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President Trump’s prime-time address provided the catalyst that risk assets were looking for - setting a rough two-to-three-week timeline to wind down military operations in Iran.

The heavy war overhang that has depressed global equity valuations for over a month. The likelihood of the war ending lifted the S&P 500 and Nasdaq to secure a strong weekly performance. Investors are now hoping for an end to the current friction points to price in a post-conflict recovery.

Crucially, this pivot reflects a growing belief that a worst case "Double Choke Point" scenario is unlikely to materialize. Last week, the prospect of the Bab el Mandeb closing alongside the Strait of Hormuz created major concern.

However, Saudi Arabia is currently relying on the Red Sea to bypass the Hormuz blockade, sending its oil south through the Bab el Mandeb to Asia.

A Houthi closure of the strait would directly paralyze Saudi exports and much depends on how the wider conflict plays out.

President Trump has also given a deadline to Iran to make a deal and also to open the Strait of Hormuz by Monday, April 6. If this deadline is not met, the war may continue and the markets will fall again.

Oil prices remain at an elevated level:

The year to date chart for West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil serves as a direct scoreboard for the escalating conflict in the Middle East. After trading in a tight, predictable band between $55 and $65 throughout January and February, prices experienced a violent breakout in early March. This initial vertical spike past $110 was the immediate market reaction to physical blockades and the severing of supply lines through the Strait of Hormuz.

While a brief correction saw prices cool toward the mid $80s, the baseline has shifted. The market then traded at an elevated floor, reflecting the severe reality that a short term supply release cannot fix a prolonged physical deficit.

While the US administration introduced a two to three week timeline to finish the war, the promise of an immediate, severe military escalation over that exact window forced a risk premium.

The market has shifted its view of Qatar's offline capacity from a temporary bottleneck to a significant, multi year structural deficit.

The drop in capacity was triggered by targeted strikes on the massive Ras Laffan hub. This knocked out a combined 12.8 million tons per year of LNG, representing roughly 17% of Qatar's export capacity.

Hyperscalers: Catching the Relief Bid

The Standout: Alphabet and Meta led the weekly recovery, gaining 5.3% and 4.9% respectively. Microsoft also participated in the market lift with a 2.0% weekly gain.

The Reality: Despite a dip in the final session, hyperscalers moved in line with the broader market relief rally. Investors briefly set aside capex concerns to follow the global trend, though the requirement for proven AI returns remains the primary overhead.

Semiconductors: Broad Based Recovery

The Standout: Intel led the sector with a 14.2% weekly surge, supported by its 14.2 billion dollar deal to buy back Apollos stake in its Irish Fab 34 facility.

The Sector: Gains were widespread as AMD rose 6.7% and TSMC climbed 4.0%. Nvidia also joined the rally with a 3.6% lift. Laggards included ARM and Qualcomm, which fell over 3% as the market favored core infrastructure over mobile edge AI.

Infrastructure: Power and Cooling Demand Persists

The Standout: Vertiv gained 3.5% for the week, extending its YTD lead to 61.3%. Super Micro Computer also caught the relief bid with a 4.5% weekly gain.

The Anchor: Constellation Energy was the outlier, falling 7.6% for the week following an investor update that lacked new data center catalysts.

Enterprise AI and China: Stabilization vs Pain

The Divergence: Palantir held steady with a 0.6% weekly gain. This contrasted with Snowflake, which dropped 6.5% for the week, showing that the market is becoming selective within software.

The East: China tech showed signs of stabilization as Baidu managed a 1.0% weekly gain. However, Alibaba fell 2.7% as geopolitical friction continues to weigh on sentiment.

🇺🇸 United States The labour market looks solid on the surface but is softening underneath. Payrolls and jobless claims both beat estimates in March, yet job openings fell to 6.9 million and hiring hit its lowest since 2020. Manufacturing expanded for a third straight month at 52.7, but price pressures within the sector are at their highest since June 2022. The Fed has little room for error.

🇪🇺 Eurozone Eurozone CPI jumped to 2.5% in March from 1.9%, driven by energy costs which were up 4.9%. Germany's leading institutes slashed their 2026 GDP forecast growth from 1.3% to 0.6%, while Spain's manufacturing PMI fell to 48.7, signalling uneven damage across the bloc. The ECB is on hold with inflation rising and growth being revised down simultaneously.

