🔍 Cycle one of the Iran war just ended.

Cycle one of the Iran war just ended. Here’s what has changed in the past 48 hours.

Trump wrote on Truth Social Tuesday morning that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” Markets sold off. Oil hit $115 a barrel. Bitcoin slid back to $68,000. The world braced for what appeared to be the most dramatic escalation of the US-Iran conflict since it first began on Feb. 28.

By Tuesday night, it was done. At least for now.

As a last-minute mediator, none other than Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif stepped up with a proposal for a two-week ceasefire in exchange for Iran amending the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

With less than two hours until the hard deadline Trump set of 8pm ET, he accepted the proposal. Minutes later, Iran’s foreign minister confirmed acceptance. The Strait, through which about 20 percent of the world’s oil and gas typically passes, would reopen for coordinated passage. All sides declared victory.

Oil plunged more than 13 percent on the news. WTI crude declined to about $95 a barrel from a wartime peak of just under $115. Bitcoin jumped to $72,700, causing almost half a billion dollars in crypto liquidations: most of which were shorts trapped on the wrong side of one of the fiercest short squeezes since early March.

The Fear and Greed Index was at 8 heading into Tuesday. It had been under 10 throughout the conflict.

What really matters now is what does this two weeks actually mean.

Trump made it clear this is a pause, not a peace. The two-week period is intended to finalize a wider deal, with the first day of peace talks taking place on Friday in Islamabad, where Vice President Vance led the U.S. delegation. Iran’s proposal details 10 points, including a US withdrawal of troops from the region, sanctions relief, the right to continue uranium enrichment and compensation for damages caused by war.

The United States will almost certainly not accept all those terms. Iran’s Supreme National Security Council cast the cease-fire as a victory while also making clear that it still controlled Hormuz.

How exactly the Strait would be reopened is murky. Passage would be possible “through coordination with Iran’s Armed Forces and due attention to the technical limits,” said Iran’s foreign minister.

An estimated backlog of some 1,500 ships are off the coasts of Oman and the UAE awaiting movement. It will take time to get that traffic through. Oil prices dropped sharply on the news but were still well above levels before the war.

The nuclear issue is also unresolved. When the war broke out in February, Trump stated that one of the key goals was preventing Iran from ever getting a nuclear weapon. Iran has vowed that it will not end uranium enrichment. Israel which agreed to the ceasefire, but said it does not apply to Lebanon has stated it supports “ensuring Iran no longer poses a nuclear or missile threat.” These positions he cannot put together in two weeks.

For markets, the ceasefire clears away the most significant headwind of the last six weeks. The war had overturned the Fed’s rate cut calculus almost completely. The oil-fueled inflation risk had brought rate hike prospects to the table for the first time in years.

But a durable cease-fire alters that picture fundamentally. Bitcoin trading around $72,700 puts it at the upper end of the $65,000 to $73,000 range that has capped every rally dating back to February. Whether that will reverse those couple of weeks depends solely on whether a couple of weeks becomes more.

The ceasefire is fragile. The terms are contested. The nuclear issue is unresolved. And Trump has already delayed deadlines on this conflict four times. But now for the first time since late February, the single largest variable hanging over every risk asset on Earth has shifted from escalation to negotiation.

That is not nothing.

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Big Tech's worst quarter in years might be its best buying opportunity

The Magnificent Seven just collectively lost $1.1 trillion in market value. People at Nvidia, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon sold more stock than they bought to the tune of a net $16.1 billion over the last two years. Insiders at Amazon alone sold $10.93 billion worth of stock. Nvidia insiders sold $4.11 billion. There were no insider purchases of Nvidia, Apple or Amazon.

That's not a comforting portrait.

But Goldman Sachs strategist Peter Oppenheimer offered a contrary argument this week. Tech stocks are now cheaper, relative to expected earnings growth, than the global market average. For the first time in years, the sector isn’t costly relative to what it’s expected to earn. The Iran war provided jittery investors a reason to offload shares that had already gotten bracingly expensive. They took it.

Their underlying business remains intact. AI adoption is accelerating. Earnings expectations remain intact. And the history of infrastructure buildouts, railroads and the internet suggest that the biggest winners are seldom the companies making all those capital outlays. They are the ones who come in after a place has settled and use what was created.

The trillion-dollar behemoths need not solve the conflict. They just need to outlast it. In six months, this quarter may already seem like a footnote.

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