Lately, financial markets appear confused.
Oil prices recently hit their highest level since the start of the war in Iran, stoking broad worries about inflation and a global energy crisis.
Yet, it has been the best month for the stock market of President Trump’s second term. The S&P 500 ended April nearly 10 percent higher than where it ended March.
The last time the index rose more than 10 percent in a month was in November 2020, after Joseph R. Biden Jr. was elected president and early trials for Covid-19 vaccines showed promising results. On Friday, the S&P 500 rose a further 0.5 percent, putting it on course for a fifth straight week of gains.
To many outside observers, it seems incongruous that the oil market can be sending such a dour signal, while stocks reflect a strong sense of investor optimism.
But in this unusual moment, according to analysts and traders, bullish and bearish market signals can both be true.
While the stock market reacts to day-to-day news, it is primarily concerned with how that news affects the longer-term outlook for company earnings. Stocks initially fell when the United States and Israel attacked Iran on Feb. 28, reflecting uncertainty about the war’s duration, its impact on energy supplies and the fallout for corporate America.
Stocks began to rise again after the Trump administration and Iran started to de-escalate at the end of March, moving toward a cease-fire on April 8. The standoff between the countries has not ended, a peace agreement has not been reached, but for stock investors, the expectation is that the disruption to oil markets and supply chains won’t last much longer.
And the economic impact of the war, at least as far as the United States is concerned, has been manageable. Data on Thursday showed that the U.S. economy grew at an annual pace of 2 percent in the first three months of this year, boosted by spending on infrastructure by many of the big tech companies that have led the S&P 500 stock index to repeated new highs.
This week, Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta, which collectively account for 20 percent of the S&P 500’s market value, said they had spent a combined $130 billion on data centers. The share prices of these members of the so-called Magnificent 7, a group of companies that also include Apple, Nvidia and Tesla, rose nearly 15 percent in April.
Strong earnings in other industries have also buoyed the market. Roughly a third of the companies in the S&P 500 have reported their financial results for the first quarter, and their average growth in earnings stands at roughly 15 percent, on course for a sixth straight double-digit quarterly rise.
Oil prices are a much shorter-term measure of investor sentiment than stock indexes. The oil market is primarily traded using futures contracts, which are derivatives that fix the price today for delivery at a specified date in the future. The most frequently cited oil prices refer to the next month or two. That means that changes in the conflict that could extend or shorten its duration by a few weeks show up in the price of oil but not necessarily in the stock market. Oil traders are fixated on the price of a barrel in crude in July, for example, while pension fund managers are thinking about market returns many years in the future.
This week, a deadlock over the future of Iran’s nuclear program appeared to threaten the fragile cease-fire with the United States, helping to push the price of Brent crude, the international oil benchmark, to a four-year high, of over $120 per barrel on Thursday.
But investors appear to anticipate some sort of resolution the further out they look. Futures contracts for deliveries of Brent crude in December still trade below $90 a barrel.
“While the geopolitical environment remains fluid on a day-to-day basis, markets appear to be assigning a higher probability to a relatively near-term U.S. exit from the Middle East, alongside a normalization in global supply chains that could ultimately pressure oil prices lower,” said Adam Turnquist, chief technical strategist at LPL Financial.
The timing of the Trump administration’s announcements of important changes in policy in the conflict with Iran have, to some extent, exacerbated the appearance of market moves — both on the way down and the way back up.
The war began after the market closed on the final day of February and the cease-fire was announced on the final day of March, so the stock market’s losses were concentrated in March and the recovery almost entirely captured in April.
There are reasons for trepidation among stock investors as the war enters its third month.
The conflict could drag on for longer than is currently expected. Oil prices with Brent futures contracts from September through November have all started to rise, moving above $90 in just over the past week. Although that means traders still expect the price of oil to drift downward in the coming months, crude is increasingly expected to stay elevated for longer, weighing on the economy. The government’s bond market also shows signs of lingering inflation risks stemming from the war, analysts have noted.
Many investors have also expressed a lack of conviction in the current rally, which is evident in the way investors are trading. Stock market trading volumes have been subdued through April, with some investors saying they have turned to the derivatives market to place bets on the market going higher, allowing them to profit if the rally continues but limit losses if the market falls again.
“As long as the economy continues to grow and companies are able to grow earnings, we can see higher stock prices even in the face of higher energy prices and inflation,” said Chris Zaccarelli, chief investment officer at Northlight Asset Management. “However, the longer the war drags on, the more investors will grow nervous and we could see some pullbacks as fears ebb and flow.”
