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A two-week US-Iran ceasefire triggered a broad rally across global equity markets and oil plunged. And this weekend’s peace talks have failed to reach an agreement. Markets are likely to decline next week. The talks have failed - will the cease-fire come to an end next week?

And the prospect of a naval blockade of Iran?
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/116389798405349626

Tokyo led the field last week. Japan's particular sensitivity to energy costs and global trade flows amplified the ceasefire effect more than anywhere else, while a strong week for technology and semiconductor stocks. Fast Retailing provided an additional domestic catalyst, upgrading its full-year profit guidance on the back of strong demand from the US and Europe.

European indices followed with solid but more measured gains. The DAX and CAC 40 each posted their best single sessions in years early in the week, though both gave back some ground as questions emerged over ceasefire compliance. The FTSE 100 lagged its continental peers, partly because its heavier weighting toward energy stocks meant falling oil prices were a drag.

In the US, technology led the rebound. Strong performances from Nvidia, Meta, Tesla, AMD, and Micron reflected genuine confidence in the ongoing AI infrastructure buildout rather than a simple relief bounce. The Nasdaq outpaced the broader market, though the index is still in negative territory for the year.

The energy market delivered the week's sharpest and most consequential move. WTI crude posted its largest single-day decline in six years on the day of the ceasefire announcement, as the prospect of the Strait of Hormuz reopening unwound weeks of accumulated war premium. But that could reverse next week!

In fixed income, the latest Federal Reserve meeting minutes revealed hawkish undertones among policymakers, with several members signalling that rates may remain elevated for longer than markets had anticipated.

Hyperscalers had a shift change. Amazon led because it gave the market harder evidence that AI demand is already converting into revenue - its updated run-rate numbers changed the discussion from spending burden to commercial traction. Alphabet also had a strong week, helped by a Broadcom agreement that reinforced the case for tighter control over its custom silicon stack. In the current environment, cost per unit of compute, supply assurance, and independence from third-party hardware constraints matter more than they did a year ago. Microsoft lagged because it had no equivalent catalyst, and it still carries residual skepticism over whether AI spend will translate into earnings at the pace once assumed.

Enterprise AI had the opposite problem. Palantir and Snowflake did not fall in a weak market - they fell in a strong one, which is more revealing. The pressure came from a renewed concern that more capable foundation models are beginning to challenge the economics of traditional software more directly.

Semis stayed strong because they remain tied to physical bottlenecks rather than distant adoption narratives. TSMC's revenue confirmed that AI demand is still flowing into actual chip orders. Intel's move was also more than a short squeeze - the Irish fab transaction and a deeper Google partnership both strengthened the argument that inference demand may broaden the winner set beyond the obvious GPU names. When the market becomes more selective, it tends to move closer to the bottlenecks. Compute, memory and equipment still sit there.

Networking and infrastructure reinforced the same logic. Broadcom led the group, with the Alphabet custom silicon agreement serving as a direct catalyst. Arista rose alongside it because networking remains one of the least optional areas of AI deployment - once compute clusters scale, traffic between them becomes part of the constraint. Vertiv, Eaton and Schneider also moved higher because power and cooling remain among the most credible ways to express the build-out theme. These are not story stocks. They sit where deployment meets physical reality, which is why the market continues to trust them more than later-stage software names.

China was mixed, and the divergence between Alibaba and Baidu resists a single clean explanation. The better reading is that China AI remains a selective trade.

🇺🇸 United States

The US macro picture became harder to read this week. Headline inflation accelerated in March, driven almost entirely by surging gasoline prices. Core inflation moved only modestly higher, suggesting second-round effects have not yet taken hold - but that offers limited comfort to the Fed. Growth was already softening before the oil shock, and consumer sentiment fell sharply.

🇪🇺 Eurozone

Europe is absorbing the same shock with less margin for error. Services activity contracted in France and Italy, and the EU's own economists are preparing to cut official growth forecasts, warning that even a short-lived conflict could trim meaningfully from regional GDP. Germany's factory orders disappointed. The ECB faces the familiar bind - a weakening economy that would normally argue for easier policy, but imported energy inflation that makes that response hard to justify.

