormuz. Details on the exact conditions of the deal and next steps are still unknown, but as far as investors are concerned, you had them at Hormuz – Japan opened up 5% on Monday at a new record-breaking high. Still, we’ve been here before with peace efforts in the Middle East, and details, when they emerge next week, will matter for durability and credibility. For the Iranian regime, time upgrades survival to triumph, not defeat, so the reality on the ground may be unchanged from before the war began. Again. But if “unchanged” means a return to oil at $60-$70, markets are fine with that. With war escalation off their call sheet for now, investors will keep an eye on deflating oi

Investor sentiment has not moved on from AI fears over the past 18 months so much as upgraded them. First came the fear that AI would replace humans, especially young university graduates just entering the workforce. Then came the fear that it would render parts of the SaaS sector obsolete, turning yesterday’s private-credit optimism into tomorrow’s refinancing problem as low-rate loans from 2021–23 approach a 2028 maturity wall. By November 2025, the market had moved on to a more familiar worry: revenues were not keeping pace with valuations, and the whole trade was becoming uncomfortably concentrated. Now the cycle has entered a more systemic phase. The concern is no longer just whether AI destroys jobs or business models, but whether its financing needs are so vast that it becomes a fun

A portfolio equals structure and activity. Structure is the framework: constraints, risk limits, sector allocations, and opportunity set. Activity is the continual revision of beliefs as new information arrives. Remove structure and you have speculation. Remove activity and you have a time capsule of yesterday’s convictions about a world the market has already left behind. For investors, the war in Iran ended on March 31st; they rarely wait for diplomatic closure. The Trump administration has not just once said it is negotiating an end to the conflict—it has said so repeatedly, inconsistently, and often alongside threats of escalation, roughly 6–10 distinct times since March 24, turning it into the Boy who cried Peace. For investors trying to forecast inflation, monetary policy or, for ext

We are ~12 weeks into the Hormuz closure and everyone is still talking about oil and how the energy shock is driving inflation. Two more supply shocks hide in the shadow of Hormuz: Urea, a key input into fertilizers, has already repriced sharply at $850/mt in April, up ~80% since February, and helium, a non‑substitutable process gas for semiconductors fabs - no high‑purity helium means yield loss or tool downtime. Fertilizer is the faster channel, already repricing and feeding into the next planting cycle, reinforcing second‑round inflation pressures. For helium, if disruption persists, even modest curtailments feed through with a lag given ~6‑month semiconductor lead times, pushing any chip supply shock into Q4. For inflation, energy was the first punch, fertilizer the second—helium is th

American voters were promised peace in Ukraine and no more foreign wars. So far, the administration has managed neither. It has been unable to pour oil on troubled waters in Ukraine, or water on troubled oil in Hormuz after its own foreign policy helped set it alight. The promise of peace and stability abroad was perhaps too lofty for contentment and the approach too chaotic for achievement. On the narrower test of regime change, the administration may now be 0-for-3: Venezuela, Iran, and Cuba. Meanwhile, the costs at home are mounting. Last week was dominated by the first of three planned Trump-Xi meetings. With the wars in Ukraine and Iran still imposing heavy economic costs, investors feared the administration’s doctrine of Peace through Strength could slide into Peace through Compromis

Summer-like volume in April suggests the outsized rally in US equities (99th percentile for the S&P 500) was driven by a minority of optimistic investors, firmly believing in their own heads—not the place that counts most, but important nevertheless—that negotiations between the US and Iran would succeed and Hormuz would soon reopen for business as usual. Those investors were in the middle of downward dog when they saw Trump’s Truth Social post: “TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE.” Does it matter whether what we remember really happened? Or only that it mattered enough to be remembered? In the current US-Iran conflict, both sides are living proof that those are not the same thing. The US carries a tabulated memory of June 2025 and 28 February 2026: facilities damaged, the nuclear timeline set back,

Negotiators are, by definition, pullers of strings who work behind the scenes. Yet, despite both sides dispatching their éminence grise to Islamabad, a deal between the US and Iran remains elusive. Hormuz, that narrow oesophagus through which the world has, for decades, gorged itself on oil, remains dangerously clogged. The Trump administration tells anyone who asks – and plenty who don’t – that the blockade is working and that this vital organ will soon be back to normal with both function (traffic) and form (freedom of navigation) fully restored as Iran, it insists, is about to cave. For its part, Iran’s parliament warns to expect function to return, but not form. Hormuz, it insists, will not be born again: freedom of navigation will return, but as pay-to-play. The stalemate reflects the