The United States effectively blockaded the Strait of Hormuz. Oil touched $105 a barrel intraday. The S&P 500 closed 1% higher. If that sequence of events doesn't tell you something about where investor psychology sits right now, I'm not sure what will.
The Rundown
- US equity markets closed higher despite Washington announcing a naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz
- Oil spiked sharply during the session but retreated after Trump signaled potential diplomatic progress with Iran
- Battered software stocks staged a significant rebound, with the broader sector subindex gaining 4%
- Goldman Sachs topped earnings estimates but still slipped on disappointing bond trading revenue and cautious CEO guidance
The Hormuz Standoff: More Theater Than Panic
The weekend that preceded Monday's open was uncomfortable. The latest round of US-Iran peace talks ended without agreement, and by the time markets opened, the White House had made it official: all shipping entering or leaving Iranian ports - in the Arabian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman alike - is now subject to American enforcement.
The free passage of vessels moving through the strait toward non-Iranian ports remains unaffected, Washington clarified, but the ambiguity in the fine print was enough to send oil into a sharp early spike.
WTI crude hit $105.63 a barrel during the session. Brent followed. For a few hours it looked like the kind of geopolitical shock that has a habit of compounding.
Then Trump spoke. He told reporters he had been called by "the right people" who want to make a deal, emphasized that Iran will not get a nuclear weapon, and suggested he expects Tehran to eventually agree to those terms. That was enough to pull oil back below $100. WTI closed at $99.08, up 2.6% on the day. Brent settled at $99.36, up 4.4%. A spike that briefly looked alarming ended as a managed premium.
I wouldn't file this under "resolved," though. Scott Shelton of TP ICAP put it plainly: even with the US controlling the chokepoint, the risk of Iran targeting commercial shipping in the Persian Gulf keeps a meaningful risk premium in the price. The market is skeptical this gets wrapped up cleanly - and frankly, that skepticism seems well - founded given how many times this particular conflict has paused and resumed.
US Treasuries remained broadly stable through the session. The euro climbed to 1.1735 against the dollar, a modest move that reflects broader dollar caution in an environment like this one.
Goldman Sachs: Beat the Number, Missed the Mood
Goldman Sachs (GS | ▼1.87%) delivered a first quarter that, on paper, cleared every bar.
EPS of $17.55 against analyst expectations of $16.47. Revenue of $17.23 billion versus a $17 billion consensus. Investment banking revenue surged 48% year-on-year to $2.84 billion. By any conventional read, that's a strong quarter.
The stock dropped anyway. Two reasons: fixed income and bond trading revenue came in light, and CEO David Solomon's forward guidance struck investors as cautious rather than confident.
There's also the Dow Jones mechanics worth keeping in mind. Goldman trades near $900 a share, making it the highest-weighted stock in the price-weighted Dow. When it falls 2%, the whole index feels it disproportionately, which explains why the Dow's gain of 0.6% lagged well behind the Nasdaq's 1.2% on a day when most things were moving higher.
Good results, wrong atmosphere, wrong index. A classic.
The SaaSpocalypse Takes a Day Off
Software stocks have spent the better part of the past year getting methodically sold down. The thesis behind it is real enough: if AI agents can automate a significant share of what SaaS applications do today, then the recurring subscription models that made these businesses so valuable start to look fragile.
Wall Street has been stress-testing that thesis aggressively, and the sector has paid the price. The term "SaaSpocalypse", borrowed from the idea that a wave of Software-as-a-Service companies could be wiped out by the AI wave, tells you everything about the prevailing mood.
Monday, that mood shifted, at least temporarily. Bargain hunters showed up in volume and the S&P 500 Software subindex closed 4% higher.
Oracle (ORCL | ▲12.69%) led the way with a nearly 13% gain. Cadence Design (CDNS | ▲8.48%), ServiceNow (NOW | ▲7.30%) and Adobe (ADBE | ▲6.55%) all posted meaningful recoveries. Microsoft (MSFT | ▲3.64%) and Palantir (PLTR | ▲3.33%) rounded out a broad-based move.
One session of buying doesn't settle the structural debate. The AI disruption question is real and it hasn't gone away. What Monday does suggest is that after months of continuous selling, some investors think the market has overshot on the downside and they're willing to put money behind that view.
