ANGLES.

An absolutely pivotal week began on Monday with stocks initially bouncing back somewhat at the open from the prior week’s bruising tech bloodbath, helped by a 10%+ plunge in oil prices caused by an uptick in hopes of some kind of a US/Iran diplomacy breakthrough. But Big Tech/AI anxiety soon returned, led by the ongoing collapse in the price of Intel, the previous Friday’s most brutalized victim a...

The Federal Reserve was widely expected to hold the Fed Funds Rate steady in a pivotal week where key data releases were set to collide with megacap tech earnings during the final days of campaigning before the US midterm elections. Things got off to a bright start on a Monday dominated by the announcement officially confirming the upcoming blockbuster Anthropic IPO (ticker ANT). After just five y...

The earnings focus shifted from financials to tech and tech-adjacent companies reporting over the next couple of weeks which will help set the narrative going into this week’s FOMC meeting and the midterms, now just a week or so away. European traders watched France burning over the weekend and got back to work selling local stocks and bonds on Monday , but Wall Street rebounded hard from the NASD...

Deadly Houthi attacks in Saudi Arabia over the weekend and Trump clearly throwing his weight behind Putin by lifting some Russian energy sanctions and shutting down satellite access to the Ukrainian military pushed oil prices higher again as the eleventh bull market in stocks since the 1950s celebrated its fourth birthday (during which time the S&P 500 has risen by 117%) to start a week packed wit...

A distinct lack of meaningful economic data or earnings reports during the week put financial markets at the mercy of the newsflow surrounding the Iran war, US domestic politics a month away from the midterms and European economic woes, particularly in France, which is beginning to look like Greece circa 2010 with local interest rates having surged from 3.50% in late June to 4.90% today. Stocks me...

Over the weekend, Trump killed the tentative Hormuz deal (which had basically just re-stated the previous memorandum of understanding from earlier in the summer) that had sparked a rally in equities the previous week and disappointed global markets reacted by sending interest rates and energy prices spiraling higher again, pulling stocks lower in Asia and Europe. Despite reported apparent broad in...

Geopolitics was very much on the market’s mind after record electoral successes for extremist parties in weekend German regional elections and attendees gathering in New York for the annual United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) - but notably not the leaders of China, Russia, India or Palestine - while the Iran war rumbles endlessly in the background. However, China’s premier Xi Jinping skipping t...

After spending his weekend advocating for the breakup of the United Kingdom and watching golf, Trump resumed his relentless pressure on the Federal Reserve to slash interest rates to begin a week in which the central bank was widely expected to have to raise them for the first time since 2023 to fight inflation, putting him on a collision course with his own hand-picked Fed chairman. An Iranian-ba...

After a news-light long weekend, markets woke up on Tuesday to Canada announcing its promised like-for-like retaliatory tariffs on many US goods while at the same time plotting a massive trade deal with Europe, oil prices hurtling back towards $100 with a further escalation of hostilities in the Middle East and Trump nonsensically barking that the Fed should somehow immediately cut its interest ra...

The shortage of any important news over the weekend was highlighted by the fact that the story of Trump’s Lake Ontario stunt grabbed the headlines even as polls emerged to show that two-thirds of Americans do not approve of his tariff policy, with the midterms around the corner. This is in stark contrast to Canada where the more that Prime Minister Carney sticks it back to the US, the more popular...

Open economic warfare broke out between the US and its historically closest ally and second-largest trading partner over the weekend as Canada terminated trade negotiations in response to having been “attacked” by the US, according to Prime Minister Carney who openly said that “ America is trying to break us, so it can own us” . He effectively told the Trump administration where to stick its 50% t...

Following a weak-volume, low-volatility trading week in the stock market that nevertheless solidified August’s gains and a generally quiet weekend on the newswires, Monday marked the expiry of the 60-day Memorandum of Understanding, intended to be a pause during which a resolution to the US/Iran war could be crafted but which has clearly been a total failure. Trump, faced with record low approval...