🇯🇵 Japan Markets are pricing in a BoJ rate hike at the April meeting, on the view that imported oil inflation can no longer be ignored. The domestic data complicates that case: Tokyo core CPI missed at 1.7%, retail sales fell 2.0% month-on-month, and industrial production declined 2.1% in February.

🇨🇳 China The official manufacturing PMI rose to 50.4 in March, its fastest pace in a year, with improvement broad-based across both state and private sectors. But rising input costs in both surveys point to margin pressure beneath the headline. From April 1, Beijing removed VAT export rebates on solar components and batteries, a move that will accelerate consolidation across its core export industries.

🌐 Artificial Intelligence and Tech

OpenAI The company closed a $122 billion funding round at an $852 billion valuation, anchored by SoftBank, Amazon, Nvidia, and Microsoft. The announcement came alongside the full deployment of GPT-5.4, which scored above human baseline on autonomous desktop task benchmarks and is driving record engagement in agentic workflows. OpenAI's APIs now process more than 15 billion tokens per minute, and the company is building toward a unified AI superapp integrating ChatGPT, Codex, and agent-based capabilities.

Anthropic and the private markets In secondary markets, the two leading labs are moving in opposite directions. Buyers have signalled $2 billion of ready capital for Anthropic shares, while roughly $600 million in OpenAI shares sits unsold at a discount to its primary valuation. SpaceX's confidential IPO filing this week, reportedly targeting a raise of $50-75 billion at a $1.75 trillion valuation, will compete for the same pool of capital both labs are eyeing later this year.

DeepSeek DeepSeek V4 arrived this week as a fully open-weight release - a one-trillion-parameter model whose estimated $5.2 million training cost sits well below the $100 million-plus associated with US models of comparable capability. It scored 94.7% on the HumanEval coding benchmark. The wider implication is that the cost floor for frontier-level AI is falling faster than the Western industry has been willing to admit.

JPMorgan The bank is now tracking AI tool usage across its roughly 65,000 engineers and technologists, with the data feeding into performance reviews. The move treats AI literacy as a baseline skill rather than optional behaviour. If the approach generates measurable productivity gains, similar models are likely to spread across the financial sector.

China China's 15th Five-Year Plan positions AI as a core state priority alongside quantum computing and biotechnology, calling for national intelligent computing clusters and AI embedded across manufacturing, energy, agriculture, and financial services by 2030. Beijing's stated preference for smaller, open, efficiently trained models diverges sharply from the Western approach - and DeepSeek V4 this week illustrates exactly what that looks like in practice.

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Crypto highlights

Solana taking the heaviest hit among the majors, which fits a market still leaning away from higher-beta leadership. The weakness looks more like de-risking than a clean verdict on network usage.

Binance Coin sliding with the broader altcoin complex as the market stayed in risk-off mode. The week looked less like a BNB-specific repricing and more like investors cutting higher-beta exposure as oil, geopolitics and softer conviction weighed on crypto.

Polkadot staying under notable pressure even after March’s tokenomics changes, suggesting the market is still treating it as a more speculative trade rather than rewarding the supply story.

Cardano extending its weakness as speculative appetite continued to fade across lower-conviction altcoins. This week did not bring a fresh catalyst strong enough to offset the market’s broader move away from riskier parts of crypto.

XRP moving lower in line with the broader complex, with price action still showing little independent strength. The market continues to trade it as another liquid risk asset rather than a defensive corner of crypto.

Bitcoin remaining the market’s sentiment anchor, with weakness late in the week reinforcing how fragile risk appetite still is. Price action suggests buyers are still hesitant to step in aggressively while the Iran war and wider macro uncertainty dominate the tape..

SPOTLIGHTS

Links to earlier spotlights :

The Rolling AI boom

New AI search battle

US Reserves

Residential property ;

Japan ;

India - an emerging economic power ;

Recession ;

AI chips ;

Bitcoin halving ;

US National Debt ;

Gold ;

Nvidia ;

The $84 trillion wealth transfer ;

Crowdstrike issue