🇬🇧 United Kingdom

Services activity barely grew in March, input cost inflation accelerated sharply on fuel and transport, and business confidence fell back. House prices also missed expectations. The damage to margins and confidence had accumulated well before the ceasefire. Britain's particular vulnerability is structural - a services-heavy economy with high exposure to imported energy means cost shocks travel quickly through the system.

🇯🇵 Japan

Japan's equity rebound makes sense only alongside its energy dependence. The government's release of additional state oil reserves underlines the point - this was a response to cost pressure already building in the system, not a precautionary measure. JGB yields are at levels not seen in nearly three decades. The ceasefire pulled markets back from the most severe scenario. It has not changed Japan's underlying exposure.

🇨🇳 China

Producer prices turned positive in March for the first time in over three years. The shift matters, but its origin matters too - the rebound reflects higher energy and commodity costs rather than stronger domestic demand.

🇮🇳 India

The RBI held rates unchanged, a unanimous and predictable decision. The more significant development was the context around it. Earlier this year India had space to continue easing. That space has narrowed - the energy shock hits the current account, the rupee, and the inflation trajectory simultaneously. The June meeting is likely to be the more consequential decision point.

🌐 Artificial Intelligence and Tech

Anthropic dominated the week's news on two fronts.

The UK government moved to court the company with proposals ranging from a London office expansion to a dual stock listing, explicitly capitalising on its deepening dispute with the Pentagon over military use restrictions. That dispute escalated further on Wednesday when a federal appeals court denied Anthropic's request to block the Pentagon's blacklisting - a setback that ran alongside the UK overtures and sharpened the contrast between Washington's posture and London's.

Separately, Anthropic unveiled Claude Mythos Preview - a general-purpose model whose cyber capabilities emerged as an unintended consequence of broader reasoning improvements and are now considered too dangerous for public release. Access is being restricted to a coalition of over 40 organisations under an initiative called Project Glasswing, focused on defensive security work. The competitive frontier is no longer just model quality. It is governance, political alignment, and how much access companies are willing to grant to powerful systems.

Meta's launch of Muse Spark marked a clean break from its open-source strategy. The model is multimodal, agentic, and designed to run across Meta's consumer ecosystem at scale, but the more significant development is that it is proprietary - a departure from the Llama era. Meta has said it hopes to open-source future versions, but the direction of travel is clear. Once a model is commercially viable, controlling weights, deployment and user data appears to matter more than developer goodwill.

OpenAI introduced a new $100 Pro tier this week, sitting between the existing $20 Plus plan and the $200 tier, built around expanded Codex capacity. The move reflects something broader - coding has become one of the first areas where frontier AI is generating distinct revenue bands, stratifying the market between casual users, serious developers and power users running sustained workflows.

OpenAI formally paused the Stargate UK project this week, citing energy costs and an unresolved regulatory environment around copyright. The project, announced last September in partnership with Nvidia and Nscale, had been expected to deploy thousands of GPUs across sites in north-east England. Energy prices in the UK are among the highest in the developed world for industrial users, and the copyright regime around AI training remains unsettled. OpenAI says it will move forward when conditions allow, but has given no timeline.

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Crypto highlights

The ceasefire and the prospect of continued Iran negotiations brought risk appetite back into the crypto market, driving a broad but uneven recovery across the complex.

Ethereum and Bitcoin led the major names, with Ethereum edging ahead - consistent with the market's familiar pattern of rotating first into the larger and more liquid assets when macro fear begins to ease. Bitcoin rebounded on fading tail-risk rather than any crypto-specific catalyst, continuing to behave primarily as a macro sentiment asset rather than an independent store of value.

Solana participated in the bounce but less decisively, suggesting investors were willing to add risk again - though with some discipline, preferring depth over beta. Polkadot recovered modestly, enough to signal relief but not enough to signal conviction. Cardano moved with the broader risk rebound, the price action driven by macro rather than anything token-specific.

Binance Coin and XRP both lagged the stronger part of the rally. That fits a week in which capital concentrated first in Bitcoin and Ethereum, with the rest of the complex receiving what was left over. The bid returned broadly, but not evenly.

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