Whether the follow-through materializes in the coming sessions will be more telling than the bounce itself.
SanDisk: The Chip Story That Keeps Compounding
SanDisk (SNDK | ▲11.83%) added another 12% to a year-to-date gain that now stands at 230%. For a stock that most people weren't talking about twelve months ago, that's a remarkable run.
The driver is structural and it's not complicated. AI companies are consuming memory chips at a pace the industry can barely match. Every model training run, every data center expansion, every edge inference deployment requires more storage capacity and SanDisk is one of the primary suppliers of high-density memory. When demand runs ahead of supply this aggressively, pricing power follows, and margins expand accordingly.
Friday evening brought additional fuel: SanDisk will join the Nasdaq 100 on April 20, taking the slot vacated by Atlassian (TEAM | ▲7.26%). Index inclusion creates mechanical demand as passive funds rebalance, which tends to provide a short-term price boost regardless of fundamentals. Worth watching into next week.
The Nvidia Rumor That Traveled Fast and Died Faster
The tech website SemiAcurate published a report on Monday claiming that Nvidia (NVDA | ▲0.36%) was searching for a major acquisition target in the PC market to reshape the competitive landscape. HP (HPQ | ▲5.31%) and Dell (DELL | ▲6.74%) both jumped on the speculation, HP gaining 5.3% and Dell 6.7% at their respective peaks.
By evening, Nvidia had called Bloomberg directly. "That report is false. Nvidia is not in negotiations to acquire a PC maker." Both stocks gave back roughly 2% in after-hours trading.
The underlying logic of the rumor wasn't completely absurd, Nvidia has the cash, the strategic appetite for vertical integration is well-documented, and controlling distribution channels in the PC market would have real value. But a direct denial from the company itself is about as definitive as it gets. What the episode shows, more than anything, is how sensitized the market is to any AI-adjacent M&A story right now.
The rumor moved two large-cap stocks several percentage points in a matter of hours. That's how thin the equilibrium is.
Other Moves Worth Noting
CoreWeave (CRWV | ▲8.11%) closed at $110.60, continuing a run that has taken the stock up 24% in a single week. The AI cloud infrastructure provider has been closing new deals steadily, and the market is rewarding each announcement. Pure-play AI infrastructure remains one of the few areas where investors seem willing to pay almost any price for growth.
Intel (INTC | ▲4.49%) recorded its ninth consecutive higher close, a sequence that's quiet enough to miss if you're not watching, but meaningful when you're thinking about where institutional money is starting to rotate. Nine sessions of accumulation in a name that spent the better part of two years being sold suggests something is shifting in how the large buyers view the stock.
Fastenal (FAST | ▼6.85%) was the session's notable loser despite reporting in-line results. The industrial distributor posted EPS of $0.30 on revenue of $2.2 billion, exactly what analysts expected. The problem was the margin line, rising input costs squeezed gross margins even as heavy industrial end markets held up well. In-line isn't enough when the cost structure is moving in the wrong direction.
Bottom Line
Monday was the kind of session that tests whether you can keep your head straight when the headlines are genuinely alarming and the market is doing the opposite of what common sense would suggest. A naval blockade of the world's most critical oil chokepoint, crude oil briefly above $105, an unverified Nvidia acquisition story and the S&P 500 closed up 1%.
The message investors are collectively sending is that they still believe this Iran situation resolves diplomatically, and that the oil spike is temporary noise rather than a sustained shock. That may prove correct. It may also prove to be the kind of premature confidence that looks obvious in hindsight.
The software bounce is encouraging for anyone with exposure to the sector, but I'd treat one day of buying as exactly that: one day. The structural question around AI disruption of SaaS business models doesn't get answered by a 4% subindex move.
What did get confirmed: memory chips remain the commodity everyone wants and nobody has enough of, Goldman Sachs continues to be a genuinely strong business held to standards that would be unreasonable in almost any other context, and oil is still the one variable capable of reminding markets that the real world exists.
ChartMill Market Desk - Kristoff
This daily update is prepared by ChartMill for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Always do your own due diligence before making investment decisions.
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