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The consensus this week was clean: ceasefire announced, oil dropped, buy everything. The S&P 500 has risen seven straight sessions to close Thursday at 6,824.66. The Dow turned positive for the year at 48,150.80. The best weekly advance since November, with the index up roughly 3.7% through Thursday's close.
And in the past 24 hours, nine ships transited the Strait of Hormuz. Nine. The pre-crisis average was around 140 per day.
The ceasefire exists on paper. The supply chain has not moved. Iran is restricting and conditioning every vessel that attempts to pass. Shipping operators are waiting for clear guidance from both Washington and Tehran, and neither side is providing it. The two-week clock is ticking, and the waterway that carries roughly 20% of the world's oil is operating at less than 7% of normal capacity.
The market spent the week buying the headline. The commodity market is starting to price the reality. Brent crude climbed back above $97 a barrel on Thursday after briefly touching the low $90s on Tuesday's relief trade. The bounce is telling you something the equity rally is not.
What matters:
March CPI lands this morning at 8:30 AM ET. Headline consensus runs around 0.8% month over month, which would push the year-over-year figure from 2.4% in February to roughly 3.1% to 3.4%. Core is expected around 0.2% monthly, 2.7% annually. This is the first print that captures a full month of war-driven gasoline prices. If headline comes in above 0.9%, the June rate cut disappears from the curve entirely.
The Nasdaq gained 0.83% Thursday. The 10-year Treasury yield sits around 4.3%. Gold is near $4,750 per ounce. Bitcoin is around $72,000.
Futures are pointing modestly lower ahead of the CPI print.
The energy trade is not over. It is changing shape.
The ceasefire compressed the war-risk premium in crude, but it did not restore the supply chain. That distinction matters for positioning. The names that benefit from extended disruption without acute escalation are different from the names that ripped during the shooting war.
Cheniere Energy (LNG) runs the largest liquefied natural gas export operation in the United States. With Gulf shipping routes constrained and European buyers scrambling for alternative supply, Cheniere's contracted volumes are fully booked and its spot capacity commands a premium. The stock trades at roughly 11 times forward earnings with a free cash flow yield north of 8%. In a world where the Strait stays functionally closed even under a ceasefire, every non-Gulf LNG molecule gains pricing power.
Diamondback Energy (FANG) sits on some of the most productive acreage in the Permian Basin with a breakeven cost below $40 per barrel. At current WTI levels in the mid-$90s, the company is generating outsized free cash flow and returning it through a combination of a base dividend yielding around 1.5% and a variable dividend program that flexes with commodity prices. The longer domestic crude carries a structural premium over the seaborne benchmark, the wider Diamondback's margin advantage grows.
EOG Resources (EOG) runs a similar Permian and Eagle Ford playbook, with completion costs per lateral foot consistently below peers and a balance sheet that allows it to self-fund growth without issuing debt. EOG trades at roughly 10 times forward earnings and has a history of returning cash through special dividends when commodity prices run hot. This is the environment those special dividends were built for.
CPI is the gatekeeper for what happens next in rates.
If March CPI confirms the 3%-plus annual reading the Street expects, the seven-participant bloc at the Fed that already projects zero cuts in 2026 grows louder. The FOMC minutes released Wednesday reinforced what the March meeting made clear: the committee was already worried about energy pass-through before the ceasefire frayed.
The rate-sensitive corners of the market have ignored this for a week. Homebuilders rallied alongside everything else. D.R. Horton (DHI), the largest U.S. homebuilder by volume, trades at roughly 10 times forward earnings and has been a reliable beneficiary of every rate-cut cycle in the past decade. But DHI's recent guidance assumed mortgage rates trending toward 6%. If this morning's CPI pushes the 10-year back above 4.4%, mortgage rates stay above 7%, and that guidance becomes a ceiling, not a floor.
Bank earnings reset the conversation next week.
Wells Fargo (WFC) and Morgan Stanley (MS) both report between April 14 and April 15 alongside the rest of the big banks. Wells Fargo's net interest income trajectory will show whether deposit costs are stabilizing or still climbing. Morgan Stanley's investment banking pipeline will tell you whether the M&A backlog that piled up during the war is actually converting into fees or still sitting on hold. If credit provisions are rising across the group, the seven-day rally loses its foundation.
Meanwhile, the AI capital cycle accelerated again.
Meta (META) expanded its cloud computing agreement with CoreWeave (CRWV) to roughly $21 billion, bringing the total relationship to $35 billion through 2032. The deal covers inference workloads and includes early deployments of Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin platform. Meta shares were higher in pre-market. The AI infrastructure buildout continues to attract capital at a pace that makes the rest of the market's earnings growth look modest by comparison. At some point that spending has to convert to revenue. For now, the market is giving it a pass.
The week's math.
Seven days of rally. One print away from a repricing. A ceasefire that moved markets but has not moved ships. The equity market spent the week buying the best-case scenario. This morning, the data starts answering whether it was right.
More tomorrow.
