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* FIEND'S SUPERBEAR MARKET
REPORT *
* April 23,
2026 *
* *
* e-mail:
fiendbear@fiendbear.com
*
* web
address: http://www.fiendbear.com *
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Fiend Commentary
================
The
Market Is Buying the Ending Before It Exists
Wednesday’s
price action looked like a market trying to skip straight to the happy ending.
The S&P
500 closed at a new record around 7,138 and the Nasdaq
finished at a new high near 24,658, even though the war is not truly
resolved and oil is still trading in a range that would have looked like a
crisis only weeks ago. The Dow also climbed back toward 49,500. At the same
time, Brent settled around $101.91 and WTI around $92.96 after
Iran seized two cargo ships in the Strait of Hormuz, which is hardly the kind
of backdrop that normally screams “all clear.”
That’s what
makes this moment so strange. Wall Street is acting as if the war’s economic
damage has already been contained, even though the basic facts remain messy:
the ceasefire extension is unilateral, Iran has not formally agreed to it, the
U.S. naval blockade remains in place, and Reuters reports the Strait is still
effectively shut. The market is not trading what is happening. It is
trading what it wants to happen next.
What Wall
Street appears to see at the end of the tunnel is a fairly
clean sequence: the fighting winds down, shipping gradually resumes, oil
drifts lower, and the Fed gets room to cut later in 2026. That is the bullish
script. It also explains why equities can rally at the same time gold and
silver firm up again: stocks are buying relief, while metals are buying
insurance against the chance that the relief turns out to be temporary. Reuters
noted that gold rose to about $4,738 on Wednesday after touching a
one-week low, a sign that buyers are still willing to step in even without a
full panic bid.
The snag is
that several key pieces of that bullish script are still missing. Oil has not
returned to anything like pre-war normal, and the long end of the bond market
is not behaving as if inflation is gone. The 10-year Treasury yield was
around 4.30% and the 30-year near 4.91% on
Wednesday—levels that are not catastrophic, but high enough to keep financial
conditions from loosening in the way equity bulls would prefer. If energy
prices stay elevated, that is a tax on consumers and margins, even if stock
traders are pretending otherwise.
This is why
the market’s optimism feels more speculative than grounded. Reuters reported
that about two-thirds of S&P 500 companies that have reported so far
this earnings season mentioned energy costs on their calls, which tells you
the issue is very much on corporate managements’
minds. And yet investors keep buying as if those costs are a short-lived
nuisance rather than something that could bleed into inflation, earnings, and
confidence over the next few months.
The Fed is
another part of the disconnect. Markets still want to believe that softer
growth later this year will bring cuts back into view. But the Fed’s own
posture remains more cautious, and Reuters noted that even the brokerages still
expecting two 2026 cuts have pushed the first likely move out toward September,
while the Fed itself has only projected one. In other words, the market
is front-running a central bank that is not actually giving it much to
front-run yet.
So Thursday’s takeaway is simple: this rally is being built on
a lot of assumptions arriving in the right order. The war
needs to cool. The Strait needs to reopen in practice, not just on paper. Oil
needs to stop threatening inflation. The Fed needs to
eventually soften without losing credibility. And the economy needs to
stay intact long enough for all of that to happen.
That is
possible. But it is also a lot to ask of one tunnel.
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