As the bell rang out over the New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday afternoon, it was an unusually beautiful day: 71 degrees, sun pouring on the faces of people swarming through the city. After the brutal cold of winter, it felt like something of a miracle.
The markets had spent the day chasing one of their own.
The incredible thing about the rally today wasn’t the scale of it, but the fragility of what it was built on.
“Iran has been, essentially, decimated. The hard part is done,” Trump wrote. “Go get your own oil!” Soon after, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine held a before-the-bel press conference, where they didn’t commit to either leaving the Strait or defending it, nor any sort of timeline on the war. But they said it was going well, and when the stock market opened, most of the major indexes were rallying above 1%.
The oil market looked at the same information and reached a more sober conclusion. Brent crude settled upwards nearly 5% at $118.35 a barrel, its highest close since June 2022, after Bloomberg reported that Iran had struck a Kuwaiti oil tanker in Dubai waters. Oil said war, and stocks said peace, and both closed higher.
