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*                       FIEND'S SUPERBEAR MARKET REPORT                     *

*                                 March 12, 2026                            *

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*                       e-mail: fiendbear@fiendbear.com                     *

*                    web address: http://www.fiendbear.com                  *

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Fiend Commentary
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The Strait Doesn’t Care About Strategic Reserves

Wednesday delivered an uncomfortable message: the market can talk itself into calm, but it can’t talk barrels through a chokepoint.

Oil shot back up above $90 even as officials floated strategic reserve releases and traders tried to convince themselves the supply shock would be short-lived. The problem is that “reassurance” doesn’t stop drones, missiles, or explosive boats. If ships keep getting hit in or near the Strait, you don’t need a formal closure to create a real-world shortage. You just need enough danger to keep tankers anchored, rerouted, or unwilling to sail.

That’s why oil is creeping higher again. Not because the world suddenly ran out of crude — but because the market is realizing this conflict may not have a clean timetable, a clean endgame, or even clear “win conditions” that would reliably reopen shipping lanes. Without a credible resolution, supply risk becomes something traders have to price for weeks, not hours.

Stocks are starting to catch on.

The Dow has been sliding toward longer-term support levels, including its 200-day moving average, for the first time in quite a while. There are still rallies here and there — but the tone is different now: bounces are increasingly met by selling, and “good news” doesn’t have the same lifting power when the next headline can blow up the energy tape.

This matters because the economic backdrop was already softening before the conflict intensified. A weakening job market plus rising energy costs is one of the oldest bad combinations in finance. Higher oil doesn’t just raise inflation; it squeezes consumers, dents sentiment, and forces businesses to choose between lower margins or higher prices. Either choice slows the economy.

Bond yields are reinforcing that worry. The 10-year yield was below 4% not long ago, but it has crawled back toward the 4.2% area again. That’s a warning that investors aren’t treating this as a simple growth scare. They’re treating it as a potential inflation problem layered onto a slowing economy — the kind of mix that makes the Fed’s job miserable.

And that’s where the rate-cut discussion gets tricky. Odds are still against a cut before mid-year, but in an environment like this the calendar can change fast. If growth slides sharply, pressure builds for easing. If inflation rises on energy, easing becomes harder to justify. That’s how you get policy whiplash — and why some investors are already thinking about the unspoken backstop: “money printing” returning not because it’s wise, but because it becomes politically and financially unavoidable.

So Thursday’s setup is not about whether strategic reserves exist. They do. The question is whether reserves can substitute for confidence in safe passage — and whether markets can keep believing this disruption is temporary when the Strait keeps producing incidents.

If the shipping lane normalizes, the market will relax quickly.

If it doesn’t, then the spring narrative shifts from “contained” to “persistent.” And persistent oil shocks rarely end well.

 

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