The ceasefire was this week. Everything else was a reaction to it. On Tuesday evening, with Trump's deadline ticking down, the US and Iran agreed to a two-week truce mediated by Pakistan, and markets moved hard. Oil crashed 13% in a single session, the sharpest drop since 2020. WTI went from above $111 on Monday to $98.46 by Friday. Brent settled near $96. For a few hours, it felt like the Hormuz crisis was over.

It wasn't. Iran hit Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline with drones hours after the truce was announced, knocking out 700,000 barrels a day of the kingdom's only Hormuz bypass. Oil bounced off its lows and Goldman put out a note saying Brent stays above $100 if the strait doesn't reopen within a month. The Islamabad talks starting Friday carry a lot more weight now.

Equities loved the headline though. The S&P 500 ripped 3.7% on the week to 6,825, its best weekly gain since November. Dow turned positive for 2026. DAX jumped over 5% at one point, touching 24,100. Seven straight days of green in the US. But conviction is thinning and the CPI print on Friday at 3.3% reminded everyone that the energy shock is already in the inflation data.

Crypto followed equities. BTC went from $69,100 on Monday to $72,268 by Friday, a quiet grind higher. ETH around $2,215. Fear & Greed at 16 though. Extreme Fear. The pop hasn't convinced anyone yet. Gold held $4,743, still outperforming crypto as the safe-haven play.

On the AI front, Anthropic refused to release its new Mythos Preview model publicly because it can find zero-day exploits in basically every major OS and browser. And OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google started sharing intelligence through the Frontier Model Forum to block Chinese labs from cloning their models. AI cold war stuff.

A lot depends on Islamabad this weekend. If the talks produce something real, oil drops further and the rally has legs. If not, all of this reverses fast.

Have a good weekend. We'll be back Monday.