It’s Nvidia week, and the only company that seems to matter in the continuing AI bull run reports earnings on Wednesday. Meanwhile, markets are still trying to digest Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s surprise intervention in the bond market, doubling planned buybacks of long-dated Treasuries. The amount itself is relatively small compared with the enormous volume of U.S. Treasuries traded every day, but it certainly caught the attention of investors in bitcoin and gold. Bot

Central banks can do almost anything to short-term interest rates. They can raise them, cut them, buy bonds and, if necessary, force parts of the yield curve to trade where they want. Japan spent decades proving just how far that influence can extend. However, controlling the price of money for the next thirty years is a different matter. And the long end of the curve is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. The 30-year US Treasury yields more than 5.25%, the highest lev

Amidst all the rhetoric on Iran and yet another swing in the oil price, it’s easy to forget that we are in the middle of earnings season. So far about a third of the S&P 500 has reported and nearly 90% have beaten EPS estimates. Q2 earnings growth is now approaching 47%, the strongest since the post-Covid rebound in 2021. One encouraging feature is that earnings strength isn't confined to AI. Strong reports have also come from financials, energy, communication services and in

As I stood underneath the trees, I couldn't figure out what was causing so much commotion high above me. Hidden beneath the dense canopy, all I could hear were objects striking the ground around me. We assumed it must be birds building nests, dropping the occasional twig in the process. This went on for weeks and, if anything, the activity only intensified. It couldn't possibly be pigeons with such spectacularly bad aim. Then one afternoon I was hit by something rather more s

As the World Cup draws to a close, a welcome distraction from the conflict in the Middle East disappears with it. Commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz remains severely depressed, with only four vessels transiting on Sunday and similarly low activity continuing into Monday. Not surprisingly, Brent is creeping relentlessly higher, standing at over $88 per barrel this morning. Rather surprisingly, the S&P 500 still has not got the memo and continues to hover just a c

Back in the nineties, it was relatively easy for professional traders to make money. It was the dawn of direct market access and electronic trading. Stocks would occasionally trade at different prices on different exchanges, allowing traders to buy Lufthansa in Berlin while simultaneously selling it in Frankfurt for a profit. It was, for a while at least, the closest thing to printing money. Of course, those opportunities could not last. They gave rise to high-frequency tradi

The great style rotation appears to be underway again. Over the past week, value stocks have outperformed growth, extending a trend that has characterised much of 2026. After years of being overshadowed by the AI-fuelled rally in mega-cap technology, sectors such as financials, industrials and healthcare have begun to attract renewed investor interest. The drivers behind the recent shift are easier to explain than to predict. Investors have become more confident that economic

Don’t look now, but oil prices have quietly fallen back towards levels seen before the war with Iran began. This is somewhat surprising given that the United States and Iran remain some distance from a comprehensive agreement, and it’s not like Iran’s nuclear ambitions have disappeared, or Israel’s security concerns have vanished overnight. Despite repeated warnings that it could take months for the region to normalise, why do the oil markets appear so remarkably relaxed? For

One of the enduring traditions of modern warfare is that, eventually, everyone claims to be a winner. The latest US-Iran agreement appears to be no exception. Washington can point to military success and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. Tehran remains in power and will no doubt portray its survival as a triumph. Israel can argue that it has significantly weakened a long-standing threat. Everyone gets their headline. Whether anyone achieved their original objective is an

With many chip stocks up more than 100% this year, it should not have come as a complete surprise that there would be some profit taking. The bad news is that this was not the reason global equity markets were down 3% on Friday. “Looks like meat is back on the menu, boys!” (The Lord of the Rings, 2002), and the US fixed income markets are once again pricing in the possibility of higher interest rates in the not-so-distant future. It is not like the writing has not been on the

For the fixed income markets, it’s ultimately all about the creditor being able to pay back what is owed. As such, there is a lot we can learn from current gilt yields about investors’ perception of the UK government’s ability to repay the £2.6 trillion it has borrowed. Up until March, things were fine. Short-term yields were headed lower and two-year Gilts were to be had for 3.5%. Now, we are just over 4.5%. More worryingly, 30-year gilt yields are now at a 28-year high of 5

When the Euro Stoxx 50 index launched alongside the Euro in 1999, many doubted either would survive. Yet the index quickly established itself as Europe’s benchmark, and liquidity in the futures market soon rivalled the S&P 500 as a global equity trading instrument. Clearly, the two indices are very different. The S&P500 has ten times the number of constituents and currency moves play a major role in relative performance. Yet the points difference between the two became a surp

Earnings season is doing what it always does: beating expectations. Roughly a third of S&P 500 companies have now reported, with close to 80% delivering earnings ahead of forecasts and around two-thirds beating on revenues. On the surface, that looks reassuring. Markets tend to rise when companies outperform, and so far, the numbers are holding up well enough to justify the resilience in equity indices. The problem is that this is not a story about strength. Earnings growth i

According to the equity markets, the war in Iran is over. Moreover, whatever else we were worried about does not really matter when we are making record highs again. The mega-caps led the way, up an incredible 20% in April, but even staples joined the party on Friday in the kind of broad-based rally you typically see once markets believe the inflexion point has passed. Of course, the problem is that we are far from any agreement that would lead to a true and permanent de-esca

When two sides go to war, expecting a deal after the first negotiation was always going to be optimistic. We do not know what was said behind closed doors, but the US threat to close the Strait of Hormuz looks as much like a message to China as it does to Iran. At the very least, it raises the stakes well beyond the region itself. Discounted Iranian oil, increasingly settled outside the Dollar system, has become a quiet but important dynamic. Threatening that flow is not just

For investors, the war in Iran has been a disaster. Far from delivering a decisive blow through an extensive bombing campaign, Iran appears more entrenched than ever. It retains significant influence over the Strait of Hormuz, and that chokehold on energy could tighten further if tensions spill into the Bab al-Mandeb strait. Natural gas markets are under even greater strain, with LNG flows harder to reroute and increasingly vulnerable to shocks. Fertiliser prices are surging

You can’t win a game of chicken against someone with nothing to lose. Iran is facing an existential threat and has spent four decades preparing for asymmetric warfare. It appears to have neither the intention to de-escalate nor the incentive to stop targeting the Gulf’s exposed energy infrastructure. That reality seems to have finally sunk into financial markets last week. Oil prices are getting painfully comfortable above $100 a barrel. Equities are drifting towards correcti

It is fair to say that of all the available options for dealing with Iran, the current path must rank among the least attractive. Diplomacy was messy, containment imperfect, and strategic ambiguity uncomfortable. Instead, President Donald Trump appears to have kicked a hornet’s nest and now seems surprised that Iran can sting the world where it hurts. Iran does not need to win a conventional war to create significant disruption. It merely needs to make the environment unstabl

We are now in the second week of the war in Iran. Financial markets initially absorbed the bad news with surprising resilience, but sentiment has deteriorated quickly. Oil trading above $115 per barrel early this morning is wreaking havoc with inflation forecasts, pushing bond yields sharply higher and even reviving talk of rate hikes in the UK and the Eurozone. Global equities have finally got the memo and have sold off hard in the last few trading sessions. The Nasdaq is of

Markets dislike uncertainty. They dislike a disrupted oil supply even more. The escalation in the conflict between Iran, Israel, and the United States has injected both into the system at once. Equities are mostly lower this morning, oil prices are sharply higher, and gold caught an immediate bid. The geopolitical risk premium, largely dormant this year, is back on the screen. The focal point is the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a fifth of global oil flows. Markets