Not a great weekend for US diplomacy. Iran threw ice-cold water on any lingering hopes of an imminent resolution to the war by issuing a list of demands (most of which were complete non-starters in the eyes of the Trump administration) that the US would need to agree to before the Strait of Hormuz can be reopened. Israel then piled on, formally rejecting Trump’s proposed Gaza peace plan. The week...

Following Trump’s latest flip-flop over the weekend as he continued to desperately search in vain for an off-ramp to the highly unpopular war that he started over five months ago, Iran accused him of “psychological warfare” . An exasperated Wall Street would probably agree. Traders are dancing in the dark . Trying to get a handle on what the plans are, if any, for bringing this conflict (and the r...

Traders were very much on edge all weekend, bracing for a frenetic week with multiple impactful earnings reports, a Fed interest rate-setting meeting, tariffs suddenly front and center again, $100 oil and who knows what from an increasingly erratic Trump. Conventional wisdom on Wall Street is that US foreign policy and military strategy is now being dictated by the interplay between the oil price...

“Not a drop of oil will leave the Strait of Hormuz” , according to Iran on Sunday as the so-called “three-week skirmish” approached its five-month anniversary amid daily US airstrikes and zero signs of any resolution. Stock markets around the world are still considerably higher than they were on the day the conflict formally began back on February 28th, but the oil price spiking back through $90 a...

The US/Iran ceasefire memorandum is obviously in tatters . Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, prompting a reinstatement of the blockade by Trump who also briefly proposed an idea to create his own toll system to pocket 20% from all shipping traffic (within 24 hours, he was forced to clumsily back-track on this bonkers plan). The US carried out more air strikes, prompting a resumption of Iranian att...

After successfully fixing the World Cup over the long weekend, Trump is finding Iran to be far less willing than FIFA to bend to his every whim and certainly not surrendering by any definition of the word, let alone the “unconditional” kind that the US president claims to require at a minimum. The sixty-day deadline countdown continued inexorably with no sign whatsoever of any progress towards a w...

The truce between the US and Iran came under severe stress over the weekend with both sides firing on one another and each blaming the other. But there was some geopolitical de-escalation on Monday that pushed stocks higher to start a holiday-shortened week, despite interest rates climbing steeply on the back of ongoing Fed rate hike fears. There was a flurry of Supreme Court decisions, including...

Over the weekend, we were treated to the bizarre sight of the US and Iran delegations chummily sitting down together in Switzerland against a backdrop of the Strait of Hormuz being closed again after being sort of open for all of two days, Israel continuing its deadly assault on Lebanon and Trump again taking to social media to threaten more and more violence. By the time US markets opened on Mond...

A 60-day extension of the ceasefire, a conditional reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and a suspension of the US blockade was announced on Sunday but it seems nothing has been resolved when it comes to Iran’s nuclear program, its frozen assets, war reparations or the lifting of sanctions, which would all be the subject of “further discussions” over the coming months. Despite lots of missing detail...

Alive and well, the US/Iran war, which we were told would last about four weeks, entered its 100th day over the weekend despite weeks of multiple fake reports of its demise and a Trump declaration back on April 17th that the Strait of Hormuz had re-opened (still waiting for that one). The odds of a swift resolution lengthened further as Iran and Israel exchanged fire on Sunday for the first time s...

Following another weekend of zero trustworthy information on the war and peace front, financial markets were hoping to be able to focus their attention for a few days on the more tangible reality of earnings, economic data and evolving narratives surrounding interest rates and AI etc. as a banger of a month of May for stocks gave way to the final month of Q2 on Monday . Energy traders ignored Trum...

Trump and Rubio spent last Saturday teasing that a US/Iran agreement including a re-opening of the Strait of Hormuz was “95% done” and was hours away from being finally announced. Iran quickly denied that anything was imminent and indeed there was nothing substantial to report by the time Asian and European markets opened on Monday , which was a holiday in the US and a number of other countries. N...

Another weekend, another complete lack of progress or even any useful information related to the Iran war as the paralysis continued with both sides wasting everybody’s time and effort by offering up proposals that are clearly non-starters since they know full well the other side won’t accept them. Wall Street loves itself a corny acronym and while bulls are tending to still hold on to the long-st...