Category: Newsletter

What a week. A rocket company became the largest public offering in history. The May inflation print landed mid-week as the hottest reading in three years. And the whole tape spent five sessions hostage to a single question about the Persian Gulf. When the dust settled, the S&P 500 closed Friday at 7,431.46, up 0.65% on the week. That rally clawed back roughly a quarter of the prior Friday's brutal 2.64% plunge to 7,383.74. The Nasdaq added 0.70%, and the Dow gained 0.66%. Small caps kept doing their 2026 thing, with the Russell 2000 leading on the upside again.

The melt-up finally took a breather. After nine straight winning weeks, the S&P 500 closed lower, finishing Friday at 7,384, down about 2.6% on the week and roughly 3% below Tuesday's record high of 7,609.78. The headline number buries the real story, because underneath it the market staged the sharpest rotation we've seen all year, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average tearing to a fresh record near 51,562 on Thursday even as the Nasdaq logged its worst day in nearly eight months. So the tape didn't fall apart. It rotated.

The headline tape made fresh history. The S&P 500 closed Friday at 7,580.06, finishing up 1.43% on the week and posting its ninth consecutive weekly gain. That's the longest weekly winning streak since 2024, and only the 5th time since 1965 that has occurred. While markets previously saw weakness following such streaks, the 24- and 52-week outcomes were primarily positive, except in 1989.

The week opened on the back foot and ended at a record high. The S&P 500 closed Friday at 7,473.47, up 0.37% on the day and 0.9% for the week, notching its eighth straight winning week. That's the longest weekly win streak since late 2023.

The S&P 500 closed Friday at 7,408.50, surrendering the historic 7,500 level it briefly breached Thursday and ending the week with a gain of just 0.3%. That Thursday intraday high of 7,517 now looks like a blow-off signal rather than a launching pad, and the week's full narrative explains exactly why.

The S&P 500 and Nasdaq closed at fresh all-time highs for the second consecutive week, with the broader index adding roughly 1.4% to finish near 7,330. Markets were led by communication services, energy, information technology, and consumer discretionary, while materials, industrials, and health care lagged. The geopolitical overhang defining the prior ten weeks is now background noise, and the market is trading on what it always ultimately trades on: earnings

The S&P 500 closed at a fresh all-time high Friday, capping a week in which the market did something remarkable: it largely stopped caring about Iran. That wasn't recklessness. It was earnings. Five of the Magnificent Seven reported this week, and the results were, on balance, strong enough to shift the market's center of gravity from geopolitical fear to fundamental momentum. As we wrote in "Hormuz, Why The Markets Are Shrugging Off The Oil Shock," the market ultimately reprices around what matters most: earnings. We're seeing exactly that play out now.

Last week, we noted that after the sharpest rally since May 2025, a correction was likely. Notably, those corrections come in two forms: a price pullback or a sideways consolidation. We got the latter. The S&P 500 churned between roughly 7,080 and 7,140 for most of the week. But Friday, did make a push to all-time highs. That kind of tight, high-level consolidation following an explosive move is technically constructive. Historically, it suggests the market is digesting gains rather than distributing them.

The market didn't just recover this week. It made new history. Monday opened with the S&P 500 erasing all losses since the Iran war began. The market rose 1% to its highest close since late February. Driving that rally were reports that Iran had reached out to the Trump administration despite a U.S. naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. The buying accelerated from there. By Wednesday, both the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq Composite closed at fresh all-time highs. With investors pricing in an increasingly credible path to a permanent peace deal, the bulls regained control.